Quotes about period
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“No newspaper or periodical worth its name in India will publish what I write in the lines that follow. Not because the subject matter is seditious…, but simply because it defies the Emergency imposed on this country by Muslim theologians and politicians backed by 'secularist' intellectuals and politicians and riotous Muslim mobs and plain terrorists.”

Sita Ram Goel (1921–2003) Indian activist

Freedom of expression - Secular Theocracy Versus Liberal Democracy (1998)

Country

“Those were the days of "Florodora" and of sextets, of pinched-in waists and blown-out sleeves, of almost bustles and absolute ballet skirts, but here, without doubt, disguised as she might be by the unaccustomed stiffness and old fashion of her costume, was a butterfly of butterflies. Here was the gayety of the period — the soft wine of eyes, the songs that flurried hearts, the toasts and tie bouquets, the dances and the dinners. Here was a Venus of the hansom, cab, the Gibson girl in her glorious prime. Here was…”

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) American novelist and screenwriter

"The Lees of Happiness"
Quoted, Tales of the Jazz Age (1922)

Girl, Fashion, Wine, Heart

“To prevent the starving peasants from fleeing to the towns an internal passport system was introduced and unauthorized change of residence was made punishable with imprisonment. Peasants were not allowed passports at all, and were therefore tied to the soil as in the worst days of feudal serfdom: this state of things was not altered until the 1970s. The concentration camps filled with new hordes of prisoners sentenced to hard labour. The object of destroying the peasants’ independence and herding them into collective farms was to create a population of slaves, the benefit of whose labour would accrue to industry. The immediate effect was to reduce Soviet agriculture to a state of decline from which it has not yet recovered, despite innumerable measures of reorganization and reform. At the time of Stalin’ s death, almost a quarter of a century after mass collectivization was initiated, the output of grain per head of population was still below the 1913 level; yet throughout this period, despite misery and starvation, large quantities of farm produce were exported all over the world for the sake of Soviet industry. The terror and oppression of those years cannot be expressed merely by the figures for loss of human life, enormous as these are; perhaps the most vivid picture of what collectivization meant is in Vasily Grossman’ s posthumous novel Forever Flowing.”

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

pg. 39
Main Currents Of Marxism (1978), Three Volume edition, Volume III: The Breakdown

Life, Death, World, Change

“Its (Rasayan’s) principles (certain operations, drugs and compound medicines, most of which are taken from plants) restore the health… and give back youth to fading old age… white hair becomes black again, the keenness of the senses is restored as well as the capacity for juvenile agility, and even for co-habitation, and the life of the people in this world is even extended to a long period.”

Al-Biruni (973–1048) Persian scholar and polymath

quoted from Lal, K. S. (1992). The legacy of Muslim rule in India. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan. Chapter 1 https://archive.org/details/alberunisindiaac01biru/page/188 From Alberuni's India

Life, People, Health, Youth

“[T]he Islamic world is a source of danger and destruction is all too conceivable. Indeed, it’s been on display, in plain sight, for years… The jihadist threat is real, and it must, obviously, be fought and defeated. But that raises another problem—not a problem with Islam, but a problem with the West. We have lost our nerve. In recent years, the attitude of Barack Obama has prevailed over the spirit of Charlie Hebdo. The claims of sensitivity have trumped the attachment to freedom. Appeasement of jihad has supplanted the war on terror. Most fundamentally—let’s be honest—fear has overwhelmed courage. And so the American president has been happy to proclaim, as he did at the United Nations in September 2012, “The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.” He has been less willing to say that the future must not belong to those who kill in the name of the prophet of Islam… We face a crisis of Islam. We need to be clear-eyed about that. But we also face a crisis of the West. Only if we come to grips with that second crisis will this period of consequences turn out to be an occasion for renewal rather than another marker on the path to decadence.”

William Kristol (1952) American writer

2010s, 2017, The Two Crises (2017)

War, Happiness, World, Fear

“There is good evidence that the art of shooting with bows and arrows has not been handed down from any common progenitor of mankind, yet the stone arrow-heads, brought from the most distant parts of the world and manufactured at the most remote periods, are, as Nilsson has shewn, almost identical; and this fact can only be accounted for by the various races having similar inventive or mental powers.”

Charles Darwin book The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex

volume I, chapter VII: "On the Races of Man", pages 232-233 http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?pageseq=245&itemID=F937.1&viewtype=image The Descent of Man (1871)

World, Art, Distant, Parting

“…the French are on the point of making a great effort in Portugal…which Lord Wellington…will find himself unable to resist. But even if such an effort could not take place or should not succeed, I am convinced the period when we shall be obliged to give up the contest from an absolute inability to support the expense, is fast approaching.”

Charles Grey, 2nd Earl Grey (1764–1845) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland

Letter to Lord Grenville (1 September 1811), quoted in Rory Muir, Britain and the Defeat of Napoleon, 1807-1815 (Yale University Press, 1996), p. 157.
1810s

Support, Effort

“I think Stone Mountain is amusing, but then again I find most representations of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson outside of Virginia, and, in Jackson's case, West Virginia, to be amusing. Aside from a short period in 1861-62, when Lee was placed in charge of the coastal defense of South Carolina and Georgia, neither general stepped foot in Georgia during the war. Lee cut off furloughs to Georgia's soldiers later in the war because he was convinced that once home they’d never come back. He resisted the dispatch of James Longstreet's two divisions westward to defend northern Georgia, and he had no answer when Sherman operated in the state. It would be better to see Joseph E. Johnston and John Bell Hood on the mountain, although it probably would have been difficult to get those two men to ride together. Maybe Braxton Bragg would have been a better pick, but no one calls him the hero of Chickamauga. Yet Bragg, Johnston, and Hood all attempted to defend Georgia, and they are ignored on Stone Mountain. So is Joe Wheeler, whose cavalry feasted off Georgians in 1864. So is John B. Gordon, wartime hero and postwar Klansman. Given Stone Mountain's history, Klansman Gordon would have been a good choice. It's also amusing to see Jefferson Davis represented. Yes, Davis came to Georgia, once to try to settle disputes within the high command of the Army of Tennessee, not a rousing success, and once to rally white Georgians to the cause once more after the fall of Atlanta. But any serious student of the war knows that Davis spent much of his presidency arguing with Georgia governor Joseph Brown about Georgia's contribution to the Confederate war effort, and that the vice president of the Confederacy, Georgia's own Alexander Hamilton Stephens, was not a big supporter of his superior. Yet we don't see Brown or Stephens on Stone Mountain, either.”

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

Brooks D. Simpson, "The Future of Stone Mountain" https://cwcrossroads.wordpress.com/2015/07/22/the-future-of-stone-mountain/ (22 July 2015), Crossroads, WordPress

Men, War, Home, History

“In fact, in the plantation areas conditions amounting to slavery were re‑established by the planters with the acquiescence of the Government. Some idea of the misery to which the population of these areas was reduced by this system of merciless exploitation in the interests of British capital may be gained from the Bengal Indigo Commission's Report and from some of the literature of the period. Nil Darpan or the Mirror of Indigo, a Bengali drama, created a sensation by throwing a little light on this dark corner of Britain's action in India, and the reaction in official circles was so great that a European missionary, Mr Long, who translated and published it in English, was fined and imprisoned. During the whole of this period, in fact till the rise of nationalism after the Great War, conditions in plantations were of a kind which showed the worst features of European relations with Asia.”

K. M. Panikkar (1895–1963) Indian diplomat, academic and historian

Asia and Western Dominance: a survey of the Vasco Da Gama epoch of Asian history, 1498–1945

War, Literature, Idea, Light

“Since only actions aimed at perceived benefit to others were, to Aristotle's mind, morally approved, actions solely for personal gain must be bad. That commercial considerations may not have affected the daily activities of most people does not mean however that over any prolonged period their very lives did not depend on the functioning of a trade that enabled them to buy essentials. That production for gain which Aristotle denounced as unnatural had -- long before his time -- already become the foundation of an extended order far transcending the known needs of other persons.”

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

Source: 1980s and later, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (1988), p. 46

People, Time, Dependency, Personality

“This (precognitive ability) steers the cell through mazes of probabilities, while allowing it to retain knowledge of its own greater fulfillment -- the ideas of itself, which is always alive in any given period of your time. On a different kind of scale, then, each individual has the same sort of idealized version of the self, and so does each species. Here I mean each species, and I am not simply referring to mankind. Obviously these are not apparent to the physical senses, yet they are strong energy centers that to some degree stimulate the physical senses toward activity. To that degree, then, there are indeed "tree gods," gods of the forest, and "gods of being" connected with each person.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Source: The “Unknown” Reality: Volume One, (1977), p. 117; Session 691

God, Idea, Knowledge, Sense

“The book of Philippine history is far from finished. However, does every sentence in our country’s story need to be finished with a period?”

Francis Escudero (1969) Filipino politician

2015, Speech: Declaration as Vice Presidential Candidate

Books, History, Country

“It were doubtless to be wished, that the power of prohibiting the importation of slaves had not been postponed until the year 1808, or rather that it had been suffered to have immediate operation. But it is not difficult to account, either for this restriction on the general government, or for the manner in which the whole clause is expressed. It ought to be considered as a great point gained in favor of humanity, that a period of twenty years may terminate forever, within these States, a traffic which has so long and so loudly upbraided the barbarism of modern policy; that within that period, it will receive a considerable discouragement from the federal government, and may be totally abolished, by a concurrence of the few States which continue the unnatural traffic, in the prohibitory example which has been given by so great a majority of the Union. Happy would it be for the unfortunate Africans, if an equal prospect lay before them of being redeemed from the oppressions of their European brethren!”

James Madison (1751–1836) 4th president of the United States (1809 to 1817)

Federalist No. 42 http://econfaculty.gmu.edu/wew/quotes/slavery.html 1780s, Federalist Papers (1787–1788)

Happiness, Suffering

“About the only power you have is the power to discriminate. Living in a culture like this, you have to make choices and search out what has the most authentic content or substance. In the 1960s, while on LSD, I realized that my mind was a garbage receptacle of mass media images and input. I spent my whole childhood absorbing so much crap that my personality and mind are saturated with it. God only knows if that affects you physically! As a kid I became increasingly interested in earlier periods of culture. I turned into a little nostalgia boy, and I became steeped in the Our Gang fantasy from watching them on TV. So much so, that my speech patterns were affected. The style of those Our Gang comedies was so charming that I started acting and talking like Jackie Cooper and Alfalfa. They had these cute kids, artificial mannerisms. It must have been embarrassing for people to hear me talk like that.”

Robert Crumb (1943) American cartoonist

The R. Crumb Handbook by Robert Crumb and Peter Poplaski (2005), p. 60

God, People, Search, Boy

“.. how with the [Dutch] Romantic movement after 1830 also the love awakened for everything that recalled former times to the mind - including the period of the middle-ages -, and how the sigh grew from it to collect all kind of objects that reassured the taste of those times. Here too, the celebrated [Dutch romantic painter] Nuyen stood in front.”

Johannes Bosboom (1817–1891) Dutch painter

version in original Dutch (citaat van Johannes Bosboom, in Nederlands): ..hoe met de Romantische beweging na 1830 ook de liefde ontwaakte voor alles wat vroegere tijden — ook het tijdvak der middeneeuwen — voor den geest riepen en hoe daaruit de zucht ontsproot tot het verzamelen van voorwerpen, die van den smaak dier tijden getuigden. Ook hierin stond de gevierde Nuyen vooraan. Quote of J. Bosboom, c. 1890; as cited in De Hollandsche Schilderkunst in de Negentiende Eeuw, G. H. Marius; https://ia800204.us.archive.org/31/items/dehollandschesch00mariuoft/dehollandschesch00mariuoft.pdf Martinus Nijhoff, s-'Gravenhage / The Hague, tweede druk, 1920, p. 108 translation from the original Dutch: Fons Heijnsbroek) the studio of Bosboom was more or less a small museum, exposing his collected objects from the middle-ages 1890's

Love, Age, Time

“At first we got along very well. Esipova even boasted outside the class that she had pupils who wrote sonatas (I completed Sonata, Op. 1, and played it to Esipova, who took it home and inserted pedaling). But before long trouble began. Esipova’s method of teaching was to try to fit everyone into a standard pattern. True, it was a very elaborate pattern, and if the pupil’s temperament coincided with her own, the results were admirable. But if the pupil happened to be of an independent cast of mind Esipova would do her best to suppress his individuality instead of helping to develop it. Moreover, I had great difficulty in ridding myself of careless playing, and the Mozart, Schubert and Chopin which she insisted on were somehow not in my line. At that period I was too preoccupied with the search for a new harmonic idiom to understand how anyone could care for the simple harmonies of Mozart.”

Anna Yesipova (1851–1914) Russian pianist

Sergei Prokofiev, Autobiography

Home, Search, Understanding, Help

“For these anticipations determine the behaviour of the economic subjects and consequently those changes in the whole price system which during a period actually occur as a result of the actions of individuals.”

Gunnar Myrdal (1898–1987) Swedish economist

Source: Monetary Equilibrium (1939), p. 121

Change

“The period of the actual revolution, the so-called transitory stage, must be the introduction, the prelude to the new social conditions. It is the threshold to the NEW LIFE, the new HOUSE OF MAN AND HUMANITY. As such it must be of the spirit of the new life, harmonious with the construction of the new edifice.”

Emma Goldman book My Disillusionment in Russia

My Disillusionment in Russia (1923)

Life, Housing

“I went into my own black-out period [1942-45] which lasted two or three years where the canvases would simply build up until they’d get like stone and it was always just a gray mess. The image wouldn’t emerge, but I worked pretty regularly. I was fighting to find I knew not what, but I could no longer stay with what I had.”

Lee Krasner (1908–1984) American artist

Source: Art Talk, Conversations with 15 woman artists 1975, p. 74.

Fight

“Algebra in the Renaissance period received its first serious consideration in Pacioli's Sūma (1494)… which characterized in a careless way the knowledge… thus far accumulated. By the aid of the crude symbolism then in use it gave a considerable amount of work in equations.
The noteworthy work… and the first to be devoted entirely to the subject, was Rudolff's Coss (1525). This work made no decided advance in the theory, but it improved the symbolism for radicals and made the science better known in Germany. Stiffel's edition of this work (1553-1554) gave the subject still more prominence.
The first epoch-making algebra to appear in print was the Ars Magna of Cardan (1545). The next great work… to appear in print was the General Trattato of Tartaglia…”

David Eugene Smith (1860–1944) American mathematician

Source: History of Mathematics (1925) Vol.2, p. 384; Ch. 6: Algebra

Way, Knowledge, Appearance, Science

“The economic and technological achievements of industrialization in this period were fundamentally mistaken. …based upon plundering the natural capital of the globe that was created over millions of years: the plundering of the soils and their fertility; the plundering of human communities whether they were our own or someone else's.”

Carroll Quigley (1910–1977) American historian

Oscar Iden Lecture Series, Lecture 3: "The State of Individuals" (1976)

Communication, Nature

“The Bible is clear that God considers 40 days a spiritually significant time period. Whenever God wanted to prepare someone for his purposes, he took 40 days…”

Rick Warren (1954) Christian religious leader

A Journey with a Purpose : Your Next 40 Days, p. 7
The Purpose Driven Life: What on Earth Am I Here For? (2002)

God, Time

“Gradually we began [ De Stijl-artists in The Netherlands, 1918] to present a closed front. By working there had been created not only a clarity in the collective consciousness of our group, but we had gained a certainty, which made it possible for us to define our collective attitude towards life and to perpetrate it according to the requirements of the period... As the world war [ World War I ] was coming to an end, we all came to feel the need of securing an interest in our efforts beyond the narrow boundaries of Holland.”

Theo van Doesburg (1883–1931) Dutch architect, painter, draughtsman and writer

Quote in Neue Schweizer Rundschau, 1929, p. 172 (Van Doesburg); as quoted in De Stijl 1917-1931 - The Dutch Contribution to Modern Art http://www.dbnl.org/tekst/jaff001stij01_01/jaff001stij01_01_0003.php, J.M. Meulenhoff, Amsterdam, 1956, p. 17 Van Doesburg is looking back on the starting years of De Stijl-movement 1926 – 1931

Life, War, World, Feeling

“It was during this early period of experiment that I first went to Paris. The time was around 1910 when Cubism was in its beginnings. I admired Matisse, Van Dongen and the other Fauves, but I was immediately drawn to the Cubists, especially to Picasso and Léger. Of all the abstractionists (Kandinsky and the Futurists) I felt that only the Cubists had discovered the right path; and, for a time, I was much influenced by them.”

Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) Peintre Néerlandais

Source: Quote of Mondrian about 1910; in 'Mondrian, Essays' ('Plastic art and pure plastic art', 1937 and his other essays, (1941-1943) by Piet Mondrian; Wittenborn-Schultz Inc., New York, 1945, p. 10; as cited in De Stijl 1917-1931 - The Dutch Contribution to Modern Art, by H.L.C. Jaffé http://www.dbnl.org/tekst/jaff001stij01_01/jaff001stij01_01.pdf; J.M. Meulenhoff, Amsterdam 1956, p. 41

Time

“There is something radically wrong, [the anarchist] declares, in a system of society that functions and maintains its existence by the impetus of violence and force. He sees nothing praiseworthy in political society which has recourse to periodic wars, or need of jails, gallows and bludgeons--and it is because he is aware that these brutal weapons are the instruments of every government and State that he works for their destruction. … Unlike the politician, he does not regard dishonesty, brutality and avariciousness as natural characteristics of human nature, but as the inevitable consequences of coercion and frustration engendered by artificial law, he believes that these social evils are best eradicated not by greater penalties and further legislation, but by the free development of the latent forces of solidarity and sympathetic understanding which government and law so ruthlessly suppress. … Freedom will be possible when people understand and desire it--for man can only rule where others subserviently obey. Where none obey, none has power to rule.”

George Nicholson (1760–1825) British anarchist and author

"The simplicity of anarchism" in Freedom, 1955. Reprinted in What Is Anarchism?: An Introduction by Donald Rooum, ed. (London: Freedom Press, 1992, 1995) pp. 39-40.

War, People, Law, Penalty

“The historian is looked upon as objective when he measures the past by the popular opinions of his own time, as subjective when he does not take these opinions for models. That man is thought best fitted to depict a period of the past, who is not in the least affected by that period. But only he who has a share in building up the future can grasp what the past has been, and only when transformed into a work of art can history arouse or even sustain instincts.”

Georg Brandes (1842–1927) Danish literature critic and scholar

Source: An Essay on Aristocratic Radicalism (1889), pp. 18-19

Art, History, Time, Past

“To unstable money are to be traced nearly all our economic troubles since 1918: the unemployment of the inter-war period; the over-employment and scarcity of labour since the Second World War; the labour unrest incidental to perpetual wage demands; the hardships and dislocation caused by the declining value of small savings, annuities and endowments; the vexation of continual price rises even for those whose incomes on the whole keep pace with them; the collapse of the prices of Government securities through distrust of the unit in which they are valued.”

Ralph George Hawtrey (1879–1975) British economist

‘Foreword’ (1961) to A Century of Bank Rate (1962, 2nd ed.), p. xxii.
A Century of Bank Rate (1938)

Money, War, World

“World Encyclopaedia. -- Behind these lies another prospect of greater and more permanent importance; that of an attempt at a comprehensive and continually revised presentation of the whole of science in its social context, an idea most persuasively put forward by H. G. Wells in his appeal for a World Encyclopaedia of which he has already given us a foretaste in his celebrated outlines. The encyclopaedic movement was a great rallying point of the liberal revolution of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The real encyclopaedia should not be what the Encyclopaedia Britannica has degenerated into, a mere mass of unrelated knowledge sold by high-pressure salesmanship, but a coherent expression of the living and changing body of thought; it should sum up what is for the moment the spirit of the age…
The original French Encyclopaedia which did attempt these things was, however, made in the period of relative quiet when the forces of liberation were gathering ready to break their bonds. We have already entered the second period of revolutionary struggle and the quiet thought necessary to make such an effort will not be easy to find, but some effort is worth making because the combined assault on science and humanity by the forces of barbarism has against it, as yet, no general and coherent statement on the part of those who believe in democracy and the need for the people of the world to take over the active control of production and administration for their own safety and welfare.”

John Desmond Bernal (1901–1971) British scientist

Source: The Social Function of Science (1939), p. 306-307. Chapter SCIENTIFIC COMMUNICATION. The Function of Scientific Publication. See also World Brain

People, Age, World, Democracy

“These movies belonged to the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries—that period of great, unsustainable, and hedonistic prosperity, driven by the burning of Earth’s reserves of perishable oil, which culminated in the False Tribulation, and the wars, and the plagues, and the painful dwindling of inflated populations to more reasonable numbers.”

Robert Charles Wilson book Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America

Source: Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America (2009), p. 29

Pain, War, Falseness

“The kind of economic trouble that Asia experienced a decade ago, and that we're all experiencing now, is precisely the sort of thing we thought we had learned to prevent. In the bad old days big, advanced economies with stable governments-like Britain in the 1920s-might have had no answer to prolonged periods of stagnation and deflation; but between John Maynard Keynes and Milton Friedman, we thought we knew enough to keep that from happening again.”

Paul Krugman (1953) American economist

Introduction
The Return of Depression Economics and The Crisis of 2008 (2009)

Learning

“During the entire period of occupation of Afghanistan, we were the country that provided the most support to the Afghans.”

Hossein Shariatmadari (1947) Iranian government spokesman

Interview with Hossein Shariatmadari, PBS Frontline, Aug. 1, 2007 http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/showdown/interviews/shariatmadari.html,

Support, Country

“When you get in these people when you… get these people in, say: 'Look, the problem is that this will open the whole, the whole Bay of Pigs thing, and the President just feels that' ah, without going into the details… don't, don't lie to them to the extent to say there is no involvement, but just say this is sort of a comedy of errors, bizarre, without getting into it, 'the President believes that it is going to open the whole Bay of Pigs thing up again.' And, ah because these people are plugging for, for keeps and that they should call the FBI in and say that we wish for the country, don't go any further into this case, period!”

Richard Nixon (1913–1994) 37th President of the United States of America

The 'smoking gun tape' on (23 June 1972)
1970s

People, Lie, Error, Feeling

“When we consider the time which is necessary to fulfill the needs of an individual it will easily be understood that the needs of a vast country like Ethiopia can only be filled progressively and by stages.
For the life of the world is such that periods of constructive achievement are followed by periods of destruction: the period of construction brings peace and the period of destruction brings uncertainty. We have always kept in mind that the union of the spiritual strength of the people with the material power of the independent nation provides the firm basis for our people to overcome the hardships and difficulties of life facing them in this world.”

Haile Selassie (1892–1975) Emperor of Ethiopia

Address on the 18th anniversary of his coronation (2 November 1948) http://www.jah-rastafari.com/selassie-words/show-jah-word.asp?word_id=18ann

Life, People, World, Peace

“Both the law of inertia and the law of gravitation contain a numerical factor or a constant belonging to matter, which is called mass. We have thus two definitions of mass; one by the law of inertia: mass is the ratio between force and acceleration. We may call the mass thus defined the inertial or passive mass, as it is a measure of the resistance offered by matter to a force acting on it. The second is defined by the law of gravitation, and might be called the gravitational or active mass, being a measure of the force exerted by one material body on another. The fact that these two constants or coefficients are the same is, in Newton's system, to be considered as a most remarkable accidental coincidence and was decidedly felt as such by Newton himself. He made experiments to determine the equality of the two masses by swinging a pendulum, of which the bob was hollow and could be filled up with different materials. The force acting on the pendulum is proportional to its active mass, its inertia is proportional to its passive mass, so that the period will depend on the ratio of the passive and the active mass. Consequently the fact that the period of all these different pendulums was the same, proves that this ratio is a constant, and can be made equal to unity by a suitable choice of units, i. e., the inertial and the gravitational mass are the same. These experiments have been repeated in the nineteenth century by Bessel, and in our own times by Eötvös and Zeeman, and the identity of the inertial and the gravitational mass is one of the best ascertained empirical facts in physics-perhaps the best. It follows that the so-called fictitious forces introduced by a motion of the body of reference, such as a rotation, are indistinguishable from real forces…. In Einstein's general theory of relativity there is also no formal theoretical difference, as there was in Newton's system…. the equality of inertial and gravitational mass is no longer an accidental coincidence, but a necessity.”

Willem de Sitter (1872–1934) Dutch cosmologist

p, 125
"The Astronomical Aspect of the Theory of Relativity" (1933)

Law, Time, Dependency

“Sir Walter Scott, Wordsworth, Byron…Carlyle, Tennyson, John Henry Newman…Thackeray, Browning and Dickens. There was a galaxy of talent of the highest order in a literature that stands second to none in the world…No country can compare with our own in the literature of that period…I have always firmly held that there is no race with more ability latent than our own, or with a higher aptitude for mechanical genius. When the College was founded, Hargreaves, Arkwright and Crompton, all sons of working men, were inventing the machines which brought the cotton industry. I mention these names to show the stuff of which our people are made, and how that stuff is worth training and educating. It would be a very interesting subject, for anyone who cared to explore it, to see how many of the mechanical inventions which are light-heartedly attributed to Americans are really the product of British brains, whether they were British brains which have gone to work in that country, or the brains of children of British parents who have gone there.”

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

Speech at Birkbeck College (20 March 1924), quoted in On England, and Other Addresses (1926), pp. 143-144.
1924

Men, Children, People, World

“A basic income paid for out of taxes on the market economy gives people the chance to build positions in the non-market economy. It allows them to volunteer, set up co-ops, edit Wikipedia, learn how to use 3D design software, or just exist. It allows them to space out periods of work; make a late entry or early exit from working life; switch more easily into and out of high-intensity, stressful jobs. Its fiscal cost would be high: that’s why all attempts to enact the measure separately from an overall transition project are likely to fail, despite the growing number of academic papers and global congresses dedicated to it.”

Paul Mason (journalist) book PostCapitalism: A Guide to our Future

PostCapitalism: A Guide to our Future (2015)

Life, People, Learning, Chance

“The proletariat thus shared its dictatorship with nobody. As to the question of the "majority", this never troubled Lenin much. In an article "Constitutional Illusions" (Aug. 1917; Works, vol. 25, p. 201) he wrote: "in time of revolution it is not enough to ascertain the ‘ will of the majority’ – you must prove to be stronger at the decisive moment and at the decisive place; you must win … We have seen innumerable examples of the better organized, more politically conscious and better armed minority forcing its will upon the majority and defeating it." (pg. 503) Trotsky, however, answers questions [in The Defence of Terrorism] that Lenin evaded or ignored. "Where is your guarantee, certain wise men ask us, that it is just your party that expresses the interests of historical development? Destroying or driving underground the other parties, you have thereby prevented their political competition with you, and consequently you have deprived yourselves of the possibility of testing your line of action." Trotsky replies: "This idea is dictated by a purely liberal conception of the course of the revolution. In a period in which all antagonisms assume an open character; and the political struggle swiftly passes into a civil war, the ruling party has sufficient material standard by which to test its line of action, without the possible circulation of Menshevik papers. Noske crushes the Communists, but they grow. We have suppressed the Mensheviks and the S. R. s [Socialist Republics] … and they have disappeared. This criterion is sufficient for us" (p. 101). This is one of the most enlightening theoretical formulations of Bolshevism, from which it appears that the "rightness" of a historical movement or a state is to be judged by whether its use of violence is successful. Noske did not succeed in crushing the German Communists, but Hitler did; it would thus follow from Trotsky’ s rule that Hitler "expressed the interests of historical development". Stalin liquidated the Trotskyists in Russia, and they disappeared – so evidently Stalin, and not Trotsky, stood for historical progress.”

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

pg. 510
Main Currents Of Marxism (1978), Three Volume edition, Volume II, The Golden Age

Men, War, Idea, Question

“this third period (as it may be termed) of my mental progress, which now went hand in hand with hers, my opinions gained equally in breadth and depth, I understood more things, and those which I had understood before, I now understood more thoroughly. I had now completely turned back from what there had been of excess in my reaction against Benthamism. I had, at the height of that reaction, certainly become much more indulgent to the common opinions of society and the world, and more willing to be content with seconding the superficial improvement which had begun to take place in those common opinions, than became one whose convictions on so many points, differed fundamentally from them. I was much more inclined, than I can now approve, to put in abeyance the more decidedly heretical part of my opinions, which I now look upon as almost the only ones, the assertion of which tends in any way to regenerate society.”

John Stuart Mill book Autobiography

Source: Autobiography (1873)
Source: https://archive.org/details/autobiography01mill/page/230/mode/1up p. 230

World, Way, Parting

“Wadewitz used Wikipedia as a way to spread and improve knowledge on the period she focused, adding to biographies of women writers and thinkers. Wadewitz made her first edit on July 18, 2004, and over the course of her career made approximately 49,000 edits.”

Adrianne Wadewitz (1977–2014) academic and Wikipedian

Michelle Broder Van Dyke (April 21, 2014). "Prolific Wikipedia Editor Adrianne Wadewitz Dies After Rock Climbing Accident" http://www.buzzfeed.com/mbvd/prolific-wikipedia-editor-adrianne-wadewitz-dies-after-rock. BuzzFeed. About

Women, Way, Knowledge

“I was quite active politically just previous to this, and I'm leading into this time when I was on WPA and there was a group called the Artist's Union which was organized, so that I was extremely active in that. Again that meant more meetings and fighting for artists' rights on the WPA... I would say it gave me an opportunity to continue through a period of where one had a livelihood to deal with and/or painting. This allowed for painting and I'd say in that sense it was extremely influencing.... WPA itself ended after the War Service Project and by way of terminating, it allowed you to take one of several war courses that were being offered. After which you were supposed to be able to go into that field and earn a living. I took drafting.”

Lee Krasner (1908–1984) American artist

n.p.
Oral history interview with Lee Krasner, 1964 Nov. 2 - 1968 Apr. 11

War, Way, Sense, Time

“It gives liberty and breadth to thought, to learn to judge our own epoch from the point of view of universal history, history from the point of view of geological periods, geology from the point of view of astronomy.”

Henri-Frédéric Amiel (1821–1881) Swiss philosopher and poet

20 July 1848
Journal Intime (1882), Journal entries

History, Learning, Universe

“Is it not altogether absurd that, under actual circumstances, the average man does not feel spontaneously, and without being preached at, an ardent enthusiasm for those sciences and the related ones of biology?… Every day furnishes a new invention which this average man utilises. Every day produces a new anesthetic or vaccine from which this average man benefits. … How is it, nevertheless, that there is no sign of the masses imposing on themselves any sacrifice of money or attention in order to endow science more worthily? Far from this being the case, the post-war period has converted the man of science into a new social pariah.”

José Ortega Y Gasset book The Revolt of the Masses

Chap.IX: The Primitive and the Technical
The Revolt of the Masses (1929)

Money, War, Feeling, Science

“Both Abrams and Westmoreland would have been judged as authentic military "heroes" at a different time in history. Both men were outstanding leaders in their own right and in their own way. They offered sharply contrasting examples of military leadership, something akin to the distinct differences between Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant of our Civil War period. They entered the United States Military Academy at the same time in 1932- Westmoreland from a distinguished South Carolina family, and Abrams from a simpler family background in Massachusetts- and graduated together with the Class of 1936. Whereas Westmoreland became the First Captain (the senior cadet in the corps) during their senior year, Abrams was a somewhat nondescript cadet whose major claim to fame was as a loud, boisterous guard on the second-string varsity football squad. Both rose to high rank through outstanding performance in combat command jobs in World War II and the Korean War, as well as through equally commendable work in various staff positions. But as leaders they were vastly different. Abrams was the bold, flamboyant charger who wanted to cut to the heart of the matter quickly and decisively, while Westmoreland was the more shrewdly calculating, prudent commander who chose the more conservative course. Faultlessly attired, Westmoreland constantly worried about his public image and assiduously courted the press. Abrams, on the other hand, usually looked rumpled, as though he might have slept in his uniform, and was indifferent about his appearance, acting as though he could care less about the press. The sharply differing results were startling; Abrams rarely receiving a bad press report, Westmoreland struggling to get a favorable one.”

Bruce Palmer Jr. (1913–2000) United States Army Chief of Staff

Source: The 25-Year War: America's Military Role in Vietnam (1984), p. 134

Men, War, World, Family

“The youth of an art is, like the youth of anything else, its most interesting period. When it has come to the knowledge of good and evil it is stronger, but we care less about it.”

Samuel Butler (1835–1902) novelist

Early Art
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part IX - A Painter's Views on Painting

Youth, Art, Knowledge, Evil

“The use of criticism, in periodical writing, is to sift, not to stamp a work.”

Margaret Fuller (1810–1850) American feminist, poet, author, and activist

"A Short Essay on Critics" in Papers on Literature and Art (1846), p. 5.

“The purpose of sketching out these half-dozen areas of risk is not to claim to know how bad they would turn out to be, but simply to point out how little thought the Brexotics have given to them, or to the suspicions and fears they have roused, not just in their own country but across the whole continent. There remains the last and to me the worst suspicion: that they would be quite happy to put their supposedly beloved country through a period of prolonged turmoil and stagnation simply for the exhilaration of being on their own at last.”

Ferdinand Mount (1939) British writer

" Nigels against the World http://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n10/ferdinand-mount/nigels-against-the-world", London Review of Books (19 May 2016)

Happiness, Fear, Country

“In the meantime, I urge all military and police commanders to make sure that human rights are respected during this period.”

Francis Escudero (1969) Filipino politician

2009, Statement: on the Declaration of Martial Law in Maguindanao

“I liked my body growing up and I wasn't ashamed of it. I liked boys and didn't feel inhibited by them. Maybe it comes from having brothers and sharing a bathroom. The boys got the wrong impression of me at high school. They mistook forwardness for promiscuity. When they don't get what they want, they turn on you. I went through this period when all the girls thought I was loose and the boys said I was a nymphomaniac. The first boy I ever slept with was my boyfriend and we'd been going out a long time.”

Madonna (1958) American singer, songwriter, and actress

Madonna Rocks the Land, Time, 1985-05-27 http://time.com/3724297/madonna-rocks-the-land/,

School, Feeling, Girl, Boy

“Being a bourgeoisie in a colonial and semi-colonial country and oppressed by imperialism, the Chinese national bourgeoisie retains a certain revolutionary quality at certain periods and to a certain degree--even in the era of imperialism--in its opposition to the foreign imperialists and the domestic governments of bureaucrats and warlords (instances of opposition to the latter can be found in the periods of the Revolution of 1911 and the Northern Expedition), and it may ally itself with the proletariat and the petty bourgeoisie against such enemies as it is ready to oppose. In this respect the Chinese bourgeoisie differs from the bourgeoisie of old tsarist Russia. Since tsarist Russia was a military-feudal imperialism which carried on aggression against other countries, the Russian bourgeoisie was entirely lacking in revolutionary quality. There, the task of the proletariat was to oppose the bourgeoisie, not to unite with it. But China's national bourgeoisie has a revolutionary quality at certain periods and to a certain degree, because China is a colonial and semi-colonial country which is a victim of aggression. Here, the task of the proletariat is to form a united front with the national bourgeoisie against imperialism and the bureaucrat and warlord governments without overlooking its revolutionary quality.”

Mao Zedong (1893–1976) Chairman of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China

On New Democracy (1940)

Country

“Fifty years is a very long period. The first 30–35 years – we could call this period as one when India equipped itself to face important problems. For example, we built institutions such as the IITs and the National Laboratories…We need much better infrastructure facilities and we must work on more difficult problems. Unfortunately, we have been used to working on problems that are somewhat repetitive. If we want to be at the cutting edge, we have to be innovators and originators.”

C. N. R. Rao (1934) Indian chemist

Quoted in pdf, In Conversation, 22 December 2013, Indian Institute of Science http://www.iisc.ernet.in/currsci/apr102002/788.pdf,

Problem

“The new government of Sri Lanka is now carrying out the program [to improve Sri Lanka's economy] to build the coexistence and reconciliation in the country by fulfilling the responsibilities of a post-war period, after ending the 26 years long terrorism in Sri Lanka”

Maithripala Sirisena (1951) Sri Lankan politician, 7th President of Sri Lanka

Sirisena on improving Sri Lankan reconciliation after the post-war period, quoted on defence.lk, "Austria - Sri Lanka agree to enhance economic cooperation" http://www.defence.lk/new.asp?fname=Austria_Sri_Lanka_agree_to_enhance_economic_cooperation_20160220_02, March 3, 2016.

War, Country

“All these actions will require sacrifice on the part of every one of us if we are to get over this dangerous period without intolerable risk. The simplest form of this sacrifice would be the payment of more taxes to support a larger defense budget. It is difficult to estimate how much money will be required to close the gap of our inferiority at the maximum possible rate, but I would suggest that we are talking in terms of a budget between $50 and $55 billion a year for the next five years. Once the gap is closed, subsequent budgets will not need be so high. This requirement for a bigger budget will exist regardless of any transitory shift in Soviet attitude and behavior. There is no living with communism as an inferior.”

Maxwell D. Taylor (1901–1987) United States general

Source: The Uncertain Trumpet (1960), p. 178-179

Money, Behavior, Communication, Support

“It is said that it is not good for man to be alone. This is true, not only in the sense in which our women’s rights’ friends so zealously and wisely teach, but it is true as to nations. The voice of civilization speaks an unmistakable language against the isolation of families, nations and races, and pleads for composite nationality as essential to her triumphs. Those races of men who have maintained the most distinct and separate existence for the longest periods of time; which have had the least intercourse with other races of men are standing confirmation of the folly of isolation. The very soil of the national mind becomes in such cases barren, and can only be resuscitated by assistance from without.”

Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman

1860s, Our Composite Nationality (1869)

Women, Men, Family, Sense

“When [Nelson Mandela] was in prison I admired him for his moral strength…
Of his period in power I can see few results. Apartheid no longer exists, at least to all appearances, but no one understands what the new government in South Africa is doing.”

Mengistu Haile Mariam (1937) Former dictator of Ethiopia

As quoted in Riccardo Orizio, Talk of the Devil: Encounters with Seven Dictators, (Walker and Company, 2003), p. 148

Understanding, Appearance

“I have had a long talk with Renoir. He admitted that the whole crowd – Durand and his former admirers – were shouting at him, deploring his attempt to abandon his 'Romantic' period. He seems very sensitive to what we think of his exhibition. I told him that as far as we were concerned, the search for unity should be the aim of every intelligent artist. – that even in spite of serious faults, it was more intelligent and artistic than wallowing in romanticism.”

Camille Pissarro (1830–1903) French painter

Quote in a letter to his son Lucien, 14th May 1887, as quoted in Renoir – his life and work, Francois Fosca, Book Club Associates /Thames and Hudson Ltd, London 1975, p. 189
1880's

Search, Intelligence, Thinking

“I would love to do that. They (Kohli and Root) have been playing brilliantly. I love both. Outstanding cricketers and they have been fantastic for a long period of time. Watching these two bat and perform in the way they have been performing, you can learn a lot.”

Kane Williamson (1990) New Zealand cricketer

New Zealand captain and top batsman Kane Williamson, quoted on Indian Express, "England vs New Zealand: There’s plenty to learn from Virat Kohli and Joe Root, says Kane Williamson" http://indianexpress.com/article/sports/cricket/england-vs-new-zealand-theres-plenty-to-learn-from-virat-kohli-joe-root-says-kane-williamson/, March 31, 2016.

Love, Way, Learning, Time

“He Kandinsky had always expressed a great interest in abstraction when we visited Tunisia together in 1904. The Moslem interdiction of representational painting seemed to stir his imagination and that was when I first heard him say that objects disturbed him. Between 1907 and 1910 [the period in which Kandinsky painted his first abstract compositions], he began to rely increasingly on his own theories of art, which many of his friends could understand only with great difficulty.”

Gabriele Münter (1877–1962) German painter

Source: Interview by Edouard Roditi (1958), p. 117

Art, Imagination, Understanding, Painting

“The world "legendary" is much overused, but it certainly applies to the seventy-six-year-old Andreas Papandreou, whose life had encompassed so much Greek-American history. As a Greek-born American citizen, he earned a doctorate in economics from Harvard, served in the United States Navy during World War II, and then taught at Harvard, the University of Minnesota, and Berkeley (where he was chairman of the economics department). He was part of Adlai Stevenson's advisory team during his two runs for the presidency. Then he returned to Greece and fought his way into power, surviving a long period in the political wilderness after right-wing pressure forced the resignation of his father, Georgios Papandreou, in 1965, two years before the military coup. He won the prime ministership fifteen years after his father had been forced out of it, and then lost it following a series of corruption scandals - only to make another astonishing comeback, regaining it again in 1993. To conservative Americans, he was anathema, an American turncoat. To Greeks, both those who followed him and those who hated him, he was the dominant political figure of the era.”

Richard Holbrooke (1941–2010) American diplomat

Source: 1990s, To End a War (1998), p. 124

Life, Hate, War, World

“Looking backward on a period which is finished, we are looking at actually realized returns, costs, etc., as those items are registered in the bookkeeping of business. In such an ex post calculation there is, as we will show later, an exact balance between the invested waiting and the value of gross investment [Phil: he appears to mean savings and investment]. Looking forward there is no such balance except under certain conditions which remain to be ascertained. In the ex ante calculus it is a question not of realized results but of anticipations, calculations, and plans driving the dynamic process forward. Had this distinction been kept in mind, much confusion about “saving and investment” would have been avoided. There is in fact no contradiction at all between the statement of an exact bookkeeping balance ex post and the obvious inference that in a situation in which saving is increasing without a corresponding increase in investment, or perhaps with an adverse movement in investment, there must be a tendency ex ante to disparity.”

Gunnar Myrdal (1898–1987) Swedish economist

Source: Monetary Equilibrium (1939), p. 34

Question, Business, Appearance, Waiting

“The claims of an Armenian Genocide are not based on historical facts. If the history of the period is examined it becomes evident that in fact no such genocide took place.”

Cenk Uygur (1970) Turkish-American online news show host

"Column: Historical Fact or Falsehood?", The Daily Pennsylvanian (20 November 1991) http://www.webcitation.org/68YqvmgSY; but see: "Rescinding Daily Pennsylvanian Article" https://tytnetwork.com/2016/04/22/rescinding-daily-pennsylvanian-article/ by Cenk Uygur (22 April 2016).

History

“There is much to be said concerning retirement. Some men cannot survive it because they have not prepared themselves for it. For the man who has retained his curiosity, retirement in old age can be the most enjoyable period of his life; but he must be aware of the emptiness of public renown and desire the peace of obscurity; he must still have the wish to learn and understand; in his village, his garden, or his house, he must have some restricted personal occupation. The wise man, after having given all his time to his public activities, now devotes himself entirely to his personal affairs and development; and this will be easier for him if he has been able to interest himself in poetry and the beauties of nature, even during his busiest years. For myself, I cannot imagine a pleasanter old age than one spent in the not too remote country where I could reread and annotate my favorite books. "The mind," says Montaigne, "must thrive upon old age as the mistletoe upon a dead oak."”

André Maurois (1885–1967) French writer

Un Art de Vivre (The Art of Living) (1939), The Art of Growing Old

Life, Men, Books, Age

“I lay it down as one of the distinctive characteristics of a good story that it pleases--or rather, seizes--every period of life; that the child, and his elder brother, and his father, and his grandfather, may read it with like enjoyment.”

Walter Besant (1836–1901) English novelist and historian

June, 1898: The Literary News, Some Novels Loved of Novelists http://books.google.com/books?id=NrAKAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA179

Life, Reading

“From his high pedestal, Prof. Sharma could afford to disregard the 'very few authors whose work effectively addresses the feudalism thesis in a critical manner', and he 'appears to have been in no mood to take heed of criticism levelled at his work'. This disregarding and ignoring of counter-evidence is tactically the best way to prolong your dominant position (which is why this tactic was adopted by most secularists in the Ayodhya debate): it denies publicity and respectability to the critic's alternative thesis. But to the progress of science, this upholding of dogma and suppression of debate is detrimental. According to Prof. Wink, the effect has been this : 'Under the impact of the feudalism thesis the historiography of the period is still in utter disarray.”

Koenraad Elst (1959) orientalist, writer

1990s, Ayodhya and After: Issues Before Hindu Society (1991)

Way, Mood, Appearance, Science

“The centralized state power that is peculiar to bourgeois society came into being in the period of the fall of absolutism. Two institutions are most characteristic of this state machine: bureaucracy and a standing army.”

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

2.2, Essential Works of Lenin (1966)
(1917)

“I am very pleased to be here in Israel, the land of our friends, friends who are going through a complex period like their neighbors. We are convinced that the efforts of all countries and governments in the region will find a way to reach peace and long-term security. I have arrived here after visiting Beirut and Damascus and I want to tell the Prime Minister and all other ministers that today, everyone wants peace more than ever, peace and security.Now, the preferred position is that of those who do not want to live amidst endless arguments about who was right first and last. Everybody wants to sit around the negotiating table. Everyone aspires to reach decisions that will be acceptable to all and certainly to Israel. We always point out the Russian Federation’s full agreement that the State of Israel has the full right to peace and security. We are convinced that that there is no other way to resolve this problem except through peace.We are certain that UN Security Council Resolution #1701, that we all worked on together, will be carried out in full by all sides. We think that the abductees should be released as soon as possible and we are also convinced that the military blockade of Lebanon must be lifted and that the Lebanese army needs to deploy in southern Lebanon in order to facilitate the Israeli army’s withdrawal as quickly as possible. But we are convinced that peace is attainable only if an international conference - with the participation of all sides - convenes. Lastly, I would like to point out that we are very much looking forward to the Prime Minister’s visit to Moscow in order to discuss bilateral relations.”

Sergey Lavrov (1950) Russian politician and Foreign Minister

In Israel, where he meets the Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, {{September 2006)) http://www.mfa.gov.il/MFA/Government/Communiques/2006/PM+Olmert+meets+Russian+FM+Lavrov+7-Sept-2006.htm

Peace, Way, Problem, Thinking

“His life from the very beginning is a story of temptation; it is not only one particular period in his life, the forty days, that is the story of temptation – no his whole life is a story of temptation (just as it is also of suffering). Every moment of his life he is tempted – that is, he has this possibility in his power, to take his calling, his task, in vain.”

Sören Kierkegaard book For Self-Examination

Soren Kierkegaard, For Self-Examination, Hong p. 58-59
1850s, For Self-Examination (1851), Christ is the Way

Life, Suffering

“I'm standing on the shoulders of Nina Duchess of Hamilton and Miss Lind-af-Hageby and the people who fought for the animals in the previous generation. Their period of life on earth is gone, but people carry on their work. As I said, my husband and I stood on their shoulders, but there are lots who will stand on our shoulders.”

Muriel Dowding, Baroness Dowding (1908–1993) British noble

Source: Interview by Rynn Berry, p. 149

Life, People, Animals

“There were many examples in the history of life to show that precisely the most perfectly adapted, the physically biggest and strongest, the most numerous creatures, the lords of whole periods of life, died out in the end with monotonous regularity leaving the torch of life to be carried forward by smaller, more modest and often previously almost unnoticed forms of life, until they too fell into the trap of all too perfect adaptation.”

Henno Martin (1910–1998) German geologist

Source: Sheltering Desert; Union Deutsche Verlangsgesellschaft Ulm (1958), p. 170

Life, History, Perfection

“The then-Japanese empire suppressed the people of the Republic of China and took over the authority against our will, and so ‘Japanese occupation’ should be a proper term to describe the period.”

Jiang Yi-huah (1960) Taiwanese politician

Jiang Yi-huah (2013) cited in " Jiang backs use of ‘Japanese occupation’ http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/front/archives/2013/07/24/2003568016/1" on Taipei Times, 24 July 2013

People

“I've always wanted to go to England; I've always felt a tremendous drawing to England — especially the Elizabethan period. I felt I was familiar with a lot of it — more than what I was familiar with from what I read and studied in school. I went to England. I started driving. I drove to Stonehenge and found that I had been there. It was familiar to me. I went to the tower of London and knew that I had been there. It was more than just feeling vibrations, which a lot of people can do — feel, you know, vibrations of a place that has antiquity screaming through it. It was an irrefutable fact. It was like coming home for me.”

Cass Elliot (1941–1974) American singer

Rolling Stone interview (1968)

People, School, Feeling, Home

“I tended, even from my early years, to look at the world from a slightly different vantage point. Although I might have had trouble articulating it at the age of 10, I wasn't unduly convinced of the durability of the Anglo-Saxon world as we had come to know it in the postwar period, a world of latter-day materialism advancing around the globe on the wongs of the English language and the American dollar. I had a sneaking suspicion that we were living in a bit of a fool's paradise…”

Conrad Black (1944) Canadian-born newspaper publisher

The Establishment Man by Peter Newman

Age, World, Fools

“Mahmood having reached Tahnesur before the Hindoos had time to take measures for its defence, the city was plundered, the idols broken, and the idol Jugsom was sent to Ghizny to be trodden under foot…Mahmood having refreshed his troops, and understanding that at some distance stood the rich city of Mutra [Mathura], consecrated to Krishn-Vasdew, whom the Hindoos venerate as an emanation of God, directed his march thither and entering it with little opposition from the troops of the Raja of Delhy, to whom it belonged, gave it up to plunder. He broke down or burned all the idols, and amassed a vast quantity of gold and silver, of which the idols were mostly composed. He would have destroyed the temples also, but he found the labour would have been excessive; while some say that he was averted from his purpose by their admirable beauty. He certainly extravagantly extolled the magnificence of the buildings and city in a letter to the governor of Ghizny, in which the following passage occurs: "There are here a thousand edifices as firm as the faith of the faithful; most of them of marble, besides innumerable temples; nor is it likely that this city has attained its present condition but at the expense of many millions of deenars, nor could such another be constructed under a period of two centuries."…The King tarried in Mutra 20 days; in which time the city suffered greatly from fire, beside the damage it sustained by being pillaged. At length he continued his march along the course of a stream on whose banks were seven strong fortifications, all of which fell in succession: there were also discovered some very ancient temples, which, according to the Hindoos, had existed for 4000 years. Having sacked these temples and forts, the troops were led against the fort of Munj…The King, on his return, ordered a magnificent mosque to be built of marble and granite, of such beauty as struck every beholder with astonishment, and furnished it with rich carpets, and with candelabras and other ornaments of silver and gold. This mosque was universally known by the name of the Celestial Bride. In its neighbourhood the King founded an university, supplied with a vast collection of curious books in various languages. It contained also a museum of natural curiosities. For the maintenance of this establishment he appropriated a large sum of money, besides a sufficient fund for the maintenance of the students, and proper persons to instruct youth in the arts and sciences…The King, in the year AH 410 (AD 1019), caused an account of his exploits to be written and sent to the Caliph, who ordered it to be read to the people of Bagdad, making a great festival upon the occasion, expressive of his joy at the propagation of the faith.”

Mahmud of Ghazni (971–1030) Sultan of Ghazni

Tarikh-i-Firishta, translated by John Briggs under the title History of the Rise of the Mahomedan Power in India, first published in 1829, New Delhi Reprint 1981, Vol. I, pp. 27-37.
Quotes from Muslim medieval histories

Money, God, People, Books

“The lower classes of people in Europe may at some future period be much better instructed then they are at present; they may be taught to employ the little spare time they have in many better ways than at the ale-house; they may live under better and more equal laws than they have hitherto done, perhaps, in any country; and I even conceive it possible, though not probable, that they may have more leisure; but it is not in the nature of things, that they can be awarded such a quantity of money or substance, as will allow them all to marry early, in the full confidence that they shall be able to provide with ease for a numerous family.”

Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834) British political economist

Source: An Essay on The Principle of Population (First Edition 1798, unrevised), Chapter XIV, paragraph 9

Money, People, Family, Law

“Around 1950-51… I was finally getting away from the pictographs and looking for something… So it was necessary to find other forms, a different changed concept. So finally after a certain period of transition I hit on dividing the canvas into two parts, which then became like an imaginary landscape… What I was really trying to do when I got away from the pictographs was to make this notion of the kind of polarity clearer and more extreme. So the most extreme thing that I could think of doing at the time was dividing the canvas in half, make two big divisions and put something in the upper division and something in the lower section. So I painted that way… I would say roughly from 1952 to 56/57. About five years.”

Adolph Gottlieb (1903–1974) American artist

Source: 1960s, Interview with Dorothy Seckler, 1967, p. 55-59.

Way, Thinking, Change, Time

“The common base of all the Semitic creeds, winners or losers, was the ever present idea of world-worthlessness. Their profound reaction from matter led them to preach bareness, renunciation, poverty; and the atmosphere of this invention stifled the minds of the desert pitilessly. A first knowledge of their sense of the purity of rarefaction was given me in early years, when we had ridden far out over the rolling plains of North Syria to a ruin of the Roman period which the Arabs believed was made by a prince of the border as a desert-palace for his queen. The clay of its building was said to have been kneaded for greater richness, not with water, but with the precious essential oils of flowers. My guides, sniffing the air like dogs, led me from crumbling room to room, saying, 'This is jessamine, this violet, this rose'. But at last Dahoum drew me: 'Come and smell the very sweetest scent of all', and we went into the main lodging, to the gaping window sockets of its eastern face, and there drank with open mouths of the effortless, empty, eddyless wind of the desert, throbbing past. That slow breath had been born somewhere beyond the distant Euphrates and had dragged its way across many days and nights of dead grass, to its first obstacle, the man-made walls of our broken palace. About them it seemed to fret and linger, murmuring in baby-speech. 'This,' they told me, 'is the best: it has no taste.”

T. E. Lawrence book Seven Pillars of Wisdom

My Arabs were turning their backs on perfumes and luxuries to choose the things in which mankind had had no share or part.
Source: Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1922), Ch. 3

World, Dogs, Way, Flowers

“Every work of art is the child of its age and, in many cases, the mother of our emotions. It follows that each period of culture produces an art of its own which can never be repeated. Efforts to revive the art-principles of the past will at best produce an art that is still-born. It is impossible for us to live and feel, as did the ancient Greeks. In the same way those who strive to follow the Greek methods in sculpture achieve only a similarity of form, the work remaining soulless for all time. Such imitation is mere aping. Externally the monkey completely resembles a human being; he will sit holding a book in front of his nose, and turn over the pages with a thoughtful aspect, but his actions have for him no real meaning.”

Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944) Russian painter

I. Kandinsky's introduction: Lead paragraph
1910 - 1915, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, 1911

Books, Age, Art, Way

“The five minutes ticked away on Limaal Mandella’s fob watch and the tension wound tight around Corporation Plaza. Rael Mandella Jr., sweating in his father’s best championship suit, was horrified to realize how few of such brief five-minute periods went to make up a lifetime.”

Ian McDonald book Desolation Road

Source: Desolation Road (1988), Chapter 47 (p. 238).

“These days, it seemed that the only thing he was certain about was the knowledge that he wouldn't trade his years with Gabby for anything. Without her, his life had little meaning. He was a small-town husband with a small-town occupation and his cares were no different from anyone else's. He'd been neither a leader nor a follower, nor had he been someone who would be remembered long after he passed away. He was the most ordinary of men with only one exception: He'd fallen in love with a woman named Gabby, his love deepening in the years they'd been married. But fate had conspired to ruin all that, and now he spent long periods of his days wondering whether it was humanly possible to fix things between them.”

Nicholas Sparks (1965) American writer and novelist

Travis Parker, Chapter 15, p. 199
2000s, The Choice (2007)

Love, Life, Men, Fate

“The scholars who understand it hesitate to speak out boldly for fear people will not understand. The people, who understand it quite easily, also fear to speak out while they wait for the scholars to speak out first. The difference between our present situation and that of the story is that it is not the emperor but the people who are periodically made to go naked and hungry and insecure and discontented - a ready prey to less timid organizers of discontent for the destruction of the civilization.”

Abba Lerner (1903–1982) American economist

(1951, pg.16) http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=174849

People, Fear, Understanding, Waiting

“Any cleric or monk who seduces young men or boys, or who is apprehended in kissing or in any shameful situation, shall be publicly flogged and shall lose his clerical tonsure. Thus shorn, he shall be disgraced by spitting in his face, bound in iron chains, wasted by six months of close confinement, and for three days each week put on barley bread given him toward evening. Following this period, he shall spend a further six months living in a small segregated courtyard in custody of a spiritual elder, kept busy with manual labor and prayer, subjected to vigils and prayers, forced to walk at all times in the company of two spiritual brothers, never again allowed to associate with young men.”

Peter Damian (1007–1072) reformist monk

Letter 31:38. To Pope Leo IX, A.D. 1049. The Fathers of the Church, Medieval Continuation, Peter Damian: Letters 31-60, Owen J. Blum, tr., Catholic University of America Press, ISBN 081320707X ISBN 9780813207070, vol. 2, p. 29. http://books.google.com/books?id=3PkYNcU0k94C&pg=PA29&dq=%22Any+cleric+or+monk+who+seduces%22&hl=en&ei=lrZHTP3EHcL78Aac2uDWBA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CCgQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=%22Any%20cleric%20or%20monk%20who%20seduces%22&f=false

Men, Boy, Business, Kiss

“The scope of time ahead which inﬂuences present behavior, and is therefore to be regarded as part of the present life-space, increases during development. This change in time perspective is one of the most fundamental facts of development. Adolescence seems to be a period of particularly deep change in respect to time perspective. The change can be partly described as a shift in scope. Instead of days, weeks, or months, now years ahead are considered in certain goals. Even more important is the way in which these future events influence present behavior. The ideas of a child of six or eight in regard to his occupation as an adult are not likely to be based on sufficient knowledge of the factors which might help or interfere with the realization of these ideas. They might be based on relatively narrow but definite expectations or might have a dream or playlike character. In other words, "ideal goals" and "real goals" for the distant future are not much distinguished, and this future has more the fluid character of the level of irreality. In adolescence a definite differentiation in regard to the time perspective is likely to occur. Within those parts of the life-space which represent the future, levels of reality and irreality are gradually being differentiated.”

Kurt Lewin (1890–1947) German-American psychologist

Kurt Lewin (1939) "Field theory and experiments in social psychology" in: American Journal of Sociology. Vol 44. p. 879.
1930s

Life, Dreams, Way, Behavior

“The absolutely inaudible is rejected from music during the period of Viennese Classicism in which every musical line is potentially or imaginatively audible, but it makes a dramatic reappearance in the music of Schumann. The most striking of many examples is one of the episodes in the Humoresk, the last of the great piano works of Schumann's early years. … There are three staves: the uppermost for the right hand; the lowest for the left; the middle, which contains the melody, is not to be played. Note that the melody is no more to be imagined as a specific sound than it is to be played: nothing tells us that the melody is to be heard as vocal or instrumental. This melody, however, is embodied in the upper and lower parts as a kind of after-resonance-out of phase, delicate, and shadowy.”

Charles Rosen (1927–2012) American pianist and writer on music

Source: The Romantic Generation (1995), Ch. 1 : Music and Sound

Music, Imagination, Parting

“We live in a period of transitions. Old interpretations of the scripture are giving way to new ones. Old conceptions of the method of creation are no longer popular”

Benjamin Fish Austin (1850–1933) Nineteenth-century Canadian educator/Methodist Minister/Spiritualist

Defence at his Heresy Trial

Way

“The mysterious name of God, revealed from the burning bush, a name which separates this God from all other divinities with their many names and simply asserts being, "I am", already presents a challenge to the notion of myth, to which Socrates' attempt to vanquish and transcend myth stands in close analogy. Within the Old Testament, the process which started at the burning bush came to new maturity at the time of the Exile, when the God of Israel, an Israel now deprived of its land and worship, was proclaimed as the God of heaven and earth and described in a simple formula which echoes the words uttered at the burning bush: "I am". This new understanding of God is accompanied by a kind of enlightenment, which finds stark expression in the mockery of gods who are merely the work of human hands (cf. Ps 115). Thus, despite the bitter conflict with those Hellenistic rulers who sought to accommodate it forcibly to the customs and idolatrous cult of the Greeks, biblical faith, in the Hellenistic period, encountered the best of Greek thought at a deep level, resulting in a mutual enrichment evident especially in the later wisdom literature. Today we know that the Greek translation of the Old Testament produced at Alexandria - the Septuagint - is more than a simple (and in that sense really less than satisfactory) translation of the Hebrew text: it is an independent textual witness and a distinct and important step in the history of revelation, one which brought about this encounter in a way that was decisive for the birth and spread of Christianity. A profound encounter of faith and reason is taking place here, an encounter between genuine enlightenment and religion. From the very heart of Christian faith and, at the same time, the heart of Greek thought now joined to faith, Manuel II was able to say: Not to act "with logos" is contrary to God's nature.”

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

2006, Faith, Reason and the University — Memories and Reflections (2006)

Wisdom, God, Faith, Religion

“The second period, which commenced in the middle of the seventeenth century, and lasted for about a century, was characterized by the application of the powerful analytical methods provided by the new Analysis to the determination of analytical expressions for the number π in the form of convergent series, products, and continued fractions. The older geometrical forms of investigation gave way to analytical processes in which the functional relationship as applied to the trigonometrical functions became prominent. The new methods of systematic representation gave rise to a race of calculators of π, who, in their consciousness of the vastly enhance means of calculation placed in their hands by the new Analysis, proceeded to apply the formulae to obtain numerical approximations to π to ever larger numbers of places of decimals, although their efforts were quite useless for the purpose of throwing light upon the true nature of that number. At the end of this period no knowledge had been obtained as regards the number π of the kind likely to throw light upon the possibility or impossibility of the old historical problem of the ideal construction; it was not even definitely known whether the number is rational or irrational. However, one great discovery, destined to furnish the clue to the solution of the problem, was made at this time; that of the relation between the two numbers π and e, as a particular case of those exponential expressions for the trigonometrical functions which form one of the most fundamentally important of the analytical weapons forged during this period.”

E. W. Hobson (1856–1933) British mathematician

Source: Squaring the Circle (1913), pp. 11-12

Way, Nature, Knowledge, Problem

“The movie, as everyone knows, is about a man who finds himself living the same day over and over and over again. He is the only person in his world who knows this is happening, and after going through periods of dismay and bitterness, revolt and despair, suicidal self-destruction and cynical recklessness, he begins to do something that is alien to his nature. He begins to learn.”

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

Review https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-groundhog-day-1993 of Groundhog Day Reviews, Four star reviews

World, Nature, Suicide, Learning

“You [ Katherine Sophie Dreier; director of the Art Center in New York City; she co-founded with Duchamp and Man Ray the 'Sociéte Anonyme' in Manhattan in 1920] must understand:
My attitude toward the book is based upon my attitude towards 'Art' since 1918 – so I am furious myself that you will accept only partly that attitude [in a new publication by Katherine Dreier]. It can be no more question of my life as an artist’s life: [because] I gave it up ten years ago; this period is long enough to prove that my intention to remain outside of any art manifestation is permanent... The third question is that I want to be alone as much as possible.
This abrupt way to speak of my 'hardening process' is not meant to be mean, but is the result of '42 years of age'....10 000 apologies for this rough letter and affectueusement
Dee”

Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) French painter and sculptor

Quote from a letter to Katherine Sophie Dreier, Paris 11 September 1929; as cted in The Duchamp Book, ed. Gavin Parkinson, Tate Publishing, London 2008 p. 158
Duchamp's quote is referring to a new publication of the 'Duchamp Book' and to his famous so-called Art-Silence.
1921 - 1950

Life, Books, Age, Art

“It is difficult, if not impossible, for most people to think otherwise than in the fashion of their own period.”

George Bernard Shaw Saint Joan

Preface http://books.google.com/books?id=T70Ahd88jSMC&q=%22It+is+difficult+if+not+impossible+for+most+people+to+think+otherwise+than+in+the+fashion+of+their+own+period%22&pg=PA46#v=onepage to Saint Joan: A Chronicle Play In Six Scenes And An Epilogue (1923) 1920s

People, Fashion, Thinking

“.. I let myself go.. [in Kandinsky's Murnau-period when he was painting in open air; c. 1908 – 1914] I thought little of the houses and trees, but applied colour stripes and spots to the canvas with the knife and made them sing out as strongly as I could. Within me sounded the memory of early evening in Moscow, before my eyes was the strong, colour-saturated scale of the Munich light and atmosphere, which thundered deeply in the shadows.”

Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944) Russian painter

'..stripes and spots with the knife', as he learned then also Gabriele Münter - they frequently painted together in open air
Source: 1916 -1920, Autobiography', 1918, p. 31

Tree, Light, Strong, Memory

“It was a carefree period and we took to it like genuine lowlife.”

Ralph Steadman book The Joke's Over

The America's Cup, p. 65
The Joke's Over (2006)

“We are going through a period of uncertainty, but we are in a good position to strengthen ourselves and win back a majority. We have already got rid of much deadwood and Kinnock is winning back younger voters. He is politically intelligent, has character and courage; but he has never been a minister, lacks experience, and people know it. In troubled times, the electorate looks for a strong leader and Mrs Thatcher is seen as one.”

Denis Healey (1917–2015) British Labour Party politician and Life peer

Interview for La Stampa (5 April 1986), quoted in The Times (7 April 1986), p. 2
1980s

People, Intelligence, Courage, Strong

“Dave would punch or slap people in the face repeatedly when they delivered bad news, or when people talked back with anything other than what he wanted to hear. I would say over a period of five years between 2000 and 2005 I saw him do this maybe 30 to 40 times. I saw him hit Jeff on at least one or two occasions.”

David Miscavige (1960) leader of the Church of Scientology

Marc Headley referring to incidents involving former Scientology executive, Jeff Hawkins, interviewed in — [Selling Scientology: A Former Scientologist Marketing Guru Turns Against the Church, Matt, Davis, August 7, 2008, http://www.portlandmercury.com/news/selling_scientology/Content?oid=862344, 2010-07-03, The Portland Mercury, Portland, Oregon].
About

People, Time

“This book is dedicated to the memory of my teacher Rudolf Bultmann. He encouraged me more than thirty years ago to deal more intensively with the extra-canonical writings from the early Christian period. His unwavering insistence upon the consistent application of the historical-critical method and his emphasis upon the investigation of early Christian literature in the context of the history of religions must remain basic commitments of New Testament scholarship.”

Helmut Koester (1926–2016) biblical scholar

Introduction to the New Testament (1982), Preface

Books, Religion, History, Literature

“You have no right whatever to speak on behalf of the Government. Foreign affairs are in the capable hands of Ernest Bevin. His task is quite sufficiently difficult without the irresponsible statements of the kind you are making... I can assure you there is widespread resentment in the Party at your activities and a period of silence on your part would be welcome.”

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

Letter to Harold Laski, Chairman of the Labour Party (1946), quoted in David Butler and Gareth Butler, Twentieth Century British Political Facts (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), p. 289.
Prime Minister

Silence, Parting

“Among organization theorists general, if not universal agreement obtains that it is proper to view the development of organization theory as divided into three periods. Conventionally, this "history" is regarded as beginning early in this century; and the three periods are customarily are designed by the terms classic, neo-classic and modern… The classical period has its beginning, in the conventional view, with Frederick W. Taylor and Henri Fayol… [and] reaches its high point in the thirties with the work of James Mooney and of the editors and authors of the Paper in the Science of Administration. The neo-classical wave is seen as beginning with the Hawthorne experiments in the late twenties. These experiments challenge the formality and rationality of classical theory with the "discovery"of human relations.”

Dwight Waldo (1913–2000) American political scientist

Dwight Waldo (1978), "Organization Theory: Revisiting the Elephant," Public Administration Review, 38 (November/December): p. 589

History, Universe, Science

“In one of his many public statements, the leader of the Bosnian Serbs, Montenegrin Radovan Karadžić, said the Serbs in the past period, when everyone was on their side, had been subjected to "genocidal extermination" whereas now, over the last year, when so many are against them, they are suffering the least. Of all the innumerable absurdities and untruths that have been uttered, this statement truly takes the cake. For more than forty years Bosnia was inhabited by Bosnians, and we did not distinguish between Serbs, Muslim, and Croats, or at least such distinctions were not paramount in their mutual relations. Throughout that period, to the best of the Yugoslav and world public's knowledge, there were no detenction camps for Serbs in Bosnia, no brothels for Serbs women, no Serbian children had their throat cut. (…) But according to Karadzic, the Serbs were somehow unhappy then. And now, in war, with so many dead, (…) now, according to their leader, the time has come when they are suffering the least. (…) Ethnically pure states are an impossibility in today's world, and it is ridiculous to try to create and maintain such a state, even when there is just one nation.”

Mirjana Markovic (1942–2019) Serbian politician

In her newspaper column, on 20 January 1993, cited in Night and Day: A Diary, 1995, pp.17-18

Women, War, Children, World

“I met him Cummingham around 1953 after a performance I saw. He was teaching and making dances for his company and was already working with John Cage. What interested me initially wasn't just the movement but also the music he worked with, which was unfamiliar to me... Later Bob Rauschenberg had been doing sets and costumes for the Cunningham Company... I can't say exactly how, but for a period of time, Cage, Cunningham, Rauschenberg, and I saw each other frequently and exchanged ideas. John [Cage] was very interested in presenting his ideas to other people, so it was impossible to be around and not to learn... He could apply his ideas on space and time to painting, or music or architecture... I don't have a clear sense of cause and effect in my painting, but it is probably there.”

Jasper Johns (1930) American artist

Jasper Johns, by Bryan Robertson and Tim Marlow, Tate, in 'The Art Magazine', London, Winter 1993, pp. 40, 47
1990s

People, Music, Idea, Sense

“Here is my proposal. Israel should announce an immediate unilateral cessation in retaliation against terrorist attacks. This moratorium would be in effect for a short period, say four or five days, to give the Palestinian leadership an opportunity to respond to the new policy. It would also make it clear to the world that Israel is taking an important step in ending what has become a cycle of violence. Following the end of the moratorium, Israel would institute the following new policy if Palestinian terrorism were to resume. It will announce precisely what it will do in response to the next act of terrorism. For example, it could announce the first act of terrorism following the moratorium will result in the destruction of a small village which has been used as a base for terrorist operations. The residents would be given 24 hours to leave, and then troops will come in and bulldoze all of the buildings.”

Alan M. Dershowitz (1938) American lawyer, author

"New response to Palestinian terrorism", The Jerusalem Post, 2002-03-11

World

“It is worthy of notice that in Table VI the brighter variables have the longer periods. It is also noticeable that those having the longest periods appear to be as regular in their variations as those which pass through their changes in a day or two.”

Henrietta Swan Leavitt (1868–1921) astronomer

"1777 Variables in the Magellanic Clouds" http://books.google.com/books?id=UkdWAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA87 (1908) Annals of the Astronomical Observatory of Harvard College Vol.60. No.4

Appearance, Change

“The era of the masses, which follows the age of the republics, excites the feelings and dazzles the eyes. But even though the vision of this era denotes genuine freedom of the masses and their happy emancipation from the bonds of external authoritarian structures, it warns also of the dangers of a period of chaos and demagoguery, and the threat of a return to the authority of the individual, the sect and party, instead of the authority of the people. Theoretically, this is genuine democracy but, realistically, the strong always rules. That is, the stronger party in the society is the one that rules.”

Muammar Gaddafi book The Green Book

The Green Book (1975)
The Green Book (1975)

Happiness, People, Age, Feeling

Quotes about period page 12

Quotes about period
page 12