Quotes about place
page 30

Ba Jin photo
Thomas Gainsborough photo

“I am favoured with your obliging letter, and shall finish your picture in two or three days at farthest, and send to Colchester according to your order, with a frame. I thank you. Sir, for your kind intention of procuring me a few heads to paint when I come over, which I purpose doing as soon as some of those are finished which I have [now] in hand. I should be glad if you'd place your picture as far from the light as possible; observing to let the light fall from the left.”

Thomas Gainsborough (1727–1788) English portrait and landscape painter

Quote in Gainborough's letter, 24 Feb. 1757 from Ipswich, to a correspondent in the neighbouring town of Colchester; as cited in Thomas Gainsborough, by William T, Whitley https://ia800204.us.archive.org/6/items/thomasgainsborou00whitrich/thomasgainsborou00whitrich.pdf; New York, Charles Scribner's Sons – London, Smith, Elder & Co, Sept. 1915, p. 20
1755 - 1769

Paul Williams (songwriter) photo

“So much of life ahead
We'll find a place where there's room to grow,
And yes, we've just begun.”

Paul Williams (songwriter) (1940) American composer, singer, songwriter and actor

"We've Only Just Begun" (1970).

Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury photo

“The great evil, and it was a hard thing to say, was that English officials in India, with many very honourable exceptions, did not regard the lives of the coloured inhabitants with the same feeling of intense sympathy which they would show to those of their own race, colour, and tongue. If that was the case it was not their fault alone. Some blame must be laid upon the society in which they had been brought up, and upon the public opinion in which they had been trained. It became them to remember that from that place, more than from any other in the kingdom, proceeded that influence which formed the public opinion of the age, and more especially that kind of public opinion which governed the action of officials in every part of the Empire. If they would have our officials in distant parts of the Empire, and especially in India, regard the lives of their coloured fellow-subjects with the same sympathy and with the same zealous and quick affection with which they would regard the lives of their fellow-subjects at home, it was the Members of that House who must give the tone and set the example. That sympathy and regard must arise from the zeal and jealousy with which the House watched their conduct and the fate of our Indian fellow-subjects. Until we showed them our thorough earnestness in this matter—until we were careful to correct all abuses and display our own sense that they are as thoroughly our fellow-subjects as those in any other part of the Empire, we could not divest ourselves of all blame if we should find that officials in India did treat with something of coldness and indifference such frightful calamities as that which had so recently happened in that country.”

Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury (1830–1903) British politician

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1867/aug/02/motion-for-an-address in the House of Commons (2 August 1867) on the Orissa famine of 1866
1860s

Patrick Matthew photo
Oliver Stone photo
Noam Chomsky photo

“In order to make it look dramatic, they staged what was ridiculed by some Israeli commentators, correctly, they staged a national trauma… There was a huge media extravaganza, you know, pictures of a little Jewish boy try to hold back the soldiers destroying his house… And a lot of the settlers were allowed in, so there could be a pretense of violence, though there wasn't any… The withdrawal could have been done perfectly quietly. All that was necessary was for Israel to announce that on August 1st the army will withdraw. And immediately the settlers, who had been subsidized to go there in the first place, and to stay there, would get on to the trucks that are provided for them and move over to the West Bank where they can move into new subsidized settlements. But if you did that way, there wouldn't have been any national trauma, any justification for saying, "never can we give up another 1 mm² of land". What made all of this even more ridiculous was that it was a repetition of what was described in Haaretz as "Operation National Truama 1982". After Israel finally agreed to Sadat's 1971 offer, they had to evacuate northeastern Sinai, and there was another staged trauma, which again was ridiculed by Israel commentators. By a miracle, none of the settlers who were resisting needed a Band-Aid, while Palestinians were being killed all over the place.”

Noam Chomsky (1928) american linguist, philosopher and activist

Talk titled "The Current Crisis in the Middle East" at MIT, September 21, 2006 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/403/
Quotes 2000s, 2006

Jean Giraudoux photo
Francis Bacon photo
Jiddu Krishnamurti photo
Peter Greenaway photo
Gancho Tsenov photo
Joseph Strutt photo
George Curzon, 1st Marquess Curzon of Kedleston photo

“We may also, I think, congratulate ourselves on the part that the British Empire has played in this struggle, and on the position which it fills at the close. Among the many miscalculations of the enemy was the profound conviction, not only that we had a "contemptible little Army," but that we were a doomed and decadent nation. The trident was to be struck from our palsied grasp, the Empire was to crumble at the first shock; a nation dedicated, as we used to be told, to pleasure-taking and the pursuit of wealth was to be deprived of the place to which it had ceased to have any right, and was to be reduced to the level of a second-class, or perhaps even of a third-class Power. It is not for us in the hour of victory to boast that these predictions have been falsified; but, at least, we may say this—that the British Flag never flew over a more powerful or a more united Empire than now; Britons never had better cause to look the world in the face; never did our voice count for more in the councils of the nations, or in determining the future destinies of mankind. That that voice may be raised in the times that now lie before us in the interests of order and liberty, that that power may be wielded to secure a settlement that shall last, that that Flag may be a token of justice to others as well as of pride to ourselves, is our united hope and prayer.”

George Curzon, 1st Marquess Curzon of Kedleston (1859–1925) British politician

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/lords/1918/nov/18/the-armistice-address-to-his-majesty in the House of Lords (18 November 1918).

Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo
Slash (musician) photo
Stanley Baldwin photo
Georges Duhamel photo

“For many people in the future, radio will take the place of an inner life.”

Georges Duhamel (1884–1966) French writer

Source: Défense des Lettres [In Defense of Letters] (1937), p. 35

Tom Petty photo
F. Scott Fitzgerald photo
Kenneth Minogue photo
Paul A. Samuelson photo
Thomas Jefferson photo
Luther Burbank photo
Hillary Clinton photo
Marshall McLuhan photo
Peter Weiss photo
Gary Johnson photo
Eugène Delacroix photo
Charles Krauthammer photo
Andrew Dickson White photo
Alauddin Khalji photo
Denis Diderot photo

“How did they meet? By chance, like everybody … Where did they come from? From the nearest place. Where were they going? Do we know where we are going?”

Denis Diderot (1713–1784) French Enlightenment philosopher and encyclopædist

Prologue
Jacques le Fataliste (1796)

Jeremy Corbyn photo
Samuel P. Huntington photo
Theodor Mommsen photo

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

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

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

Arun Shourie photo
Conrad Aiken photo

“Death is a meeting place of sea and sea.”

Conrad Aiken (1889–1973) American novelist and poet

The House of Dust (1916 - 1917)

Zia Haider Rahman photo
Paul Krugman photo
Frederick Buechner photo
Plutarch photo
Chris Cornell photo

“I remember seeing how Layne [Staley] reacted to Andy [Andrew Wood] dying from drugs, and I think that he was scared possibly. And I think he also reacted the same way when Kurt [Cobain] shot himself. They were really good friends. And yet it didn’t stop him. But for me, if I think about the evolution of my life as it appears in songs for example, Higher Truth is a great example of a record I wouldn’t have been able to write [when I was younger], and part of that is in essence because there was a period of time there where I didn’t expect to be here. And now not only do I expect to be here, and I’m not going anywhere, but I’ve had the last 12 years of my life being free of substances to kind of figure out who the substance-free guy is, because he’s a different guy. Just by brain chemistry, it can’t be avoided. I’m not the same, I don’t think the same, I don’t react the same. And my outlook isn’t necessarily the same. My creative endeavours aren’t necessarily the same. And one of the great things about that is it enabled me to kind of keep going artistically and find new places and shine the light into new corners where I hadn’t really gone before. And that feels really good. But it’s also bittersweet because I can’t help but think, what would Jeff be doing right now, what would Kurt be doing right now, what would Andy be doing? Something amazing, I’m sure of it. And it would be some music that would challenge me to lift myself up, something that would be continually raising the bar so that I would work harder too, in the same way they affected me when they were alive basically.”

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

When asked if there was a lesson to be learned from his friends' deaths caused by substance abuse and if it was not enough to scare everyone ** The Life & Times of Chris Cornell, Rolling Stone Australia, 17 September 2015 https://rollingstoneaus.com/music/post/the-life-and-times-of-chris-cornell/2273,
Solo career Era

Jimmy Wales photo

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

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

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

José Mourinho photo
Franklin D. Roosevelt photo
Cornelia Parker photo

“My work has threads of ideas from all over the place. I try to crystallise them in something simple and direct that the viewer can then take where they want.”

Cornelia Parker (1956) English artist

Source: Mark Hudson. "Cornelia Parker Interview." in: Telegraph. June 24, 2010

Báb photo
Abby Sunderland photo

“I will never forget the feeling of walking into my home, a place that while drifting helpless in the middle of the Indian Ocean I wondered if I would ever see again.”

Abby Sunderland (1993) Camera Assistant, Inspirational Speaker and Sailor

Source: Unsinkable: A Young Woman's Courageous Battle on the High Seas (2011), p. 193

Ulysses S. Grant photo

“I never wanted to get out of a place as much as I did to get out of the presidency.”

Ulysses S. Grant (1822–1885) 18th President of the United States

As quoted in Around the World with General Grant Vol. 2 (1879) by John Russell Young
1870s, Around the World with General Grant (1879)

Timothy Levitch photo
Humberto Maturana photo
Chris Hedges photo
Wilfred Thesiger photo
William Scott, 1st Baron Stowell photo

“In the first place, it is not improper to observe, that the law of cases of necessity is not likely to be well furnished with precise rules; necessity creates the law, it supersedes rules; and whatever is reasonable and just in such cases, is likewise legal; it is not to be considered as matter of surprise, therefore, if much instituted rule is not to be found on such subjects.”

William Scott, 1st Baron Stowell (1745–1836) British politician

The Gratitudine (18 December 1801); as published in Reports of Cases Argued and Determined in the High Court of Admiralty, Commencing with the Judgments of the Right Hon. Sir William Scott, Michaelmas Term, 1798, Vol. III (1802) http://books.google.com/books?id=-vcvAAAAYAAJ, p. 266.

Thomas Browne photo
Woodrow Wilson photo

“America is the place where you can not kill your Government by killing the men who conduct it. The only way you can kill government in America is by making the men and women of America forget how to govern, and nobody can do that. They sometimes find the team a little difficult to drive, but they sooner or later whip it into harness.”

Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) American politician, 28th president of the United States (in office from 1913 to 1921)

"Address at Opera House, Helena Montana" (September 11, 1919), in, Addresses of President Wilson (1919), p. 154.
1910s

Brendan Fraser photo
John Steinbeck photo
Noam Chomsky photo
Zinedine Zidane photo

“Sometimes I don't know what takes me over during a game. Sometimes I just feel I have moved to a different place and I can make the pass, score the goal or go past my marker at will.”

Zinedine Zidane (1972) French association football player and manager

Interview, June 2000 http://soccernet.espn.go.com/euro2000/news/20000702finalpreview.html.

Harry Chapin photo
Oksana Shachko photo
Jordan Peterson photo

“We're adapted to the meta-reality, which means that we're adapted to that which remains constant across the longest spans of time. And that's not the same things that you see around you day to day. They're just like clouds, they're just evaporating, you know? There are things underneath that that are more fundamental realities, like the dominance hierarchy, like the tribe, like the danger outside of society, like the threat that other people pose to you, and the threat that you pose to yourself. Those are eternal realities, and we're adapted to those. That's our world, and that's why we express all those things in stories. Then you might say, well how do you adapt yourself to that world? The answer, and I believe this is a neurological answer, is that your brain can tell you when you're optimally situated between chaos and order. The way it tells you that is by producing the sense of engagement and meaning. Let's say that there's a place in the environment that you should be. So what should that place be? Well, you don't want to be terrified out of your skull. What good is that? And you don't want to be so comfortable that you might as well sleep. You want to be somewhere where you are kind of on firm ground with both of your feet, but you can take a step with one leg and test out new territory. Some of you who are exploratory and emotionally stable are going to go pretty far out there into the unexplored territory without destabilizing yourself. And some people are just going to put a toe in the chaos, and that's neuroticism basically - your sensitivity to threat that is calibrated differently in different people. And some people are more exploratory than others. That's extroversion and openness, and intelligence working together. Some people are going to tolerate more chaos in their mixture of chaos and order. Those are often liberals, by the way. They're more interested in novel chaos, and conservatives are more interested in the stabilization of the structures that already exist. Who's right? It depends on the situation. That's why liberals and conservatives have to talk to each other, because one of them isn't right and the other is wrong. Sometimes the liberals are right and sometimes the liberals are right, because the environment is unpredictable and constantly changing, so that's why you have to communicate. That's what a democracy does. It allows people of different temperamental types to communicate and to calibrate their societies. So let's say you're optimally balanced between chaos and order. What does that mean? Well, you're stable enough, but you're interested. A little novelty heightens your anxiety. It wakes you up a bit. That's the adventure part of it. But it also focuses the part of your brain that does exploratory activity, and that's associated with pleasure. That's the dopamine circuit. So if you're optimally balanced - and you know you're there if you're listening to an interesting conversation or you're engaged in one…you're saying some things that you know, and the other person is saying some things that they know - and what both of you know is changing. Music can model that. It provides you with multi-level predictable forms that can transform just the right amount. So music is a very representational art form. It says, 'this is what the universe is like.' There's a dancing element to it, repetitive, and then little variations that surprise you and produce excitement in you. In doesn't matter how nihilistic you are, music still infuses you with a sense of meaning because it models meaning. That's what it does. That's why we love it. And you can dance to it, which represents you putting yourself in harmony with these multiple layers of reality, and positioning yourself properly.”

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

"The selection pressure that women placed on men developed the entire species. There's two things that happened. The men competed for competence, since the male hierarchy is a mechanism that pushes the best men to the top. The effect of that is multiplied by the fact that women who are hypergamous peel from the top. And so the males who are the most competent are much more likely to leave offspring, which seems to have driven cortical expansion."
Concepts

Ron Paul photo
Muhammad bin Qasim photo

“The forts of Siwistan and Sisam have been already taken. The nephew of Dahir, his warriors, and principal officers have been despatched, and the infidels converted to Islam or destroyed. Instead of idol temples, mosques and other places of worship have been built, pulpits have been erected, the Khutba is read, the call to prayers is raised, so that devotions are performed at the stated hours. The takbir and praise to the Almighty Allah are offered every morning and evening.”

Muhammad bin Qasim (695–715) Umayyad general

Muhammad bin Qasim, letter to Hajjaj, his uncle and governor of Iraq. Siwistan and Sisam (Sindh). Elliot and Dowson, History of India as told by its own Historians, Volume I, p. 164. (The Chach Nama). Also quoted in B.R. Ambedkar, Pakistan or The Partition of India (1946)
Quotes from The Chach Nama

Franz Kafka photo
Anne Lamott photo
Joseph Lewis photo
Joseph Strutt photo
Talal Abu-Ghazaleh photo

“E-Business will become the virtual market place in 20 years.”

Talal Abu-Ghazaleh (1938) Jordanian businesspeople

April 1, 2001, First Arab Conference on Arabizing the Internet, Amman, Jordan.

Tommy Douglas photo
Frederic G. Kenyon photo
Kate Bush photo

“This little girl inside me
Is retreating to her favourite place.
Go into the garden.
Go under the ivy,
Under the leaves,
Away from the party.
Go right to the rose.
Go right to the white rose
(For me.)”

Kate Bush (1958) British recording artist; singer, songwriter, musician and record producer

Song lyrics, Singles and rarities

John Fante photo

“I went up to my room, up the dusty stairs of Bunker Hill, past the soot-covered frame buildings along that dark street, sand and oil and grease choking the futile palm trees standing like dying prisoners, chained to a little plot of ground with black pavement hiding their feet. Dust and old buildings and old people sitting at windows, old people tottering out of doors, old people moving painfully along the dark street. The old folk from Indiana and Iowa and Illinois, from Boston and Kansas City and Des Moines, they sold their homes and their stores, and they came here by train and by automobile to the land of sunshine, to die in the sun, with just enough money to live until the sun killed them, tore themselves out by the roots in their last days, deserted the smug prosperity of Kansas City and Chicago and Peoria to find a place in the sun. And when they got here they found that other and greater thieves had already taken possession, that even the sun belonged to the others; Smith and Jones and Parker, druggist, banker, baker, dust of Chicago and Cincinnati and Cleveland on their shoes, doomed to die in the sun, a few dollars in the bank, enough to subscribe to the Los Angeles Times, enough to keep alive the illusion that this was paradise, that their little papier-mâché homes were castles. The uprooted ones, the empty sad folks, the old and the young folks, the folks from back home. These were my countrymen, these were the new Californians. With their bright polo shirts and sunglasses, they were in paradise, they belonged.”

Ask the Dust (1939)

John Adams photo
Camille Pissarro photo

“I brought Durand eight pictures, among them my 'Sunset' and the motif done from my window. They have been praised, but I find them poor, - tame, grey, monotonous, - I am not at all satisfied. - I am working with fury and I have finally discovered the right execution, the search for which has tormented me for a year. I am pretty sure I have it now, all I need is to spend this coming autumn in Rouen or in some other place where I can find striking motifs.”

Camille Pissarro (1830–1903) French painter

Quote of Pissarro, from Osny, February 1884, in a letter to his son Lucien; in Camille Pissarro - Letters to His Son Lucien ed. John Rewald, with assistance of Lucien Pissarro; from the unpublished French letters; transl. Lionel Abel; Pantheon Books Inc. New York, second edition, 1943, p. 61
1880's

Eugène Boudin photo

“When I got back [from Le Havre], where I had made several sketches of the harbour exit, I thought of placing the sun in the background. I liked the picture so much that I painted it ten times over, with its three-master and its sun.”

Eugène Boudin (1824–1898) French painter

Quote from Boudin's letter, 1882; as cited in the article 'Artists around Monet http://www.muma-lehavre.fr/en/exhibitions/impressions-sun/artists-around-monet, Muma-museum, Le Havre
1880s - 1890s

Jack Osbourne photo
Bhakti Tirtha Swami photo
Agatha Christie photo
Stanley Baldwin photo
Ron Paul photo
Halldór Laxness photo
Thomas Little Heath photo
Charlotte Salomon photo

“The tri-coloured play with music begins' (in Deutsch: Das Drei Farben Singespiel beginnt..)
the cast is as follows
Dr. and MRS. Knarre, a married couple
Franziska and Charlotte, their daughters
Dr. Kahn, a physician
Charlotte Kahn, his daughter
Paulinka Bimbam, a singer
Dr. Singsong, a versatile person
Professor Klingklang, a famous conductor
An Art teacher
Professor and Students at an art academy
and Chorus..
.. The action takes places during the years 1913 to 1940 in Germany, later in Nice, France”

Charlotte Salomon (1917–1943) German painter

Charlotte's 3rd introduction page, related to image JHM no. 4155-3 https://charlotte.jck.nl/detail/M004155-c/part/character/theme/keyword: 'The tri-coloured play with music begins..', p. 43
the quote is written in brush, over the whole page of the painting, with a rough painted gate above
Charlotte Salomon - Life? or Theater?

Arthur Schopenhauer photo
Bobby Jindal photo

“This is a serious storm that has caused serious damage in our state … We're pleased we haven't seen breaches in the levees. We're pleased we haven't seen major flooding in New Orleans or the places that flooded before. But there are serious challenges.”

Bobby Jindal (1971) American politician; two-term Governor of Louisiana

In response to the effects of Hurricane Gustav
"Jindal Presents a Face of Calm During the Storm" http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/02/AR2008090203049.html, The Washington Post, September 2, 2008

John Allen Fraser photo

“The purpose of privilege is not to place parliamentarians above the law, but rather to allow them to carry out their duties independently and effectively, in the national interest.”

John Allen Fraser (1931) Canadian politician

Source: The House Of Commons At Work (1993), Chapter 10, The Business of the House, p. 152

David Brewster photo
Richard Rodríguez photo