Quotes about other
page 85

“The would-be climber must be able to make himself liked … please his superiors — avoid showing independence except in those matters wherein independence is expected of him by his chiefs… the winners in the race have qualities which disincline them to allow others to be their true selves. Hence the winners snub all those who aim at adequate self-expression, speaking of them as pretentious, eccentric, biased, unpractical, and measuring their achievements by insincere standards.”

Karl Jaspers (1883–1969) German psychiatrist and philosopher

Man in the Modern Age (1933)

“The need for a fundamentally different approach to the study of physical processes at the molecular level motivated the development of relevant statistical methods, which turned out to be applicable not only to the study of molecular processes (statistical mechanics), but to a host of other areas such as the actuarial profession, design of large telephone exchanges, and the like. In statistical methods, specific manifestations of microscopic entities (molecules, individual telephone sites, etc.) are replaced with their statistical averages, which are connected with appropriate macroscopic variables. The role played in Newtonian mechanics by the calculus, which involves no uncertainty, is replaced in statistical mechanics by probability theory, a theory whose very purpose is to capture uncertainty of a certain type.”

George Klir (1932–2016) American computer scientist

Source: Fuzzy sets and fuzzy logic (1995), p. 1-2.

Motivation, Study

“Androids (i. e., artificial humans) tend to blur the line between living and non-living. Especially in a case like the Human Torch, where his origin tends to establish him as something much more than a clever assemblage of non-organic parts. The “instability” which originally caused him to burst into flame spontaneously indicates there’s an unknown factor involved. Push come to shove, I would put Jim Hammond into his own category, and grant that, altho he is “not of woman born,” he is, in a true sense, alive. In other words, not a toaster.”

John Byrne (1950) American author and artist of comic books

2006
http://www.byrnerobotics.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=15591
The humanity of the original Human Torch

Sense, Parting

“That is a true sentiment which makes us feel that we do not love our country less, but more, because we have laid up in our minds the knowledge of other lands and other institutions and other races, and have had enkindled afresh within us the instinct of a common humanity, and of the universal beneficence of the Creator.”

Arthur Penrhyn Stanley (1815–1881) English churchman, Dean of Westminster

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 442.

Love, Feeling, Knowledge, Universe

“Liberal Arts may ultimately prove to be the most relevant learning model. People trained in the Liberal Arts learn to tolerate ambiguity and to bring order out of apparent confusion. They have the kind of sideways thinking and cross-classifying habit of mind that comes from learning, among other things, the many different ways of looking at literary works, social systems, chemical processes or languages.”

Roger Smith (executive) (1925–2007) CEO

Cited in: " Bachelor of Arts in Liberal Studies: What is Liberal Studies? http://scs.georgetown.edu/departments/4/bachelor-of-arts-in-liberal-studies/department-details.cfm#f2" on georgetown.edu about bachelor of arts in liberal studies, 2013. The liberal arts and the art of management (1987)

People, Art, Way, Thinking

“(Prince Duan and others) with the support of Empress Dowager took control of the Manchu Imperial Court. Using the most ignorant mind, by the most despicable means, with the most selfish goal, using Yihetuan, which was the most prone to rioting social underclass, to "support the Qing, eliminate the foreigners", and to takeover the regime. This coup d'etat was repeated 66 years later, by those aggressive Red Guards (China). History repeated itself, in minute details.”

Tong Tekong (1920–2009) historian

http://www.cuhk.edu.hk/ics/21c/supplem/essay/0007038.htm

History, Support, Selfishness

“I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.”

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. 25

Children, People, Feeling, Question

“When private industry makes a mistake, it gets corrected and goes away. As governments make mistakes, it gets bigger, bigger and bigger and they make more, more and more because as they run out of money, they just ask for more and so they get rewarded for making mistakes. In the meantime that is exactly what we are doing by subsidizing companies which are failing, we have a reverse Darwinism, we've got survival of the unfittest, the companies and people that have made terrible mistakes are being rewarded and other people are being punished and being taxed.”

Peter D. Schiff (1963) American entrepreneur, economist and author

Authors@Google: Peter Schiff (2009)

Money, People

“The thought of Mr. J. L. B. Matekoni nursing secret, unfulfilled ambitions saddened Mma Ramotswe, as did the thought of people wanting something very much indeed and not getting the thing they yearned for. When we dismiss or deny the hopes of others, she thought, we forget that they, like us, have only one chance in this life.”

Alexander McCall Smith book Tea Time for the Traditionally Built

Tea Time for the Traditionally Built, chapter 11.
The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series

Life, People, Secret, Hope

“I came to the conclusion long ago … that all religions were true and also that all had some error in them, and whilst I hold by my own, I should hold others as dear as Hinduism. So we can only pray, if we are Hindus, not that a Christian should become a Hindu … But our innermost prayer should be a Hindu should be a better Hindu, a Muslim a better Muslim, a Christian a better Christian.”

Mahatma Gandhi (1869–1948) pre-eminent leader of Indian nationalism during British-ruled India

Young India (19 January 1928)
1920s

Religion, Error

“Is it not better to die in a glorious attempt, than, after having been the sport of other men's insolence, to resign a wretched and degraded existence with ignominy?”
Nonne emori per virtutem praestat quam vitam miseram atque inhonestam, ubi alienae superbiae ludibrio fueris, per dedecus amittere?

Sallust (-86–-34 BC) Roman historian, politician

Source: Bellum Catilinae (c. 44 BC), Chapter XX, section 9; quoting Catiline

Men, Sport

“To comprehend the hysterical mass contagion that is the war on Trump it's essential to trace the contours of that other war, 'Operation Iraqi Freedom,' and the way it was peddled to the American public.”

Ilana Mercer South African writer

" Beware The Atavistic Dynamics Undergirding Two American Wars, https://misesuk.org/2017/06/21/beware-the-atavistic-dynamics-undergirding-two-american-wars/" The Ludwig von Mises Centre For Property and Freedom, June 21, 2017. 2010s, 2017

War, Way, Freedom

“Yes, he loved his mother like no other,
His daughter was his sister and his son was his brother.
One thing on which you can depend is,
He sure knew who a boy's best friend is.”

Tom Lehrer (1928) American singer-songwriter and mathematician

"Oedipus Rex"
An Evening (Wasted) With Tom Lehrer (1959)

Love, Boy, Sister, Dependency

“The accusations of cultism leveled against Korzybski's followers are not altogether unfounded. In the United States there is a large floating population of 'truthseekers'. Many of them lack the capacity of strenuous intellectual effort required in a fruitful pursuit of knowledge and wisdom; others lack the power of critical evaluation, which would enable them to tell the genuine from the false. Still others cannot be comfortable until they find a panacea to believe in. These people support 'movements' and cults. They are as likely to 'go for' Christian Science as for technocracy, for psychoanalysis as for theosophy, for the Great Books programme as for dianetics. And so inevitably one finds some of them among the adherents of general semantics… Whether they were actually helped by general semantics or by other factors cannot be determined without sufficient controls. But they went about spreading the faith, thus giving a cultist flavour to the 'movement'.”

Anatol Rapoport (1911–2007) Russian-born American mathematical psychologist

Source: 1950s, "What is Semantics?", 1950, p. 6 ; as cited in: Schaff (1962;94-95)

Wisdom, People, Books, Faith

“Where do we find a precept in the Gospel requiring Ecclesiastical Synods? Convocations? Councils? Decrees? Creeds? Confessions? Oaths? Subscriptions? and whole cart-loads of other trumpery that we find religion incumbered with in these days?”

John Adams (1735–1826) 2nd President of the United States

(18 February 1756)
1750s, Diaries (1750s-1790s)
Context: Spent an hour in the beginning of the evening at Major Gardiner's, where it was thought that the design of Christianity was not to make men good riddle-solvers, or good mystery-mongers, but good men, good magistrates, and good subjects, good husbands and good wives, good parents and good children, good masters and good servants. The following questions may be answered some time or other, namely, — Where do we find a precept in the Gospel requiring Ecclesiastical Synods? Convocations? Councils? Decrees? Creeds? Confessions? Oaths? Subscriptions? and whole cart-loads of other trumpery that we find religion incumbered with in these days?

Religion

“Perhaps the most precious possession of man is his abiding awareness of the Analogy of Proper Proportionality, the key to all metaphysical insight, and perhaps the very condition of consciousness itself. This analogical awareness is constituted of a perpetual play of ratios among ratios. A is to B, what C is to D, which is to say the ratio between A and B, is proportionable to the ratio between C and D, there being a ratio between these ratios, as well, this lively awareness of the most exquisite delicacy depends upon there being no connection whatsoever between the components. If A were linked to B, or C to D, mere logic would take the place of analogical perception, thus one of the penalties paid for literacy and a high visual culture is a strong tendency to encounter all things through a rigorous storyline, as it were. Paradoxically, connected spaces and situations exclude participation, whereas discontinuity affords room for involvement. Visual space is connected and creates detachment or non-involvement. It also tends to exclude the participation of the other senses.”

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

Source: 1960s, Through the Vanishing Point (1968), p.240

Penalty, Sense, Strong, Dependency

“During a single week of July 1967, 164 Americans were killed and 2100 were wounded in city riots in the United States. We are truly fighting a two-front war and doing badly in both. Each war feeds on the other and, although the President assures us that we have the resources to win both wars, in fact we are not winning either.”

J. William Fulbright (1905–1995) American politician

"The Price of Empire" speech, to the meeting of the American Bar Association in Hawaii (August 1967), in Haynes Bonner Johnson and Bernard M. Gwertzman, Fulbright: The Dissenter (1968), p. 305.

War, Fight

“It is probable that what we call thought is not an actual being, but no more than the relation between certain parts of that infinitely varied mass, of which the rest of the universe is composed, and which ceases to exist as soon as those parts change their position with regard to each other.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) English Romantic poet

On a Future State (1815; publ. 1840)

Universe, Change, Parting

“I do not see in what way the face of a man should be a less interesting landscape than any other. A man, the physical person of a man, is a little world, like any other a country, with its towns, and suburbs... As a rule what is needed in a portrait is a great deal of the general, and very little of the particular.”

Jean Dubuffet book Prospectus et tous écrits suivants

Source: 1960-70's, Prospectus et tous écrits suivants, 1967, p. 63-73

World, Way, Personality, Country

“Somebody has to be on the other side.”

George Goodman (1930–2014) American author and economics commentator

Source: The Money Game (1968), Chapter 14, Why Are The Little People Always Wrong?, p. 200

“Thus our judgments, if they do not borrow from reason and philosophy a fixity and steadiness of purpose in their acts, are easily swayed and influenced by the praise or blame of others, which make us distrust our own opinions.”

Plutarch book Parallel Lives

Timoleon, sec. 6
Parallel Lives

“[About Ada] For none of the evidence we have so far can inspire confidence that this language has avoided any of the problems that have afflicted other complex language projects of the past. […] It is not too late! I believe that by careful pruning of the ADA language, it is still possible to select a very powerful subset that would be reliable and efficient in implementation and safe and economic in use.”

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

The Emperor's Old Clothes

Confidence, Problem, Affliction, Past

“When they asked some old Roman philosopher or other how he wanted to die, he said he would open his veins in a warm bath. I thought it would be easy, lying in the tub and seeing the redness flower from my wrists, flush after flush through the clear water, till I sank to sleep under a surface gaudy as poppies. But when it came right down to it, the skin of my wrist looked so white and defenseless that I couldn't do it. It was as if what I wanted to kill wasn't in that skin or the thin blue pulse that jumped under my thumb, but somewhere else, deeper, more secret, and a whole lot harder to get at.”

Sylvia Plath book The Bell Jar

Source: The Bell Jar (1963), Ch. 12

Secret, Flowers, Lying, Sleep

“The same reasoning that applies to the individual person applies to the individual state. A very broad twilight zone exists in which it is difficult to distinguish where state right ends and federal right begins. Deprived of the privilege of its day in court, each state would be compelled to submit to the exactions of the Congress or resort to resistance by force. On the other hand, the legislatures of states, and sometimes the people, through the initiative and referendum, may pass laws which are very injurious to the minority residents of that state, by attempting to take away the privilege which they hold under the Federal Constitution. Except for the courts, such a minority would have no remedy for wrong done them. Their ultimate refuge is the Supreme Court of the United States.”

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

1920s, Ordered Liberty and World Peace (1924)

People, Law, Personality

“For such is the nature of men, that howsoever they may acknowledge many others to be more witty, or more eloquent, or more learned; Yet they will hardly believe there be many so wise as themselves: For they see their own wit at hand, and other men's at a distance.”

Thomas Hobbes book Leviathan

The First Part, Chapter 13, p. 61
Leviathan (1651)

Men, Nature, Learning

“If active managers win, it has to be at the expense of other active managers. And when you add them all up, the returns of active managers have to be literally zero, before costs. Then after costs, it's a big negative sign”

Eugene Fama (1939) American economist and Nobel laureate in Economics

Cited in: Lawrence Delevingne. " Nobel winner Fama: Active management 'never' good. http://www.cnbc.com/id/102014057" at cnbc.com. 19 Sept. 2014.

“When someone like Kurt Cobain or Jack White comes out, they didn’t go, “He sounds just like Muddy Waters,” did they? They just said, “He’s great, he sounds like him.” When women come out and men write about them, they tend to write about them in a way that other men can understand, which sometimes can seem a bit patronizing.”

Shingai Shoniwa (1981) British musician

http://venuszine.com/stories/music/4102.php

Women, Men, Way, Understanding

“In his work a means of escape has been found from outmoded romanticism on the one hand and from a barren objectivity on the other.”

Jean Sibelius (1865–1957) Finnish composer of the late Romantic period

Neville Cardus in the Manchester Guardian, 1935; reprinted in his The Delights of Music (1966) p. 56.
Criticism

“When a man make of his personnal interests the mainspring of his life and he is greedy to make use of everything that can benefit him, he naturally enters into conflict with other persons, acting also in their interests, hence the disagreements that can become a hundred years old, and drive whole generations to a mutual hate.”

African Spir (1837–1890) Russian philosopher

Source: Words of a Sage : Selected thoughts of African Spir (1937), p. 42.

Life, Hate, Nature, Personality

“And fully in keeping with the demagogic prejudices of the party, no A. R. F leader would seriously propose participating cooperatively in the struggle of the people of w:Turkey against the fascist regime there… While the A. R. F. reprints maps showing the borders of a supposed "Armenia" proposed in the unratified w:Treaty of Sèvres, the party's literature ignores the native population within the borders of this "Armenia." It should be pointed out that this population, consisting of w:Kurds, Turks, Lazes and others, exceeds six million. One wonders what kind of Armenia the A. R. F. envisions in which Armenians will be an absolute—if not minuscule—minority…”

Monte Melkonian (1957–1993) National Hero of Armenia

Source: The Right to Struggle (1993), P. 57.

People, Literature

“On the other hand, I view the whole matter from a cosmic perspective. I don't take a position. I believe that there are no more positions to take, no certainties, no facts. Many people find this confusing about my films; they say I am hiding out behind irony. But from a cosmic viewpoint, it is eternally unimportant whether one lives or not.”

Peter Greenaway (1942) British film director

In an interview in Die Zeit, 24 Nov 1989
Interviews

People

“A true scholarship would examine, and then either accept or reject, with good reason, any new theory which challenges a generally accepted theory admitted to be full of sharp anomalies. However, this has not been the attitude of world scholarship towards our earlier book. The general attitude has been as follows: there is a school of crank scholarship in India which is out to prove, by hook or by crook, that India was the original homeland of the Indo-European family of languages; and the writers of this school deserve to be firmly put in their place. And the best method of doing this is by tarring all scholars who support, or even appear to support, an Indian homeland theory, with one brush; and then pointing out particularly untenable propositions made by one or the other of the scholars so branded together, to prove that all the scholars so named belong to one single school of irrational scholarship.”

Shrikant Talageri (1958) Indian author

Shrikant Talageri, The Rigveda: A Historical Analysis, 2000.
The Rigveda: A Historical Analysis (2000), Chapter 9 : Michael Witzel - An Examination of Western Vedic Scholarship

Books, World, School, Family

“Most companies are saddled with institutional constraints. A company's history, for example, may commit it to an industry that now offers limited opportunity. A more common problem is a shareholder constituency that pressures its manager to dance to Wall Street's tune. Many CEOs resist, but others give in and adopt operating and capital-allocation policies far different from those they would choose if left to themselves.”

Warren Buffett (1930) American business magnate, investor, and philanthropist

2003 Chairman's Letter http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/2003ltr.pdf Letters to Shareholders (1957 - 2012)

History, Problem, Dance

“Diverting attention from the way in which certain beliefs, desires, attitudes, or values are the result of particular power relations, then, can be a sophisticated way of contributing to the maintenance of an ideology, and one that will be relatively immune to normal forms of empirical refutation. If I claim (falsely) that all human societies, or all human societies at a certain level of economic development, have a free market in health services, that is a claim that can be demonstrated to be false. On the other hand, if I focus your attention in a very intense way on the various different tariffs and pricing schema that doctors or hospitals or drug companies impose for their products and services, and if I become morally outraged by “excessive” costs some drug companies charge, discussing at great length the relative rates of profit in different sectors of the economy, and pressing the moral claims of patients, it is not at all obvious that anything I say may be straightforwardly “false”; after all, who knows what “excessive” means? However, by proceeding in this way I might well focus your attention on narrow issues of “just” pricing, turning it away from more pressing issues about the acceptance in some societies of the very existence of a free market for drugs and medical services. One can even argue that the more outraged I become about the excessive price, the more I obscure the underlying issue. One way, then, in which a political philosophy can be ideological is by presenting a relatively marginal issue as if it were central and essential.”

Raymond Geuss book Philosophy and Real Politics

Source: Philosophy and Real Politics (2008), p. 54.

Health, Way, Falseness

“What does it mean, then, to become part of God’s work in the world? What does it mean to live a Christian life? One way to answer that question is to look back into the life of the Trinity and the original creation. God made us to ever increasingly share in his own joy and delight in the same way he has joy and delight within himself. We share his joy first as we give him glory (worshipping and serving him rather than ourselves); second, as we honor and serve the dignity of other human beings made in the image of God’s glory; and third, as we cherish his derivative glory in the world of nature, which also reflects it. We glorify and enjoy him only as we worship him, serve the human community, and care for the created environment.
Another way to look at the Christian life, however, is to see it from the perspective of the final restoration. The world and our hearts are broken. Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection was an infinitely costly rescue operation to restore justice to the oppressed and marginalized, physical wholeness to the diseased and dying, community to the isolated and lonely, and spiritual joy and connection to those alienated from God. To be a Christian today is to become part of that same operation, with the expectation of suffering and hardship and the joyful assurance of eventual success.”

Tim Keller (pastor) book The Reason for God

The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism (2008), Ch. 14: The Dance of God

Life, Death, God, World

“Once I was young and had so much more orientation and could talk with nervous intelligence about everything and with clarity and without as much literary preambling at this; in other words this is the story of an unself-confident man, at the same time of an egomaniac, naturally, facetious won't do−just to start at the beginning and let the truth seep out, that's what I'll do-.”

Jack Kerouac book The Subterraneans

Source: The Subterraneans (1958), Chapter One

Truth, Confidence, Intelligence, Nature

“The problem of directing a user to stored information, some of which may be unknown to him, is the problem of "information retrieval"… In information retrieval, the addressee or receiver rather than the sender is the active party. Other differences are that communication is temporal from one epoch to a later epoch in time, though possibly at the same point in space; communication is in all cases unidirectional; the sender cannot know the particular message that will be of later use to the receiver and must send all possible messages; the message is digitally representable; a "channel" is the physical document left in storage which contains the message; and there is no channel noise because all messages are presumed to be completely accessible to the receiver. The technical goal is finding in minimum time those messages of interest to the receiver, where the receiver has available a selective device with a finite digital scanning rate.”

Calvin Mooers (1919–1994) American computer scientist

Calvin Mooers (1950). " Information retrieval viewed as temporal signaling http://www.mathunion.org/ICM/ICM1950.1/Main/icm1950.1.0565.0576.ocr.pdf#page=8". Proceedings of the International Congress of Mathematicians. Vol. 1, S.572-573

Communication, Problem, Time

“Be true to thyself, as thou be not false to others.”

Francis Bacon book Essays

Of Wisdom for a Man's Self
Essays (1625)

Falseness

“Why should God wish to take a thoroughbred like Matty so soon, and leave some others down here that could well be spared?”

Kenesaw Mountain Landis (1866–1944) American judge and baseball commissioner

Lamenting on the death of the famously virtuous former N.Y. Giants pitcher Christy Mathewson in 1925. Quoted in Christopher Hodge Evans, William R. Herzog, The Faith of Fifty Million: Baseball, Religion, and American Culture (Westminster John Knox Press, 2002, ISBN 0664223052), p. 77. http://books.google.com/books?id=nfk_O47SFGwC&pg=PA77&dq=%22like+Matty+so+soon

God

“Creating fatherhood means creating a major psychological shift. Both sexes find it's difficult to fully share the psychological responsibility for the other sex's traditional role -- especially when the other sex is around.”

Warren Farrell (1943) author, spokesperson, expert witness, political candidate

page 90.
Father and Child Reunion (2001)

Sex

“Here’s why the life of Muhammad [and Jesus] matters: Contrary to what many secularists would have us believe, religions are not entirely determined (or distorted) by the faithful over time. The lives and words of the founders remain central, no matter how long ago they lived. The idea that believers shape religion is derived, instead, from the fashionable 1960s philosophy of deconstructionism, which teaches that written words have no meaning other than that given to them by the reader. Equally important, it follows that if the reader alone finds meaning, there can be no truth (and certainly no religious truth); one person’s meaning is equal to another’s. Ultimately, according to deconstructionism, we all create our own set of “truths,” none better, or worse than any other. Yet for the religious man or woman on the streets of Chicago, Rome, Jerusalem, Damascus, Calcutta, and Bangkok, the words of Jesus, Moses, Muhammad, Krishna, and Buddha mean something far greater than any individual’s rendering of them. And even to the less-than-devout reader, the words of these great religious leaders are clearly not equal in their meaning.”

Robert Spencer (1962) American author and blogger

The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam, Chapter 1, page 3 https://books.google.com.br/books?id=_7RD2jwMU2wC&printsec=frontcover&hl=pt-BR#v=onepage&q&f=false

Life, Truth, Faith, Religion

“She walked down the aisle with all eyes on her and she glowed
Someone chose her above all other women they had known
I can only wonder what it must be like to be
so perfect in a lover's eyes, the only one they see Well, it’s never been me, the chosen one
It’s never been me
If ever I see a chosen one I feel ugly”

Happy Rhodes (1965) American singer-songwriter

"Chosen One" - Live performance at The Tin Angel, Philadelphia PA (29 January 2005) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xt4PTtcVh5s Find Me (2007)

Women, Feeling, Lovers, Perfection

“Ambitious young women today are taught to ignore or suppress every natural instinct, if it conflicts with the feminist agenda posed on them. All literary and artistic works, no matter how great, that document the ambivalence of female sexuality they are trained to dismiss as “misogynous.” In other words, their minds are being programmed to secede from their bodies … there is a huge gap between feminist rhetoric and women’s actual sex lives, where feminism is of little help except with a certain stratum of deferential, malleable, white middle-class men.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Vamps and Tramps (1994), "No Law in the Arena: A Pagan Theory of Sexuality", p. 31

Women, Men, Sex, Nature

“One finds in this subject a kind of demonstration which does not carry with it so high a degree of certainty as that employed in geometry; and which differs distinctly from the method employed by geometers in that they prove their propositions by well-established and incontrovertible principles, while here principles are tested by inferences which are derivable from them. The nature of the subject permits of no other treatment. It is possible, however, in this way to establish a probability which is little short of certainty. This is the case when the consequences of the assumed principles are in perfect accord with the observed phenomena, and especially when these verifications are numerous; but above all when one employs the hypothesis to predict new phenomena and finds his expectations realized.”

Christiaan Huygens book Treatise on Light

Treatise on Light (1690) - preface, Translated by Michael R. Matthews, Scientific Background to Modern Philosophy. 1989. p. 126

Way, Nature, Perfection

“[There is an] unbridgeable chasm in the world. On one side are such criminal gangs, sanctified by the term government, and the United Nations they dominate, enforcing by their guns mass slavery, mass death, mass violence, mass impoverishment, and mass famine. On the other side are democratic countries where people are free, secure, and need not fear mass impoverishment, murder at the hands of government agents, and killing famines.”

Rudolph Rummel (1932–2014) American academic

Source: The Blue Book of Freedom: Ending Famine, Poverty, Democide, and War (2007), p. 12

Death, People, World, Fear

“India whose ancient borders stretched until Afghanistan, lost with the country of seven rivers (the Indus Valley), the historical center of her civilization. At a time when the Muslim invaders seemed to have lost some of their extremism and were ready to assimilate themselves to other populations of India, the European (British) conquerors, before returning home, surrendered once more to Muslim fanaticism the cradle of Hindu civilization.”

Alain Daniélou (1907–1994) French historian, musicologist, Indologist and expert on Shaivite Hinduism

Alain Danielou, Histoire de l'Inde - Alain Danielou p. 355

Home, Time, Country

“There is a sort of an unwritten code in Washington, among the underworld and the hustlers and these other guys that I am their friend.”

Marion Barry (1936–2014) American politician and former mayor of Washington, D.C.

Explaining why he was upset at being robbed at gunpoint, as quoted in the Washington Express (4 January 2006), p. 11
2000s

Guy

“On January 3, 1992 a meeting of Russian and American scholars took place in the auditorium of a government building in Moscow. Two weeks earlier the Soviet Union had ceased to exist and the Russian Federation had become an independent country. As a result, the statue of Lenin which previously graced the stage of the auditorium had disappeared and instead the flag of the Russian Federation was now displayed on the front wall. The only problem, one American observed, was that the flag had been hung upside down. After this was pointed out to the Russian hosts, they quickly and quietly corrected the error during the first intermission.
The years after the Cold War witnessed the beginnings of dramatic changes in peoples’ identities and the symbols of those identities. Global politics began to be reconfigured along cultural lines. Upside-down flags were a sign of the transition, but more and more the flags are flying high and true, and Russians and other peoples are mobilizing and marching behind these and other symbols of their new cultural identities.”

Samuel P. Huntington (1927–2008) American political scientist

Source: The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996), Ch. 1: The New Era in World Politics, § 1 : Introduction: Flags And Cultural Identity

War, People, Error, Problem

“The two former lovers finally looked at each other, their faces crawling with the crabs of conflicting emotion.”

Malcolm Azania book From the Notebooks of Dr. Brain

Source: From the Notebooks of Dr. Brain (2007), Chapter 9 “Paranoia: It Can Destroy Ya” (p. 283)

Lovers

“When a human being relates to an individual nonhuman being as an anonymous object, rather than as a being with its own subjectivity, it is the human, and not the other animal, who relinquishes personhood.”

Barbara Smuts (1950) American anthropologist

Source: Reflections (1999), p. 118

Animals

“Of greater importance than this regulation of African clientship were the political consequences of the Jugurthine war or rather of the Jugurthine insurrection, although these have been frequently estimated too highly. Certainly all the evils of the government were therein brought to light in all their nakedness; it was now not merely notorious but, so to speak, judicially established, that among the governing lords of Rome everything was treated as venal--the treaty of peace and the right of intercession, the rampart of the camp and the life of the soldier; the African had said no more than the simple truth, when on his departure from Rome he declared that, if he had only gold enough, he would undertake to buy the city itself. But the whole external and internal government of this period bore the same stamp of miserable baseness. In our case the accidental fact, that the war in Africa is brought nearer to us by means of better accounts than the other contemporary military and political events, shifts the true perspective; contemporaries learned by these revelations nothing but what everybody knew long before and every intrepid patriot had long been in a position to support by facts. The circumstance, however, that they were now furnished with some fresh, still stronger and still more irrefutable, proofs of the baseness of the restored senatorial government--a baseness only surpassed by its incapacity--might have been of importance, had there been an opposition and a public opinion with which the government would have found it necessary to come to terms. But this war had in fact exposed the corruption of the government no less than it had revealed the utter nullity of the opposition. It was not possible to govern worse than the restoration governed in the years 637-645; it was not possible to stand forth more defenceless and forlorn than was the Roman senate in 645: had there been in Rome a real opposition, that is to say, a party which wished and urged a fundamental alteration of the constitution, it must necessarily have now made at least an attempt to overturn the restored senate. No such attempt took place; the political question was converted into a personal one, the generals were changed, and one or two useless and unimportant people were banished. It was thus settled, that the so-called popular party as such neither could nor would govern; that only two forms of government were at all possible in Rome, a -tyrannis- or an oligarchy; that, so long as there happened to be nobody sufficiently well known, if not sufficiently important, to usurp the regency of the state, the worst mismanagement endangered at the most individual oligarchs, but never the oligarchy; that on the other hand, so soon as such a pretender appeared, nothing was easier than to shake the rotten curule chairs. In this respect the coming forward of Marius was significant, just because it was in itself so utterly unwarranted. If the burgesses had stormed the senate-house after the defeat of Albinus, it would have been a natural, not to say a proper course; but after the turn which Metellus had given to the Numidian war, nothing more could be said of mismanagement, and still less of danger to the commonwealth, at least in this respect; and yet the first ambitious officer who turned up succeeded in doing that with which the older Africanus had once threatened the government,(16) and procured for himself one of the principal military commands against the distinctly- expressed will of the governing body. Public opinion, unavailing in the hands of the so-called popular party, became an irresistible weapon in the hands of the future king of Rome. We do not mean to say”

Theodor Mommsen (1817–1903) German classical scholar, historian, jurist, journalist, politician, archaeologist and writer

Vol. 3, pg 163, Translated by W.P. Dickson.
The History of Rome - Volume 3

Life, War, People, Truth

“We tried in our simple way to lead our life in a manner that may make a difference to those of others.”

Nelson Mandela (1918–2013) President of South Africa, anti-apartheid activist

Nelson Mandela on freedom fighters, Upon Receiving the Roosevelt Freedom Award (8 June 2002). Source: From Nelson Mandela By Himself: The Authorised Book of Quotations © 2010 by Nelson R. Mandela and The Nelson Mandela Foundation http://www.nelsonmandela.org/content/mini-site/selected-quotes 2000s

Life, Way

“Conclusion. Then for conclusion, by these interpretative propositions, followeth foure thinges marvelous and notable. First, that the interpretation of every parte of the Revelation, is accessorie or consectarie to other: that is to say, it is so chained and linked together, that every mysterie opens other to the discoverie of the whole. Secondly, that the first halfe of the book is orderly, that is to say, it containeth in order of time the most notable accidents that concerneth Gods Church, from the time of Christs Baptisme successively to the latter day. Thirdly, that every historie prophecied, is limited or dated with his own nŭber of years. Fourthly and last of all, that whatsoever historie is more orderlie and summarlie, than plainly set downe in the first orderlie parte of the booke, the same is repeated, interpreted, or amplified in the last part of the booke: deviding the whole Revelation according to the table following, before we proceed to the principall matter.”

John Napier (1550–1617) Scottish mathematician

A Plaine Discovery of the Whole Revelation of St. John (1593), The First and Introductory Treatise

God, Books, History, Time

“These days, to be "patriotic" means to wave the flag and shout slogans whenever the mass media deem it appropriate. It means to cheer the government whenever the government decides to use its cruise missiles or its smart bombs to kill a bunch of people in some other country, regardless of the reason. Instead of blood-based patriotism, today we have government-based patriotism. If you wave the flag and support the government, you're a patriot. If you don't like what the government is doing and you say so, then all of the flag-waving, slogan-shouting yahoos look at you as if you were the enemy.”

William Luther Pierce (1933–2002) American white nationalist

The New Patriotism, 2002
2000s, 2002

People, Support, Country

“As Amish say "There is a vast difference between putting your nose in other people's business and putting your heart in other people's problems,” and there is also a vast difference between using the ‘grammar of language’ and the ‘grammar of painting’. In a language we have subjects, adjectives, verbs, and so on, and in painting we have light, composition, geometric planes, and lines. It is by using this grammar that one can understand a work of art. This is very similar to Ferdinand Saussure’s, distinction between “la langue” and “la parole” for interpretation of written words.”

Guity Novin (1944) artist

Dialogues on enlightenment and reason (2013)

People, Art, Understanding, Business

“On the other hand, we must see what peace for the Arabs means in a real sense of security on another level. Peace for the Arabs means the kind of economic security that they so desperately need. These nations, as you know, are part of that third world of hunger, of disease, of illiteracy. I think that as long as these conditions exist there will be tensions, there will be the endless quest to find scapegoats. So there is a need for a Marshall Plan for the Middle East, where we lift those who are at the bottom of the economic ladder and bring them into the mainstream of economic security.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

68th Annual Convention of the Rabbinical Assembly for Conservative Judaism, March 25, 1968, less than 2 weeks before his death. Source: Martin Luther King's pro-Israel legacy by Allen B. West on February 15, 2014 at AllenBWest.com. http://allenbwest.com/2014/02/martin-luther-kings-pro-israel-legacy/, See also 2014-06-09 Youtube video Dr. King's pro-Israel Legacy (in 5 minutes) by IBSI - Institute for Black Solidarity with Israel https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Dd7pIB0CP0 1960s

Hunger, World, Disease, Peace

“Don't try to tear down other people's religion about their ears, Build up your own perfect structure of truth, and invite your listeners to enter in and enjoy it's glories.”

Brigham Young (1801–1877) Latter Day Saint movement leader

The Life Story of Brigham Young, p. 149-150
Attributed

People, Truth, Religion, Tear

“You do not wipe away the scars of centuries by saying: 'now, you are free to go where you want, do as you desire, and choose the leaders you please.' You do not take a man who for years has been hobbled by chains, liberate him, bring him to the starting line of a race, saying, "you are free to compete with all the others," and still justly believe you have been completely fair… This is the next and more profound stage of the battle for civil rights. We seek not just freedom but opportunity—not just legal equity but human ability—not just equality as a right and a theory, but equality as a fact and as a result.”

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

LBJ in the Commencement Address at Howard University http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/eyesontheprize/sources/ps_bakke.html on June 4, 1965 on affirmative action. 1960s

Freedom

“And what has Don Quixote left, do you ask? I answer, he has left himself, and a man, a living and eternal man, is worth all the theories and all the philosophies. Other peoples have left chiefly institutions, books; we have left souls; St. Teresa is worth any institution, any Critique of Pure Reason.”

Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936) 19th-20th century Spanish writer and philosopher

The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), Conclusion : Don Quixote in the Contemporary European Tragi-Comedy

People, Books, Soul

“Here is an empire in which is the only relic of the oldest civilization of the world—one which, 2,700 years ago, according to some authorities, had a system of primary education—which had its system of logic before the time of Aristotle, and its code of morals before that of Socrates. Here is a country which has had its uninterrupted traditions and histories for so long a period—that supplied silks and other articles of luxury to the Romans 2,000 years ago! They are the very soul of commerce in the East, and one of the wealthiest nations in the world. They are the most industrious people in Asia, having acquired the name of the ants of the East…You find them not as barbarians at home, where they cultivate all the arts and sciences, and where they have carried all, except one, to a point of perfection but little below our own—but that one is war. You have there a people who have carried agriculture to a state of horticulture, and whose great cities rival in population those of the Western world. Now, there must be something in such a people deserving of respect. If in speaking of them we stigmatize them as barbarians, and threaten them with force because we say they are inaccessible to reason, it must be because we do not understand them; because their ways are not our ways, nor our ways theirs. Now, is not so venerable an empire as that deserving of some sympathy—at least of some justice—at the hands of conservative England?”

Richard Cobden (1804–1865) English manufacturer and Radical and Liberal statesman

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1857/feb/26/resolutions-moved-debate-adjourned in the House of Commons (26 February 1857) on China. 1850s

War, People, World, Education

“Truth has no greater enemy than its unwise defenders, and no warmer friends than those who, receiving it in a meek and tolerant spirit, respect the conscientious convictions of others, and seek, in study and in prayer, for the best solution of mysterious and incomprehensible revelations.”

David Brewster (1781–1868) British astronomer and mathematician

In his Memoirs of the Life, Writings, and Discoveries of Sir Isaac Newton, vol. 2 (Edinburgh: 1855)

Truth, Study

“As we have seen, the explicit part of the circular issued by the West Bengal government in 1989 in effect was that there must be no negative reference to Islamic rule in India. Although these were the very things which contemporary Islamic writers had celebrated, there must be no reference to the destruction of the temples by Muslim rulers, to the forcible conversion of Hindus, to the numerous other disabilities which were placed on the Hindu population. Along with the circular, the passages which had to be removed were listed and substitute passages were specified. The passages which were ordered to be deleted contained, if anything, a gross understatement of the facts. On the other hand, passages which were sought to be inserted contained total falsehoods: that by paying jizyah Hindus could lead ‘normal lives’ under an Islamic ruler like Alauddin Khalji! A closer study of the textbooks which are today being used under the authority of the West Bengal government shows a much more comprehensive, a much deeper design than that of merely erasing the cruelties of Islamic rule.”

Arun Shourie (1941) Indian journalist and politician

Eminent Historians: Their Technology, Their Line, Their Fraud

Study, Parting

“He [Thutmose III] went to Asia with his army and killed the natives to his heart's content, and stole so much of their goods that Egypt was rolling in wealth for quite a while. Thutmose III was thus one of the earliest exponents of internationalism, or going into other countries and slaughtering the inhabitants.”

Will Cuppy (1884–1949) American writer

The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody (1950), Part I: It Seems There Were Two Egyptians, Hatshepsut

Heart, Country, Wealth

“The people are being kept in line at the moment, because there are still lots of shiny new things for them to buy. But more and more Americans are beginning to look beyond their immediate material comfort and to worry about the long-term moral slide of their country. If the economy slips badly, there will be hell to pay. More and more people will listen to the dissidents. A big problem for the Jews is how to silence the dissidents now, how to stifle the people who are asking inconvenient questions and thinking dangerous thoughts, before these thoughts spread to other people. They've tried to do it with legislation, but the country isn't yet in a mood to be told what it can think. What the Jews need is a nice, big war. Then they can crack down on the dissidents. Then they can call us "subversives." Then they can call us "unpatriotic," because we will be against their war… That's why I am convinced that there will be a strong effort to involve America in another major war during the next four years. This effort will be disguised, of course. It will be cloaked in deceit, as such efforts always are. While the warmongers are scheming for war, they will tell us how much they want peace. They're good at that sort of thing. They've had a lot of practice. But they will be scheming for war, believe me, no matter what they say. And when that war comes, remember what you have read today.”

William Luther Pierce (1933–2002) American white nationalist

Get Set for War, 1997.
1990s, 1990

War, People, Peace, Mood

“Ravens and crows. Rats. Mists and clouds. Insects and corruption. Strange events and odd occurences. The ordinary twisted and strange. Wonders. The dead are beginning to walk and some see them. Others do not, but more and more, we all fear the night. These have been our days. They rain upon us beneath a dead sky, crushing us with their fury, until as one, we beg, "Let it begin."”

Robert Jordan (1948–2007) American writer

Journal of the Unknown Scholar, entry for the Feast of Freia, 1000 NE
(27 October 2009)

Fear, Night, Dead

“The Settlement … is an experimental effort to aid in the solution of the social and industrial problems which are engendered by the modern conditions of life in a great city. It insists that these problems are not confined to any one portion of the city. It is an attempt to relieve, at the same time, the overaccumulation at one end of society and the destitution at the other …”

Jane Addams (1860–1935) pioneer settlement social worker

Source: Twenty Years at Hull-House (1910), Ch. 6

Life, Problem, Effort, Time

“If Adam had finished his course of perfect obedience, he would have been justified: and certainly his justification would have implied something more than what is merely negative; he would have been approved of, as having fulfilled the righteousness of the law, and accordingly would have been adjudged to the reward of it. So Christ, our second surety, (in whose justification all whose surety he is, are virtually justified,) was not justified till he had done the work the Father had appointed him, and kept the Father’s commandments through all trials; and then in his resurrection he was justified. When he had been put to death in the flesh, but quickened by the spirit, 1 Pet. iii. 18. then he that was manifest in the flesh was justified in the spirit, 1 Tim. iii. 16.; but God, when he justified him in raising him from the dead, did not only release him from his humiliation for sin, and acquit him from any further suffering or abasement for it, but admitted him to that eternal and immortal life, and to the beginning of that exaltation that was the reward of what he had done. And indeed the justification of a believer is no other than his being admitted to communion in the justification of this head and surety of all believers; for as Christ suffered the punishment of sin, not as a private person, but as our surety; so when after this suffering he was raised from the dead, he was therein justified, not as a private person, but as the surety and representative of all that should believe in him. So that he was raised again not only for his own, but also for our justification, according to the apostle, Rom. iv. 25. “Who was delivered for our offences, and raised again for our justification.””

Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758) Christian preacher, philosopher, and theologian

And therefore it is that the apostle says, as he does in Rom. viii. 34. “Who is he that condemneth? It is Christ that died, yea rather, that is risen again.
Justification By Faith Alone (1738)

Life, Death, God, Law

“Let me highlight the fact, then, that a mistrust of outsiders – as manifested by and in states for thousands of years – is very different from an ideology asserting that one uniquely pure race is morally superior to all others. Such thinking was by no means the norm even in European fascism. It runs directly counter to Marx.”

Brian Reynolds Myers (1963) American professor of international studies

2010s, North Korea's State Loyalty Advantage (December 2011)

Thinking

“More computing sins are committed in the name of efficiency (without necessarily achieving it) than for any other single reason - including blind stupidity.”

William Wulf (1939) American computer scientist

"A Case Against the GOTO," Proceedings of the 25th National ACM Conference, August 1972, pp. 791-97.

Stupidity

“We know ourselves what difficult times we live in. We know equally, and we are conscious of the fact, that with us—all of us at home and overseas—there rests the responsibility whether this form of government will remain, or whether it will fail. It is therefore good that we who meet from all corners of the world to take counsel with one another, should, at any rate among ourselves, hold this torch of freedom alight, and alive, until other nations come to see our ways.”

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

Speech to the Empire Parliamentary Association's Conference in Westminster Hall (4 July 1935); published in This Torch of Freedom: Speeches and Addresses (1935), pp. 5-6.
1935

World, Way, Home, Freedom

“English is an outrageous tangle of those derivations and other multifarious linguistic influences, from Yiddish to Shoshone, which has grown up around a gnarly core of chewy, clangorous yawps derived from ancestors who painted themselves blue to frighten their enemies.”

Roy Blount Jr. (1941) American writer

Alphabet Juice (2008), p. 93.

Painting

“Most American officials viewed Prime Minister Haris Silajdzic as the Bosnia leader with the broadest vision - an eloquent advocate of a multiethnic state. But his power struggles with Izetbegović and Sacirbey and other members of the Bosnian government often isolated him. His collegues complained that he was difficult to work with. He carried a serious additional burden: Tuđman and Milošević distrusted him. Nevertheless, Silajzic was one of the two msot popular Muslim politicians in Bosnia, along with Izetbegović. My own feelings about Silajdzic shifted frequently. There was something touching about his intensity and energy, and his constant desire to improve himself intellectually. Although always busy, he seemed alone - his wife and son lived in Turkey. Silajdzic was the only Bosnian official who seemed genuinely to care about economic reconstruction of his ravaged land. His unpredictable moods worried us, but his support would be essential for any peace agreement.”

Richard Holbrooke (1941–2010) American diplomat

Source: 1990s, To End a War (1998), p. 188

Peace, Feeling, Mood, Business

“What makes love making and reading resemble each other most is that within both of them times and spaces open, different from measurable time and space”

Italo Calvino (1923–1985) Italian journalist and writer of short stories and novels

"If on a winter's night a traveller". Chapter 7. Translated from the Italian by William Weaver (1981).

Love, Making love, Time, Reading

“Wikipedia is something special. It is like a library or a public park. It is like a temple for the mind. It is a place we can all go to think, to learn, to share our knowledge with others. When I founded Wikipedia, I could have made it into a for-profit company with advertising banners, but I decided to do something different. We’ve worked hard over the years to keep it lean and tight. We fulfill our mission efficiently.”

Jimmy Wales (1966) Wikipedia co-founder and American Internet entrepreneur

Wikimedia donation page https://donate.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:LandingPage&country=US&uselang=en&utm_medium=spontaneous&utm_source=fr-redir&utm_campaign=spontaneous&rdfrom=%2F%2Fwikimediafoundation.org%2Fw%2Findex.php%3Ftitle%3DFundraising%26redirect%3Dno.

Knowledge, Thinking, Learning

“To consider the city as the projection of society on space is both an indispensible starting point and too elementary an approach. For, although one must go beyond the empiricism of geographical description, one runs the very great risk of imagining space as a white page on which the actions of groups and institutions are inscribed, without encountering any other obstacle than the trace of past generations. This is tantamount to conceiving of nature as entirely fashioned by culture, whereas the whole social problematic is born by the indissoluble union of these two terms, through the dialectical process by which a particular biological species (particularly because divided into classes) "man", transforms himself and transforms his struggle for life and for the appropriation of the product of his labour.”

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

Source: The Urban Question: A Marxist Approach, 1977, p. 115

Life, Imagination, Fashion, Nature

“To me, looking at other people in terms of what is wrong with them —these gradations of disturbance— was and is distasteful. Always implicit in the doctor's view is, of course, how much more "healthy" you are than they. And this is almost never the case.”

Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson (1941) American writer and activist

Source: Final Analysis (1990), p. 94

People

“Neither Jewish ethics nor Jewish tradition can disqualify terrorism as a means of combat. We are very far from having any moral qualms as far as our national war goes. We have before us the command of the Torah, whose morality surpasses that of any other body of laws in the world: "Ye shall blot them out to the last man." We are particularly far from having any qualms with regard to the enemy, whose moral degradation is universally admitted here.But first and foremost, terrorism is for us a part of the political battle being conducted under the present circumstances, and it has a great part to play: speaking in a clear voice to the whole world, as well as to our wretched brethren outside this land, it proclaims our war against the occupier.”

Yitzhak Shamir (1915–2012) prime minister of Israel

Hehazit [The Front] (Summer 1943).

War, World, Law, Universe

“It does not follow from the separation of planning and doing in the analysis of work that the planner and the doer should be two different people. It does not follow that the industrial world should be divided into two classes of people: a few who decide what is to be done, design the job, set the pace, rhythm and motions, and order others about; and the many who do what and as they are told.”

Peter F. Drucker (1909–2005) American business consultant

Source: 1930s- 1950s, The Practice of Management (1954), p. 284

People, World

“There was no other alternative [to the disappearances]… [Military leaders] were in agreement that it was the price that must be paid to win the war against subversion and we needed that it not be obvious so society would not realize it. It was necessary to eliminate a large group of people who could not be brought to justice nor [openly] shot either.”

Jorge Rafael Videla (1925–2013) Argentinian President

Videla in 2012, as quoted in Adam Bernstein (May 17 2013). "Jorge Rafael Videla, ruthless Argentine junta leader, dies at 87". The Washington Post.

War, People, Justice

“I declare I hold [physicians] to be true heroes, when I regard their hard existence, their pure pathetic lives; when I recall their cheerfulness and manliness; when I see them, generously forgetful of self, answering every call with alacrity; when I think of the warm heart that beats so steadfastly under the fuzzy damp coat; when I know that the lantern that guides them in a dark night to the house of distress is but like their own calm purpose and resolve shining forth to guide and comfort others.”

Jacob Mendes Da Costa (1833–1900) American physician

[citation needed]

Thinking, Heart, Housing, Night

“We do not, of course, write literary criticism at all now. Academe has won the battle in which Wilson fought so fiercely on the other side. Ambitious English teachers now invent systems that have nothing to do with literature or life but everything to do with those games that must be played in order for them to rise in the academic bureaucracy. Their works are empty indeed. But then, their works are not meant to be full. They are to be taught, not read. The long dialogue has broken down. Fortunately, as Flaubert pointed out, the worst thing about the present is the future. One day there will be no… But I have been asked not to give the game away. Meanwhile, I shall drop a single hint: Only construct!”

Gore Vidal (1925–2012) American writer

"Edmund Wilson: This Critic and This Gin and These Shoes", closing lines
1990s, United States - Essays 1952-1992 (1992)

Life, Game, Literature, Teachers

“Socialism fails when it run out of money of others.”

Esperanza Aguirre (1952) Spanish politician

Source: NoticiasEsperanzaAguirre.es http://www.noticiasesperanzaaguirre.es/aguirre-el-socialismo-fracasa-cuando-se-le-acaba-el-dinero-de-diario-siglo-xxi/. April 2011.

Money

“I was once thrown out of a mental hospital for depressing the other patients.”

Oscar Levant (1906–1972) American comedian, composer, pianist and actor

As quoted in Memorable Quotations: Jewish Writers of the Past (2005) edited by Carol A. Dingle.

“In a world that had become a salvage operation, the general supply evolved into Union Grove's leading industry. When every last useful thing in town had been stripped from the Kmart and the United Auto, the CVS drugstore, and other trading establishments of the bygone national chain-store economy, daily life became a perpetual flea market centered on the old town dump.”

James Howard Kunstler book World Made By Hand

Source: World Made By Hand (2008), Chapter 5, p. 28

Life, World

“I don’t expect any conservatives to recognize the truth of Obama’s fundamental conservatism for at least a couple of decades—perhaps only after a real progressive presidency. In any case, today they are too invested in painting him as the devil incarnate in order to frighten grassroots Republicans into voting to keep Obama from confiscating all their guns, throwing them into FEMA re-education camps, and other nonsense that is believed by many Republicans. But just as they eventually came to appreciate Bill Clinton’s core conservatism, Republicans will someday see that Obama was no less conservative.”

Bruce Bartlett (1951) American historian

2010s, Obama is a Republican (2014)

Truth, Education, Painting

“Recently I have felt just what the mood of colors means to me: it means that everything in this picture changes its local color according to the same principle and that thereby all muted tones blend in a unified relationship, one to the other.”

Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876–1907) German artist

excerpt of her Journal, Worpswede, 24 July 1898; as quoted in Voicing our visions, – Writings by women artists; ed. Mara R. Witzling, Universe New York, 1991, p. 197
1898

Color, Mood, Change

“Any restrictions to freedom of expression will always open the door to possible others, because analogical reasoning can mount arguments showing why this or that class of objects is closely similar to those for which exceptions have been made.”

Randal Marlin (1938) Canadian academic

Source: Propaganda & The Ethics Of Persuasion (2002), Chapter Six, Freedom Of Expression, p. 230

Freedom

“It is good to praise others but it important to look for faults within oneself. It is nice to be concerned about people but to be introspective is even nicer.”

Amitabh Bachchan (1942) Indian actor

Source: Soul Curry for You and Me: An Empowering Philosophy that Can Enrich Your Life, P. 25.

People

“God desireth not to see, in the Dispensation of the Bayán, any soul deprived of joy and radiance. He indeed desireth that under all conditions, all may be adorned with such purity, both inwardly and outwardly, that no repugnance may be caused even to themselves, how much less unto others.”

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

V, 14
The Persian Bayán

God, Soul, Joy

“It took centuries of intellectual, philosophical development to achieve political freedom. It was a long struggle, stretching from Aristotle to John Locke to the Founding Fathers. The system they established was not based on unlimited majority rule, but on its opposite: on individual rights, which were not to be alienated by majority vote or minority plotting. The individual was not left at the mercy of his neighbors or his leaders: the Constitutional system of checks and balances was scientifically devised to protect him from both. This was the great American achievement—and if concern for the actual welfare of other nations were our present leaders' motive, this is what we should have been teaching the world.”

Ayn Rand book Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal

Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (1966)

World, Motivation, Freedom

“Money and muscle, that’s what I want; to be able to do any damned thing I want and get away with it. Money won’t do that altogether, because if a man is a weakling, all the money in the world won’t enable him to soak an enemy himself; on the other hand, unless he has money he may not be able to get away with it.”

Robert E. Howard (1906–1936) American author

From a letter to Harold Preece (c. June 1928)
Letters

Money, World

“By and by an obscure individual, a young man, rose up, and, in the midst of all Christendom, proclaimed the startling news that God had sent an angel to him; that through his faith, prayers, and sincere repentance he had beheld a supernatural vision, that he had seen a pillar of fire descend from Heaven, and saw two glorious personages clothed upon with this pillar of fire, whose countenance shone like the sun at noonday; that he heard one of these personages say, pointing to the other, 'This is my beloved Son, hear ye him.' This occurred before this young man was fifteen years of age; and it was a startling announcement to make in the midst of a generation so completely given up to the traditions of their fathers; and when this was proclaimed by this young, unlettered boy to the priests and the religious societies in the State of New York, they laughed him to scorn. 'What!' said they, "visions and revelations in our day! God speaking to men in our day!" They looked upon him as deluded; they pointed the finger of scorn at him and warned their congregations against him. 'The canon of Scripture is closed up; no more communications are to be expected from Heaven. The ancients saw heavenly visions and personages; they heard the voice of the Lord; they were inspired by the Holy Ghost to receive revelations, but behold no such thing is to be given to man in our day, neither has there been for many generations past.'”

Orson Pratt (1811–1881) Apostle of the LDS Church

This was the style of the remarks made by religionists forty years ago. This young man, some four years afterwards, was visited again by a holy angel.
Journal of Discourses 13:65-66 (December 19, 1869).
Joseph Smith Jr.'s First Vision

Men, God, Age, Faith

“It is hard living down the tempers we are born with. We all begin well, for in our youth there is nothing we are more intolerant of than our own sins writ large in others and we fight them fiercely in ourselves; but we grow old and we see that these our sins are of all sins the really harmless ones to own, nay that they give a charm to any character, and so our struggle with them dies away.”

Gertrude Stein book The Making of Americans

The Making of Americans (1925)

Youth, Fight

“Everyone who feels "I love" adds to the heavenly glow. The love that has been felt all through the ages, everywhere, all through time… what a shining! What an eternal process and presence! Love is the source, love the goal, and love the method of attainment. A network of love crisscrosses the globe. The delicate shining lines form a tenuous web from one end of the world to the other. There are so many threads of love in the world, so much love going on, for and from so many people. To have partaken of and to have given love is the greatest of life's rewards. There seems never an end to the loving that goes on forever and ever. Loving and leaving are a part of living.”

Helen Nearing (1904–1995) American writer

Source: Loving and Leaving the Good Life (1992), pp. 193-194

Love, Life, People, Age

“Philosophical questions are not by their nature insoluble. They are, indeed, radically different from scientific questions, because they concern the implications and other interrelations of ideas, not the order of physical events; their answers are interpretations instead of factual reports, and their function is to increase not our knowledge of nature, but our understanding of what we know.”

Susanne K. Langer (1895–1985) American philosopher

Feeling and Form, ch. 1, Scribner (1953)

Idea, Understanding, Question, Nature

“But institutional economics is the field of the public interest in private ownership, which shows itself behavioristically in buying and selling, borrowing and lending, hiring and firing, leasing and renting. The private interests become the field of intangible yet quantitative and measurable rights, duties, liberties and exposures to the liberties of others. These are various aspects of rights of ownership. What we buy and sell is not material things and services but ownership of materials and services. The correlation of engineering economics, home economics, and institutional economics makes up the whole of the science of political economics.”

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

Source: "Institutional economics," 1936, p. 243

Home, Science

“A vegetarian diet, by reason of its low content of saturated fatty acids, cholesterol, and animal proteins, and its high concentrations of folic acids, antioxidants, and phytoestrogens—shown to be effective in inhibiting the growth or in promoting the regression of serious coronary pathologies—constitutes a barrier against a number of chronic degenerative diseases, cancer among them. And that is not all. Fruits and vegetables—besides contaminating us much less than some other foods—are troves of precious substances that enable the neutralization of carcinogenic agents and that 'dilute' the concentration of diseased cells and reduce their proliferation. All of these advantages, as well as many others, emerged from studies on populations in the last century.”

Umberto Veronesi (1925–2016) Italian oncologist and politician

The First Day Without Cancer (2013)

Disease, Food, Study, Animals

“I refuse to be a part of this reality that was manufactured by other people; I manufactured my own reality”

Ron Finley American fashion designer and urban gardener

Ron Finley at TED2013 (2013)

People, Reality, Parting

“It is a pity that Elizabeth and I cannot marry each other. Our children would have gained mastery over the whole world.”

Pope Sixtus V (1520–1590) pope

On Queen Elizabeth I of England, in 1587; reported in Emil Reich, Woman Through the Ages: Volume 2 (1908), p. 38. Alternately reported without the phrase "each other" and ending with "would have ruled the whole world".
Attributed

Children, World

“Major poetry not only 'employs' metaphor, irony and other tropes (and is of them) but always and explicitly or implicitly considers the nature of the trope itself.”

John Hollander (1929–2013) American poet

Nature

Quotes about other page 85

Quotes about other
page 85