Quotes about place (8705 quotes, page 83)

“Time seemed stationary, yet the painful pressure of time was constantly felt. If only the pressure would crush the life out of him and allow him simply to sink into the inviting movement of clock hands or feel the passing of time he could then feel he was getting closer to something or at least further away from something, it didnt really matter which. Nothing really mattered. If only there were some kind of movement. But everything remained motionless, the body not even moving on the bed, while feeling the tearing pressures from all sides in all directions. Feeling deep within him in that pit where there lived the violent and contorting pain of maggots crawling through your guts between the rusty cans and broken bottles and the screaming urgency to get time to move, to just move before every FUCKING GODDAMN PART OF YOUR BODY SCREWS UP INTO A FUCKING BALL AND YOUR WHOLE FUCKING BODY DISINTEGRATES, JUST SHATTERS and there was no escape, even with the lack consciousness, for with it came dreams of wakefulness. There was no escape from the past. The struggle against it only entangled him deeper in the fear of the future. There was no place for him to go. No place he could hide. No place where his enemy didnt exist. No escape from unconscious wakefulness. There was no rest.”

Hubert Selby Jr. book The Room

The Room (1971)

Fear , Pain , Time , Past

“He (Veediya Bandara), went and stopped at the Seven Korale. By this time, the ruler there was a war hero. He was Edirimanne Suriya, better known as Edirille Rala. He had made Mudukondapala, a place close to Kurunegala, his capital city. When he saw Commander Veediya Bandara, he was delighted and welcomed him with all love and respect. He was well treated. Then both of them broke into conversation. This leader Edirille Rala, just like Veediya Bandara, was an erstwhile enemy of the Portuguese. As such, this meeting of theirs was extra special. Both of them were enemies of the King of Sitawaka as well. This common feature was something to be happy about. The main aim of Veediya Bandara too, was chasing away the Portuguese from Sri Lanka.”

Dominicus Corea (1565–1596) King of Kotte and Sitawaka

The Mahavama, the recorded chronicles of Sri Lankan history recalls the meeting between Commander Veediya Bandara of the Kandyan kingdom and King Dominicus Corea (Edirille Rala). http://sundaytimes.lk/110320/FunDay/fut_01.html

War , Love , Time , Making love

“The most painful sight I saw in New Orleans was the selling of slaves. Every day in the streets at appointed places, negroes and negresses in holiday attire are exposed for this shameful traffic, like the meanest animals at our fairs. This spectacle oppressed my heart. Lo! I said to myself, these Americans, so proud of their liberty, thus make game of the liberty of others.”

Théodore Guérin (1798–1856) Catholic saint and nun from France

Poor negroes! I would have wished to buy them all that I might say to them, "Go! Bless Providence. You are free!"
Third Journal of Travel (1844-1845)

Pain , Game , Holiday , Heart

“A proportional condensation of the nebulous matter in the brighter places will sufficiently account for their different degree of shining.”

William Herschel (1738–1822) German-born British astronomer, technical expert, and composer

Astronomical Observations relating to the Construction of the Heavens... (1811)

“Madness frequently discovers itself merely by unnecessary deviation from the usual modes of the world. My poor friend Smart showed the disturbance of his mind, by falling upon his knees, and saying his prayers in the street, or in any other unusual place. Now although, rationally speaking, it is greater madness not to pray at all, than to pray as Smart did, I am afraid there are so many who do not pray, that their understanding is not called in question.”

Christopher Smart (1722–1771) English poet

Samuel Johnson, quoted in James Boswell, Life of Dr. Johnson http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Texts/smart.html

World , Madness , Understanding , Question

“He supported himself at odd jobs until he won himself a place on the Olean (New York) professional team at sixteen and never again willingly took orders from any man. Although he was short and weighed barely 155 pounds, he held far bigger base runners back by the belt, blocked them, tripped them, spiked them - and rarely complained when they did the same to him.”

John McGraw (1873–1934) American baseball player, manager

Ibid.

Support

“I can’t sit down and write jokes. I just flows in from some maddeningly elusive place. Believe me, if I had an Alaska in my brain, I would drill baby drill, and I’d cum right on Sarah’s back while I was there.”

Louis C.K. (1967) American comedian and actor

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/tmlnp/louis_ck_reddit/ (2012)

Baby

“But that is the way of the place: down our many twisting corridors, one encounters story after story, some heroic, some villainous, some true, some false, some funny, some tragic, and all of them combining to form the mystical, undefinable entity we call the school.”

Stephen L. Carter book The Emperor of Ocean Park

Not exactly the building, not exactly the faculty or the students or the alumni — more than all those things but also less, a paradox, an order, a mystery, a monster, an utter joy.
Source: The Emperor of Ocean Park (2002), Ch. 9, A Pedagogical Disagreement, II

School , Falseness , Way

“I’ve been travelling a lot. My boyfriend and I, we just went to Santa Fe. You know, the one named after the gay saint. Has anybody ever been to Santa Fe? …did you know it was a desert? I didn’t know it was a desert. Hated it! People had been telling me for years, if you’re an artist, a non-conformist, come to Santa Fe! I mean, it’s the place you can be yourself! The light, the light, you can paint here! You can live here, the space, the sky! – The fucking dust! I was doing an AIDS benefit there – like what else do I do with my life?”

Harvey Fierstein (1954) actor from the United States

and I said, look, I’m a guest here, you’re paying for the hotel, I don’t mean to insult nobody, but I got a little suggestion for you. If I was yaz, I’d take a hose, hook it up to Colorado, and water this fucking place!
This Is Not Going to Be Pretty, Live at the Bottom Line (1995)

Hate , Painting , Light , People

“That man who is responsible for slave labor in Germany does not have my sympathy. I did not like the whole idea of what he did. After all, there are limits to what one can do with foreign populations in the forced labor business. In the first place, the whole idea is completely unproductive. One needs three or four men to watch one compulsory worker. Sauckel deserves the severest punishment.”

Fritz Sauckel (1894–1946) German general

Paul O. Schmidt to Leon Goldensohn, March 13, 1946.

Business , Idea , Men

“What constitutes an American? Not color nor race nor religion. Not the pedigree of his family nor the place of his birth. Not the coincidence of his citizenship. Not his social status nor his bank account. Not his trade nor his profession. An American is one who loves justice and believes in the dignity of man. An American is one who will fight for his freedom and that of his neighbor. An American is one who will sacrifice… An American is one in whose heart is engraved the immortal second sentence of the Declaration of Independence.”

Harold L. Ickes (1874–1952) American politician

Americans have always known how to fight for their rights and their way of life. Americans are not afraid to fight. They fight joyously in a just cause.
"What Is An American?" http://www.historyplace.com/speeches/ickes.htm (18 May 1941)

Family , Religion , Justice , Freedom

“Nobody beat Ray twice until he was 40 years old. His intelligence, his versatility, and his will to win were the reasons he won all those rematches. He created a new place for the imagination of a fighter.”

Sugar Ray Robinson (1921–1989) American boxer

Jack Newfield http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2441835652984416201&ei=sjpZS9eZGZPllQevwenkAw&q=sugar+ray+robinson#
About Sugar Ray sourced

Intelligence , Imagination

“Artaud sought to remove aesthetic distance, bringing the audience into direct contact with the dangers of life. By turning theatre into a place where the spectator is exposed rather than protected, Artaud was committing an act of cruelty upon them.”

Antonin Artaud (1896–1948) French-Occitanian poet, playwright, actor and theatre director

Lee Jamieson, Antonin Artaud: From Theory to Practice, Greenwich Exchange, 2007, p. 23.

Life

“The picture of the economic revolution as the final step to freedom was false as soon as I asked myself that question. For, in actual fact, The State, The Government, cannot exist. They are abstract concepts, useful enough in their place, as the theory of minus numbers is useful in mathematics. In actual living experience, however, it is impossible to subtract anything from nothing; when a purse is empty, it is empty, it cannot contain a minus ten dollars. On this same plane of actuality, no State, no Government, exists. What does in fact exist is a man, or a few men, in power over many men.”

Rose Wilder Lane (1886–1968) American journalist

Give Me Liberty (1936)

Question , Freedom , Falseness , Mathematics

“I had gotten really bad. I mean my place was almost like a crack house.”

Lawrence Taylor (1959) All-American college football player, professional football player, linebacker, Pro Football Hall of Fame member

discussing the depths of his drug problems after he retired, in his 60 Minutes interview with Mike Wallace.
Source: L.T. Over The Edge: Former Hall Of Famer Reveals Shocking Stories From His Playing Days http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/09/10/60minutes/main642605.shtml, cbsnews.com, accessed January 29, 2007.

Bad luck , Housing

“More over, Sai Baba was a celibate, remaining in one place, performing miracles, admonishing his disciples, and keeping a fire perpetually burning at Shirdi. The functions of a Guru, ascetic and saint, Sai Baba adds that of Avatar as many of his devotees and followers consider him as major incarnation of this age.”

Sai Baba of Shirdi (1836–1918) Hindu and muslim saint

Stated by Charles S.J.White.[Sinha, K.N., Sai Baba: A Ray from the Supreme, http://books.google.com/books?id=o7A_TxQzx8kC&pg=PA80, 1 January 1997, Abhinav Publications, 978-81-7017-349-6, 80–]

Age

“Aren’t we all, in one way or another, trying to find a solution to the problem of reality? If I get this job, this girl, this guy, these shoes. If I pass this exam, eat this pizza, drink this booze, go on this holiday. Learn karate, learn yoga. If West Ham stay up, if my dick stays up, if I get more likes on Facebook, more fancy cookbooks, a better kitchen, cure this itchin’, if she stops bitching. Isn’t there always some kind of condition to contentment? Isn’t it always placed in the future, wrapped up in some object, either physical or ideological? I know for me it is, and as an addict that always leads me to excess and then to trouble. Do you feel like that? Are you looking for something? It’s not just me, is it? Do you sometimes feel afraid, self-conscious, lonely, not good enough? I mean, you’re reading this, so you must want to change something. Don’t leave me out on a limb, all vulnerable and exposed. Are you reading this on a yacht, through your Ray-Bans with, I dunno, a pair of glistening Russian sisters and a gob oozing with lobster juice as the sun shines down on you and the sisters smile up at you? And even if you are, especially if you are, is it working, behind the salty tang and priapic pang, is it real, is it real, is it like God is holding your hand?”

Russell Brand book Revolution

Revolution (2014)

God , Drink , Reading , Girl

“Of course they aren’t ready for it, of course we’ll spoil the place. Are they any more ready for World War Three? You seriously think we could mess the place up more than they’re doing at the moment? When they’re not actually out slaughtering each other they’re inventing ingenious new ways to massacre each other more efficiently in the future, and when they’re not doing that they’re committing speciescide, from the Amazon to Borneo… or filling the seas with shit, or the air, or the land. They could hardly make a better job of vandalizing their own planet if we gave them lessons.”

Iain Banks (1954–2013) Scottish writer

“State of the Art” (p. 84)
Short fiction, The State of the Art (1991)

War , Future , Thinking , Way

“Some places have already quit lotteries.”

Shirley Jackson book The Lottery

Mrs. Adams said.
"Nothing but trouble in that," Old Man Warner said stoutly. "Pack of young fools."
The Lottery (1948)

“The spectator experiences the phenomenon of transmutation; through the change from inert matter into a work of art, an actual transubstantiation has taken place... All in all, the creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work into contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act.”

Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) French painter and sculptor

Quote from The Writings of Marcel Duchamp (Marchand du Sel) e.d. Michel Sanouille and Elmer Peterson, New York 1973, pp. 139-140
posthumous

World , Change , Art

“Will you really sweep away the righteous with the wicked? Suppose there are 50 righteous men within the city. Will you, then, sweep them away and not pardon the place for the sake of the 50 righteous who are inside it? It is unthinkable that you would act in this manner by putting the righteous man to death with the wicked one so that the outcome for the righteous man and the wicked is the same! It is unthinkable of you. Will the Judge of all the earth not do what is right?”

Abraham (-1813–-1638 BC) Biblical patriarch

Genesis 18: 23-25 http://www.jw.org/en/publications/bible/nwt/books/genesis/18/, NWT
Bible

Death , Men

“Put away these frozenjawed primates and their annals of ways beset and ultimate dark. What deity in the realms of dementia, what rabid god decocted out of the smoking lobes of hydrophobia could have devised a keeping place for souls so poor as in this flesh. This mawky wormbent tabernacle.”

Cormac McCarthy book Suttree

page 130
Suttree (1979)

Way , God , Soul

“He is without doubt the greatest player I have ever played with, he has everything. At Liverpool, he is irreplaceable. Every big club has a standard bearer, a home-grown talent, someone with a lifelong commitment to the cause. People come and go but he’s always there. It’s him and 10 others. He’s everything to the side. That’s Steven Gerrard at Liverpool. I can’t even begin to imagine the place without him.”

Steven Gerrard (1980) English footballer

Fernando Torres on Steven Gerrard, Sep 2009 ( Source http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/football/article-1213814/My-idol-Steven-Gerrard-best-player-world-insists-Liverpool-star-Fernando-Torres.html)

Home , Imagination , People

“Some people don’t like Mr Cameron. Mr Cameron and his cube of air. He doesn’t seem to know where to put that thing down. He can’t find a place for it. I think the reason he can’t get rid of it is because it contains the essence of the Big Society, and nobody wants that shit.”

Dylan Moran (1971) Irish actor and comedian

on David Cameron
Yeah, Yeah (2011)

Thinking , People

“I spend eight to nine months working abroad and cram in a holiday when I have the odd week off. This year, three of those months were spent in America playing gigs with my band, so we got to visit all kinds of places from Arizona to New York. After a few weeks, I really began to miss family and friends not to mention baked beans!”

Katie Melua (1984) British singer-songwriter

[York Membery, Travelling Life - Katie Melua, http://ultratravel.telegraph.co.uk/site/pages/ultra_experts/travelling_life_-_katie_melua_page1.php, The Telegraph, 2006-09-18]

Family , Holiday

“Neither punk nor prom king, Mayer was a tall kid from Connecticut, driving on the freeways, chasing slippery techno women, inhabiting a world of parents and slipcovers and holidays and gracious Southeastern metropolises; he was smart, inquisitive, articulate, a touch off in places.”

John Mayer (1977) guitarist and singer/songwriter

Hunter, James (2003-10-02), "Corduroy Boy" http://www.rollingstone.com/reviews/album/_/id/300650/johnmayer?pageid=rs.ArtistDiscography&pageregion=triple1. Rolling Stone. (932):116 Retrieved October 2, 2003

World , Holiday , Parent , Women

“To take such generous contracts and screw them up so dramatically must suggest that these are the most probably the worst business people ever assembled in one place to run anything. … the civil servants were taken to the cleaners and on the face of it you still end up with a £750 million overspend based on your mismanagement of them. I think they should be sacked, hung drawn and quartered, thrown out of the country and the whole thing (the London Underground) returned to public ownership. I saw that they (Metronet management) wanted to talk to the Mayor about this — wasting their breath sunshine!”

Ken Livingstone (1945) Mayor of London between 2000 and 2008

they can go out and raise the money amongst their shareholders who came here to get their snout in the trough — they screwed it up; they are not getting any of our money!
Remarks made regarding the management of Metronet and the PPP of the London Underground during a Mayor's press conference (13 March 2007)

Business , Thinking , People , Country

“We are… bound to attach the greatest importance to the preliminary step taken by Lavoisier, who is even more justly called the father of modern chemistry than Kepler is called the father of modern astronomy. The exact claims of Lavoisier to this important place in the history of chemistry have been variously stated: …since his time, and greatly through his labours, the quantitative method has been established as the ultimate test of chemical facts; the principle of this method being the rule that in all changes of combination and reaction, the total weight of the various ingredients—be they elementary bodies or compounds—remains unchanged. The science of chemistry was thus established upon an exact, a mathematical basis. By means of this method Lavoisier, utilising and analysing the results gained by himself and others before him, notably those of Priestley, Cavendish, and Black, succeeded in destroying the older theory of combustion, the so-called phlogistic theory.”

Antoine Lavoisier (1743–1794) French chemist

John Theodore Merz, A History of European Thought in the Nineteenth Century Vol.1 http://books.google.com/books?id=xqwQAAAAYAAJ (1903)

Time , History , Mathematics , Science

“I found out yesterday there really is a place called Bumfuck, Egypt. And the only way to get there is to go up Shit Creek.”

Ron White (1956) American comedian

You Can't Fix Stupid

Way

“I welcome the democratic process allowing all sections of society to express their views on the proposed legislation. The debate taking place is, in itself, helping the nation to understand that reconciliation is a difficult but necessary process.”

Josefa Iloilo (1920–2011) President of Fiji

on the government's controversial plans to set up a Commission empowered to compensate victims and pardon perpetrators of the political upheaval of 2000
Speech opening Parliament, 1 August 2005 (excerpts)

Help , Understanding

“I think I’ve gone through quite an ordinary series of steps in life. I began as most children began, with God and Santa Claus and the tooth fairy and the Easter Bunny all being about the same thing. Then I went through the things that I think sensitive people go through, wrestling with the thoughts of Jesus—did he shit? Did he screw? I began to dare to believe that God wasn’t some white beard. I began to look upon the miseries of the human race and to think God was not as simple as my mother said. As nearly as I can concentrate on the question today, I believe I am God; certainly you are, I think we intelligent beings on this planet are all a piece of God, are becoming God. In some sort of cyclical non-time thing we have to become God, so that we can end up creating ourselves, so that we can be in the first place. … My own feeling is that relation to God as a person is a petty, superstitious approach to the All, the infinite.”

Gene Roddenberry (1921–1991) American television screenwriter and producer

As quoted in God & (1975) by Terrance A. Sweeney

God , Time , Question , Personality

“Indeed, he was never without it; for he had raised beds made in frames upon wheels, by means of which the cucumbers were moved and exposed to the full heat of the sun; while, in winter, they were withdrawn, and placed under the protection of frames glazed with mirrorstone.”

Tiberius (-42–37 BC) 2nd Emperor of Ancient Rome, member of the Julio-Claudian dynasty

Pliny the Elder The Natural History 19, 23
About

Sun , Winter

“Abstract cleverness of the mind only separates the thinker from the world of reality, and that world, the Forest of Real Life, is in a desperate condition now because of too many who think too much and care too little. In spite of what many minds have thought themselves into believing, that mistake cannot continue for much longer if everything is going to survive. The one chance we have to avoid certain disaster is to change our approach, and learn to value wisdom and contentment. These are things that are being searched for anyway, through Knowledge and Cleverness, but they do not come from Knowledge and Cleverness. They never have, and they never will. We can no longer afford to look so desperately hard for something in the wrong way and in the wrong place. If Knowledge and Cleverness are allowed to go on wrecking things, they will before much longer destroy all life on this earth as we know it, and what little may temporarily survive will not be worth looking at, even if it were possible for us to do so.”

Benjamin Hoff book The Tao of Pooh

The Now of Pooh.
The Tao of Pooh (1982)

Chance , Search , Learning , Knowledge

“The God Delusion by the atheist writer Richard Dawkins, is remarkable in the first place for having achieved some sort of record by selling over a million copies. But what is much more remarkable than that economic achievement is that the contents – or rather lack of contents – of this book show Dawkins himself to have become what he and his fellow secularists typically believe to be an impossibility: namely, a secularist bigot.”

Antony Flew (1923–2010) British analytic and evidentialist philosopher

Helpfully, my copy of The Oxford Dictionary defines a bigot as ‘an obstinate or intolerant adherent of a point of view’
Flew's review of The God Delusion

God , Books

“His win today at the French Open, tying Pete Sampras’s record for major titles and the completion of a career grand slam firmly places him in a special place as the greatest player of all time. He has earned his place and he has proven he belongs. Roger is a champion for the ages.”

Roger Federer (1981) Swiss tennis player

Billie Jean King, winner of 39 Grand Slams, after Federer won the 2009 French Open Final http://sports.yahoo.com/ten/news?slug=reu-openfederergreat&prov=reuters&type=lgns

Time , Age

“What he’s done over the past five years has never, ever been done — and probably will never, ever happen again. Regardless if he won there or not, he goes down as the greatest ever. This just confirms it. Now that he has won in Paris, I think it just more solidifies his place in history as the greatest player that played the game, in my opinion. I’m a huge Laver fan, and he had a few years in there where he didn’t have an opportunity to win majors. But you can’t compare the eras. And in this era, the competition is much more fierce than Rod’s.”

Roger Federer (1981) Swiss tennis player

Pete Sampras, winner of 14 Grand Slams, after Federer winning 2009 French Open Final http://sports.yahoo.com/ten/news?slug=ap-frenchopen-sampras&prov=ap&type=lgns

Past , Game , Thinking , History

“You will follow us soon! Your house will be beaten down and salt sown in the place where it stood!”

Maximilien Robespierre (1758–1794) French revolutionary lawyer and politician

Exclamation of Georges Danton passing Robespierre's house on the way to the guillotine, quoted in the memoirs of Paul vicomte de Barras
About Robespierre

Housing

“Historically our own culture has relied for the creation of rich and contrasting values upon many artificial distinctions, the most striking of which is sex. It will not be by the mere abolition of these distinctions that society will develop patterns in which individual gifts are given place instead of being forced into an ill-fitting mould. If we are to achieve a richer culture, rich in contrasting values, we must recognize the whole gamut of human potentialities, and so weave a less arbitrary social fabric, one in which each diverse human gift will find a fitting place.”

Margaret Mead (1901–1978) American anthropologist

Source: 1930s, Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935), p. 322

Sex

“Accidents in the mountains are less common than in the lowlands, and these mountain mansions are decent, delightful, even divine, places to die in, compared with the doleful chambers of civilization. Few places in this world are more dangerous than home. Fear not, therefore, to try the mountain-passes. They will kill care, save you from deadly apathy, set you free, and call forth every faculty into vigorous, enthusiastic action. Even the sick should try these so-called dangerous passes, because for every unfortunate they kill, they cure a thousand.”

John Muir (1838–1914) Scottish-born American naturalist and author

Source: 1890s, The Mountains of California (1894), chapter 5: The Passes

World , Home , Mountain , Fear

“If sin must be kept alive, then hell must be kept alive; but while I regard the smallest sin as infinitely loathsome, I do not believe that any being, never good enough to see the essential ugliness of sin, could sin so as to deserve such punishment. I am not now, however, dealing with the question of the duration of punishment, but with the idea of punishment itself; and would only say in passing, that the notion that a creature born imperfect, nay, born with impulses to evil not of his own generating, and which he could not help having, a creature to whom the true face of God was never presented, and by whom it never could have been seen, should be thus condemned, is as loathsome a lie against God as could find place in heart too undeveloped to understand what justice is, and too low to look up into the face of Jesus.”

George MacDonald (1824–1905) Scottish journalist, novelist

From ‘’Justice’’ in Unspoken Sermons Series III (1889)

God , Hell , Justice , Understanding

“His message is one of hope and peace, and he has inspired millions throughout the world. As an educator, the opportunity to learn has been central and the focus of my life. I have witnessed brilliant teachers and eager students turn classrooms into magical places. Prem Rawat reminds us that magic begins with people, and it’s within each person. That the possibility of peace and the possibility of living a life to the fullest begins with recognizing the value of life itself. That is, in my opinion, the deepest learning and is certainly a curriculum for everyone.”

Prem Rawat (1957) controversial spiritual leader

Dr. Eduardo Padron, President of w:Miami Dade College (June 16, 2005)
About, 2000s

Peace , Personality , People , Learning

“My own opinion is enough for me, and I claim the right to have it defended against any consensus, any majority, anywhere, any place, any time. And anyone who disagrees with this can pick a number, get in line and kiss my ass.”

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) British American author and journalist

"Be It Resolved: Freedom of Speech Includes the Freedom to Hate," debate at University of Toronto, (2006-11-15). Hitchens argued the affirmative position. Info http://hhdce.sa.utoronto.ca/formaldebates_20062007.htm#20062007_3; video http://onegoodmove.org/1gm/1gmarchive/2007/03/free_speech_6.html.
2000s, 2006

Time , Kiss

“After this was done I reached in under my left armpit in approved American gangster fashion and produced my ugly little automatic. Without a further word I placed it on the front desk of my Steinway and proceeded with my concert. Every note was heard and, in a sense, I suppose I opened up the way in Hungary for modern music of a non-Bartó k– Kodá ly variety.”

George Antheil (1900–1959) American avant-garde composer, pianist, author and inventor

Music , Lying , Sense , Way

“Every time I hit Panama, the place is exactly one month, two months, six months more nowhere, like the progress of a degenerative illness. A shift from arithmetic to geometric progressive seems to have occurred. Something ugly and ignoble and subhuman is cooking in this mongrel town of pimps and whores and recessive genes, this degraded leech on the Canal.”

William S. Burroughs (1914–1997) American novelist, short story writer, essayist, painter, and spoken word performer

Two Years Later: Mexico City Return
Queer: A Novel (1985)

Whore , Time , Cooking

“We know a little place in the American Far West, where Charlie Briggs chops up the finest prairie-fed beef and tastes…”

Orson Welles (1915–1985) American actor, director, writer and producer

(pauses, and continues with a note of disgust in his voice) This is a lot of shit, you know that! You want one more? One more on the beef?
The Findus Foods "Frozen Peas" Session Out-Takes

“Highly ought we to rejoice that God dwelleth in our soul, and much more highly ought we to rejoice that our soul dwelleth in God. Our soul is made to be God’s dwelling-place; and the dwelling-place of the soul is God, Which is unmade.”

Julian of Norwich (1342–1416) English theologian and anchoress

And high understanding it is, inwardly to see and know that God, which is our Maker, dwelleth in our soul; and an higher understanding it is, inwardly to see and to know that our soul, that is made, dwelleth in God’s Substance: of which Substance, God, we are that we are.
And I saw no difference between God and our Substance: but as it were all God; and yet mine understanding took that our Substance is in God: that is to say, that God is God, and our Substance is a creature in God.
Summations, Chapter 54

God , Soul

“Very old money was behind the Crow’s Nest. And enough of it that its Owners didn’t mind losing some every month to keep the place going. It was a kind of eleemosynary institution, created to serve not culture and not dukh, but a thing called the Purpose.”

Neal Stephenson book Seveneves

And if Ty kept working there for another few decades, perhaps one of the Owners would sit him down one day in the Bolt Hole and deign to tell him what exactly the Purpose was.
"Five Thousand Years Later"
Seveneves (2015), Part Three

Money

“Very often we will have the impression of having reached the end of the task, because we will find (or they will bring us) similar hairs of the one we seek; but since it is not known of any case where a hair has a knot in the middle without human hand intervention, we will almost always end up with the knot in question being a mere thickening of the caliber of the hair (although we do not know of any similar case) or a deposit of some silicate or any oxide produced by a long stay against a wet surface. It is probable that we will advance in this way through various sections of major and minor pipes, until we reach that place where no one will decide to penetrate: the main drain heading in the direction of the river, the torrential meeting of detritus in which no money, no boat, no bribe will allow us to continue the search.”

Julio Cortázar book Historias de cronopios y de famas

Historias de Cronopios y de Famas (1962)

Money , Question , Way , Search

“All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you; the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse, and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. If you can get so that you can give that to people, then you are a writer.”

Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) American author and journalist

A Letter from Cuba (1934)

Reading , Bad luck , People , Books

“Miss Austen was surely a great novelist. What she did, she did perfectly. Her work, as far as it goes, is faultless. She wrote of the times in which she lived, of the class of people with which she associated, and in the language which was usual to her as an educated lady. Of romance, -- what we generally mean when we speak of romance -- she had no tinge. Heroes and heroines with wonderful adventures there are none in her novels. Of great criminals and hidden crimes she tells us nothing. But she places us in a circle of gentlemen and ladies, and charms us while she tells us with an unconscious accuracy how men should act to women, and women act to men. It is not that her people are all good; -- and, certainly, they are not all wise. The faults of some are the anvils on which the virtues of others are hammered till they are bright as steel. In the comedy of folly I know no novelist who has beaten her. The letters of Mr. Collins, a clergyman in Pride and Prejudice, would move laughter in a low-church archbishop.”

Jane Austen (1775–1817) English novelist

Anthony Trollope, Lecture (1870)

Time , People , Women , Education

“To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair. The movies are onto the search, but they screw it up. The search always ends in despair. They like to show a fellow coming to himself in a strange place-but what does he do? He takes up with the local librarian, sets about proving to the local children what a nice fellow he is, and settles down with a vengeance. In two weeks time he is so sunk in everydayness that he might just as well be dead.”

Walker Percy book The Moviegoer

The Moviegoer (1961)

Despair , Time , Dead , Search

“If we want to postulate a deity capable of engineering all the organized complexity in the world, either instantaneously or by guiding evolution, that deity must have been vastly complex in the first place. The creationist, whether a naive Bible-thumper or an educated bishop, simply postulates an already existing being of prodigious intelligence and complexity. If we are going to allow ourselves the luxury of postulating organized complexity without offering an explanation, we might as well make a job of it and simply postulate the existence of life as we know it!”

Richard Dawkins book The Blind Watchmaker

Source: The Blind Watchmaker (1986), Chapter 11 “Doomed Rivals” (p. 316)

Intelligence , World , Education , Life

“In those days I had seen little further than the old school of political economists into the possibilities of fundamental improvement in social arrangements. Private property, as now understood, and inheritance, appeared to me, as to them, the dernier mot of legislation: and I looked no further than to mitigating the inequalities consequent on these institutions, by getting rid of primogeniture and entails. The notion that it was possible to go further than this in removing the injustice -- for injustice it is, whether admitting of a complete remedy or not -- involved in the fact that some are born to riches and the vast majority to poverty, I then reckoned chimerical, and only hoped that by universal education, leading to voluntary restraint on population, the portion of the poor might be made more tolerable. In short, I was a democrat, but not the least of a Socialist. We were now much less democrats than I had been, because so long as education continues to be so wretchedly imperfect, we dreaded the ignorance and especially the selfishness and brutality of the mass: but our ideal of ultimate improvement went far beyond Democracy, and would class us decidedly under the general designation of Socialists. While we repudiated with the greatest energy that tyranny of society over the individual which most Socialistic systems are supposed to involve, we yet looked forward to a time when society will no longer be divided into the idle and the industrious; when the rule that they who do not work shall not eat, will be applied not to paupers only, but impartially to all; when the division of the produce of labour, instead of depending, as in so great a degree it now does, on the accident of birth, will be made by concert on an acknowledged principle of justice; and when it will no longer either be, or be thought to be, impossible for human beings to exert themselves strenuously in procuring benefits which are not to be exclusively their own, but to be shared with the society they belong to. The social problem of the future we considered to be, how to unite the greatest individual liberty of action, with a common ownership in the raw material of the globe, and an equal participation of all in the benefits of combined labour. We had not the presumption to suppose that we could already foresee, by what precise form of institutions these objects could most effectually be attained, or at how near or how distant a period they would become practicable. We saw clearly that to render any such social transformation either possible or desirable, an equivalent change of character must take place both in the uncultivated herd who now compose the labouring masses, and in the immense majority of their employers. Both these classes must learn by practice to labour and combine for generous, or at all events for public and social purposes, and not, as hitherto, solely for narrowly interested ones. But the capacity to do this has always existed in mankind, and is not, nor is ever likely to be, extinct. Education, habit, and the cultivation of the sentiments, will make a common man dig or weave for his country, as readily as fight for his country. True enough, it is only by slow degrees, and a system of culture prolonged through successive generations, that men in general can be brought up to this point. But the hindrance is not in the essential constitution of human nature. Interest in the common good is at present so weak a motive in the generality not because it can never be otherwise, but because the mind is not accustomed to dwell on it as it dwells from morning till night on things which tend only to personal advantage. When called into activity, as only self-interest now is, by the daily course of life, and spurred from behind by the love of distinction and the fear of shame, it is capable of producing, even in common men, the most strenuous exertions as well as the most heroic sacrifices. The deep-rooted selfishness which forms the general character of the existing state of society, is so deeply rooted, only because the whole course of existing institutions tends to foster it; modern institutions in some respects more than ancient, since the occasions on which the individual is called on to do anything for the public without receiving its pay, are far less frequent in modern life, than the smaller commonwealths of antiquity.”

John Stuart Mill book Autobiography

Source: Autobiography (1873)
Source: https://archive.org/details/autobiography01mill/page/230/mode/1up pp. 230-233

Fight , Love , Fear , Problem

“The personal sympathies I wished for were those of fellow labourers in this enterprise. I endeavoured to pick up as many flowers as I could by the way; but as a serious and permanent personal satisfaction to rest upon, my whole reliance was placed on this.”

John Stuart Mill book Autobiography

Autobiography (1873)

Way , Personality , Flowers

“There is nothing very extraordinary in this fact: no youth of the age I then was, can be expected to be more than one thing, and this was the thing I happened to be. Ambition and desire of distinction, I had in abundance; and zeal for what I thought the good of mankind was my strongest sentiment, mixing with and colouring all others. But my zeal was as yet little else, at that period of my life, than zeal for speculative opinions. It had not its root in genuine benevolence, or sympathy with mankind; though these qualities held their due place in my ethical standard. Nor was it connected with any high enthusiasm for ideal nobleness.”

John Stuart Mill book Autobiography

Autobiography (1873)

Life , Youth , Age

“What I have found to be unanimous about people is that they guard and act like they don’t want you to touch the places inside them that they are the most desperate for you to touch.”

Teal Swan (1984) American spiritual teacher

People

“If not the usual suspects, what’s going on? It boils down to this: The academic gap is widening because rich students are increasingly entering kindergarten much better prepared to succeed in school than middle-class students. This difference in preparation persists through elementary and high school. As you may have heard, the incomes of the rich have grown faster over the last 30 years than the incomes of the middle class and the poor. Money helps families provide cognitively stimulating experiences for their young children because it provides more stable home environments, more time for parents to read to their children, access to higher-quality child care and preschool and — in places like New York City, where 4-year-old children take tests to determine entry into gifted and talented programs — access to preschool test preparation tutors or the time to serve as tutors themselves.”

Sean Reardon American sociologist

No Rich Child Left Behind, 2013

Money , Family , School , Home

“This is no day for the rabble-rouser, whether he be Negro or white.We must realize that we are grappling with the most weighty social problem of this nation, and in grappling with such a complex problem there is no place for misguided emotionalism. We must work passionately and unrelentingly for the goal of freedom, but we must be sure that our hands are clean in the struggle. We must never struggle with falsehood, hate, or malice. We must never become bitter. I know how we feel sometime. There is the danger that those of us who have been forced so long to stand amid the tragic midnight of oppression — those of us who have been trampled over, those of us who have been kicked about — there is the danger that we will become bitter. But if we will become bitter and indulge in hate campaigns, the new order which is emerging will be nothing but a duplication of the old order.”

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

1950s, Give Us the Ballot (1957)

Hate , Freedom , Problem , Passion

“It seems to be a fact of life that human beings cannot continue to do wrong without eventually reaching out for some thin rationalization to clothe the obvious wrong in the beautiful garments of righteousness. The philosopher-psychologist William James used to talk a great deal about the stream of consciousness. He says that the very interesting and unique thing about human nature is that man had the capacity temporarily to block the stream of consciousness and place anything in it that he wants to, and so we often end up justifying the rightness of the wrong. This is exactly what happened during the days of slavery. Even the Bible and religion were misused to crystallize the patterns of the status quo. And so it was argued from pulpits across the nation that the Negro was inferior by nature, because of Noah’s curse upon the children of Ham. The apostle Paul’s dictum became a watchword: Servants, be obedient to your master. And then one brother had probably studied the logic of the great philosopher Aristotle. You know Aristotle did a great deal to bring into being what we know as formal logic, and he talked about the syllogism, which had a major premise and a minor premise and a conclusion. And so this brother could put his argument in the framework of an Aristotelian syllogism. He could say, All men are made in the image of God. This was the major premise; then came the minor premise: God, as everybody knows, is not a Negro. Therefore, the Negro is not a man. This was the type of reasoning that prevailed.”

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

1960s, Address to Cornell College (1962)

God , Clothes , Religion , Study

“We can assert, with entire plausibility, that there is not one of all these sects — Kabalism, Judaism, and our present Christianity included — but sprung from the two main branches of that one mother-trunk, the once universal religion, which antedated the Vedaic ages — we speak of that prehistoric Buddhism which merged later into Brahmanism.The religion which the primitive teaching of the early few apostles most resembled — a religion preached by Jesus himself — is the elder of these two, Buddhism. The latter as taught in its primitive purity, and carried to perfection by the last of the Buddhas, Gautama, based its moral ethics on three fundamental principles. It alleged that 1, every thing existing, exists from natural causes; 2, that virtue brings its own reward, and vice and sin their own punishment; and, 3, that the state of man in this world is probationary... However puzzling the subsequent theological tenets; however seemingly incomprehensible the metaphysical abstractions which have convulsed the theology of every one of the great religions of mankind as soon as it was placed on a sure footing, the above is found to be the essence of every religious philosophy, with the exception of later Christianity. It was that of Zoroaster, of Pythagoras, of Plato, of Jesus, and even of Moses, albeit the teachings of the Jewish law-giver have been so piously tampered with.”

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky book Isis Unveiled

Source: Isis Unveiled (1877), Volume II, Chapter III

Religion , Law , Nature , Perfection

“I can tell Albanians in Kosovo that in Serbia, no one had trouble living for not being Serbian. Serbia has always been opened for all, and for those who had no other place to go—and for those who had no other place to go, for the poor and rich, for those who are happy and sad, and for those who are only passing through, and for those who wish to stay. Serbia only doesn’t want evil people, even if they be Serbian.”

Slobodan Milošević (1941–2006) Yugoslavian and Serbian politician

Slobodan Milošević (1988), Слободан Милошевић Ушће https://www.youtube.com/embed/iyj4l3cH2Pc

Sadness , People , Evil , Happiness

“An unjust composition never fails to contain error and falsehood. Therefore an unjust connection of ideas is not derived from nature, but from the imperfect composition of man. Misconnection of ideas is the same as misjudging, and has no positive existence, being merely a creature of the imagination; but nature and truth are real and uniform; and the rational mind by reasoning, discerns the uniformity, and is thereby enabled to make a just composition of ideas, which will stand the test of truth. But the fantastical illuminations of the credulous and superstitious part of mankind, proceed from weakness, and as far as they take place in the world subvert the religion of REASON, NATURE and TRUTH.”

Ethan Allen (1738–1789) American general

Source: Reason: The Only Oracle Of Man (1784), Ch. XIII Section II - Of The Importance of the Exercise of Reason, and Practice of Morality, in order to the Happiness of Mankind

Imagination , Religion , Error , Nature

“If not belonging is a consequence for certain actions, there was no belonging in the first place.”

Teal Swan (1984) American spiritual teacher

“Unlike animals, with their instincts to guide them past dangers, we humans have to rely upon our conscious decisions. We do the best we can when it comes to our career path and handling the inevitable setbacks in life. But in the back of our minds we can sense an overall lack of direction, as we are pulled this way and that way by our moods and by the opinions of others. How did we end up in this job, in this place? Such drifting can lead to dead ends. The way to avoid such a fate is to develop a sense of purpose, discovering our calling in life and using such knowledge to guide us in our decisions. We come to know ourselves more deeply—our tastes and inclinations. We trust ourselves, knowing which battles and detours to avoid. Even our moments of doubt, even our failures have a purpose—to toughen us up. With such energy and direction, our actions have unstoppable force.”

Robert Greene (1959) American author

Chap. 13 : Advance with a Sense of Purpose
The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

Dead , Fate , Past , Knowledge

“You are born into a generation that defines who you are more than you can imagine. Your generation wants to separate itself from the previous one and set a new tone for the world. In the process, it forms certain tastes, values, and ways of thinking that you as an individual internalize. As you get older, these generational values and ideas tend to close you off from other points of view, constraining your mind. Your task is to understand as deeply as possible this powerful influence on who you are and how you see the world. Knowing in depth the spirit of your generation and the times you live in, you will be better able to exploit the zeitgeist. You will be the one to anticipate and set the trends that your generation hungers for. You will free your mind from the mental constraints placed on you by your generation, and you will become more of the individual you imagine yourself to be, with all the power that freedom will bring you.”

Robert Greene (1959) American author

Chap. 17 : Seize the Historical Moment
The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

Hunger , Imagination , Time , Understanding

“Though patriotism includes a sentimental, as it were a family, feeling for place, we can distinguish the ethical motive from the sentimental. At certain times in certain countries there has been a moral urgency to be patriotic when the actual or ideal policy of a man’s nation has been a sine qua non for his conscience. But to-day patriotism, in so far as it means subordination to a specifically national policy, is superannuated. This war, we assume, is not being fought-not by most of us-for any merely national end; we are fighting it, primarily and clearly, for our lives, and secondarily, and, alas! vaguely, for a new international order.”

Louis MacNeice (1907–1963) poet

"Traveller's Return", in Horizon, February 1941, Reprinted in David Pierce Irish Writing in the Twentieth Century: A Reader. Cork University Press, 2000.

Family , Time , Country , War

“Compassion is the single most critical thing for the human race to develop. And quite honestly, the survival of our own species depends on it. We are no longer in a place where we can wait for compassion to spontaneously occur. We now have to take steps to help it to arise.”

Teal Swan (1984) American spiritual teacher

Help , Waiting , Dependency

“There is no possibility for two people to stay connected and close if they are in different parallel perceptual realities, no matter if their bodies are in the same place. And it is intimacy and attunement that will bridge the gap between these different parallel realities that make us so utterly alone.”

Teal Swan (1984) American spiritual teacher

Reality , People , Making love

“As we find a place in the economic world the rebellion of youth subsides; we disapprove of earthquakes when our feet are on the earth. We forget then the radicalism then in a gentle liberalism — which is radicalism softened with the consciousness of a bank account.”

Will Durant (1885–1981) American historian, philosopher and writer

Source: Fallen Leaves (2014), Ch. 3 : On Middle Age

World , Forgetting , Youth

“Technology is nothing. What's important is that you have a faith in people, that they're basically good and smart, and if you give them tools, they'll do wonderful things with them. It's not the tools that you have faith in — tools are just tools. They work, or they don't work. It's people you have faith in or not. Yeah, sure, I'm still optimistic I mean, I get pessimistic sometimes but not for long. … The world's clearly a better place. Individuals can now do things that only large groups of people with lots of money could do before. What that means is, we have much more opportunity for people to get to the marketplace — not just the marketplace of commerce but the marketplace of ideas. The marketplace of publications, the marketplace of public policy. You name it. We've given individuals and small groups equally powerful tools to what the largest, most heavily funded organizations in the world have. And that trend is going to continue. You can buy for under $10,000 today a computer that is just as powerful, basically, as one anyone in the world can get their hands on.”

Steve Jobs (1955–2011) American entrepreneur and co-founder of Apple Inc.

1990s, Rolling Stone interview (1994)

Money , Faith , People , World

“I remember the very place in Hyde Park where, in my fourteenth year, on the eve of leaving my father's house for a long absence, he told me that I should find, as I got acquainted with new people, that I had been taught many things which youths of my age did not commonly know; and that many persons would be disposed to talk to me of this, and to compliment me upon it. What other things he said on this topic I remember very imperfectly; but he wound up by saying, that whatever I knew more than others, could not be ascribed to any merit in me, but to the very unusual advantage which had fallen to my lot.”

John Stuart Mill book Autobiography

Source: Autobiography (1873)

https://archive.org/details/autobiography01mill/page/34/mode/1up p. 34

Personality , People , Age , Housing

“the correct statement would be, not that I disliked poetry, but that I was theoretically indifferent to it. I disliked any sentiments in poetry which I should have disliked in prose; and that included a great deal. And I was wholly blind to its place in human culture, as a means of educating the feelings. But I was always personally very susceptible to some kinds of it.”

John Stuart Mill book Autobiography

'Long before I had enlarged in any considerable degree, the basis of my intellectual creed, I had obtained in the natural course of my mental progress, poetic culture of the most valuable kind, by means of reverential admiration for the lives and characters of heroic persons; especially the heroes of philosophy.'
Autobiography (1873)

Indifference , Personality , Education , Feeling

“It never occurred to me that I had brought him not just to show him my little world, but to ask my little world to let him in, so that the place where I came to be alone on summer afternoons would get to know him, judge him, see if he fitted in, take him in, so that I might come back here and remember.”

André Aciman book Call Me By Your Name

Part 2, p. 77
Call Me By Your Name (2007)

World , Summer

“The sin of self-pollution is one of the vilest, the basest, and the most degrading that a human being can commit. It is worse than beastly. Those who commit it place themselves far below the meanest brute that breathes.”

John Harvey Kellogg (1852–1943) American physician

Plain Facts for Old and Young, Burlington, IA: Segner & Condit, 1881, p. 428 https://books.google.it/books?id=pubVzCbD_DMC&dq=%22a+dreadful%22&focus=searchwithinvolume.

Self-confidence

“School is a place that adds to emotional pain for most children alive today. It is even more so the case for the two most isolated kids in school: 1. The social outcasts who are isolated in every way. 2. The social actors who are surrounded by other kids, but no one sees them because they are in a relationship not with them, but with the role they play.”

Teal Swan (1984) American spiritual teacher

School , Pain , Children , Way

“Nothing which consists of corporeal matter is absolutely light, but that is comparatively lighter which is rarer, either by its own nature, or by accidental heat. And it is not to be thought that light bodies are escaping to the surface of the universe while they are carried upwards, or that they are not attracted by the earth. They are attracted, but in a less degree, and so are driven outwards by the heavy bodies; which being done, they stop, and are kept by the earth in their own place.”

Johannes Kepler book Mysterium Cosmographicum

As translated and quoted by Bryant, ibid.
Mysterium Cosmographicum (1596), Astronomia nova (1609)

Light , Universe , Nature

“Almost all the regimes which did not place Man and the sanctity of Life at the heart of their world view, all those regimes have collapsed and are no more. You can see it for yourselves in our own day.”

Yitzhak Rabin (1922–1995) Israeli politician, statesman and general

ibid

World , Life , Heart

“We must ally ourselves with the oppressed communities of the world. We cannot make our stand as nationalists, we cannot even make our stand as internationalists. We must place our future hopes upon the philosophy of intercommunalism, a philosophy which holds that the rise of imperialism in America transforms all other nations into oppressed communities. In revolutionary love we must make common cause with these oppressed communities.”

Huey P. Newton (1942–1989) Co-founder of the Black Panther Party

Resolutions and Declarations (1970)
To Die For The People

Future , Hope , Communication , World

“One must say Yes to life, and embrace it wherever it is found — and it is found in terrible places. … For nothing is fixed, forever and forever, it is not fixed; the earth is always shifting, the light is always changing, the sea does not cease to grind down rock. Generations do not cease to be born, and we are responsible to them because we are the only witnesses they have. The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to each other and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.”

James Baldwin (1924–1987) (1924-1987) writer from the United States

From Nothing Personal, a collaboration with the photographer Richard Avedon (1964). Baldwin's text for the volume can be found " here https://scholarworks.umass.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1042&context=cibs".

Faith , Light , Children , Lovers

“About five years ago, somebody showed me some web sites that had my material all over them, and I thought that was fascinating. One reason was, I'd never seen my jokes written one right after another like that. I write on drawing paper—I don't even like lines on the paper—so I have notebooks all over the place with handwritten pieces of my act in them. So to see it go by, all typed out neatly, was like, "Wow."”

Steven Wright (1955) American actor and author

And then two or three years ago, someone showed me a site, and half of it that said I wrote it, I didn't write. Recently, I saw one, and I didn't write any of it. What's disturbing is that with a few of these jokes, I wish I had thought of them. A giant amount of them, I'm embarrassed that people think I thought of them, because some are really bad.
[The Tenacity of the Cockroach: Conversations with Entertainment's Most Enduring Outsiders, Thompson, Steven, 2002, Three Rivers Press, 0609809911, September 9, 2012, http://www.avclub.com/articles/steven-wright,13796/]
Interviews

Drawing

“In the places I go there are things that I see
That I never could spell if I stopped with the Z.
I'm telling you this 'cause you're one of my friends.
My alphabet starts where your alphabet ends!”

Dr. Seuss book On Beyond Zebra!

On Beyond Zebra! (1955)

“Just as we pull up to this place…I notice two very large American flags…It's as if there was a need to emphasize the Americanness of this place. "We are American" says the first flag. "No we really are!"”

Margaret Cho (1968) American stand-up comedian

says the second. It struck me as enormously sad, somehow awkward and tragic.
From Her Books, I Have Chosen To Stay And Fight, NATIONALISM

“So Sweden. Good place not bad people. But a successful model for a viable economy in today's global market. Incorrect!”

Steven Crowder (1987) American actor

Bad luck , People , Success

“We emerged victorious in every battle with the enemy at all times and in all places, because we were full of confidence in victory, and maintained an indefatigable fighting and self-sacrificing spirit without losing our composure and hope, even in confrontation with an enemy force, which was dozens of times stronger in number.”

Kim Il-sung (1912–1994) President of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea

With the century, vol. 5

Confidence , Time , Victory , Hope

“I tell them that a simple story is the best story, and that time and place is really crucial to good storytelling. Establish your stories in a specific time and place and get your characters set solidly within that framework before you let them start moving from one room to the next...”

James McBride (writer) (1957) American journalist

On the writing advice he gives to his students in "James McBride's Advice For New Writers: 'A Simple Story Is The Best Story'" https://www.npr.org/2020/02/29/810052791/james-mcbrides-advice-for-new-writers-a-simple-story-is-the-best-story in NPR (2020 Feb 29)

Time

“We must see that all places, times and conscious organisms are equally "this one."”

Arnold Zuboff (1946) American philosopher

For a failure to see this must distort our view by forcing us to accommodate in it what seems to be our own special objective status; and that awkward accommodation must then ruin any prospect of discovering the truly objective universal principles that govern the world.
" An Introduction to Universalism http://nsl.com/misc/zuboff/zuboff1.htm" p. 9

Time

“The artist, however faithful to his personal vision of reality, becomes the last champion of the individual mind and sensibility against an intrusive society and an officious state. The great artist is thus a solitary figure. He has, as Frost said, a lover's quarrel with the world. In pursuing his perceptions of reality, he must often sail against the currents of his time. This is not a popular role. If Robert Frost was much honored in his lifetime, it was because a good many preferred to ignore his darker truths. Yet in retrospect, we see how the artist's fidelity has strengthened the fiber of our national life. If sometimes our great artist have been the most critical of our society, it is because their sensitivity and their concern for justice, which must motivate any true artist, makes him aware that our Nation falls short of its highest potential. I see little of more importance to the future of our country and our civilization than full recognition of the place of the artist.”

John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) 35th president of the United States of America

1963, Speech at Amherst College

Faith , Time , Justice , Country

“Wisdom and contrivance are shown in overcoming difficulties, so there is no place for them in a Being for whom no difficulties exist”

John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) British philosopher and political economist

pages 176-177; Early Modern Texts page 16
Three Essays on Religion (posthumous publication), Theism, Part II: Attributes

Wisdom

“The inner revolution will not be televised or sold on the Internet. It must take place within one's own mind and heart.”

Noah Levine (1971) American Buddhist teacher

Dharma Punx: A Memoir (2003)

Heart

“I Photo Elfed all day for a variety of Santas and it struck me that many of the parents don't allow their children to speak at all. A child sits upon Santa's lap and the parents say, 'All right now, Amber, tell Santa what you want. Tell him you want a Baby Alive and My Pretty Ballerina and that winter coat you saw in the catalog.'
The parents name the gifts they have already bought. They don't want to hear the word 'pony' or 'television set,' so they talk through the entire visit, placing words in the child's mouth. When the child hops off the lap, the parents address their children, each and every time, with, 'What do you say to Santa?'
The child says, 'Thank you, Santa.'”

David Sedaris book Barrel Fever

It is sad because you would like to believe that everyone is unique and then they disappoint you every time by being exactly the same, asking for the same things, reciting the exact same lines as though they have been handed a script.
All of us take pride and pleasure in the fact that we are unique, but I'm afraid that when all is said and done the police are right: it all comes down to the fingerprints.
Essay, "Santaland diaries" - p.233-234, 235
Barrel Fever (1994)

Baby , Time , Photo , Children

“When the structures and values of Salvadoran society exemplify a democratic system, then the revolution I have worked for will have taken place. This is my dream.”

José Napoleón Duarte (1925–1990) President of El Salvador

Duarte: My Story https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:BookSources/0-399-13202-3 (1986), G.P. Putnam's Sons
1980s

Dreams

“Jesus' call to bear the cross places all who follow him in the community of the forgiveness of sins. Forgiving sins is the Christ-suffering required of his disciples. It is required of all Christians.”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906–1945) German Lutheran pastor, theologian, dissident anti-Nazi

Source: Discipleship (1937), Discipleship and the Cross, p. 88

Forgiveness , Christ , Suffering , Communication

“If communication takes place between the artwork and the public, it is on the level of sensibility, through the emotions and their immanent modifications. It does not have anything to do with words, with collective, ideological or scientific representations, or with their critical, intellectual or literary formulations, in short, anything that is called culture. It is totally independent from that type of culture. This is why it is addressed to the group of people who ‘lack culture’. It is popular in the sense that it leads to what is most essential in each human being: one’s capacity to feel, to suffer and to love.”

Michel Henry (1922–2002) French writer

Michel Henry, Seeing the invisible: On Kandinsky, Continuum, 2009, p. 73
Books on Culture and Barbarism, Seeing the Invisible: On Kandinsky (1988)

People , Suffering , Communication , Sense

“Suffering makes up the tissue of the existence, it is the place where the life becomes living, the reality and the phenomenological effectivity of this gradual change.”

Michel Henry (1922–2002) French writer

Original: (fr) La souffrance forme le tissu de l'existence, elle est le lieu où la vie devient vivante, la réalité et l'effectivité phénoménologique de ce devenir.
Source: Michel Henry, L'Essence de la manifestation, 1963, t. 2, § 70, p. 828
Source: Books on Phenomenology of Life, The Essence of Manifestation (1963)

Suffering , Reality , Life , Making love