Quotes about particular
page 5

“If there's a particular problem that Perl is trying to solve, it's the basic fact that all programming languages suck. Sort of the concept of original sin, applied to programming languages.”

Larry Wall (1954) American computer programmer and author, creator of Perl

Public Talks, The State of the Onion 10

Problem

“Diophantus shows great Adroitness in selecting the unkown, especially with a view to avoiding an adfected quadratic…. The most common and characteristic of Diophantus' methods is his use of tentative assumptions which is applied in nearly every problem of the later books. It consists in assigning to the unknown a preliminary value which satisfies one or two only of the necessary conditions, in order that, from its failure to satisfy the remaining conditions, the operator may perceive what exactly is required for that purpose…. a third characteristic of Diophantus [is]… the use of the symbol for the unknown in different senses…. The use of tentative assumptions leads again to another device which may be called… the method of limits. This may best be illustrated by a particular example. If Diophantus wishes to find a square lying between 10 and 11, he multiplies these numbers by successive squares till a square lies between the products. Thus between 40 and 44, 90 and 99 no square lies, but between 160 and 176 there lies the square 169. Hence x^2 = \tfrac{169}{16} will lie between the proposed limits.”

James Gow (scholar) (1854–1923) scholar

p, 125
A Short History of Greek Mathematics (1884)

Lie, Books, Lying, Failure

“Men whose research is based on shared paradigms are committed to the same rules and standards for scientific practice. That commitment and the apparent consensus it produces are prerequisites for normal science, i. e., for the genesis and continuation of a particular research tradition.”

Thomas Kuhn book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

Source: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), II. The Route to Normal Science, p. 11 (2012 ed.)

Men, Science

“Again I come back, why is USADA which is really a nefarious locals drugs agency in the United States so intent? Now I can tell you one thing. And I could prove it in SA but I, I went to, I met a chap who worked with Armstrong, err, on Saturday in Boulder Colorado. And he told me that he had a visit, two years ago, err to tell, and the question was, they were agents from a particular agency and, er, they said “will you tell us that Lance Armstrong took EPO? And we could assure that you will never want for money again“. That was his quote on Thursday and he told them in words I can’t put on radio what to do with that and they said “I think we’re talking to the wrong man” and they walked away.”

Phil Liggett (1943) sports journalist, commentator

Accusations that USADA fabricated evidence http://inrng.com/2012/08/can-liggett-save-armstrong/ (30 August 2012)

Money, Quotes, Question, Thinking

“I’m only interested in playing competitively if there’s serious money on the line. I love playing, but at this point I need a concrete incentive to devote the time necessary to make that happen. If chess was my only love, I’d do it in spite of the financial hurdles. But because I love so many other things, writing and editing in particular, it makes sense to me to focus on that now.”

Jennifer Shahade (1980) chess player

Gothamist interview (2006)

Love, Money, Sense, Time

“This changed attitude toward slavery was, however, part of a changed attitude toward morality in general that was sweeping over Western civilization. This change was marked by the apotheosis of "change" itself. What had heretofore been regarded as moral absolutes came to be regarded as merely relative to a particular time and place—to History or Progress—with no enduring claim upon our consciences. Lincoln praised Jefferson for embodying in the Declaration "an abstract truth applicable to all men and all times." But the idea of such truth, and of the correlation of such truth with justice, was increasingly repudiated by the most educated and influential minds in the Western world. Representative of this triumph of historicism and moral relativism was historian Carl Becker's assertion in a landmark 20th-century work that "To ask whether the natural rights philosophy of the Declaration of Independence is true or false is essentially a meaningless question."”

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

2000s, God Bless America (2008), Slavery and the American Cause

Men, Truth, World, Education

“Vertical and horizontal lines are the expression of two opposing forces; they exist everywhere and dominate everything; their reciprocal action constitutes 'life'. I recognized that the equilibrium of any particular aspect of nature rests on the equivalence of its opposites.”

Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) Peintre Néerlandais

Quote in 'Plastic Art and Pure Plastic Art', Piet Mondrian (1937), in 'Documents of modern Art', for Wittenborn, New York 1945, p. 13; as quoted in Abstract Expressionist Painting in America, W.C, Seitz, Cambridge Massachusetts, 1983, p. 55
1930's

Life, Nature

“We can all agree– it has already been a measure of the debate– that Saddam Hussein is an evil tyrant with no regard for the sanctity of human life, for either his own citizens or the people of other countries. We all agree that he is in flagrant breach of a series of UN resolutions, and in particular those relating to his duty to allow the inspection, and indeed participate in the destruction, of his weapons of mass destruction. We can also agree that he most certainly has chemical and biological weapons and is working towards a nuclear capability. The dossier contains confirmation of information that we either knew or most certainly should have been willing to assume.”

Menzies Campbell (1941) British Liberal Democrat politician and advocate

Hansard HC 6ser vol 390 col 43 http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200102/cmhansrd/vo020924/debtext/20924-12.htm#20924-12_spnew1. Speech in the House of Commons, 24 September 2002.

Life, People, Evil, Country

“In this case, the United States had particular reason to consult most closely with those Caribbean countries which had called on it to help resolve the crisis. Nevertheless, their lack of consultation was regrettably less than we would have wished.”

Geoffrey Howe (1926–2015) British Conservative politician

"Foreign Secretary regrets lack of consultation by US", The Times, 27 October 1983; p. 4.
Remarks in the House of Commons, 26 October 1983, on the United States' decision to invade Grenada (a Commonwealth country) without consultation with the United Kingdom.

Help, Country

“The idea that a few people have about the gene being the target of selection is completely impractical; a gene is never visible to natural selection, and in the genotype, it is always in the context with other genes, and the interaction with those other genes make a particular gene either more favorable or less favorable. In fact, Dobzhanksy, for instance, worked quite a bit on so-called lethal chromosomes which are highly successful in one combination, and lethal in another. Therefore people like Dawkins in England who still think the gene is the target of selection are evidently wrong. In the 30s and 40s, it was widely accepted that genes were the target of selection, because that was the only way they could be made accessible to mathematics, but now we know that it is really the whole genotype of the individual, not the gene. Except for that slight revision, the basic Darwinian theory hasn't changed in the last 50 years”

Ernst Mayr (1904–2005) German-American Evolutionary Biologist

Part of the answer to the question "Where do you think Darwinism is going to go in the next 50 years?"
What evolution is: Talk with Ernst Mayr (2001)

People, Way, Mathematics, Idea

“When government was represented only by the authority of the Crown and the views of a particular class I can understand that it was the first duty of men who valued their freedom to restrict its authority and to limit its expenditure. But all that is changed. Now government is the organized expression of the wishes and the wants of the people, and under these circumstances let us cease to regard it with suspicion. Suspicion is the product of an older time, of circumstances which have long since disappeared. Now it is our business to extend its functions and to see in what way its operations can be usefully enlarged.”

Joseph Chamberlain (1836–1914) British businessman, politician, and statesman

Speech to the Eighty Club, London (28 April 1885), quoted The Times (29 April 1885), p. 10.
1880s

Men, People, Way, Understanding

“I don't see any particular problem with that.”

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

Responding to http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2007-March/066648.html the deletion of a Wikipedia article from non-administrator view, while the article's deletion was being reviewed by the community. (27 March 2007)

Problem

“Tis certainly a kind of indignity to philosophy, whose sovereign authority ought every where to be acknowledg'd, to oblige her on every occasion to make apologies for her conclusions, and justify herself to every particular art and science, which may be offended at her.”

David Hume book A Treatise of Human Nature

Part 4, Section 5
A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40), Book 1: Of the understanding

Art, Science

“A critical feature of the EU(European Union) in general and EMU in particular is that there is no legitimate way for a member to withdraw… The American experience with the secession of the South may contain some lessons about the danger of a treaty or constitution that has no exits.”

Martin Feldstein (1939–2019) American economist

"EMU and international conflict", 1997

Way

“CIMOSA provides a Reference Architecture (known as the CIMOSA cube) from which particular enterprise architectures can be derived. This Reference Architecture and the associated enterprise modelling framework are based on a set of modelling constructs, or generic building blocks, which altogether form the CIMOSA modelling languages.”

Peter Bernus (1949) Hungarian-Australian computer scientist

Peter Bernus, Kai Mertins, Günter Schmidt (1998) Handbook on Architectures of Information Systems. p. 244

“The great inviolate place had an ancient permanence which the sea cannot claim. Who can say of a particular sea that it is old? Distilled by the sun, kneaded by the moon, it is renewed in a year, in a day, or in an hour. The sea changed, the fields changed, the rivers, the villages, and the people changed, yet Egdon remained.”

Thomas Hardy book The Return of the Native

Bk. I, ch. 1
The Return of the Native (1878)

People, Change, Sun, Sea

“Critics argue that Hayek mixed a number of ethical and political philosophies in constructing his system, positions that do not necessarily cohere one with another and all of which have been independently criticized. … There are evident tensions as well between his earlier advocacy of planning a framework of law and his later enthusiasm for the gradual evolution of judge-made common law. Finally, Hayek's opinion that judges operating under the common law tradition are bound to draw "conclusions that follow from the existing body of rules and the particular facts of the case" has struck more than one observer as naive. If one is judging his work against the standard of whether he provided a finished political philosophy, Hayek clearly did not succeed.”

Bruce Caldwell (economist) (1952) economic historian

Source: Hayek's Challenge: An Intellectual Biography of F. A. Hayek (2004), Ch. 14 : Journey’s End—Hayek’s Multiple Legacies

Law, Drawing

“The 'state' on the modern conception is a legally defined term which refers, at the level of substance, to a state power that possesses both internal and external sovereignty, at the spatial level over a clearly delimited terrain (the state territory) and at the social level over the totality of members (the body of citizens or the people). State power constitutes itself in the forms of positive law, and the people is the bearer of the legal order whose jurisdiction is restricted to the state territory. In political usage, the concepts 'nation' and 'people' have the same extension. But in addition to its legal definition, the term 'nation' has the connotation of a political community shaped by common descent, or at least by a common language, culture, and history. A people becomes a 'nation' in this historical sense only in the concrete form of a particular form of life.”

Jürgen Habermas book The Inclusion of the Other

Habermas (1998) The Inclusion of the Other: Studies in Political Theory. Ciaran Cronin and Pablo De Greiff, eds. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Life, People, Law, History

“And now, in the final irony, the fact that the US military power has solved the European problem, especially the "German problem", allows Europeans today, and Germans in particular, to believe that American military power, and the "strategic culture" that has created and sustained it, is outmoded and dangerous.”

Robert Kagan book Of Paradise and Power

Of Paradise and Power, p. 73

Problem

“Because demography is concerned with human affairs and human populatlons it is possible, in principle, to consider demography as a sub-ﬁeld of many other subjects. It provided the scope of any particular subject-ﬁeld like anthropology, genetics, ecology, economics, sociology, etc., and is deﬁned in a sufﬁciently comprehensive manner. While not denying the possibility of considering demography as a sub-ﬁeld of one or another subject, at least for certain special purposes, it is suggested that demography should be logically viewed as the totality of convergent and inter-related factors and topics which (although these could be, spearately, the concern of many diﬂ'erent subjects like genetics and anthropology, sociology, education, psychology. economics, social and political affairs etc.) jointly, together with their mutual inter-actions, form the determinants as well as the consequences of growth (or decline), changes in composition, territorial movements, and social mobility of population in different geographical regions or in the world as a whole, at any given period of time, or over diﬂ'erent periods of time. Such a view would supply an aggregative, inter-related, and mutually interacting system of all those factors which have any inﬂuence over, or are inﬂuenced by, demographic or population changes over space and time.”

Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis (1893–1972) Indian scientist

Quote, Professor P.C. Mahalanobis and the Development of Population Statistics in lndia

World, Education, Change, Time

“It is a most extraordinary thing, but I never read a patent medicine advertisement without being impelled to the conclusion that I am suffering from the particular disease therein dealt with in its most virulent form.”

Jerome K. Jerome book Three Men in a Boat

Source: Three Men in a Boat (1889), Ch. 1.

Disease, Suffering, Reading

“[T]he constitution controls any legislative act repugnant to it.... It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is.... So if a law be in opposition to the constitution; if both the law and the constitution apply to a particular case, so that the court must either decide that case conformably to the law, disregarding the constitution; or conformably to the constitution disregarding the law; the court must determine which of these conflicting rules governs the case. This is the very essence of judicial duty.... Those then who controvert the principle that the constitution is to be considered, in court, as a paramount law, are reduced to the necessity of maintaining that courts must close their eyes on the constitution, and see only the law. This doctrine would subvert the very foundation of all written constitutions... It would be giving the legislature a practical and real omnipotence... The judicial power of the United States is extended to all cases arising under the constitution.”

John Marshall (1755–1835) fourth Chief Justice of the United States

5. U.S. (1 Cranch) 137
Marbury v. Madison (1803)

Law

“He who would do good to another must do it in minute particulars;
General good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite, and flatterer:
For art and science cannot exist but in minutely organized Particulars.”

William Blake (1757–1827) English Romantic poet and artist

Source: 1800s, Jerusalem The Emanation of The Giant Albion (c. 1803–1820), Ch. 3, plate 55, line 60

Art, Science

“The problem of ideology … has especially to do with the concepts and the languages of practical thought which stabilize a particular form of power and domination; or which reconcile and accommodate the mass of the people to their subordinate place in the social formation.”

Stuart Hall (cultural theorist) (1932–2014)

"The Problem of Ideology-Marxism without Guarantees," in Marx:100 Years On (London: 1983), p. 59

People, Problem

“…Sooltan Mahmood now attacked one of the forts in the Koombulmere district, defended by Beny Ray, the deputy of Rana Koombho of Chittor. In front of the gateway was a large temple which commanded the lower works. This building was strongly fortified, and employed by the enemy as a magazine. Sooltan Mahmood, aware of its importance, determined to take possession of it at all hazards; and having stormed it in person, carried it, but not without heavy loss; after which, the fort fell into his hands, and many Rajpoots were put to death. The temple was now filled with wood, and being set on fire, cold water was thrown on the, stone images, which causing them to break, the pieces were given to the butchers of the camp, in order to be used as weights in selling meat. One large figure in particular, representing a ram, and formed of solid marble, being consumed, the Rajpoots were compelled to eat the calcined parts with pan, in order that it might be said that they were made to eat their gods…”

Firishta (1560–1620) Indian historian

Sultãn Mahmûd Khaljî of Malwa (AD 1435-1469) Kumbhalgadh (Rajasthan)
Tãrîkh-i-Firishta

Death, God, Water, Loss

“Semiotics… is not concerned with the study of a particular kind of object, but with ordinary objects in so far (and only in so far) as they participate in semiosis.”

Charles W. Morris (1903–1979) American philosopher

Source: "Foundations of the Theory of Signs," 1938, p. 4

Study

“The tradition of "turkey pardoning" in the US is a wonderful allegory for new racism. Every year, the National Turkey Federation presents the US president with a turkey for Thanksgiving. Every year, in a show of ceremonial magnanimity, the president spares that particular bird (and eats another one). After receiving the presidential pardon, the Chosen One is sent to Frying Pan Park in Virginia to live out its natural life. The rest of the 50 million turkeys raised for Thanksgiving are slaughtered and eaten on Thanksgiving Day. ConAgra Foods, the company that has won the Presidential Turkey contract, says it trains the lucky birds to be sociable, to interact with dignitaries, school children and the press.

That's how new racism in the corporate era works. A few carefully bred turkeys - the local elites of various countries, a community of wealthy immigrants, investment bankers, the occasional Colin Powell, or Condoleezza Rice, some singers, some writers (like myself) - are given absolution and a pass to Frying Pan Park.
The remaining millions lose their jobs, are evicted from their homes, have their water and electricity connections cut, and die of AIDS. Basically, they're for the pot. But the fortunate fowls in Frying Pan Park are doing fine. Some of them even work for the IMF and the World Trade Organisation - so who can accuse those organisations of being anti-turkey? Some serve as board members on the Turkey Choosing Committee - so who can say that turkeys are against Thanksgiving? They participate in it! Who can say the poor are anti-corporate globalisation? There's a stampede to get into Frying Pan Park. So what if most perish on the way?”

Arundhati Roy (1961) Indian novelist, essayist

From a speech http://www.greenleft.org.au/back/2004/569/569p12.htm given at the World Social Forum in Mumbai, 16 January 2004 Speeches

Life, Children, World, School

“We see in the 20th Century an unfortunate trench warfare, in which psychoanalysis, in a struggle against the internalized compulsion and superstition of a particular doctrine, has expressed itself atheistically. By contrast, theology is not merely under suspicion of talking soullessly about God. Both theology and psychology, in striving for human health, need one another like the right and the left hand.”

Eugen Drewermann (1940) German psychologist and theologian

"Heil und Heilung - Theologie und Psychoanalyse," speech at a conference of therapists in Basel, Switzerland (1977-05-21)

God, Health

“Thus it was that America sank further and further into Americanism. Vast wealth and industry, and also brilliant invention, were concentrated upon puerile ends. In particular the whole of American life was organized around the cult of the powerful individual, that phantom ideal which Europe herself had only begun to outgrow in her last phase. Those Americans who wholly failed to realize this ideal, who remained at the bottom of the social ladder, either consoled themselves with hopes for the future, or stole symbolical satisfaction by identifying themselves with some popular star, or gloated upon their American citizenship, and applauded the arrogant foreign policy of their government. Those who achieved power were satisfied so long as they could merely retain it, and advertise it uncritically in the conventionally self-assertive manners.”

Olaf Stapledon book Last and First Men

Source: Last and First Men (1930), Chapter II: Europe’s Downfall; Section 1, “Europe and America” (pp. 34-35)

Life, Hope, Star, Future

“All systems are receding, not from any particular centre, but from each other: the whole system of galactic systems is expanding.”

Willem de Sitter (1872–1934) Dutch cosmologist

Kosmos (1932), Above is Beginning Quote of the Last Chapter: Relativity and Modern Theories of the Universe -->

“Aesthetics is related to every particular conflict; to everyday conflict.”

Eli Siegel (1902–1978) Latvian-American poet, philosopher

Everything Has to Do with Hardness and Softness (1969)

“The physicist needs a facility in looking at problems from several points of view. The exact analysis of real physical problems is usually quite complicated, and any particular physical situation may be too complicated to analyze directly by solving the differential equation. But one can still get a very good idea of the behavior of a system if one has some feel for the character of the solution in different circumstances. Ideas such as the field lines, capacitance, resistance, and inductance are, for such purposes, very useful. … On the other hand, none of the heuristic models, such as field lines, is really adequate and accurate for all situations. There is only one precise way of presenting the laws, and that is by means of differential equations. They have the advantage of being fundamental and, so far as we know, precise. If you have learned the differential equations you can always go back to them. There is nothing to unlearn.”

Richard Feynman (1918–1988) American theoretical physicist

volume II; lecture 2, "Differential Calculus of Vector Fields"; section 2-1, "Understanding physics"; p. 2-1
The Feynman Lectures on Physics (1964)

Law, Way, Behavior, Feeling

“No statement about God is simply, literally true. God is far more than can be measured, described, defined in ordinary language, or pinned down to any particular happening.”

David Jenkins (bishop)

Quoted in The Guardian ( 24 December 1984 http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/guardian/doc/186552854.html)

God

“The hypostasis of the particular methods of procedure employed by natural science … results in the view that all theoretical differences which rest on historically conditioned antagonisms of interest are to be settles by a “crucial experiment” rather than by struggle and counter-struggle. The harmonious relation of individuals to one another becomes a fact, therefore, that has even more general character than a law of nature.”

Max Horkheimer (1895–1973) German philosopher and sociologist

Source: "The Latest Attack on Metaphysics" (1937), p. 148.

Law, Nature, Science

“.. of what use is a painting which does not realize its aesthetical problem? Underlying all sensible works of art, there must be somewhere in evidence the particular problems understood. It was so with those artists of the great past who had the intellectual knowledge of structure upon which to place their emotions. It is this structural beauty that makes the old [clssical] painting valuable. And so it becomes to me a problem. I would rather be sure that I had placed two colors in true relationship to each other than to have exposed a wealth of emotionalism gone wrong in the name of richness of personal expression... The real artists have always been interested in this problem, and you feel it strongly in the work of [Leonardo] Da Vinci, Piero della Francesca, Courbet, Pissarro, Seurat, and Cezanne.”

Marsden Hartley (1877–1943) American artist

n.p.
1921 - 1930, Art and the Personal Life', Marsden Hartley, 1928

Beauty, Art, Color, Feeling

“[W]e prefer not to countenance the kinds of sacrifices the professional-grade athlete has made to get so good at one particular thing.... We prefer not to consider the shockingly vapid and primitive comments uttered by athletes in postcontest interviews, or to imagine what impoverishments in one's mental life would allow people actually to think in the simplistic way great athletes seem to think. Note the way "up-close and personal profiles" of professional athletes strain so hard to find evidence of rounded human life—outside interests and activities, charities, values beyond the sport. We ignore what's obvious, that most of this straining is farce. It's farce because the realities of top-level athletics today require an early and total commitment to one pursuit. An almost ascetic focus. A subsumption of almost all other features of human life to their one chosen talent and pursuit. A consent to life in a world that, like a child's world, is very serious and very small.”

David Foster Wallace (1962–2008) American fiction writer and essayist

Tennis Player Michael Joyce's Professional Artistry as a Paradigm of Certain Stuff about Choice, Freedom, Discipline, Joy, Grotesquerie, and Human Completeness
Essays

Life, People, World, Way

“The IPCC WG1 Chapter 3 Report clearly cherrypicked information on the robustness of the land near-surface air temperature to bolster their advocacy of a particular perspective on the role of humans within the climate system. As a result, policymakers and the public have been given a false (or at best an incomplete) assessment of the multi-decadal global average near-surface air temperature trends.”

Roger A. Pielke (1946) American meteorologist

"Documentation of IPCC WG1 Bias by Roger A. Pielke Sr. and Dallas Staley - Part I," Climate Science: Roger Pielke Sr. Research Group Weblog (2007-06-20) http://climatesci.org/2007/06/20/documentation-of-ipcc-wg1-bias-by-roger-a-pielke-sr-and-dallas-staley-part-i/

Falseness

“I also don't think it's unsophisticated to think of God the Father as the spirit that arises from the crowd that exists into the future. You make sacrifices in the present so that the future is happy with you. The question is, then, what is that future that would be happy with you? It's the spirit of humanity. That's who you're negotiating with, because you make the assumption that if you forgo impulsive pleasure and get your medical degree, that when you're done in ten years and when you're a physician, humanity as such will honor your sacrifice and commitment, and it will open the doors to you. So you're treating the future as if it's a single being, and you're also treating it as if it's a compassionate judge. You're acting that out. And maybe, once we figured out that there is a future, we needed to imagine God in that form in order to concretize something that we could bargain with so that we could figure out how to use sacrifice so that we could guide ourselves into the future. Because if sacrifice is a contract with the future, but not with any particular person, then it is a contract with the spirit of humanity as such. It's something like that. To come up with the idea that you can bargain with the future is THE major idea of humankind. We suffer. What do we do about it? We figure out how to bargain with the future. And we minimize suffering in that manner.”

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

Concepts

God, Happiness, Pleasure, Imagination

“The master of a private dwelling will not allow any untidiness or unseemliness to be seen in the house, such as a couch upset, or the table littered with rubbish, or vessels of price thrown away into dirty corners, while those which serve ignobler uses are thrust forward for entering guests to see. He has everything arranged neatly and in the proper place, where it stands to most advantage; and then he can welcome his guests, without any misgivings that he need be ashamed of opening the interior of his house to receive them. The same duty, I take it, is incumbent on that master of our "tabernacle," the mind; it has to arrange everything within us, and to put each particular faculty of the soul, which the Creator has fashioned to be our implement or our vessel, to fitting and noble uses.”

Gregory of Nyssa (335–395) bishop of Nyssa

On Virginity, Chapter 18

Soul, Fashion, Housing

“Everyone with any experience of life is aware of the extent to which the characters of people he has known have been given their particular forms by the sufferings through which they have passed. But it is not simply what has happened to them that has defined them; their responses to what has happened to them have been of even greater importance, and these responses have been shaped by their interpretations of what they suffered.”

H. Richard Niebuhr (1894–1962) American theologian

Source: The Responsible Self: An Essay in Christian Moral Philosophy (1963), pp. 60-61

Life, People, Suffering

“If, while hurrying ostensibly to the temple of truth, we hand the reins over to our personal interests which look aside at very different guiding stars, for instance at the tastes and foibles of our contemporaries, at the established religion, but in particular at the hints and suggestions of those at the head of affairs, then how shall we ever reach the high, precipitous, bare rock whereon stands the temple of truth?”

Arthur Schopenhauer book Parerga and Paralipomena

E. Payne, trans. (1974) Vol. 1, pp. 22–23
Parerga and Paralipomena (1851), Sketch of a History of the Doctrine of the Ideal and the Real

Truth, Religion, Star, Personality

“A question which has long troubled astronomers and physicists is what becomes of the energy that is continually being poured out into space by the sun and the stars. To this question a complete answer is given by the new theory. It is used up, diluted, or degraded, by the expansion of the universe. …the light travelling through the expanding universe and, so to say, trying to reach a particular star, or stellar system, which is continually receding with great velocity, is losing energy in trying to catch up with it. It is this degradation of the light, technically known as the redshift of the spectral lines, by which we become aware of the receding velocities of the extra-galactic nebulae. It can be shown that the decrease of the total amount of radiant energy in the universe by this degradation exceeds the increase by the radiation of the stars. It would not be correct, however, to conclude that the expansion is caused by the energy thus lost by the radiation…”

Willem de Sitter (1872–1934) Dutch cosmologist

Kosmos (1932)

Travel, Star, Question, Light

“In Deutsch's view, to say that a social system is in equilibrium implies that: 1) it will return to a particular state when disturbed; 2) the disturbance is coming from outside the system; 3) the greater the disturbance the greater the force with which the system will return to its original state; 4) the speed of the system's reaction to disturbance is somehow less relevant — a sort of friction, or blemish having no place in the "ideal" equilibrium; 5) no catastrophe can happen within the system.”

Walter F. Buckley (1922–2006) American sociologist

Source: Sociology and modern systems theory (1967), p. 56.

Speed

“Eighteen centuries have passed since the Bible was finished. They have been centuries of great changes. In their course the world has been wrought over into newness at almost every point. But, to-day, the text of the Scriptures, after copyings almost innumerable and after having been tossed about through ages of ignorance and tumult, is found by exhaustive criticism to be unaltered in every important particular — there being not a single doctrine, nor duty, nor fact of any grade, that is brought into question by variations of readings — a fact that stands alone in the history of such ancient literature.”

Enoch Fitch Burr (1818–1907) American astronomer

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 35.

Age, World, History, Literature

“Human beings have an almost unlimited capacity for self-delusion. We can justify any amount of sadness if it fits our own particular standard of reality.”

John Twelve Hawks American writer

Fourth Realm Trilogy (2005-2009), The Traveler (2005)

Sadness, Reality

“You have a list of things that you want to do in life—to own your own house, to own your own car, to own your own yacht. [Making] wine was on my list, because it has a particular glamour to it.”

Luis Miguel (1970) Puerto Rican singer; music producer

http://www.winespectator.com/webfeature/show/id/Wine-Talk-Luis-Miguel_3307
Interview with Wine Spectator, 2006

Life, Cars, Wine, Housing

“First let us ask whether our wealth-creating agencies, particular that of industry, are to be based upon private enterprise of policy management. I can not see how any intelligent observer can have any possible faith in the capacity of political management to provide either stability or progress if it should set out to operate the agencies of wealth creation, particularly industry. It is my firm conviction that any form of 'Government Regulation of Business' is bound to result in an ever-increasing interference with the broad exercise of initiative - the very foundation of the American system. That is the natural evolution of bureaucracy. If that be so, might not the ultimate logical result be the necessity for the socialization of industry through the break down of the profit system induced by the accumulative effect of the ever-increasing political management. We do not need to go far afield to see definite evidences of that possibility”

Alfred P. Sloan (1875–1966) American businessman

as cited in: Thurman Arnold (2000, 72-73).
New York Times interview, 1935

Faith, Exercises, Intelligence, Business

“There probably is no more important quest in all science than the attempt to understand those very particular events in evolution by which brains worked out that special trick that has enabled them to add to the cosmic scheme of things: color, sound, pain, pleasure, and all the other facets of mental experience.”

Roger Wolcott Sperry (1913–1994) American neuroscientist

"Evolution of the Human Brain" (1964), p. 3

Pain, Pleasure, Color, Understanding

“Love has a particular trait: it has a task or purpose to fulfill - to abide. By its nature, love is enduring. The Holy Spirit offers our world love that dispels uncertainty; love that overcomes the fear of betrayal; love that carries eternity within; the true love that draws us into a unity that abides!”

Pope Benedict XVI (1927) 265th Pope of the Catholic Church

2008, Youth Day Vigil (19 July 2008)

Love, World, Fear, Nature

“"Normal science" means research firmly based upon one or more past scientific achievements, achievements that some particular scientific community acknowledges for a time as supplying the foundation for its further practice”

Thomas Kuhn book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

Source: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), II. The Route to Normal Science, p. 10

Communication, Science, Time, Past

“If there's any illness for which people offer many remedies, you may be sure that particular illness is incurable, I think.”

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

Act I
The Cherry Orchard (1904)

People, Thinking

“To tell the indigenous inhabitants of Brixton or Southall or Leicester or Bradford or Birmingham or Wolverhampton, to tell the pensioners ending their days in streets of nightly terror unrecognisable as their former neighbourhoods, to tell the people of towns and cities where whole districts have been transformed into enclaves of foreign lands, that "the man with a coloured face could be an enrichment to my life and that of my neighbours" is to drive them beyond the limits of endurance. It is not so much that it is obvious twaddle. It is that it makes cruel mockery of the experience and fears of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of ordinary, decent men and women…In understanding this matter, the beginning of wisdom is to grasp the law that in human societies power is never left unclaimed and unused. It does not blow about, like wastepaper on the streets, ownerless and inert. Men's nature is not only, as Thucydides long ago asserted, to exert power where they have it: men cannot help themselves from exerting power where they have it, whether they want to or not…It is the business of the leaders of distinct and separate populations to see that the power which they possess is used to benefit those for whom they speak. Leaders who fail to do so, or to do so fast enough, find themselves outflanked and superseded by those who are less squeamish. The Gresham's Law of extremism, that the more extreme drives out the less extreme, is one of the basic rules of political mechanics which operate in this field: it is a corollary of the general principle that no political power exist without being used. Both the general law and its Gresham's corollary point, in contemporary circumstances, towards the resort to physical violence, in the form of firearms or high explosive, as being so probable as to be predicted with virtual certainty. The experience of the last decade and more, all round the world, shows that acts of violence, however apparently irrational or inappropriate their targets, precipitate a frenzied search on the part of the society attacked to discover and remedy more and more grievances, real or imaginary, among those from whom the violence is supposed to emanate or on whose behalf it is supposed to be exercised. Those commanding a position of political leverage would then be superhuman if they could refrain from pointing to the acts of terrorism and, while condemning them, declaring that further and faster concessions and grants of privilege are the only means to avoid such acts being repeated on a rising scale. This is what produces the gearing effect of terrorism in the contemporary world, yielding huge results from acts of violence perpetrated by minimal numbers. It is not, I repeat again and again, that the mass of a particular population are violently or criminally disposed. Far from it; that population soon becomes itself the prisoner of the violence and machinations of an infinitely small minority among it. Just a few thugs, a few shots, a few bombs at the right place and time – and that is enough for disproportionate consequences to follow.”

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

Speech to the Stretford Young Conservatives (21 January 1977), from A Nation or No Nation? Six Years in British Politics (Elliot Right Way Books, 1977), pp. 168-171
1970s

Life, Wisdom, Women, Men

“A metaphysical thesis of a particular school is usually rejected by a rival school which puts forward a (directly or indirectly) contradictory thesis. Jainism says that the lesson to be drawn from such age-old philosophic disputes is the following: Each school asserts its thesis and claims it to be the absolute truth, and thus it does not really wish to understand the point that is being made by the opposite side. The rival schools, by their arguments and counter arguments, only encourage dogmatism and intoleration in philosophy, This, according to the Jainas, is the evil of ekanta one-sided philosophies. But the philosophic propositions of rival schools could be integrated together under the Anekanta system.”

Bimal Krishna Matilal (1935–1991) Indian philosopher

Central Philosophy of Jainism (1981), p. 2

Truth, Age, School, Understanding

“Particulars are frequently fallible, but universals never. Occult philosophy lays bare Nature in her complete nakedness, and alone contemplates the wisdom of universals by the eyes of intelligence. Accustomed to partake of the rivers which flow from the Fountain of Life, it is unacquainted with grossness and with clouded waters.”

Robert Fludd (1574–1637) British mathematician and astrologer

Robert Fludd, cited in: Arthur Edward Waite (1887). The Real History of the Rosicrucians Founded on Their Own Manifestoes https://archive.org/stream/realhistoryofros00waituoft#page/290/mode/1up. p. 290 Waite commented: "Like others of his school, Fludd insists on the uncertainty of a posteriori and experimental methods, to which he unhesitatingly attributes all the errors of the natural sciences..."

Life, Wisdom, Intelligence, Nature

“Religion’s preferred punishment is almost always death, regardless of the crime. But the death penalty is a statistical failure just like all their proposed solutions to other problems always are. Here in the US, the states that still have the death penalty also have the highest murder rates; its a negative correlation. The problem there is one of society, the conditions imposed and the types of responses that are culturally coaxed. When murder happens, and that person is caught and tried, we should remove them as a threat, and whether they are imprisoned, institutionalized, or what have you should be determined by the particulars in each case.”

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

Patheos, How is secular humanist governance better than theocracy? http://www.patheos.com/blogs/reasonadvocates/2013/09/07/how-is-secular-humanist-governance-better-than-theocracy/ (September 7, 2013)

Death, Religion, Penalty, Failure

“The cinema is about other things than storytelling. What you remember from a good film -- and let's only talk about good films -- is not the story, but a particular and hopefully unique experience that is about atmosphere, ambience, performance, style, an emotional attitude, gestures, singular events, a particular audio-visual experience that does not rely on the story.”

Peter Greenaway (1942) British film director

"105 Years of Illustrated Text" in the Zoetrope All-Story, Vol. 5 No. 1.
105 Years of Illustrated Text

“Thus they shall not miss this particular branch of the many branches of the Law and will have no need to roam and ramble about in other books in search of information on matters set forth in this treatise.”

Maimónides book Mishneh Torah

Book 3 (Sefer Zemanim "Times"), Treatise 8 (Kiddush HaChodesh "Sanctification of the New Moon"), closing words
Mishneh Torah (c. 1180)

Books, Law, Search

“A national programme which would provide television to about 80% of India’s population during the next ten years would be of great significance to national integration, for implementing schemes of economic and social development and for the stimulation and promotion of electronic industry. It is of particular significance for population living in isolated rural countries”

Vikram Sarabhai (1919–1971) (1919-1971), Indian physicist

His priority in 1974 quoted in "Communication and National Development".

Country

“A genre is maintained by the conventions of a community, and in most cases serves specific functions within the system of practices of particular institutions of that community.”

Jay Lemke (1946) American academic

Lemke, J. (2005). "Multimedia genres and transversals." Folia Linguistica, 39(1-2): 45-56. p. 46

Communication

“There is no general reason to expect evolution to be progressive – even in the weak, value-neutral sense. There will be times when increased size of some organ is favoured and other times when decreased size is favoured. Most of the time, average-sized individuals will be favoured in the population and both extremes will be penalised. During these times the population exhibits evolutionary stasis (i. e., no change) with respect to the factor being measured. If we had a complete fossil record and looked for trends in some particular dimension, such as leg length, we would expect to see periods of no change alternating with fitful continuations or reversals in direction – like a weathervane in changeable, gusty weather.”

Richard Dawkins (1941) English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author

The Evolutionary Future of Man (1993)

Sense, Change, Time, Weather

“We are in a country that's in deep crisis at this particular juncture; all indicators are bad, not only in terms of terrorism and security. There is high unemployment; marginalised people; poor social.”

Raid Jahid Fahmi (1950) Iraqi politician

Interview with Al Jazeera (25 May 2018)

People, Country

“There must be other leaps in life - as momentous as the "mirror stage" - that Lacan didn't mention. Some are universal; others, culturally particular. To understand that your parents are human (and not an element of the natural world), that they're separate from you, that they were children once, that they were born and came into the world, is another leap. It's as if you hadn't seen who they were earlier - just as, before you were ten months old, you didn't know it was you in the mirror. This happens when you're sixteen or seventeen. Not long after - maybe a year - you find out your parents will die. It's not as if you haven't encountered death already. But, before now, your precocious mind can't accommodate your parents' death except as an academic nicety - to be dismissed gently as too literary and sentimental. After that day, your parents' dying suddenly becomes simple. It grows clear that you're alone and always have been, though certain convergences start to look miraculous - for instance, between your father, mother, and yourself. Though your parents don't die immediately - what you've had is a realisation, not a premonition - you'll carry around this knowledge for their remaining decades or years. You won't think, looking at them, "You're going to die". It'll be an unspoken fact of existence. Nothing about them will surprise you anymore.”

Amit Chaudhuri (1962) contemporary Indian-English novelist

Friend of My Youth (2017)

Life, Death, Children, World

“We must pursue the removal of church property by any means necessary in order to secure for ourselves a fund of several hundred million gold rubles (do not forget the immense wealth of some monasteries and lauras). Without this fund any government work in general, any economic build-up in particular, and any upholding of soviet principles in Genoa especially is completely unthinkable. In order to get our hands on this fund of several hundred million gold rubles (and perhaps even several hundred billion), we must do whatever is necessary. But to do this successfully is possible only now. All considerations indicate that later on we will fail to do this, for no other time, besides that of desperate famine, will give us such a mood among the general mass of peasants that would ensure us the sympathy of this group, or, at least, would ensure us the neutralization of this group in the sense that victory in the struggle for the removal of church property unquestionably and completely will be on our side.
One clever writer on statecraft correctly said that if it is necessary for the realization of a well-known political goal to perform a series of brutal actions then it is necessary to do them in the most energetic manner and in the shortest time, because masses of people will not tolerate the protracted use of brutality. … Now victory over the reactionary clergy is assured us completely. In addition, it will be more difficult for the major part of our foreign adversaries among the Russian emigres abroad, i. e., the Socialist-Revolutionaries and the Milyukovites, to fight against us if we, precisely at this time, precisely in connection with the famine, suppress the reactionary clergy with utmost haste and ruthlessness.
Therefore, I come to the indisputable conclusion that we must precisely now smash the Black Hundreds clergy most decisively and ruthlessly and put down all resistance with such brutality that they will not forget it for several decades. … The greater the number of representatives of the reactionary clergy and the reactionary bourgeoisie that we succeed in shooting on this occasion, the better because this "audience" must precisely now be taught a lesson in such a way that they will not dare to think about any resistance whatsoever for several decades.”

Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) Russian politician, led the October Revolution

Letter to Comrade Molotov for the Politburo (19 March 1922) http://www.ibiblio.org/expo/soviet.exhibit/ae2bkhun.html Variant translation: It is precisely now and only now, when in the starving regions people are eating human flesh, and hundreds if not thousands of corpses are littering the roads, that we can (and therefore must) carry out the confiscation of church valuables. … I come to the categorical conclusion that precisely at this moment we must give battle to the Black Hundred clergy in the most decisive and merciless manner and crush its resistance with such brutality that it will not forget it for decades to come. The greater the number of representatives of the reactionary clergy and reactionary bourgeoisie we succeed in executing for this reason, the better. As translated in The Unknown Lenin : From the Secret Archive (1996) edited by Richard Pipes, pp. 152-4 1920s

People, Way, Mood, Thinking

“Only someone as puffed up and demented as John Maynard Keynes, every left wing fascist's sainted mentor in this connection, could manage to convince himself that taxing America's Productive Class can restore it to prosperity. In point of fact, it's like screwing for chastity, guzzling alcohol for sobriety, or gorging to fight gluttony. It's like killing indiscriminately for peace — oops, Democrats, Republicans and their moral and spiritual ilk have devoutly believed that particular bit of perverse nonsense since at least the War of 1812.”

L. Neil Smith (1946) American writer

"A Little Austrian Flea".

War, Alcohol, Peace, Fight

“When you write your own lyrics, you tend to be over-analytical. One second everything you do is brilliant, and the next, everything is garbage, and I want to be able to express personal things without being made to feel stupid. One of the first times I remember writing something personal was on tour. I was feeling really freaky and down, and I looked in the mirror and I was wearing a red T-shirt and some baggy tennis shorts. I remember thinking that as bummed as I felt, I looked like some beach kid. And then I came up with that line—’I’m looking California / And feeling Minnesota,’ from the song ‘Outshined’—and as soon as I wrote it down, I thought it was the dumbest thing. But after the record came out and we went on tour, everybody would be screaming along with that particular line when it came up in the song. The was a shock. How could anyone know that that was one of the most personally specific things I had ever written? It was just a tiny line. But somehow, maybe because it was personal, it just pushed that button.”

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

Interview with Details Magazine, December 1996 https://pitchfork.com/features/article/10081-chris-cornell-searching-for-solitude/, Soundgarden Era

Stupidity, Feeling, Thinking, Time

“India had never known a theocratic state till the advent of Islam in this country in the first quarter of the eighth century AD. Hindu Dharma has always been a pluralistic religion. Hindu culture and society too have been pluralistic throughout their hoary history. It was, therefore, impossible for the Hindus to erect an established church or to proclaim a state religion and call upon the State to impose it by force. The Hindu state extended its patronage to all religious sects equally, even when a king and his courtiers adhered to a particular sect in their private lives. Religious strife followed by bloodshed had never blackened the fair face of Hindu society. …The Hindu experience of a theocratic state was a very painful experience, spread as it was over several centuries. Even so, the Hindus did not learn any lessons in theocracy. The Hindu states which re-emerged under the Rajputs, the Marathas, the Sikhs, and the Jats were secular states….”

Sita Ram Goel (1921–2003) Indian activist

Defence of Hindu Society (1983)

Pain, Religion, History, Learning

“Any planned social change will have to consider a multitude of factors characteristic for the particular case. The change may require a more or less unique combination of educational and organizational measures; it may depend upon quite different treatments or Ideology, expectation and organization. Still, certain general formal principles always have to be considered.”

Kurt Lewin (1890–1947) German-American psychologist

Source: 1940s, Quasi-Stationary Social Equilibria and the Problem of Permanent Change, 1947, p. 39.

Education, Change, Dependency

“The schedule is a moral contract or agreement with the men as to a particular machine operation, rate of wages and time. Any change in men [etc. ] calls for a new schedule.”

Harrington Emerson (1853–1931) American efficiency engineer and business theorist

Harrington Emerson, as cited in: Horace Bookwalter Drury (1918) Scientific Management: A History and Criticism http://archive.org/stream/scientificmanag00druruoft#page/140/mode/2up. p. 142

Men, Change, Time

“Since the value of freedom rests on the opportunities it provides for unforeseen and unpredictable actions, we will rarely know what we lose through a particular restriction of freedom.”

Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992) Austrian and British economist and Nobel Prize for Economics laureate

“Principles or Expediency?” Toward Liberty: Essays in Honor of Ludwig von Mises on the Occasion of his 90th Birthday (29 September 1971)
1960s–1970s

Freedom

“He that is to govern a whole Nation, must read in himself, not this, or that particular man; but Mankind; which though it be hard to do, harder than to learn any Language, or Science; yet, when I shall have set down my own reading orderly, and perspicuously, the pains left another, will be only to consider, if he also find not the same in himself. For this kind of Doctrine, admitteth no other Demonstration.”

Thomas Hobbes book Leviathan

The Introduction, p. 2
Leviathan (1651)

Pain, Learning, Science, Reading

“Now, it is unquestionable that language, and consequently the system of concepts which it translates, is the product of a collective elaboration. What it expresses is the manner in which society as a whole represents the facts of experience. The ideas which correspond to the diverse elements of language are thus collective representations. Even their contents bear witness to the same fact. In fact, there are scarcely any words among those which we usually employ whose meaning does not pass, to a greater or less extent, the limits of our personal experience. Very frequently a term expresses things which we have never perceived or experiences which we have never had or of which we have never been the witness. Even when we know some of the objects which it concerns, it is only as particular examples that serve to illustrate the idea which they would never have been able to form by themselves. Thus there is a great deal of knowledge condensed in the word which I never collected, and which is not individual; it even surpasses me to such an extent that I cannot even completely appropriate all its results. Which of us knows all the words of the language he speaks and the entire signification of each?”

Émile Durkheim book The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life

Source: The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, 1912, p. 434

Idea, Knowledge, Personality

“Symbols in general, and their main group,—words and concepts—in particular, perform a skeletal role for the socio-psychic content. … Consequently, the nature of ideologies is generally degressive, skeletal, with all the related features… So, beginning with the simplest example, the word not only secures the living content of experience, but also hampers the future development of experience by its conservatism. In science and philosophy, the customary but obsolete terminology is often a serious obstacle to progress, preventing the mastery of new material, and distorting the meaning of new facts which it cannot express fully and precisely. But this contradiction appears even more vividly in the development of more complicated complexes.”

Alexander Bogdanov (1873–1928) Physician, philosopher, writer

Source: Essays in tektology, 1980, p. 195, as cited in: Arran Gare, " Aleksandr Bogdanov and systems theory http://aaltowebstudio.cloudapp.net/tangentialpoints/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2014/05/Arren-Gare-2000-Aleksandr-Bogdanov-and-Systems-Theory.pdf." Democracy & Nature 6.3 (2000): 341-359.

Nature, Appearance, Science, Future

“Pride is an established conviction of one’s own paramount worth in some particular respect, while vanity is the desire of rousing such a conviction in others, and it is generally accompanied by the secret hope of ultimately coming to the same conviction oneself. Pride works from within; it is the direct appreciation of oneself. Vanity is the desire to arrive at this appreciation indirectly, from without.”

Arthur Schopenhauer book Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life

Vol. 1, Ch. 4, § 2
Parerga and Paralipomena (1851), Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life

Secret, Hope

Olivier Blanchard (1948) French economist

Source: Macroeconomics (7th Edition, 2017), Ch. 16 : Expectations, Output, and Policy

People, Thinking, Reality, Time

“These new means [in the modern film, 1920's] have given us a new mentality. We want to see clearly, we want to understand mechanisms, functions, motors, down to their subtlest details. Composite wholes are no longer enough for us – we want to feel and grasp the details of those wholes – and we realise that these details, these fragments, if seen in isolation, have a complete and particular life of their own... Close-ups in the cinema are a consecration of this new vision... A shoe as beautiful as a picture. A picture as beautiful as an X-ray machine.”

Fernand Léger (1881–1955) French painter

Quote from: 'Actualités, Fernand Léger', in 'Varietés nr. 1', 1928, pp. 522-23
Quotes of Fernand Leger, 1920's

Life, Beauty, Shoe, Feeling

“When drag queen Carlotta agreed to compere and sit for a portrait at an R-rated charity fundraiser in March, she was not prepared for the tool of trade of the artist. The painter was Pricasso, who releases his artistic side by using a particular extremity. Not to put too fine a point on it (and Pricasso couldnt), Carlotta hovered between humour and horror as her portrait came to life.”

Pricasso (1949) Australian painter

[Gold Coast Bulletin staff, The 2012 Yoohoo Awards, Gold Coast Bulletin, 29 December 2012, 34, Queensland, Australia, News Limited]
About

Life

“The multiplier effect is a major feature of networks and flows. It arises regardless of the particular nature of the resource, be it goods, money, or messages.”

John H. Holland (1929–2015) US university professor

Source: Hidden Order - How Adaptation Builds Complexity (1995), Ch 1. Basic Elements, p. 25

Money, Nature

“Kennaston no longer thought of himself as a man of flesh-and-blood moving about a world of his compeers. Or, at least, that especial aspect of his existence was to him no longer a phase of any particular importance.”

James Branch Cabell book The Cream of the Jest

"Richard Fentnor Harroby" in Ch. 1 : Pallation of the Gambit
The Cream of the Jest (1917)

World

“Bad men, like good men, are entitled to be tried and sentenced in accordance with law, and when it is shown to us that a person is serving an illegal sentence our obligation is to direct that proper steps be taken to correct the wrong done, without regard to the character of a particular defendant or to the possible effect on others who might also want to challenge the legality of their sentences as they have the right to do 'at any time' under Rule 35. If it has any relevance at all, the fact that there may be other prisoners in this country's jails serving illegal sentences would seem to me to make it all the more imperative that we grant appropriate relief in this case rather than search for some obviously dubious excuse to deny this petitioner's claim.”

Hugo Black (1886–1971) U.S. Supreme Court justice

Dissenting in Green v. United States, 365 U.S. 301, 309-310 (1961).

Men, Law, Search, Time

“Social psychology has, as a rule, dealt with various phases of social experience from the psychological standpoint of individual experience. The point of approach which I wish to suggest is that of dealing with experience from the standpoint of society, at least from the standpoint of communication as essential to the social order. Social psychology, on this view, presupposes an approach to experience from the standpoint of the individual, but undertakes to determine in particular that which belongs to this experience because the individual himself belongs to a social structure, a social order.”

George Herbert Mead (1863–1931) American philosopher, sociologist, and psychologist

Source: Mind, Self, and Society. 1934, p. 1 , lead paragraph

Communication

“The purpose of formulating [a] conflict as a game is not that of resolving the conflict by 'solving the game.' It is that of displaying the structure of the conflict and thereby exposing features of it that may be concealed by rhetoric. In particular, appreciation of the peculiar structure of some of the so-called mixed—motive conflicts represented nonzero-sum games may change the conflicting parties' perception of their situation.”

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

Anatol Rapoport, Conflict in man-made environment. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1974; As cited in M.J. Apter, ‎J.H. Kerr, ‎S. Murgatroyd (1993) Advances in Reversal Theory. p. 63-64
1970s and later

Game, Motivation, Change

“We have the tendency to judge others by their surface appearance, and to find only their negative qualities. But if we search beneath the surface we discover that a myriad of strains mix together to create a particular person’s nature. The faults we perceive are likely to be the effect of circumstances, the psychological response to trauma, abuse, rejection, heartbreak, insecurity, pain, confusion, or disease.”

Radhanath Swami (1950) Gaudiya Vaishnava guru

?
The Journey Home: Autobiography of an American Swami (Tulsi Books, 2010)

Pain, Disease, Search, Nature

“Many leaders are in the first instance executives whose primary duty is to direct some enterprise or one of its departments or sub-units…
It remains true that in every leadership situation the leader has to possess enough grasp of the ways and means, the technology and processes by means of which the purposes are being realized, to give wise guidance to the directive effort as a whole…
In general the principle underlying success at the coordinative task has been found to be that every special and different point of view in the group affected by the major executive decisions should be fully represented by its own exponents when decisions are being reached. These special points of view are inevitably created by the differing outlooks which different jobs or functions inevitably foster. The more the leader can know at first hand about the technique employed by all his group, the wiser will be his grasp of all his problems…
But more and more the key to leadership lies in other directions. It lies in ability to make a team out of a group of individual workers, to foster a team spirit, to bring their efforts together into a unified total result, to make them see the significance of the particular task each one is doing in relation to the whole.”

Ordway Tead (1891–1973) American academic

Source: The art of leadership (1935), p. 115; as cited in: William Sykes " Visions Of Hope: Leadership http://www.openwriting.com/archives/2012/08/leadership_2.php." Published on August 12, 2012.

Way, Problem, Decision, Effort

“Functionalist systems theories. The theorists in this tradition explain the emergence and/or maintenance of parts, structures, institutions, norms or cultural patterns of a social system in terms of their consequences, that is, the particular functions each realizes or satisfies. This includes, for instance, their contribution to the maintenance and reproduction over time of the larger system. The major functionalist in sociology is arguably Talcott Parsons.”

Tom R. Burns (1937) American sociologist

Source: Systems theories (2006), p. 1.

Time, Parting

“On one level, then, Cadbury can be seen as a classic example of Victorian industrial paternalism, albeit carried to greater lengths than in most other companies of the day. On another level, however, the Cadbury system resulted in a very strong, highly flexible organisation which, thanks to the strong levels of employee commitment and participation, could draw on a large bank of experience and intelligence to solve problems and undertake what amounted to continuous improvement. The employee participation system in particular meant that Cadbury was constantly upgrading its processes and products. Herbert Casson regarded Cadbury in the 1920s as one of the best-run companies in Britain, if not the world, and summed up the key to its success very succinctly: ‘At Cadbury, everybody thinks.”

Edward Cadbury (1873–1948) British businessman

Morgen Witzel (2003), Fifty Key Figures in Management. p. 39
Quote on the Cadbury company at the time Edward Cadbury was managing director

World, Intelligence, Problem, Thinking

“Every person, every race, every nation, has its own particular keynote which it brings to the general chord of life and of humanity. Life is not a monotone but a many-stringed harmony, and to this harmony is contributed a distinctive note by each individual.”

Annie Besant (1847–1933) British socialist, theosophist, women's rights activist, writer and orator

The Birth of New India: A Collection of Writings and Speeches on Indian Affairs http://books.google.co.in/books?id=n7ZMF8Mjh2oC, p. 85

Life, Personality

“To sum up [Trotsky wrote], "the road to Socialism lies through a period of the highest possible intensification of the principle of the Slate … The State, before disappearing, assumes the form of the dictatorship of the proletariat, i. e. the most ruthless form of State, which embraces the life of the citizens authoritatively in every direction" ([The Defence of Terrorism] p. 157). It would be difficult indeed to put the matter more plainly. The state of the proletarian dictatorship is depicted by Trotsky as a huge permanent concentration camp in which the government exercises absolute power over every aspect of the citizens’ lives and in particular decides how much work they shall do, of what kind and in what places. Individuals are nothing but labour units. Compulsion is universal, and any organization that is not part of the state must be its enemy, thus the enemy of the proletariat. All this, of course, is in the name of an ideal realm of freedom, the advent of which is expected after an indefinite lapse of historical time.”

Leszek Kolakowski (1927–2009) Philosopher, historian of ideas

pg. 512
Main Currents Of Marxism (1978), Three Volume edition, Volume II, The Golden Age

Life, Exercises, Freedom, Universe

“But though there be naturally a wide difference in point of delicacy between one person and another, nothing tends further to encrease and improve this talent, than practice in a particular art, and the frequent survey or contemplation of a particular species of beauty.”

David Hume book Four Dissertations

Four Dissertations (1757)

Beauty, Art, Nature, Personality

“We must never forget that the NHS is a public service. It is a service used by the public and it is a service paid for by the public. … We must therefore never forget that is the duty of health boards - and of responsive government - to take full account of particular local views and circumstances.”

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

Principles and Priorities : Programme for Government (September 5, 2007)

Health, Forgetting

“Morals excite passions, and produce or prevent actions. Reason of itself is utterly impotent in this particular. The rules of morality, therefore, are not conclusions of our reason.”

David Hume book A Treatise of Human Nature

Part 1, Section 1
A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40), Book 3: Of morals

Passion

“I have to inform the House that the present situation is so critical that the Government are compelled to seek special powers from the House by a Bill to be passed through all its stages in both Houses of Parliament to-day. The situation is grave. … The Government are convinced that now is the time when we must mobilise to the full the whole resources of this country. We must throw all our weight into the struggle. Every private interest must give way to the urgent needs of the community. We cannot know what the next few weeks or even days may bring forth, but whatever may come we shall meet it as the British people in the past have met dangers and overcome them. But it is necessary that the Government should be given complete control over persons and property, not just some persons of some particular class of the community, but of all persons, rich and poor, employer and workman, man or woman, and all property.”

Clement Attlee (1883–1967) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1940/may/22/business-of-the-house-emergency#S5CV0361P0_19400522_HOC_158 in the House of Commons (22 May 1940) introducing the Emergency Powers Act 1940. War Cabinet

People, Way, Communication, Time

“By unessential things in reference to religion I mean first of all, the miracles, to which nevertheless such particular importance is attached by the Christian religion. No one can affirm that miracles of themselves establish a single article of faith. If we granted that articles of faith carried with them conviction and inherent credibility, how should we dare to require miracles in order to believe them? If we granted that the resurrection had been proved to be true by the most undoubted and unanimous witnesses, as in all fairness it ought to be, we could surely believe it without any assistant miracle. If we granted that Christ really did return in the clouds of Heaven, as according to promise he ought to have done, we should certainly want no miracles to prove it.”

Hermann Samuel Reimarus (1694–1768) German philosopher

Source: Fragments from Reimarus: Consisting of Brief Critical Remarks on the Object of Jesus and His Disciples as Seen in the New Testament, p. 69

Faith, Religion, Christ

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

Charles A. Beard (1874–1948) American historian

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

Law, Color, Star, Mathematics

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

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

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

Life, People, Truth, World

“Progress in these policies can only be brought about if a considerable degree of consensus exists within our country. I have heard some doubt expressed as to what consensus means…Consensus means deliberately setting out to achieve the widest possible measure of agreement about our national policies, in this particular case about our economic activities, in the pursuit of a better standard of living for our people and a happier and more prosperous country. If there be any doubt about the desirability of working towards such a consensus let us recognize that every successful industrialized country in the modern world has been working on such a basis.”

Edward Heath (1916–2005) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (1970–1974)

Speech to the Federation of Conservative Students in Manchester (6 October 1981), quoted in The Times (7 October 1981), p. 6. Margaret Thatcher had read Heath's advance text and responded http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/104712 by saying that "To me consensus seems to be—the process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values and policies in search of something in which no-one believes, but to which no-one objects". Post-Prime Ministerial

People, World, Success, Country

“When Siddhartha listened attentively to this river, to the song of a thousand voices; when he did not listen to the sorrow or laughter, when he did not bind his soul to any one particular voice and absorb it in his Self, but heard them all, the whole, the unity; then the great song of a thousand voices consisted of one word: Om — perfection.”

Hermann Hesse (1877–1962) German writer

Source: Siddhartha (1922), p. 94

Soul, Laughter, Perfection

“In sum, the processes of evolution create initially comparatively simple dynamical systems on particular levels of organisation. The processes then lead to the progressive complexification of the existing systems and, ultimately, to the creation of simpler systems on the next higher organisational level, where complexification begins anew. Thus evolution moves from the simpler to the more complex, and from the lower to the higher level of organisation”

Ervin László (1932) Hungarian musician and philosopher

Laszlo (1991) The Age of Bifurcation: Understanding the Changing World. Philadelphia: Gordon & Breach. p. 112; As cited in: K.L. Dennis (2003, p. 69).

“In the selection of papers for this volume, two problems have arisen, namely what constitutes systems thinking and what systems thinking is relevant to the thinking required for organizational management. The first problem is obviously critical. Unless there were a meaningful answer there would be no sense in producing a volume of readings in systems thinking in any subject. A great many writers have manifestly believed that there is a way of considering phenomena which is sufficiently different from the well-established modes of scientific analysis to deserve the particular title of systems thinking.”

Fred Emery (1925–1997) Australian psychologist

Frederick Edmund Emery (ed.) (1969) Systems thinking: selected readings Penguin, p. 7: Beginning of editorial by Fred Emery.

Way, Problem, Thinking, Sense

“The skills of the modern artist are the opposite of those of the craftsman: instead of acquiring techniques for producing classes of objects, the artist today perfects the means suited to his particular work.”

Harold Rosenberg (1906–1978) American writer and art critic

Source: Art & Other Serious Matters, (1985), p. 51, "Inquest into Modernism"

Perfection