Quotes about participation
page 5

Nicholas Murray Butler photo

“I would like to congratulate everybody with the commencement of the "Combined Endeavour 2007" military exercises. This exercise is running simultaneously in Armenia and Germany. We have about 130 participants from 6 countries, this being evidence of importance and actuality of the event. It is notable that the cooperation between the Ministry of Defence of Armenia and the US European Command is developing and implementing a number of projects, and the vivid evidence of this cooperation is this military exercise. This is not the first military exercise in Armenia. Since 2003, we have hosted a number of military exercises organized with the NATO/PfP and the US European Command. It is important that the running of military exercises in Armenia is growing into a good tradition. Especially since, we already have an arrangement of hosting "Cooperative Longbow/Lancer" military exercises in Armenia for 2008. I would also like to mention with appreciation that the planning conference and working meetings before the military exercise would be held in a constructive atmosphere. We have effectively managed to run all preparation activities with joint efforts of the US European Command, the MOD of Armenia and other partners. The communication field is that chain which has fundamental importance for realizing multinational activities. The effectiveness and successes of our cooperation is related to that. This military exercise not only supports the testing of capabilities of participating units and experts, but also an opportunity for developing effective mechanisms for ensuring an interoperability and carrying out the tasks jointly. It is not accidental that Armenia has always expressed its readiness to host such kinds of events, and all participants have been trying to create appropriate conditions for their work. Taking this opportunity, one more time, I would like to thank all participants for their presence here and the US European command for their assistance in organizational matters. I am sure that due to our joint activities, the military exercise would be on a high professional and organizational level. I also hope that while you are in Armenia, you have a chance to make yourselves familiar with our history, culture and will have wonderful impressions. I am sure that on the 10th of May, after the completion of the military exercise, we will ascertain one more time that another multinational military exercise was held with success and fulfilled its tasks. I would like to wish all participants fruitful work and further success. I allow the commencement of the opening of the "Combined Endeavour 2007" military exercise.”

Mikael Harutyunyan (1946) Armenian general

Quoted in 2007 article. [April 27, 2007]

Rudolf Karl Bultmann photo

“Freedom from the world is, in principle, not asceticism, but rather a distance from the world for which all participation in things worldly takes place in the attitude of “as if not.””

Rudolf Karl Bultmann (1884–1976) German theologian

1 Cor. 7:29-31 http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1+Corinthians+7%3A29-31&version=KJV
Source: New Testament and Mythology and Other Basic Writings (1941), p. 18

Lewis Mumford photo
Asger Jorn photo

“GO TO HELL BASTARD STOP. REFUSE PRIZE STOP. NEVER ASKED FOR IT STOP. AGAINST ALL DECENCY MIX ARTIST AGAINST HIS WILL IN YOUR PUBLICITY STOP. I WANT PUBLIC CONFIRMATION NOT TO HAVE PARTICIPATED IN YOUR RIDICULOUS GAME.”

Asger Jorn (1914–1973) Danish artist

Quote from Wikipedia: the text of Asger Jorn's telegram in 1964, to the president of the Guggenheim Museum, Harry F. Guggenheim
Jorn was awarded a Guggenheim Award including a generous cash prize, by an international jury assembled by Lawrence Alloway; he rejected!
1959 - 1973, Various sources

Hillary Clinton photo

“So-called electronic communities encourage participation in fragmented, mostly silent, micro-groups who are primarily engaged in dialogues of self-congratulation. In other words, most people lurk; and the ones that post are pleased with themselves.”

Carmen Hermosillo Community manager, essayist, poet, research analyst

"Pandora's Vox", as cited in Menon, Siddhartha, 2007, " A Participation Observation Analysis of the Once & Again Internet Message Bulletin Boards http://tvn.sagepub.com/content/8/4/341.short", Television New Media 8 (4): 345.

John Ruysbroeck photo

“If every earthly pleasure were melted An intelligence in repose without images, an intuition in the light of God, and a spirit elevated in Purity to the Face of God, these three qualities united constitute the true contemplative life into a single experience and bestowed upon one man,
it would be as nothing when measured by the joy of which I write for here it is God who passes into the depths of us in all His purity,
and the soul is not only filled but overflowing.
This experience is that light that makes manifest to the soul the terrible desolation of such as live divorced from love;
it melts the man utterly; he is no longer master of his joy.
Such possession produces intoxication, the state of the spirit in which its bliss transcends the uttermost bounds of anticipation or desire.
Sometimes the ecstasy pours forth in song, sometimes in tears:
at one moment it finds expression in movement, at others in the intense stillness of burning, voiceless feeling.
Some men knowing this bliss wonder if others feel God as they do; some are assured that no living creature has ever had such experiences as theirs;
there are those who wonder that the world is not set aflame by this joy; and there are others who marvel at its nature, asking whence it comes, and what it is.
The body itself can know no greater pleasure upon earth than to participate in it;
and there are moments when the soul feels that it must shiver to fragments in the poignancy of this experience.”

John Ruysbroeck (1293–1381) Flemish mystic

An Anthology of Mysticism and Philosophy

Ken Wilber photo
Oswald Pohl photo
Ben Emmerson photo

“Saudi Arabia's addiction to the blood cult of public execution demeans and humiliates not only the victims, but all those who participate in the process and Saudi society as a whole.”

Ben Emmerson (1963) British Queen's Counsel

As quoted in Saudi Arabia using anti-terror laws to detain and torture political dissidents, UN says https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/saudi-arabia-torture-political-dissidents-anti-terror-laws-un-mohammad-bin-salman-a8388226.html (8 June 2018), The Independent.

John R. Commons photo

“These individual actions are really trans-actions instead of either individual behavior or the "exchange" of commodities. It is this shift from commodities and individuals to transactions and working rules of collective action that marks the transition from the classical and hedonic schools to the institutional schools of economic thinking. The shift is a change in the ultimate unit of economic investigation. The classic and hedonic economists, with their communistic and anarchistic offshoots, founded their theories on the relation of man to nature, but institutionalism is a relation of man to man. The smallest unit of the classic economists was a commodity produced by labor. The smallest unit of the hedonic economists was the same or similar commodity enjoyed by ultimate consumers. One was the objective side, the other the subjective side, of the same relation between the individual and the forces of nature. The outcome, in either case, was the materialistic metaphor of an automatic equilibrium, analogous to the waves of the ocean, but personified as "seeking their level." But the smallest unit of the institutional economists is a unit of activity -- a transaction, with its participants. Transactions intervene between the labor of the classic economists and the pleasures of the hedonic economists, simply because it is society that controls access to the forces of nature, and transactions are, not the "exchange of commodities," but the alienation and acquisition, between individuals, of the rights of property and liberty created by society, which must therefore be negotiated between the parties concerned before labor can produce, or consumers can consume, or commodities be physically exchanged.”

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

"Institutional Economics," 1931

John Archibald Wheeler photo

“We are participators in bringing into being not only the near and here but the far away and long ago. We are in this sense, participators in bringing about something of the universe in the distant past and if we have one explanation for what's happening in the distant past why should we need more?”

John Archibald Wheeler (1911–2008) American physicist

"The Anthropic Universe" http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/scienceshow/the-anthropic-universe/3302686 (Feb 18, 2006) Australia's Science Show, with Martin Redfern moderating excerpts from several scientists, including Wheeler. Audio recording http://mpegmedia.abc.net.au/rn/podcast/2006/02/ssw_20060218_1200.mp3 and transcript available. See also same show at WayBack Machine, https://web.archive.org/web/20080616183602/http://www.abc.net.au/rn/science/ss/stories/s1572643.htm Internet archive.org.

Alfred de Zayas photo

“Participation is a hallmark of democratic governance.”

Alfred de Zayas (1947) American United Nations official

Post-2015 Agenda should include elected UN Assembly to strengthen democratic participation http://en.unpacampaign.org/news/722.php.
2014, UNPA - World Parliamentary Assembly

Margaret Mead photo

“… Her aunt is an agnostic, an ardent advocate of women's rights, an internationalist who rests all her hopes on Esperanto, is devoted to Bernard Shaw, and spends her spare time in campaigns of anti-vivisection. Her elder brother, whom she admires exceedingly, has just spent two years at Oxford. He is an Anglo-Catholic, an enthusiast concerning all things medieval, writes mystical poetry, reads Chesterton, and means to devote his life to seeking for the lost secret of medieval stained glass. Her mother's younger brother is an engineer, a strict materialist, who never recovered from reading Haeckel in his youth; he scorns art, believes that science will save the world, scoffs at everything that was said and thought before the nineteenth century, and ruins his health by experiments in the scientific elimination of sleep. Her mother is of a quietistic frame of mind, very much interested in Indian philosophy, a pacifist, a strict non-participator in life, who in spite of her daughter's devotion to her will not make any move to enlist her enthusiasms. And this may be within the girl's own household. Add to it the groups represented, defended, advocated by her friends, her teachers, and the books which she reads by accident, and the list of possible enthusiasms, of suggested allegiances, incompatible with one another, becomes appalling.”

Margaret Mead (1901–1978) American anthropologist

Source: 1920s, Coming of Age in Samoa (1928), p. 161

Calvin Coolidge photo
Rick Warren photo

“Larry King: So you did ask your people who worship with you to vote that way?
Rick Warren: Yeah, I just never campa— I never campaigned for it. I never — I'm not an anti-gay activist — never have been. Never participated in a single event. I just simply made a note in a newsletter, and of course, everything I write, it's the road.”

Rick Warren (1954) Christian religious leader

Interview on Larry King Live on CNN (6 April 2009), as quoted in "Rick Warren says he's not an anti-gay-marriage activist" by John Amato at Crooks and Liars (1 August 2011) http://crooksandliars.com/john-amato/rick-warren-says-hes-not-against-gay-ma, Larry King Live: Pastor Rick Warren - Part 1 --- April 6, 2009 at YouTube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHPIhI5WDM8

Aung San Suu Kyi photo
Bill Gates photo
Fred Rogers photo

“I believe that appreciation is a holy thing, that when we look for what's best in the person we happen to be with at the moment, we're doing what God does; so in appreciating our neighbor, we're participating in something truly sacred.”

Fred Rogers (1928–2003) American television personality

Commencement Address at Middlebury College May, 2001 http://web.archive.org/web/20030906163501/http://www.middlebury.edu/offices/pubaff/general_info/addresses/Fred_Rogers_2001.htm

Mitsumasa Yonai photo
Lee Daniel Crocker photo

“If rules make you nervous and depressed, and not desirous of participating in the Wiki, then ignore them and go about your business.”

Lee Daniel Crocker (1963) American software programmer

First version http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Ignore_all_rules&oldid=54587 of the Wikipedia:Ignore all rules policy (17 April 2002)

Douglas Coupland photo
George W. Bush photo

“The success of any nation is impossible without the political participation, the economic empowerment, the education, and health, of women.”

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

2010s, 2014, U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit Spousal Program (August 2014)

Charles Bukowski photo
Margaret Sullivan (journalist) photo
The Mother photo

“Humanity is not the last rung of the terrestrial creation. Evolution continues and man will be surpassed. It is for each individual to know whether he wants to participate in the advent of this new species.”

The Mother (1878–1973) spiritual collaborator of Sri Aurobindo

In The Mother http://www.auroville.org/vision/ma.htm
Sayings

Pope Benedict XVI photo
Cory Booker photo
Paul Tillich photo
Carl Friedrich Gauss photo
Assata Shakur photo
Pat Carroll (actress) photo
Peter L. Berger photo
William Morley Punshon photo
Sun Myung Moon photo
Jim Yong Kim photo
Clay Shirky photo
Khushwant Singh photo
Christopher Hitchens photo
Bhakti Tirtha Swami photo
Sergey Lavrov photo
Gunnar Myrdal photo
Perry Anderson photo

“Far from participating in a current literary scene agog with vogue and hyperbole, the LRB has kept what is widely perceived as a mandarin aloofness from it. Complicity with the institutions of literature, whether patrons or advertisers, is scarcely a charge that can be made against the paper.”

Perry Anderson (1938) British historian

Debts 1. "The London Review of Books" (1996; 2005)
Ref: en.wikiquote.org - Perry Anderson / Quotes / Spectrum: From Right to Left in the World of Ideas (2005)
Spectrum: From Right to Left in the World of Ideas (2005), Debts 1. "The London Review of Books" (1996; 2005)

Marshall McLuhan photo

“The press is a group confessional form that provides communal participation. The book is a private confessional form that provides a “point of view.””

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

Source: 1960s, Understanding Media (1964), p. 204

John Milbank photo
Kevin Kelly photo

“The value of an invention, company or technology increases exponentially as the number of systems in participates with increases linearly.”

Kevin Kelly (1952) American author and editor

Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World (1995), New Rules for the New Economy: 10 Radical Strategies for a Connected World (1999)

Howard S. Becker photo
Alfred de Zayas photo

“Among the rights that States must ensure are the rights to life, security of person, participation in the conduct of public affairs, homeland, movement, health, education, employment and social security”

Alfred de Zayas (1947) American United Nations official

Report of the Independent Expert on the promotion of a democratic and equitable international order on the adverse impacts of free trade and investment agreements on a democratic and equitable international order http://www.ohchr.org/EN/Issues/IntOrder/Pages/Reports.aspx.
2015, Report submitted to the UN General Assembly

Tiberius photo
E. M. S. Namboodiripad photo
Karl Freund photo
Fred Polak photo

“Once he (man) became conscious of creating images of the future, he became a participant in the process of creating this future.”

Fred Polak (1907–1985) Dutch futurologist

Source: The Image of the Future, 1973, p. 6

Paul Krugman photo
Gregor Strasser photo

“The emancipation of the German workers will be accomplished by their participation in profits, participation in ownership, participation in achievement.”

Gregor Strasser (1892–1934) German politician, rival of Adolf Hitler inside the Nazi Psrty

As quoted in Gregor Strasser and the Rise of Nazism, Peter D. Stachura, Routledge (2015), pp. 53-54

John R. Commons photo
Bell Hooks photo

“The understanding I had by age thirteen of patriarchal politics created in me expectations of the feminist movement that were quite different from those of young, middle class, white women. When I entered my first women's studies class at Stanford University in the early 1970s, white women were revelling in the joy of being together-to them it was an important, momentous occasion. I had not known a life where women had not been together, where women had not helped, protected, and loved one another deeply. I had not known white women who were ignorant of the impact of race and class on their social status and consciousness (Southern white women often have a more realistic perspective on racism and classism than white women in other areas of the United States.) I did not feel sympathetic to white peers who maintained that I could not expect them to have knowledge of or understand the life experiences of black women. Despite my background (living in racially segregated communities) I knew about the lives of white women, and certainly no white women lived in our neighborhood, attended our schools, or worked in our homes When I participated in feminist groups, I found that white women adopted a condescending attitude towards me and other non-white participants. The condescension they directed at black women was one of the means they employed to remind us that the women's movement was "theirs"-that we were able to participate because they allowed it, even encouraged it; after all, we were needed to legitimate the process. They did not see us as equals. And though they expected us to provide first hand accounts of black experience, they felt it was their role to decide if these experiences were authentic. Frequently, college-educated black women (even those from poor and working class backgrounds) were dismissed as mere imitators. Our presence in movement activities did not count, as white women were convinced that "real" blackness meant speaking the patois of poor black people, being uneducated, streetwise, and a variety of other stereotypes. If we dared to criticize the movement or to assume responsibility for reshaping feminist ideas and introducing new ideas, our voices were tuned out, dismissed, silenced. We could be heard only if our statements echoed the sentiments of the dominant discourse.”

Bell Hooks (1952) American author, feminist, and social activist

Source: (1984), Chapter 1: Black Women: Shaping Feminist Theory, pp. 11-12.

Noam Chomsky photo
Warren G. Harding photo

“I want to acclaim the day when America is the most eminent of the shipping nations. A big navy and a big merchant marine are necessary to the future of the country…The United States, before the war, never seriously contested and had no thought of contesting Great Britain’s dominance in shipping, but since, as an incident of the war, we installed a huge shipbuilding plant and became the owners of what was, for us, an unprecedented quantity of tonnage, we have come to be ambitious in this field. If the aggregate mind of our business world were distilled, it would probably be found, consciously or unconsciously, that we now have a national ambition to contest Great Britain’s shipping dominance. If we are to achieve a position in shipping and foreign trade comparable with that which Great Britain has had for many generations, we can only do so through time, patience, and the building up of the reputation for commercial skill and integrity that makes Great Britain’s prestige in every part of Asia and Africa…We are witnessing and participating in one of those great incidents in world-history which occur only once in several centuries, and which will be a subject for poets and historians for generations to come.”

Warren G. Harding (1865–1923) American politician, 29th president of the United States (in office from 1921 to 1923)

Speech at Norfolk, Virginia (4 December 1920), quoted in The Times (6 December 1920), p. 17.
1920s

Fermín Lasuén photo
Cass Elliot photo
Wentworth Miller photo
Felix Adler photo
Mircea Eliade photo

“The crude product of nature, the object fashioned by the industry of man, acquire their reality, their identity, only to the extent of their participation in a transcendent reality.”

Mircea Eliade (1907–1986) Romanian historian of religion, fiction writer and philosopher

The Myth of the Eternal Return (1954) [also published as Cosmos and History (1959)].

Scott Pruitt photo
Sergey Lavrov photo
William H. Rehnquist photo

“Well, I think it's a very good job. One of the most appealing things about it is that… it enables you to participate in some way and to some extent in the way the country is governed but you're able to maintain a private life as well.”

William H. Rehnquist (1924–2005) Chief Justice of the United States

As quoted in BBC article http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/4212570.stm on his death. (4 September 2005).
Books, articles, and speeches

Wesley Clark photo
Anthony Crosland photo

“Militant leftism in politics appears to have its roots in broadly analogous sentiments. Every labour politician has observed that the most indignant members of his local Party are not usually the poorest, or the slum-dwellers, or those with most to gain from further economic change, but the younger, more self-conscious element, earning good incomes and living comfortably in neat new council houses: skilled engineering workers, electrical workers, draughtsmen, technicians, and the lower clerical grades. (Similarly the most militant local parties are not in the old industrial areas, but either in the newer high-wage engineering areas or in middle-class towns; Coventry or Margate are the characteristic strongholds.) Now it is people such as these who naturally resent the fact that despite their high economic status, often so much higher than their parents’, and their undoubted skill at work, they have no right to participate in the decisions of their firm, no influence over policy, and far fewer non-pecuniary privileges than the managerial grades; and outside their work they are conscious of a conspicuous educational handicap, of a style of life which is still looked down on by middle-class people often earning little if any more, of differences in accent, and generally of an inferior class position.”

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

Julian Huxley photo
Robert Todd Carroll photo

“I am participating in the evolution of inspired action.”

Source: Life, the Truth, and Being Free (2010), p. 140

Thomas Jefferson photo

“If a due participation of office is a matter of right, how are vacancies to be obtained? Those by death are few; by resignation, none.”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

Letter to Elias Shipman and others of New Haven (12 July 1801). Often misquoted as, "few die and none resign".
1800s, First Presidential Administration (1801–1805)

Berthe Morisot photo
Koenraad Elst photo
Edmund Burke photo

“Deny them this participation of freedom, and you break that sole bond, which originally made, and must still preserve the unity of the empire.”

Edmund Burke (1729–1797) Anglo-Irish statesman

Second Speech on Conciliation with America (1775)

Leonid Brezhnev photo

“As you know, I am not a writer but a Party functionary. But like every Communist I consider myself to have been mobilized by Party propaganda and deem it my duty to participate actively in the work of our press.”

Leonid Brezhnev (1906–1982) General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union

As quoted in Reprints from the Soviet Press (1977), p. 5

William Luther Pierce photo
Johann Georg Hamann photo
Jacques Ellul photo
Joseph Campbell photo