Quotes about plain
page 6

“Trust a girl of sixteen for knowing well if she is pretty; concerning her plainness she may be ignorant.”

Mary Barton, ch. 3 (1848)

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

Sita Ram Goel (1921–2003) Indian activist

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

Country

“The wheel may be one of those cases where the engineering solution can be seen in plain view, yet be unattainable in evolution because it lies [on] the other side of a deep valley, cutting unbridgeably across the massif of Mount Improbable.”

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

[Dawkins, Richard, Richard Dawkins, Why don't animals have wheels?, Sunday Times, November 24, 1996, http://www.simonyi.ox.ac.uk/dawkins/WorldOfDawkins-archive/Dawkins/Work/Articles/1996-11-24wheels.shtml, October 29, 2008, http://web.archive.org/web/20070221073440/http://www.simonyi.ox.ac.uk/dawkins/WorldOfDawkins-archive/Dawkins/Work/Articles/1996-11-24wheels.shtml, February 21, 2007]

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

William Kristol (1952) American writer

2010s, 2017, The Two Crises (2017)

War, Happiness, World, Fear

“Our entire linear and accumulative culture collapses if we cannot stockpile the past in plain view.”

Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007) French sociologist and philosopher

The Precession of Simulcra, Ramses, or the Rosy-Colored Resurrection
1980s, Simulacra and Simulation (1981)

Past

“And here I hold that a liberal and brotherly welcome to all who are likely to come to the United States is the only wise policy which this nation can adopt. It has been thoughtfully observed that every nation, owing to its peculiar character and composition, has a definite mission in the world. What that mission is, and what policy is best adapted to assist in its fulfillment, is the business of its people and its statesmen to know, and knowing, to make a noble use of this knowledge. I need not stop here to name or describe the missions of other or more ancient nationalities. Our seems plain and unmistakable. Our geographical position, our relation to the outside world, our fundamental principles of government, world-embracing in their scope and character, our vast resources, requiring all manner of labor to develop them, and our already existing composite population, all conspire to one grand end, and that is, to make us the perfect national illustration of the unity and dignity of the human family that the world has ever seen. In whatever else other nations may have been great and grand, our greatness and grandeur will be found in the faithful application of the principle of perfect civil equality to the people of all races and of all creeds. We are not only bound to this position by our organic structure and by our revolutionary antecedents, but by the genius of our people. Gathered here from all quarters of the globe, by a common aspiration for national liberty as against caste, divine right govern and privileged classes, it would be unwise to be found fighting against ourselves and among ourselves, it would be unadvised to attempt to set up any one race above another, or one religion above another, or prescribe any on account of race, color or creed.”

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

1860s, Our Composite Nationality (1869)

People, World, Family, Faith

“The only excuse for a novelist, aside from the entertainment and vicarious living his books give the people who read them, is as a sort of second-class historian of the age he lives in. The "reality" he missed by writing about imaginary people, he gains by being able to build a reality more nearly out of his own factual experience than a plain historian or biographer can.”

John Dos Passos (1896–1970) novelist, playwright, poet, journalist, painter

"Statement of Belief," Bookman, Sept 1928

People, Books, Age, Reality

“What you won't hear, except from me, is that 'Let the good times roll' is an especially risky message for African-Americans. The plain fact is that they tend to possess poorer native judgment than members of better-educated groups. Thus they need stricter moral guidance from society. … In contrast to New Orleans, there was only minimal looting after the horrendous 1995 earthquake in Kobe, Japan — because, when you get down to it, [the] Japanese aren't blacks.”

Steve Sailer (1958) American journalist and movie critic

Racial Reality And The New Orleans Nightmare https://archive.is/20121211061614/www.vdare.com/sailer/050903_new_orleans.htm, VDARE, September 3, 2005

Education, Time

“I had time after time watched the progression across the plain of the giraffe, in their queer, inimitable, vegetative gracefulness as if it were not a herd of animals but a family of rare, long stemmed spackled gigantic flowers slowly advancing. It was, in giant size, the border of a very old, infinitely precious Persian carpet in the dyes of green, yellow and black-brown”

Karen Blixen book Out of Africa

Out of Africa (1937)

Family, Flowers, Time, Animals

“Be plain in dress, and sober in your diet;
In short, my deary, kiss me, and be quiet.”

Mary Wortley Montagu (1689–1762) writer and poet from England

A Summary of Lord Lyttelton’s Advice.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Kiss

“The fiery lava in the hollow bosom of the earth, if it be restrained, in spite of its prison, bursts forth with greater force; then flows abroad, but, as it flows, subverts, beats down, and overthrows plains, mountains, forests, and cities.”

Pietro Metastasio Achille in Sciro

Del terreno nel concavo seno
Vasto incendio se bolle ristretto,
A dispetto del carcere indegno,
Con più sdegno gran strada si fa.
Fugge allora; ma, intanto che fugge,
Crolla, abbatte, sovverte, distrugge
Piani, monti, foreste e città.
Act III, scene 3.
Achille in Sciro (1736)

Mountain

“As to the essence of human nature, what our national experience has made plain is this, that to remain in a continually exalted moral condition is not human nature. That has happened which was prophesied: we have gone down hill from the Revolution until now; we are absorbed in "mere money-getting."”

Voltairine de Cleyre (1866–1912) American anarchist writer and feminist

Anarchism & American Traditions (1908)

Money, Nature

“One ought not to be unkind to a woman merely on account of her plainness, any more than one had a right to take liberties with her merely because she was handsome.”

Murasaki Shikibu book The Tale of Genji

Source: Tale of Genji, The Tale of Genji, trans. Arthur Waley, Ch. 36: Kashiwagi

“No matter how you look at it,” Margo muttered, “when you get down to it, human beings aren’t really much better than killer plains apes, are they? Just a thin sugar-coating of civilization to make ’em look prettier.”

Robert Lynn Asprin (1946–2008) American science fiction and fantasy author

Source: Ripping Time (2000), Chapter 12 (p. 364)

“This way, gentlemen, if you please. Come right on board the Declaration. I am the man from Oregon, with dispatches to the President of these United States, that you all read about in this morning's paper. Come on board, ladies and gentlemen, if you want to hear the news from Oregon. I've just come across the plains, two months from the Columbia River, where the Injuns are killing your missionaries. Those passengers who come aboard the Declaration shall hear all about it before they get to Pittsburg. Don't stop thar, looking at my old wolf-skin cap, but just come aboard, and hear what I've got to tell!”

Joseph Meek (1810–1875) American mountain man, pioneer of the Oregon Country, politician

as quoted in Frances Fuller Victor's Eleven years in the Rocky Mountains and a life on the frontier

Way, Wolf, Reading

“Have you ever wondered, perhaps, why opinions which the majority of people quite naturally hold are, if anyone dares express them publicly, denounced as 'controversial, 'extremist', 'explosive', 'disgraceful', and overwhelmed with a violence and venom quite unknown to debate on mere political issues? It is because the whole power of the aggressor depends upon preventing people from seeing what is happening and from saying what they see.

The most perfect, and the most dangerous, example of this process is the subject miscalled, and deliberately miscalled, 'race'. The people of this country are told that they must feel neither alarm nor objection to a West Indian, African and Asian population which will rise to several millions being introduced into this country. If they do, they are 'prejudiced', 'racialist'... A current situation, and a future prospect, which only a few years ago would have appeared to everyone not merely intolerable but frankly incredible, has to be represented as if welcomed by all rational and right-thinking people. The public are literally made to say that black is white. Newspapers like the Sunday Times denounce it as 'spouting the fantasies of racial purity' to say that a child born of English parents in Peking is not Chinese but English, or that a child born of Indian parents in Birmingham is not English but Indian. It is even heresy to assert the plain fact that the English are a white nation. Whether those who take part know it or not, this process of brainwashing by repetition of manifest absurdities is a sinister and deadly weapon. In the end, it renders the majority, who are marked down to be the victims of violence or revolution or tyranny, incapable of self-defence by depriving them of their wits and convincing them that what they thought was right is wrong. The process has already gone perilously far, when political parties at a general election dare not discuss a subject which results from and depends on political action and which for millions of electors transcends all others in importance; or when party leaders can be mesmerised into accepting from the enemy the slogans of 'racialist' and 'unChristian' and applying them to lifelong political colleagues...

In the universities, we are told that education and the discipline ought to be determined by the students, and that the representatives of the students ought effectively to manage the institutions. This is nonsense—manifest, arrant nonsense; but it is nonsense which it is already obligatory for academics and journalists, politicians and parties, to accept and mouth upon pain of verbal denunciation and physical duress.

We are told that the economic achievement of the Western countries has been at the expense of the rest of the world and has impoverished them, so that what are called the 'developed' countries owe a duty to hand over tax-produced 'aid' to the governments of the undeveloped countries. It is nonsense—manifest, arrant nonsense; but it is nonsense with which the people of the Western countries, clergy and laity, but clergy especially—have been so deluged and saturated that in the end they feel ashamed of what the brains and energy of Western mankind have done, and sink on their knees to apologise for being civilised and ask to be insulted and humiliated.

Then there is the 'civil rights' nonsense. In Ulster we are told that the deliberate destruction by fire and riot of areas of ordinary property is due to the dissatisfaction over allocation of council houses and opportunities for employment. It is nonsense—manifest, arrant nonsense; but that has not prevented the Parliament and government of the United Kingdom from undermining the morale of civil government in Northern Ireland by imputing to it the blame for anarchy and violence.

Most cynically of all, we are told, and told by bishops forsooth, that communist countries are the upholders of human rights and guardians of individual liberty, but that large numbers of people in this country would be outraged by the spectacle of cricket matches being played here against South Africans. It is nonsense—manifest, arrant nonsense; but that did not prevent a British Prime Minister and a British Home Secretary from adopting it as acknowledged fact.”

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

The "enemy within" speech during the 1970 general election campaign; speech to the Turves Green Girls School, Northfield, Birmingham (13 June 1970), from Still to Decide (Eliot Right Way Books, 1972), pp. 36-37.
1970s

Pain, People, World, Education

“It is always a mistake to be plain-spoken.”

Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) American art collector and experimental writer of novels, poetry and plays

"As Eighty," from Bee Time Vine (1953, Yale University Press); written in 1923

“Hayek had high regard for Marx in technical economic theory and considered him a predecessor in his business cycle theory. […] It was not in technical economic theory that the classical Austrians disagreed with Marx. So towering a figure in history is Marx that discussion of his thought in summary form is always difficult, for there is so much that he said and that others have said about him. At the same time, so tendentious, ill-spirited, and just plain wrong a thinker was Marx that it is surprising that he may have had some of the influence attributed to him. Hayek’s opposition to Marx was in the realm of practical political emanations from Marx’s thought. Here he considered Marx’s influence to have been wholly pernicious.”

Alan O. Ebenstein (1959) American political scientist, educator and author

Hayek's Journey: The Mind of Friedrich Hayek (2003)

History, Business, Time

“What a wise man knows seems so plain and simple to himself that he easily makes the mistake of thinking it to be so for others.”

John Lancaster Spalding (1840–1916) Catholic bishop

Source: Aphorisms and Reflections (1901), p. 233

Thinking

“I am often asked if I would have liked to have been involved with Jurassic Park. The plain answer is no. Although excellent, it is not with all its dollars what I would have wished to do with my career. I was always a loner and worked best that way. Since the very beginning I fought and struggled under constant pressure to keep the design and final result within my hands. As time moved on this became more difficult, until I was forced to bow to the fact that my method of working, in the financial sense, was no longer practical. Model animation has been relegated to a reflection, or a starting point for creature computer effects that has reached a high few could have anticipated. However, for all the wonderful achievements of the computer, the process creates creatures that are too realistic and for me that makes them unreal because they have lost one vital element - a dream quality. Fantasy, for me, is realizing strange beings that are so removed from the 21st century. These beings would include not only dinosaurs, because no matter what the scientists say, we still don't know how dinosaurs looked or moved, but also creatures of the mind. Fantastical creatures where the unreal quality becomes even more vital. Stop-motion supplies the perfect breath of life for them, offering a look of pure fantasy because their movements are beyond anything we know.”

Ray Harryhausen (1920–2013) American animator

Ray Harryhausen & Tony Dalton (2003), An Animated Life, Aurum Press, p. 8

Life, Dreams, Way, Sense

“Imagine that leader of all the enemy, in that great plain of Babylon, sitting on a sort of throne of smoking flame, a horrible and terrifying sight. Watch him calling together countless devils, to despatch them into different cities till the whole world is covered, forgetting no province or locality, no class or single individual.”

Ignatius of Loyola (1491–1556) Catholic Saint, founder of the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits)

No. 140-141.
Spiritual Exercises (1548)

World, Imagination, Forgetting

“When we all got back to camp, our General communicated by heliograph through a distant mountain top with Sir valley and lay it waste with fire and sword in vengeance. This accordingly we did, but with great precautions. We proceeded systematically, village by village, and we destroyed the houses, filled up the wells, blew down the towers, cut down the great shady trees, burned the crops and broke the reservoirs in punitive devastation. So long as the villages were in the plain, this was quite easy. The tribesmen sat on the mountains and sullen watched the destruction of their homes and means of livelihood. When however we had to attack the villas on the sides of the mountains they resisted fiercely, and we lost for every village two or three British officers and fifteen or twenty native soldiers. Whether it was worth it, I cannot tell. At any rate, at the end of a fortnight the valley was a desert, and honour was satisfied.”

Winston S. Churchill book My Early Life

My Early Life: A Roving Commission (1930)
Source: https://books.google.com/books?id=ooFGl74WbXsC&pg=PT149

Home, Mountain, Communication, Tree

“Between the town of Giles, to the north of the Tomkinson Range, and Forrest in the Nullarbor Plain, lies the Great Victorian Desert. It is hot, arid, desolate and merciless; and whatever the Creator had in mind when He made it that way, it most certainly wasn't human beings.
It's a really awful place to be if you've got toothache.”

Tom Holt (1961) British writer

c. 3
Grailblazers (1994)

Way

“Again, it should be borne in mind that the mere text, and only the text, and not any commentaries or creeds written by those who wished to give the text a meaning apart from its plain reading, was adopted as the Constitution of the United States. It should also be borne in mind that the intentions of those who framed the Constitution, be they good or bad, for slavery or against slavery, are so respected so far, and so far only, as we find those intentions plainly stated in the Constitution. It would be the wildest of absurdities, and lead to endless confusion and mischiefs, if, instead of looking to the written paper itself, for its meaning, it were attempted to make us search it out, in the secret motives, and dishonest intentions, of some of the men who took part in writing it. It was what they said that was adopted by the people, not what they were ashamed or afraid to say, and really omitted to say.”

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

1860s, The Constitution of the United States: Is It Pro-Slavery or Anti-Slavery? (1860)

Men, People, Secret, Search

“Somehow for me these common tunes
Can never sound the same again:
They've magic now to thrill my heart
And bring before me, clear and plain,
Man that is master of his flesh,
And has the laugh of death and pain.”

Eva Dobell (1876–1963) British poet

Unsourced, In A Soldiers' Hospital II: Gramophone Tunes

Death, Pain, Heart

“Every part of all this soil is sacred to my people. Every hillside, every valley, every plain and grove has been hollowed by some sad or happy event in days long vanished. The very dust you now stand on responds more willingly to their footsteps than to yours, because it is rich with the blood of our ancestors and our bare feet are conscious of the sympathetic touch.”

Chief Seattle (1786–1866) Duwamish chief

Misattributed

Happiness, People, Sadness, Parting

“Deep in the winter plain, two armies
Dig their machinery, to destroy each other.
Men freeze and hunger. No one is given leave
On either side, except the dead, and wounded.”

Stephen Spender (1909–1995) English poet and man of letters

"Two Armies"
The Still Centre (1939)

Men, Hunger, Winter, Dead

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

T. E. Lawrence book Seven Pillars of Wisdom

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

World, Dogs, Way, Flowers

“Bring me men to match my mountains,
Bring me men to match my plains,
Men with empires in their purpose,
And new eras in their brains.”

Sam Walter Foss (1858–1911) American writer

"The Coming American" (July 4, 1894), reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

Men, Mountain

“One outcome of the Norman Conquest was the making of the English language. …the speech of Alfred and Bede, was exiled from hall and bower, from court and cloister, and was despised as a peasant's jargon… It ceased almost, though not quite, to be a written language. … Now when a language is seldom written and is not an object of interest to scholars, it quickly adapts itself in the mouths of plain people to the needs and uses of life. …it can be altered much more easily when there are no grammarians to protest. During the three centuries when our native language was a peasant's dialect, it lost its clumsy inflexions and elaborate genders, and acquired the grace, suppleness, and adaptability which are among its chief merits.”

George Macaulay Trevelyan (1876–1962) Historian

A Shortened History of England (1959)

Life, People

“All the wild world is beautiful, and it matters but little where we go, to highlands or lowlands, woods or plains, on the sea or land or down among the crystals of waves or high in a balloon in the sky; through all the climates, hot or cold, storms and calms, everywhere and always we are in God's eternal beauty and love. So universally true is this, the spot where we chance to be always seems the best.”

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

June 1890, page 299
John of the Mountains, 1938

Love, God, World, Beauty

“Can it be the sun descending o'er the level plain of water or the Red Swan floating, flying wounded by the Magic Arrow? Staining all the waves with crimson, with the crimson of its life-blood, filling all the air with splendor, filling all the air with plumage? […] O'er it the Star of Evening melts and trembles through the purple, hangs suspensed in twilight, walks in silence through the heavens…”

Mike Oldfield (1953) English musician, multi-instrumentalist

Song lyrics, Incantations (1978)

Life, Star, Silence, Water

“Foldings of the earth's crust, low hills, extensive plains, mountain-chains and narrow valleys, broad table-lands and wide valleys, local chimneys or volcanoes, river-beds, lake-basins, inland seas,—such are some of the phenomena which, disconnected as they seem at first glance, have nevertheless been brought under certain principles, and explained according to definite physical laws.”

Louis Agassiz (1807–1873) Swiss naturalist

Geological Sketches (1870), ch 4, p. 98 https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=hvd.32044018968388;view=1up;seq=116

Law, Mountain, Sea

“Ask yourself why totalitarian dictatorships find it necessary to pour money and effort into propaganda for their own helpless, chained, gagged slaves, who have no means of protest or defense. The answer is that even the humblest peasant or the lowest savage would rise in blind rebellion, were he to realize that he is being immolated, not to some incomprehensible noble purpose, but to plain, naked human evil.”

Ayn Rand book The Virtue of Selfishness

The Virtue of Selfishness (1964)

Money, Effort, Evil

“There is no authority in the Bible for a woman to have a place of supremacy in the church. When she takes it she steps out of her right place. She goes against the plain teaching of The Bible when she takes the place of the authoritative teacher in the church.”

Ray Comfort (1949) New Zealand-born Christian minister and evangelist

Cults, Sects and Questions (c. 1979)

Teachers

“I want to see all Americans have a reasonable amount of leisure. Then I want to see them educated to use such leisure for their own enjoyment and betterment, and the strengthening of the quality of their citizenship. We can go a long way in that direction by getting them out of doors and really interested in nature. We can make still further progress by engaging them in games and sports. Our country is a land of cultured men and women. It is a land of agriculture, of industries, of schools, and of places of religious worship. It is a land of varied climes and scenery, of mountain and plain, of lake and river. It is the American heritage. We must make it a land of vision, a land of work, of sincere striving for the good, but we must add to all these, in order to round out the full stature of the people, an ample effort to make it a land of wholesome enjoyment and perennial gladness.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

1920s, The Democracy of Sports (1924)

Women, Men, People, Education

“Were I as base as is the lowly plain,
And you, my Love, as high as heaven above,
Yet should the thoughts of me your humble swain
Ascend to heaven, in honour of my Love.”

Joshua Sylvester (1563–1618) English poet

Poem: Love's Omnipresence http://www.bartleby.com/106/25.html

Love

“It is better to have a plain, substantial building, with no extravagance about it, but without a debt, than to have the most splendid specimen of Gothic architecture that is overlaid by a mortgage.”

William Mackergo Taylor (1829–1895) American theologian

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 151.

“" Tis plain to me
As A B C,
My dear friend, Mr. Neff!"
"Oh, yes! but then,"
Says Mr. N,
"You know I'm D E F!"”

Charles Follen Adams (1842–1918) American poet

"Yawcob Strauss", in Yawcob Strauss, and Other Poems (1876), p. 69.

“Plowboy: In your opinion, what are mankind's prospects for the near future?
Asimov: To tell the truth, I don't think the odds are very good that we can solve our immediate problems. I think the chances that civilization will survive more than another 30 years—that it will still be flourishing in 2010—are less than 50 percent.
Plowboy: What sort of disaster do you foresee?
Asimov: I imagine that as population continues to increase—and as the available resources decrease—there will be less energy and food, so we'll all enter a stage of scrounging. The average person's only concerns will be where he or she can get the next meal, the next cigarette, the next means of transportation. In such a universal scramble, the Earth will be just plain desolated, because everyone will be striving merely to survive regardless of the cost to the environment. Put it this way: If I have to choose between saving myself and saving a tree, I'm going to choose me.
Terrorism will also become a way of life in a world marked by severe shortages. Finally, some government will be bound to decide that the only way to get what its people need is to destroy another nation and take its goods … by pushing the nuclear button.
And this absolute chaos is going to develop—even if nobody wants nuclear war and even if everybody sincerely wants peace and social justice—if the number of mouths to feed continues to grow. Nothing will be able to stand up against the pressure of the whole of humankind simply trying to stay alive!”

Isaac Asimov (1920–1992) American writer and professor of biochemistry at Boston University, known for his works of science fiction …

Mother Earth News interview (1980)

Life, War, People, Truth

“I can write about prayer, you can read about prayer…but sooner or later you have to fall to your knees and just plain pray. Then, and only then, will you begin to operate in the vein of God's miracle-working ways.”

Bill Hybels (1951) American writer

Too Busy Not to Pray (2008, InterVarsity Press)

God, Way, Reading

“Sometimes the answers are hiding in plain sight. A eureka moment came to Archimedes when he connected the dots between the ordinary routine of taking a bath and the scientific pursuit of determining the volume of an irregularly shaped object.”

Newton Lee American computer scientist

Google It: Total Information Awareness, 2016

“Writing isn’t fun. It’s the hardest work in the world. The very, very hardest. I mean creative writing. If it’s reportorial, it’s a different thing. When you have to create a whole milieu, with characters and background, that’s a different thing entirely. … Oh, you start out all enthusiastic. But after two or three chapters it becomes plain drudgery. I worked about ten hours the other night just on correcting and rewriting, because what you write originally is just a shadow of what you had in mind.”

Taylor Caldwell (1900–1985) Novelist

1970s-, The Captains, the Kings, and Taylor Caldwell (1978)

World, Night

“Mill, in speaking of Hume's celebrated principle, "that nothing is credible which is contradictory to experience, or at variance with the laws of nature," calls it a very plain and harmless proposition, being, in effect, nothing more than that whatever is contradictory to a complete induction is incredible. Admit the existence of a Deity, and the possibility of a miracle is the natural consequence. No doubt our examination of the evidence which sustains an unusual phenomenon should be most carefully conducted; but we must not measure the credibility or incredibility of an event by the narrow sphere of our own experience, nor forget that there is a Divine energy which overrides what we familiarly call the laws of nature.”

Charles Babbage Passages from the life of a philosopher

"Passages from the life of a philosopher", Appendix, p. 488
Passages from the Life of a Philosopher (1864)

Law, Nature, Forgetting

“The word is clear only to the kind who on peak or plain, from dark northern ice-fields to the hot wet jungles, through all wine and want, through lies and unfamiliar truth, dark or light, are governed by the unknown gods, and though each man knows the law, no man may give tongue to it.”

Stephen Crane (1871–1900) American novelist, short story writer, poet, and journalist

"The Clan of No Name" (1899); published in the anthology Wounds in the Rain (1900)

God, Truth, Law, Light

“In the year A. D. 1202, when Qulb-ud-Din captured Kalinjar, after the temples had been convened into mosques, and the very name of idolatry was annihilated, fifty thousand men came under the collar of slavery and the plain became black as pitch with Hindus.”

Qutb al-Din Aibak (1150–1210) Turkic peoples king of Northwest India

Dr. Murray Titus quoted from B.R. Ambedkar, Pakistan or The Partition of India (1946)

Men

“Great cities, or the endless beautiful plains stretched out before
his jaded gaze and disappeared into the nothingness of his feeling. ~ Fall in Love”

Steve Kilbey (1954) British artist

Lyrics

Love, Beauty, Feeling

“Towards the end of the twelfth century, while Western Europe was still wavering between a dying Roman influence and a dawning Gothicism, preliminaries to a medieval era which would make possible the development of a world-wide humanism, Asia had already lived through her classical period and, sinking into decay, was preparing to face a long period of political and spiritual unrest. While India was beginning to suffer under the yoke of the victorious Mussulman, who had come down on her from the mountains of Afghanistan and the plains of Iran, and while the domination of the Khmers was reaching its climax at Angkor, China, under pressure from the barbarians of the north, was withdrawing to the south where the Song empire, thinking itself safe from invasions, continued to live a life of luxury.”

Louis Frédéric (1923–1996) French scholar

Frédéric, L. (1984). Daily life in Japan at the time of the samurai, 1185-1603. Tokyo: Tuttle.

Life, World, Mountain, Thinking

“When Galilei let balls of a particular weight, which he had determined himself, roll down an inclined plain, or Torricelli made the air carry a weight, which he had previously determined to be equal to that of a definite volume of water; or when, in later times, Stahl changed metal into lime, and lime again into metals, by withdrawing and restoring something, a new light flashed on all students of nature. They comprehended that reason has insight into that only, which she herself produces on her own plan, and that she must move forward with the principles of her judgments, according to fixed law, and compel nature to answer her questions, but not let herself be led by nature, as it were in leading strings, because otherwise accidental observations made on no previously fixed plan, will never converge towards a necessary law, which is the only thing that reason seeks and requires. Reason, holding in one hand its principles, according to which concordant phenomena alone can be admitted as laws of nature, and in the other hand the experiment, which it has devised according to those principles, must approach nature, in order to be taught by it: but not in the character of a pupil, who agrees to everything the master likes, but as an appointed judge, who compels the witnesses to answer the questions which he himself proposes. Therefore even the science of physics entirely owes the beneficial revolution in its character to the happy thought, that we ought to seek in nature (and not import into it by means of fiction) whatever reason must learn from nature, and could not know by itself, and that we must do this in accordance with what reason itself has originally placed into nature. Thus only has the study of nature entered on the secure method of a science, after having for many centuries done nothing but grope in the dark.”

Immanuel Kant book Critique of Pure Reason

Preface to 2nd edition, Tr. F. Max Müller (1905)
Critique of Pure Reason (1781; 1787)

Happiness, Law, Question, Nature

“The evolution of life, and the evolutionary origin of mankind, are scientifically established as firmly and completely as any historical event not witnessed by human observers. Any concession to anti-evolutionists, suggesting that there are scientific reasons to doubt the facticity of evolution, would be propagating a plain untruth.”

Theodosius Dobzhansky (1900–1975) geneticist and evolutionary biologist

In a letter to J. Kunamoto, 1972.

Life

“Moreover, given the unpleasant option of having to associate with either the self-satisfied beautiful or the self-pitying plain, he'd choose the former every time because beauty could sometimes transcend smugness whereas self-pity just made ugliness all the more unattractive.”

Tom Robbins Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates

Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates (2000)

Beauty, Time

“The United States, for example, has never had a President as bad as George III, but neither has Britain had a king as admirable as George Washington (of whom William Thackeray rightly said that 'his glory will descend to remotest ages' while the memory of the sovereign went the other way). Still, even to concede this obvious argument is to make it plain that a bad monarch is at least as likely as a bad president even given the caprice of random selection by the hereditary principle…”

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

1990s, The Monarchy: A Critique of Britain's Favourite Fetish

Age, Way, Memory

“Winter Light — suppose we discuss that now?… The film is closely connected with a particular piece of music: Stravinski's A Psalm Symphony. I heard it on the radio one morning during Easter, and it struck me I'd like to make a film about a solitary church on the plains of Uppland. Someone goes into the church, locks himself in, goes up to the altar, and says: 'God, I'm staying here until in one way or another You've proved to me You exist. This is going to be the end either of You or of me!' Originally the film was to have been about the days and nights lived through by this solitary person in the locked church, getting hungrier and hungrier, thirstier and thirstier, more and more expectant, more and more filled with his own experiences, his visions, his dreams, mixing up dream and reality, while he's involved in this strange, shadowy wrestling match with God.
We were staying out on Toro, in the Stockholm archipelago. It was the first summer I'd had the sea all around me. I wandered about on the shore and went indoors and wrote, and went out again. The drama turned into something else; into something altogether tangible, something perfectly real, elementary and self-evident.
The film is based on something I'd actually experienced. Something a clergyman up in Dalarna told me: the story of the suicide, the fisherman Persson. One day the clergyman had tried to talk to him; the next, Persson had hanged himself. For the clergyman it was a personal catastrophe.”

Ingmar Bergman (1918–2007) Swedish filmmaker

Jonas Sima interview 
Bergman on Bergman (1970)

God, Dreams, Music, Way

““That is the principal thing,” thought Nekhludoff. “We all live in the silly belief that we ourselves are the lords of our world, that this world has been given us for our enjoyment. But this is evidently untrue. Somebody must have sent us here for some reason. And for this reason it is plain that we will suffer like those laborers suffer who do not fulfill the wishes of their Master. The will of the Lord is expressed in the teachings of Christ. Let man obey Him, and the Kingdom of the Lord will come on earth, and man will derive the greatest possible good.
“Seek the truth and the Kingdom of God, and the rest will come of itself. We seek that which is to come, and do not find it, and not only do we not build the Kingdom of God, but we destroy it.
“So this will henceforth be the task of my life!”
And indeed, from that night a new life began for Nekhludoff; not so much because he had risen into a new stage of existence, but because all that had happened to him till then assumed for him an altogether new meaning.”

Leo Tolstoy book Resurrection

Source: Resurrection (1899), Ch. 92

Life, God, Truth, World

“I bring fresh showers for the thirsting flowers,
From the seas and the streams;
I bear light shade for the leaves when laid
In their noonday dreams.
From my wings are shaken the dews that waken
The sweet buds every one,
When rocked to rest on their mother's breast,
As she dances about the sun.
I wield the flail of the lashing hail,
And whiten the green plains under,
And then again I dissolve it in rain,
And laugh as I pass in thunder.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley The Cloud

St. 1
The Cloud (1820)

Dreams, Flowers, Light, Sun

“It takes a heap o’ children to make a home that’s true,
And home can be a palace grand, or just a plain, old shoe;
But if it has a mother dear, and a good old dad or two,
Why, that’s the sort of good old home for good old me and you.”

Louis Untermeyer (1885–1977) American poet

Mother Goose Up-to-date
Other

Children, Shoe, Home

“Anita – I am so glad I'm out here – I can't tell you how much I like it. I like the plains – and I like the work [her painting] – everything is so ridiculously new – and there is something about it that just makes you glad you're living here – You understand – there is nothing here – so maybe there is something wrong with me that I am liking it so much.”

Georgia O'Keeffe (1887–1986) American artist

Canyon, Texas, (September, 1916), p. 187
1910s, Letters to Anita Pollitzer' (1916)

Understanding, Painting

“Every picture shop is filled with pictures of the Emperor; every photographer's with photos--all sizes and in all kinds of positions, in and out of uniform, in different uniforms, looking condescending, looking dignified, on horseback in uniform, on horseback in plain clothes, on donkeyback, head and shoulders without legs, legs without head and shoulders, helmet in hand, helmet on head, helmet on tail, flying in mid air etc. etc. All the statuary too turns on the Emperor. There are busts chiselled in all sizes and the number of different varieties to be seen in halls, houses, shop windows etc. is something quite unbearable. The toy shops are filled with toy Emperors; when he was young the boy Emperor; then the man Emperor; in fact Berlin is saturated with the blessed Emperor as man, woman, boy, girl, soldier, tinker, tailor. The end of it all will be that the people will go stark staring mad and the Emperor himself will go off with a bang the verdict being: "Death from explosion owing to his receiving more hero-worship than the human frame can bear!"”

Edward German (1862–1936) English musician and composer

In a letter to his sister, describing his observations from a trip to Germany of the cult-like status given the Kaiser.

Death, People, Photo, Girl

“Many families could not and should not have been expected to abandon hope that their sons, husbands, and brothers who had disappeared in the jungles of Vietnam might yet be returned to them. And many good people, who shared their hope and had come to their assistance, were motivated by the most admirable of intentions, to keep faith with Americans who had done all that duty asked of them. But these good intentions and understandable emotions also drew the attention of people with less honorable purposes. There came to exist in America, and elsewhere in the years that followed the Vietnam War, a small cottage industry made up of swindlers, dime-store Rambos, and just plain old conspiracy nuts who preyed on the emotions of the families and on the attention of ofﬁcials who were dedicated to the search for our missing. They had helped convince many of the families and a few members of Congress that the US. government had knowingly abandoned American servicemen in Vietnam and that ﬁve successive presidential administrations had covered up the crime. It was among the most damaging and most hurtful of all the lies about the Vietnam War that I ever encountered.”

John McCain (1936–2018) politician from the United States

Source: 2000s, 2002, Worth the Fighting For (2002), pp. 235 - 236

War, People, Family, Faith

“I have endeavour'd to make every thing so plain, that a very little Skill in Geometry may be sufficient to enable one to read this Book by himself. And upon this occasion I would advise all my Readers, who desire to make themselves Masters of this Subject, not to be contented with the Schemes they find here; but upon every Occasion to draw new ones of their own, in all the Variety of Circumstances they can think of. This will take up a little more Time at first; but in a little while they will find the vast Benefit of it, by the extensive Notions it will give them of the Nature of these Principles.”

Brook Taylor (1685–1731) English mathematician

New Principles of Linear Perspective (1715, 1749)

Books, Nature, Thinking, Time

“Give me a mystery – just a plain and simple one – a mystery which is diffidence and silence, a slim little, barefoot mystery: give me a mystery – just one!”

Yevgeny Yevtushenko (1932–2017) Russian poet, film director, teacher

"Mysteries" (1960), st. 10; Dimitri Obolensky (ed.) The Heritage of Russian Verse (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976) p. 452.

Silence

“Was that, too, destined to thrive awhile and decay and vanish, and be replaced by another, Nortekku wondered? Probably. The earth changes, he thought. Mountains rise, are ground to dust, give way to plains and valleys. Shorelines are drowned; new islands are thrust upward out of the sea. Civilizations are born, die, are forgotten. The planet alone abides, and all that dwells upon it is transient.
Contemplating these things, he felt much the richer for all his freshly acquired knowledge. He felt that for the first time he comprehended, at least some small way, the great chain of existence, stretching across time from misty past to unborn future.”

Robert Silverberg (1935) American speculative fiction writer and editor

Source: Short fiction, A Piece of the Great World (2005), p. 80

Way, Mountain, Knowledge, Change

“In this present that God has made us, there is nothing unworthy our care; we stand accountable for it even to a hair; and is it not a commission to man, to conduct man according to his condition; 'tis express, plain, and the very principal one, and the Creator has seriously and strictly prescribed it to us. Authority has power only to work in regard to matters of common judgment, and is of more weight in a foreign language; therefore let us again charge at it in this place”

Michel De Montaigne book Essays

Book III, Ch. 13
Essais (1595), Book III

God

“When peace and mercy, banish'd from the plain,
Sprung on the viewless winds to Heav'n again;
All, all forsook the friendless guilty mind,
But Hope, the charmer, linger'd still behind.”

Thomas Campbell (1777–1844) British writer

Part I, lines 37 - 40
Pleasures of Hope (1799)

Peace, Hope

“Since then, much has changed. We do not care for Raphael, and are less enthusiastic about the statues of the so-called golden age of Greece. Our predecessors’ ideals are not ours. Works signed by great names over the centuries appeal to us less. In the hurry and bustle of their times, worldly-wise artists created works for Popes and palaces. It is the ordinary people who laboured in their workshops and of whose lives scarcely anything is now known, whose very names have not come down to us, that we love and respect today in their plain, large-scale carvings in the cathedrals of Naumburg, Magdeburg and Bamberg.”

Emil Nolde (1867–1956) German artist

2.
1900 - 1920, On Primitive Art – Emil Nolde, 1912

Love, People, Age, Change

“I sing the form of war, the bloodless plain,
Armies of ivory, and a mock campaign;
How two bold kings in different armour veil'd,
One black, one white, for conquest fought the field.”
Ludimus effigiem belli, simulataque veris Praelia, buxo acies fictas, et ludicra regna, Ut gemini inter se reges albusque, nigerque Pro laude oppositi certent bicoloribus armis.

Marco Girolamo Vida Scacchia Ludus

Vida's Game of Chess https://books.google.com/books?id=IGMIAAAAQAAJ, opening lines Compare: Of armies on the chequer'd field array'd, And guiltless war in pleasing form display'd; When two bold kings contend with vain alarms, In ivory this, and that in ebon arms. William Jones, Caïssa; Or, The Game of Chess. Scacchia Ludus (1527)

War, Singing

“(Sylvia) Rita! Did you hear that! Tax cuts benefit the rich! Oh, the shock! Quick, get my medication! (Rita) Plain, or with peanuts?”

Nicole Hollander (1939) Cartoonist

Source: Sylvia cartoon strip, p. 88

“That man is little to be envied whose patriotism would not gain force upon the plain of Marathon, or whose piety would not grow warmer among the ruins of Iona.”

Samuel Johnson book A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland

A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775), Inch Kenneth

Envy

“It's mind-boggling to consider that movies this bad are actually committed to film. The poor quality of The Pest in almost every category — humor, intelligence, creativity, and just plain entertainment value — ranks it somewhere between a bad infomercial and a local cable newscast. Rarely do I consider the act of seeing a movie to be a chore, but this kind of experience is the exception - Directed By Paul Miller.”

James Berardinelli (1967) American film critic

Review http://www.reelviews.net/movies/p/pest.html of The Pest (1997). Zero star reviews

Intelligence

“I remember a picture I saw in a paper not long before the wall came down. There was a man standing holding a very young daughter, my guess was that she was only about one or two years old. She had on a rather plain dress, he had on a coat and a tie and he was carrying probably a cardboard suitcase. And my guess is that everything he owned in the world was in that suitcase. And he was weeping. He wasn't weeping because he left his car and the rest of his family back on the other side of that Iron Curtain; he was weeping because he was free. He was weeping because now he had opportunity, he had the chance to choose for the first time in his life, and his daughter whom he was holding in his hands had a future, whereas before she would not have had one. That struck me as a very, very vivid picture of what this all meant.”

Leighton W. Smith, Jr. (1939) United States Navy admiral

On the end of the Cold War, in part 7: The End of the Cold War http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/conversations/LWSmith/lwsmith-con02.html Interview at USC Berkeley (1997)

Life, World, Family, Cars

“I argued that it was important not to place too much reliance on any single piece of experimental evidence. It might turn out to be misleading, as the 5.1 Å reflection undoubtedly was. Jim was a little more brash, stating that no good model ever accounted for all the facts, since some data was bound to be misleading if not plain wrong. A theory that did fit all the data would have been "carpentered" to do so and would thus be open to suspicion.”

Francis Crick (1916–2004) British molecular biologist, biophysicist, neuroscientist; co-discoverer of the structure of DNA

Source: What Mad Pursuit (1988), pp. 59-60

“Hasan Nizami writes that after the suppression of a Hindu revolt at Kol (Aligarh) in 1193 AD, Aibak raised “three bastions as high as heaven with their heads, and their carcases became food for beasts of prey. The tract was freed from idols and idol-worship and the foundations of infidelism were destroyed.” In 1194 AD Aibak destroyed 27 Hindu temples at Delhi and built the Quwwat-ul-Islãm mosque with their debris. According to Nizami, Aibak “adorned it with the stones and gold obtained from the temples which had been demolished by elephants”. In 1195 AD the Mher tribe of Ajmer rose in revolt, and the Chaulukyas of Gujarat came to their assistance. Aibak had to invite re-inforcements from Ghazni before he could meet the challenge. In 1196 AD he advanced against Anahilwar Patan, the capital of Gujarat. Nizami writes that after Raja Karan was defeated and forced to flee, “fifty thousand infidels were despatched to hell by the sword” and “more than twenty thousand slaves, and cattle beyond all calculation fell into the hands of the victors”. The city was sacked, its temples demolished, and its palaces plundered. On his return to Ajmer, Aibak destroyed the Sanskrit College of Visaladeva, and laid the foundations of a mosque which came to be known as ADhãî Din kã JhoMpaDã. Conquest of Kalinjar in 1202 AD was Aibak’s crowning achievement. Nizami concludes: “The temples were converted into mosques… Fifty thousand men came under the collar of slavery and the plain became black as pitch with Hindus.””

Qutb al-Din Aibak (1150–1210) Turkic peoples king of Northwest India

Hasan Nizami, quoted from Goel, Sita Ram (2001). The story of Islamic imperialism in India. ISBN 9788185990231 Ch. 6

Men, Food, Hell

“What the Big Bang theory tells us, is that at least our region of the universe 13.82 years ago, was an extremely hot, dense uniform soup of particles which in the conventional standard Big Bang model filled literally all of space—and now we certainly believe that it filled essentially all of the space that we have access to—uniformly. …This is contrary to a popular cartoon image of the Big Bang, which is just plain wrong. The cartoon image of the Big Bang is the image of a small egg of highly dense matter that then exploded and spewed out into empty space. That is not the scientific picture of the Big Bang. …If there was a small egg that exploded into empty space, you would certainly expect that today you would see something different if you were looking towards where the egg was, versus looking the opposite direction, but we don't see any effect like that. When we look around the sky the universe looks completely uniform, on average, in all directions, to a very high degree of accuracy… So we don't see a sign of an egg having happened anywhere. Rather, the Big Bang seems to have happened everywhere, uniformly.”

Alan Guth (1947) American theoretical physicist and cosmologist

Lecture 1: Inflationary Cosmology: Is Our Universe Part of a Multiverse? Part I.
The Early Universe (2012)

Universe

“Based on the metaphysical implications of the Dadaist dogma.... Arp's Reliefs [carvings] between 1916 and 1922 are among the most convincing illustrations of that anti- rationalistic era... Arp showed the importance of a smile to combat the sophistic theories of the moment. His poems of the same period stripped the word of its rational connotation to attain the most unexpected meaning through alliteration or plain nonsense.”

Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) French painter and sculptor

1921 - 1950
Source: 'Appreciations of other artists': Jean (Hans) Arp (sculptor, painter, writer) 1949, by Marcel Duchamp; as quoted in Catalog, Collection of the Societé Anonyme, eds. Michel Sanouillet / Elmer Peterson, London 1975, pp. 143- 159

Smile