Quotes about point
page 25

“Traditionally, every Chinese was Confucian in ethics and public life, Taoist in private life and hygiene, and Buddhist at the time of death, with a healthy dash of shamanistic folk religion thrown in along the way. As someone has put the point: Every Chinese wears a Confucian hat, Taoist robes, and Buddhist sandals. In Japan Shinto was added to the mix.”

Huston Smith book The World's Religions

The World's Religions (1991)

Life, Death, Religion, Way

“Well, this is a strange reversal of the situation. The English are at loggerheads with the Americans. The Lansdowne Clique has coalesced with the Labour Party to obtain a swift acceptable peace for Germany. It seems that Lloyd George put pressure on him to this end. On the other hand we know that the Paris Senate has said that it will not come to the conference table to sue for peace but pursue the war with every means in its power. After your report I'll read you a confidential letter I have received from an agent in Holland…The agent…points to a possibility of coming to terms with England, which is obviously perturbed by American numerical superiority, and thinks we should have done better not to make peace overtures to America but to England…An agreement with England, to include a treaty with Japan to fling the Americans out of Europe. A European Monroe doctrine therefore to which I outlined to Hintze at Spa as the policy to be followed in future.”

Wilhelm II, German Emperor (1859–1941) German Emperor and King of Prussia

Georg Alexander von Müller's diary entry (29 October 1918), quoted in Georg Alexander von Müller, The Kaiser and His Court (London: Macdonald, 1961), pp. 416-417
1910s

War, Peace, Thinking, Reading

“It is amusing to think how much conservative ingenuity has been wasted in the defence of the House of Lords by men who were desperately endeavouring to prove that the House of Lords consisted of clever men. There is one really good defence of the House of Lords […] and that is, that the House of Lords, in its full and proper strength, consists of stupid men. It really would be a plausible defence of that otherwise indefensible body to point out that the clever men in the Commons, who owed their power to cleverness, ought in the last resort to be checked by the average man in the Lords, who owed their power to accident.”

G. K. Chesterton book Heretics

Heretics (1905)

Men, Stupidity, Thinking, Housing

“I for my part still conceive it to be the paramount duty of a British member of parliament to consider what is good for Great Britain…I do not envy that man's feelings, who can behold the sufferings of Switzerland, and who derives from that sight no idea of what is meant by the deliverance of Europe. I do not envy the feelings of that man, who can look without emotion at Italy – plundered, insulted, trampled upon, exhausted, covered with ridicule, and horror, and devastation – who can look at all this, and be at a loss to guess what is meant by the deliverance of Europe? As little do I envy the feelings of that man, who can view the peoples of the Netherlands driven into insurrection, and struggling for their freedom against the heavy hand of a merciless tyranny, without entertaining any suspicion of what may be the sense of the word deliverance. Does such a man contemplate Holland groaning under arbitrary oppressions and exactions? Does he turn his eyes to Spain trembling at the nod of a foreign master? And does the word deliverance still sound unintelligibly in his ear? Has he heard of the rescue and salvation of Naples, by the appearance and the triumphs of the British fleet? Does he know that the monarchy of Naples maintains its existence at the sword's point? And is his understanding, and his heart, still impenetrable to the sense and meaning of the deliverance of Europe?”

George Canning (1770–1827) British statesman and politician

Speech in 1798, quoted in Wendy Hinde, George Canning (London: Purnell Books Services, 1973), p. 66.

People, Feeling, Idea, Understanding

“Home from Guatemala, back at the Waldorf.
This arrival in the wild country of the soul,
All approaches gone, being completely there,
Where the wild poem is a substitute
For the woman one loves or ought to love,
One wild rhapsody a fake for another.You touch the hotel the way you touch moonlight
Or sunlight and you hum and the orchestra
Hums and you say "The world in a verse,A generation sealed, men remoter than mountains,
Women invisible in music and motion and color,"
After that alien, point-blank, green and actual Guatemala.”

Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) American poet

"Arrival at the Waldorf"
Parts of a World (1942)

Love, Women, Men, World

“Appropriate patterns of reproductive, gender, and sexual conduct are all products of specific cultures and all can be viewed as examples of socially scripted conduct. Western societies now have a system of gender and sexual learning in which gender differential scripts are learned prior to sexual scripts, but take their origins in part from the previously learned gender scripts… There are two important points: The first is that both gender and sexuality are learned forms of social practice, and the second is that looking to "natural differences" between women and men for lessons about sexual conduct is an error.”

John Gagnon

"The Explicit and Implicit Use of the Scripting Perspective in Sex Research", Annual Review of Sex Research, Vol. 1, (1990), 5

Women, Men, Error, Nature

“The presence of U. S. troops in South Korea has been and remains the greatest deterrent to North Korean adventurism and a disruption of the current and longstanding peace on the Korean peninsula. And to repeat an important point: the absence of a formal peace treaty no more threatens this peace than the absence of a post-World War Two peace treaty between Moscow and Tokyo threatens the peace between Russia and Japan.”

Sung-Yoon Lee Korea and East Asia scholar, professor

http://www.hillsdale.edu/news/imprimis/archive/issue.asp?year=2010&month=12
Keeping the Peace: America in Korea, 1950–2010
December 2010
Imprimis
March 1, 2013
https://www.webcitation.org/6EyqabQdp?url=http://www.hillsdale.edu/news/imprimis/archive/issue.asp?year=2010
March 9, 2013
yes

War, World, Peace

“I started writing instrumentals but Roma pointed out they were very visual, so she started writing lyrics.. and Nicky had this idea of creating a wall of sound and started multi-tracking my voice.”

Enya (1961) Irish singer, songwriter, and musician

The Times Magazine interview (2005)

Idea

“My two fingers on a typewriter have never connected with my brain. My hand on a pen does. A fountain pen, of course. Ball-point pens are only good for filling out forms on a plane.”

Graham Greene (1904–1991) English writer, playwright and literary critic

International Herald Tribune (October 7, 1977)

“You won't feel under-dressed when with your naked heart you come to me, for mine is past the point to dress for company.”

Vanna Bonta (1958–2014) Italian-American writer, poet, inventor, actress, voice artist (1958-2014)

"Eeeeeee"
Rewards of Passion (Sheer Poetry) (1981)

Feeling, Past, Heart

“As we all know, the singularity in the art of Bach is the fusion of both levels and lines, the horizontal and vertical line. It’s a real wonder to see that the creation and forming of the horizontal line, the polyphonic structure, also results in this perfect, beautiful vertical line, the harmonic line. As we also know, Bach already used the full harmonic range and radius as no composer before him. My artistic aim of course is to point out the horizontal line in soloistic manner in a dynamically elastic way, but in the same breath to form the harmonic line in a bright field of color (I would call it “harmonic articulation”), to achieve a particular atmosphere of emotions and moods, drama, velocity, vividness, and so on. As we can imagine, these are high demands …”

Burkard Schliessmann classical pianist

Talkings on Bach

Beauty, Art, Color, Way

“An order must first of all be clear. A meditation may be vague, a scheme always has something of the vision in it, but an order must be precise. All order can be misunderstood; an obscure one will never be understood. "To do a thing well," said Napoleon, "one must do to oneself." This is not always true, but the prudent leader will admit that few people understand and that almost everyone forgets. It is therefore not enough to give an order; one must see to its execution and, when giving it, anticipate anything that may nullify its effectiveness. The stupidity of human beings and the malevolence of chance are limitless. The unexpected always happens. The leader who endeavors to frustrate the onset of ill luck and who strengthens the weak points in his schemes against stupidity is more apt to impose his will than one who does not take these measures.”

André Maurois (1885–1967) French writer

Un Art de Vivre (The Art of Living) (1939), The Art of Leadership

People, Stupidity, Understanding, Chance

“From a Buddhist point of view, this is standing the truth on its head by considering goods as more important than people and consumption as more important than creative activity. It means shifting the emphasis from the worker to the product of work, that is, from the human to the sub-human, surrender to the forces of evil.”

E. F. Schumacher book A Guide for the Perplexed

A Guide for the Perplexed

People, Truth, Evil

“[A] group of scientists came out and said unequivocally that global warming is being caused by human beings. Did you hear that mentioned on the "news"? No, that day Britney Spears shaved her head. People would rather hear about this than what's happening in Iraq? Or are we simply being dumbeddown to that point? The people of the United States should demand more than this!”

Jesse Ventura (1951) American politician and former professional wrestler

Source: Don't Start the Revolution Without Me! (2008), Ch. 3 (p. 51)

People

“The movie stars Michelle Pfeiffer as LouAnne Johnson… [h]er teaching methods are inventive. She bribes them with candy bars and free trips to amusement parks, and involves them in the words of that important poet, Bob Dylan (the Tambourine Man might have been a drug dealer!). Soon they're in the school library, finding connections between Bob Dylan and Dylan Thomas… [w]hat, exactly, will these disadvantaged inner-city kids accomplish by being bribed with candy bars and the "relevancy" of Bob Dylan? Can they read and write? Can they compete in the job market? An educational system that has brought them to the point we observe in the first classroom scene has already failed them so miserably that all of Miss Johnson's karate lessons are not going to be much help.”

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

Review of http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/dangerous-minds-1995 Dangerous Minds (11 August 1995) Reviews, One-and-a-half star reviews

Education, School, Star, Reading

“It was little consolation that I had been ‘in good company’ in my ignorance of genetics; in fact, that aspect of the situation seemed even more alarming to me. I was overwhelmed by the realization of the almost Herculean job that would be needed to get the majority of psychologists and educators fully to recognize the importance of genetics for the understanding of variation in psychological traits. Hence, rather than attempting at first to add small increments of original empirical research to the body of knowledge on the genetics of human abilities, I thought my most useful role at that point was a primarily didactic one.”

Arthur Jensen (1923–2012) professor of educational psychology

Source: Differential Psychology: Towards Consensus (1987), p. 424

Education, Understanding, Knowledge

“The stern hand of fate has scourged us to an elevation where we can see the great everlasting things which matter for a nation — the great peaks we had forgotten, of Honor, Duty, Patriotism, and clad in glittering white, the great pinnacle of Sacrifice pointing like a rugged finger to Heaven.”

David Lloyd George (1863–1945) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech, Queen's Hall, London (19 September 1914)
Chancellor of the Exchequer

Fate

“I’m so thankful that all that stuff made it to the screen, because a lot of the time studio executives say that there’s no time, or ask why we should feel sympathy for this bad guy. I joke that I’m the romantic lead in the movie, I just happened to pick the wrong girl. Imhotep is kind of the tragic villain, I guess, and a lot of people have come up to me and said I was hating you, but then I reach a point when I was feeling sorry for you too. It's those different facets that help explain why this film is such a success”

Arnold Vosloo (1962) South African-American actor

Interview: Arnold Vosloo http://www.bbc.co.uk/films/2001/05/11/arnold_vosloo_article.shtml (May 11, 2001)

Hate, People, Guy, Feeling

“People keep on wanting fetish figures, and things like that are very popular. That's Pop art. There was an enormous resistance to Abstract Expressionism and there still is to that school, which is not dead at all. But Pop art came as a reaction to that because kids can't paint abstract expressionism unless they're under five year of age. Because it really is tremendously hard work and it's very challenging. But the point is, people love an immediately recognizable word – if you put a word in anything, they lie it... I am not interested in culture at all. Once a work of art has gotten into the culture, its dead as far as I'm concerned. I think there is a difference between art and culture. Or as the sage once said, 'Art is what we do; culture is what is done to us.”

Carl Andre (1935) American artist

Source: Artists talks 1969 – 1977, pp. 22-23

Love, People, Lie, Age

“Philosophers are never quite sure what they are talking about — about what the issues really are — and so often it takes them rather a long time to recognize that someone with a somewhat different approach (or destination, or starting point) is making a contribution.”

Daniel Dennett (1942) American philosopher

Source: The Intentional Stance (1987), p. 350

Time

“"[Relationships] never seem to work out, I mean it gets to the point where I have to be extremely cautious. You have to understand, this stardom thing is still new to me, I don't even consider myself "famous". It's 2008: if you have a blog, a mixtape and two pairs of skinny jeans you, too, can be 'famous'."”

Danny! (1983) American rapper

On fame and its effect on finding love, (Rolling Stone interview http://www.rollingstone.com/rockdaily/index.php/2008/02/13/hoopla-dreams-danny-plays-hard-loves-harder/, 2008) Interviews

Understanding

“The third lesson and tip actually comes from two of my favorite political philosophers - Mao Tse Tung and Mother Teresa, not often coupled with each other, but the two people that I turn to most to basically deliver a simple point, which is, you're going to make choices. You're going to challenge. You're going to say, "Why not?". You're going to figure out how to do things that have never been done before. But here's the deal: These are your choices, they are no one else's. In 1947, when Mao Zedong was being challenged within his own party on his plan to basically take China over. Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalist Chinese held the cities, they had the army, they had the air force, they had everything on their side. And people said, "How can you win? How can you do this? How can you do this, against all of the odds against you?" And Mao Zedong said, you know, "You fight your war, and I'll fight mine." And think about that for a second. You don't have to accept the definition of how to do things and you don't have to follow other peoples choices and paths. Ok? It is about your choices and your path. You fight your own war, you lay out your own path, you figure out what's right for you. You don't let external definition define how good you are internally, you fight your war, you let them fight theirs. Everybody has their own path.”

Anita Dunn (1958) American political strategist

Speech at the Washington National Cathedral for St. Andrews Episcopal High School's (of Bethesda Maryland) graduation on June 5, 2009. It was broadcast on the Glenn Beck Show, Oct 15, 2009. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fi1zg2NOCn8 http://www.saes.org/academics/lower_school/newsletter.aspx?StartDate=6/2/2009

War, People, Thinking, Fight

“I was honestly concerned people might have forgotten or given up or whatnot, but the reaction so far has been very positive. I'm very overwhelmed, very thankful, very grateful. I also feel like those fans and their passion has helped me and the team to continue moving on, heads down, to keep pushing and working hard. That's fueling our motivation at this point.”

Fumito Ueda (1970) Japanese video game designer

The Last Guardian's Long Journey: An Interview With Fumito Ueda http://www.gameinformer.com/b/features/archive/2015/06/23/the-last-guardians-long-journey-an-interview-with-fumito-ueda.aspx (June 23, 2015)

People, Feeling, Motivation, Passion

“Muslims respect the pacifist message of Jesus (even though the Qu'ran points out that Christians can be very belligerent but they accept that force is sometimes necessary. If tyrants and loathsome regimes were not opposed militarily, evil would have swamped the whole world.”

Karen Armstrong (1944) author and comparative religion scholar from Great Britain

Source: Muhammad: A Biography of The Prophet (2001), Chapter 7, Holy War

World, Evil

“The new vision…. does not proceed from a fixed point. Its viewpoint is everywhere, and not limited to any one position [in space]. Nor is it bound by space or time (in accordance with the theory of relativity) [of Einstein ]. In practice, the viewpoint is in front of the plane… Thus this new vision sees architecture as a multiplicity of planes; again flat. This multiplicity composes itself (in an abstract sense) into a flat image [in contrast to Theo van Doesburg who emphasized the dynamic position of the viewer – a central idea of Futurism in 1919].”

Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) Peintre Néerlandais

Quote, 1919, as cited in Mondrian, -The Art of Destruction, Carel Blotkamp, Reaktion Books LTD. London 2001, p. 148
1910's

Idea, Sense, Time, Future

“(mimicking a big fish talking to a little fish)
"Hey - Perch…"
(points at his eyes, then at the imaginary perch's)
"Look at me…"
(thinks, concedes, then points at the sides of his head where a fish's eyes would be)
"Look at me… Both eyes…" - oh, I've thought it all through - "if you ever see a worm… in the shape of a J… swim away. That's how we lost your Uncle Pike."”

Bill Engvall (1957) American comedian and actor

15° Off Cool (2007)

Thinking, Fish

“And the last point I would make about it is, the billionaires and millionaires that are going to be impacted by higher rates, they can afford to hire the best lawyers, lobbyists and accountants in America to figure out how not to pay those higher rates.”

Marco Rubio (1971) U.S. Senator from state of Florida, United States; politician

The Atlantic Washington Ideas Forum, , quoted in * 2012-11-15
2013-02-16
Marco Rubio On Tax Hikes For The Rich: Why Bother?
Elise
Foley
The Huffington Post
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/15/marco-rubio-tax-hikes_n_2136829.html
2010s, 2012

“To me [Sydney Opera House] looks like a portable typewriter full of oyster shells, and to the contention that it echoes the sails of yachts on the harbour I can only point out that the yachts on the harbour don't waste any time echoing opera houses.”

Clive James (1939–2019) Australian author, critic, broadcaster, poet, translator and memoirist

'Postcard from Sydney'
Essays and reviews, Flying Visits (1984)

Time, Housing

“In a pointed remark when defending Esser in 1921 against attacks from within the party, Hitler commented: ‘Everyone was at one time a Social Democrat.”

Ian Kershaw (1943) British historian

Source: Hitler 1889-1936: Hubris (1999), p. 119

Time

“There are several points on which virtually all scholars of antiquity agree. Jesus was a Jewish man, known to be a preacher and teacher, who was crucified (a Roman form of execution) in Jerusalem during the reign of the Roman emperor Tiberius, when Pontius Pilate was the governor of Judea.”

Bart D. Ehrman book Did Jesus Exist?

Source: Did Jesus Exist? (2012), Ch. 1: 'An Introduction to the Mythical View of Jesus'

Teachers

“When I had my own company on Traffic and Coonskin, all metaphors were able to get to the screen clearly. In Cool World, with the producer and Paramount watching me carefully to make sure I was in good taste, I instinctively poured stuff into the picture that I wanted to talk about. But when you force stuff, it's not really very clear. But, I have a great love for Max Fleischer, especially some of his Black & White Betty Boops with their strange Cab Calloway and Louis Armstrong black folk tale jazz hipness that part of Cool World was a homage in style to those films and that style of cartooning. The Grim Reaper is right out of a Max Fleischer cartoon or old Terrytoons, which is why I hired and love Milton Knight the artist. He understands totally the Uncle Remus fable like qualities behind Fleischer and Terrytoons. Milton Knight is probably the purest artist of that style in the business. He has a hard time because studios think he is old fashioned…but that's the point.”

Ralph Bakshi (1938) Animator, filmmaker

[c. 17 September 2004, http://www.wild-things.com/bray/documents/ralphb.doc, Questions for Ralph Bakshi, DOC, Ralph Bakshi Forum, 2007-11-27]

Love, World, Fashion, Understanding

“To get an idea of the sacrifices entailed, listen to the words of the Father of the Nation, Mahatma Gandhi, "If aiding the lepers is so dear to the Missionaries, particularly the Catholic Missionaries, it is because there is no other service, which requires a greater spirit of sacrifice. Working in a leper asylum demands the highest ideals and the most perfect abnegation. The world of politics and journalism can point to few heroes who compare with Father Damien of Molokai. The Catholic Church on the other hand, counts by the thousand, those who after the example of Father Damien have vowed themselves to the service of the lepers. It is worth inquiring into such heroism!"”

Peter de Noronha (1897–1970) Indian businessman

The Pageant of Life (1964), On Priests & Bishops

World, Idea, Perfection

“What are the hallmarks of a competent writer of fiction? The first, it seems to me, is that he should be immensely interested in human beings, and have an eye sharp enough to see into them, and a hand clever enough to draw them as they are. The second is that he should be able to set them in imaginary situations which display the contents of their psyches effectively, and so carry his reader swiftly and pleasantly from point to point of what is called a good story.”

H.L. Mencken (1880–1956) American journalist and writer

The American Mercury (May 1933), p. 136
1930s

Drawing

“The surfaces of three-dimensional space are distinguished from each other not only by their curvature but also by certain more general properties. A spherical surface, for instance, differs from a plane not only by its roundness but also by its finiteness. Finiteness is a holistic property. The sphere as a whole has a character different from that of a plane. A spherical surface made from rubber, such as a balloon, can be twisted so that its geometry changes…. but it cannot be distorted in such a way as that it will cover a plane. All surfaces obtained by distortion of the rubber sphere possess the same holistic properties; they are closed and finite. The plane as a whole has the property of being open; its straight lines are not closed. This feature is mathematically expressed as follows. Every surface can be mapped upon another one by the coordination of each point of one surface to a point of the other surface, as illustrated by the projection of a shadow picture by light rays. For surfaces with the same holistic properties it is possible to carry through this transformation uniquely and continuously in all points. Uniquely means: one and only one point of one surface corresponds to a given point of the other surface, and vice versa. Continuously means: neighborhood relations in infinitesimal domains are preserved; no tearing of the surface or shifting of relative positions of points occur at any place. For surfaces with different holistic properties, such a transformation can be carried through locally, but there is no single transformation for the whole surface.”

Hans Reichenbach (1891–1953) American philosopher

The Philosophy of Space and Time (1928, tr. 1957)

Way, Mathematics, Tear, Light

“In a word, CLEANTHES, a man who follows your hypothesis is able perhaps to assert, or conjecture, that the universe, sometime, arose from something like design: but beyond that position he cannot ascertain one single circumstance; and is left afterwards to fix every point of his theology by the utmost license of fancy and hypothesis. This world, for aught he knows, is very faulty and imperfect, compared to a superior standard; and was only the first rude essay of some infant deity, who afterwards abandoned it, ashamed of his lame performance: it is the work only of some dependent, inferior deity; and is the object of derision to his superiors: it is the production of old age and dotage in some superannuated deity; and ever since his death, has run on at adventures, from the first impulse and active force which it received from him. You justly give signs of horror, DEMEA, at these strange suppositions; but these, and a thousand more of the same kind, are CLEANTHES’s suppositions, not mine. From the moment the attributes of the Deity are supposed finite, all these have place. And I cannot, for my part, think that so wild and unsettled a system of theology is, in any respect, preferable to none at all.”

David Hume book Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion

Philo to Demea, Part V
Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779)

Death, Age, World, Thinking

“A single data point—even a single clutch of measurements—could not usually prove or disprove anything, but it might later turn out to play a vital role in a chain of argument, even if it was only in the biasing of some statistical distribution closer to one hypothesis than another. Science, as Naqi had long since realised, was as much a swarming, social process as it was something driven by ecstatic moments of personal discovery.
It was something she was proud to be part of.”

Alastair Reynolds book Diamond Dogs

Turquoise Days, Chapter 1 (p. 188)
Short fiction, Diamond Dogs, Turquoise Days (2003)

Science, Parting, Personality

“There is absolutely no point in being healed in our bodies, then dying in our sins and spending an eternity in hell. It would be better to die of cancer and go to heaven because of that cancer, then to live in perfect health and end up in hell.”

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

More Than Just Comfort: An Answer to Cancer (c. 1979)

Health, Hell, Perfection

“Let us now examine how we have employed our time, and let us see whether we have not, in point of fact, thrown away the larger portion of that which has been already granted to us. … Time is lost when it is ill-employed; as when it is spent in the society of evil-disposed or frivolous persons, or in gossiping and tale-bearing, in oppressing the poor, or in any way infringing the laws of God and of His Church.”

Louis Tronson (1622–1700) French Roman Catholic priest

Examination of Conscience upon Special Subjects, p. 81 http://books.google.com/books?id=z-4CAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA81 Examens particuliers sur divers sujets [Examination of Conscience upon Special Subjects] (1690)

God, Law, Way, Evil

“Van Gogh is congenial to me, 'Vincent' in his letters. Perhaps nature does have something. There is no need, after all, to speak of the smell of earth; it has too peculiar a savor. The words we use to speak about it, I mean, have too peculair a savor. Too bad that the early Van Gogh was so fine a human being, but not so good as a painter, and that the later, wonderful artist is such a marked man. A mean should be found between these four points pf comparison: then, yes!”

Paul Klee (1879–1940) German Swiss painter

Quote (1908), # 808, in The Diaries of Paul Klee; University of California Press, 1964; as quoted by Francesco Mazzaferro, in 'The Diaries of Paul Klee - Part Three' : Klee as a Secessionist and a Neo-Impressionist Artist http://letteraturaartistica.blogspot.nl/2015/05/paul-klee-ev.html 1903 - 1910

Nature

“I am not complaining, mind you,” the simurgh was saying in a grumpy, peevish tone of voice a while later, “I was merely pointing out that when one must tamper with the forces of nature, it is better to err on the side of caution and of prudence, than to be too liberal.”

Lin Carter book The Wizard of Zao

Source: The Wizard of Zao (1978), Chapter 4 (p. 47)

Nature

“I could write songs as bad as Wham's if I really felt the urge to, but what's the point? (The Hit magazine 1985)”

Robert Smith (musician) (1959) English singer, songwriter and musician

“The point of a brain is that it's not one huge neural network with feedback, it has up to 50 to 60 identified areas, all of which have feedback and all of which are capable of knowledge storage. We've got a complex system and, within this complex system, we can start discovering what the mechanisms that support deliberation are. Consciousness must come out of these interactions.”

Igor Aleksander (1937) scientist

The simple things are hardest (2005)

Support, Knowledge

“This deeply alarming statistic points to one of the most pernicious aspects of the conduct our investigation uncovered: that these policing practices disproportionately harm African American residents. In fact, our review of the evidence found no alternative explanation for the disproportionate impact on African American residents other than implicit and explicit racial bias.”

Eric Holder (1951) 82nd Attorney General of the United States

2010s, Update on Investigations in Ferguson (2015)

“This was not enough for a minority now demanding much sterner action to meet the Nazi threat. At the head of this group was Winston Churchill. His prestige, however, after his stand during the abdication crisis [in late spring 1937] and his aggressive, bellicose speeches on the need for more arms, was at a low point. Not many listened to him yet. He was still considered an irresponsible failure and an unreliable character.”

Lester B. Pearson (1897–1972) 14th Prime Minister of Canada

Memoirs, Volume One

Spring, Failure

“Patriotism or any other version of the herd instinct seems to me an entirely inadequate basis of virtue. Christianity is from that point of view an explanation of and a support for an essential ingredient in man's nature—far the best, though necessarily imperfect.”

Robert Cecil, 1st Viscount Cecil of Chelwood (1864–1958) lawyer, politician and diplomat in the United Kingdom

Letter to Gilbert Murray (25 October 1948), quoted in Gilbert Murray : An Unfinished Autobiography (1960) edited by Jean Smith and Arnold Toynbee, p. 179

Support, Nature

“There was no point. It's already done. Let's leave that alone. I mean, if you're not going to come there with something new, then just leave it alone.”

John Leguizamo (1964) Colombian and American actor, film producer, voice artist, and comedian

John Leguizamo Talks About "Assault on Precinct 13", January 16, 2005, asked whether he would have taken the role if it was merely a remake.

“I'm always trying to understand myself, but it's like there's a point in the centre of the room, and there's a hundred windows to look at the same point from. All I can do is give you different angles on the same thing. God, you know, if I could find one conclusive thing in anything I would probably have something to put an anchor down on. But I can't, and I haven't met anyone that can. You can pick out anything you like in my lyrics, I don't seek to be cryptic. I love words for the sake of words, for me they're kind of free standing, and they don't really need to be explained. I think every word has its own character and colour and picture and the result you get with lyrics just depends how you put them together.”

KatieJane Garside (1968) English singer

On writing, Repeat https://web.archive.org/web/20031101121528/https://www.repeatfanzine.co.uk/interviews/queen%20adreena.htm fanzine (2003)

Love, God, Understanding, Thinking

“No group in America has been more harmed by Hillary Clinton's policies than African-Americans. If Hillary Clinton's goal was to inflict pain on the African-American community, she could not have done a better job. It's a disgrace. Tonight, I'm asking for the vote of every single African-American citizen in this country who wants to see a better future. The inner cities of our country have been run by the Democratic party for more than fifty years. Their policies have reduced only poverty, joblessness, failing schools and broken homes. It's time to hold Democratic politicians accountable for what they have done to these communities. At what point do we say, "enough?" It's time to hold failed leaders accountable for their results not just their empty words over and over again. Look at what the Democratic party has done to the city as an example and there are many others of Detroit: forty percent of Detroit's residents live in poverty. Half of all Detroit residents do not work and cannot work and can't get a job. Detroit tops the list of most dangerous cities in terms of violent crime. This is the legacy of the Democratic politicians who have run this city. This is the result of the policy agenda embraced by Hillary Clinton: thirty-three thousand emails gone. The only way to change results is to change leadership. We can never fix our problems by relying on the same politicians who created our problems in the first place. A new future requires brand new leadership. Look how much African-American communities suffered under Democratic control. To those I say the following: What do you have to lose by trying something new like Trump. What do you have to lose? I say it again, what do you have to lose. Look, what do you have to lose? You're living your poverty, your schools are no good, you have no jobs. Fifty-eight percent of your youth is unemployed? What the hell do you have to lose? And at the end of four years, I guarantee you, that I will get over ninety-five percent of the African-American vote. I promise you.”

Donald J. Trump (1946) 45th President of the United States of America

Speech to the African-American community in Dimondale, Michigan https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K5B5m1S5VTA (August 19, 2016) 2010s, 2016, August

Pain, Youth, School, Way

“Your iron industry is dead; dead as mutton. Your coal industries, which depend greatly upon the iron industries, are languishing. Your silk industry is dead, assassinated by the foreigner. Your woollen industry is in articulo mortis, gasping, struggling. Your cotton industry is seriously sick. The shipbuilding industry, which held out longest of all, is come to a standstill. Turn your eyes where you like, survey any branch of British industry you like, you will find signs of mortal disease. The self-satisfied Radical philosophers will tell you it is nothing; they point to the great volume of British trade. Yes, the volume of British trade is still large, but it is a volume which is no longer profitable; it is working and struggling. So do the muscles and nerves of the body of a man who has been hanged twitch and work violently for a short time after the operation. But death is there all the same, life has utterly departed, and suddenly comes the rigot mortis…But what has produced this state of things? Free imports? I am not sure; I should like an inquiry; but I suspect free imports of the murder of our industries much in the same way as if I found a man standing over a corpse and plunging his knife into it I should suspect that man of homicide, and I should recommend a coroner's inquest and a trial by jury…”

Lord Randolph Churchill (1849–1895) British politician

Speech in Blackpool (24 January 1884), quoted in Robert Rhodes James, Lord Randolph Churchill (London: Phoenix, 1994), p. 137

Life, Death, Disease, Way

“This possession is a simple and abysmal tasting of all good and of eternal life; and in this tasting we are swallowed up above reason and without reason, in the deep Quiet of the Godhead, which is never moved…And therefrom follows the last point that can be put into words, that is, when the spirit beholds a Darkness into which it cannot enter with the reason. And there it feels itself dead and lost to itself, and one with God without difference and without distinction.”

John Ruysbroeck (1293–1381) Flemish mystic

The Spiritual Espousals (c. 1340)

Life, God, Feeling, Dead

“Humankind is a lonely creature looking for connections and associations from childhood to the end of his life. This intention to join with the others can also be found in human societies. Stories, legends and most of human efforts tend to a joint and union, the same direction towards which the humankind is heading. The definition of a human being in this theory is not considered to be a good or a devil self. Man is defined as a social creature craving for establishing relationships and connections, without which he will be unable to survive. Linking up with another thing, establishing connections with God, relating to different points of view, associating with dreams and in its most general form sharing life with a spouse are all examples of this instinct in human beings. In a similar pattern, civilizations of the world are following, and will be following, the same path. This is the era of Collaboration of Civilizations, Union of Cultures, and Joining of Religions.”

Elia M. Ramollah (1973) founder and leader of the El Yasin Community

360 Doctrines and Comprehensive Theories, Union of Civilizations

Life, God, World, Religion

“If possible, not to let the men so much as surmise that their officers anticipate aught amiss from them is the tacit rule in a military ship. And the more that some sort of trouble should really be apprehended the more do the officers keep that apprehension to themselves; tho' not the less unostentatious vigilance may be augmented.
In the present instance the sentry placed over the prisoner had strict orders to let no one have communication with him but the Chaplain. And certain unobtrusive measures were taken absolutely to insure this point.”

Herman Melville book Billy Budd, Sailor

Source: Billy Budd, the Sailor (1891), Ch. 23

Men, Communication

“As Akins observes, it is not the point of our sensory systems that they should detect "basic" or "natural" properties of the environment, but that they should serve our "narcissistic" purposes in staying alive; nature doesn't build epistemic engines.”

Daniel Dennett book Consciousness Explained

citing Kathleen Akins. "On Piranhas, Narcissism and Mental Representations: An Essay on Intentionality and Naturalism" (1989)
Consciousness Explained (1991)

Nature

“I never said, and don't believe, that all Germans are Nazis. I'm just pretty sure that they're all Germans, and that is the point.”

George MacDonald Fraser (1925–2008) English-born author of Scottish descent

The Europe Fiasco. p. 75.
The Light's On At Signpost (2002)

“I have lately spent some Thoughts relative to the Nature of Light, whether it be subject to the common Laws of Motion. In this particular Newton seems to contradict himself. For in his Principia Sect. 14th he applies the common Laws of Motion to account for Reflection and Refraction, as he does also in one Part of his Optics where he proves the Sine of Incid. to Sine Refr, in a given in a given Ratio. But in another Part he says, “nothing more is requisite for producing all the Variety of Colours and Degrees of Refrangibility than that the Rays of Light be Bodies of different Sizes, the least of which may make Violet, and the Greatest the Red"; this manifestly is not consistent with the Theory of Motion applied to Bodies, where the Magnitude of the Bodies is of no Consequence. Now it is evident that if the common Theory of Motion can be applied to Light, the Red Light must have had the greatest Velocity before Incidence, as it suffers the least Deviation, for if the Vels of all the Difft colour'd Light were equal before Incidence, they must by Newton's Principia Sect. Sect. 8. Prop. 1. have continued equal after, and therefore must have suffered the same Deviation. The Determination of this Point seems to be of considerable Importance, as we so often apply the Theory of Motion to Light.”

Samuel Vince (1749–1821) British mathematician, astronomer and physicist

As quoted in: Russell McCormmach (2011) Weighing the World: The Reverend John Michell of Thornhill. p. 193

Law, Nature, Light, Suffering

“In defining the CL the primary intention is to locate a psychologically meaningful mid-point for the scale of outcomes — a neutral point on a scale of satisfaction-dissatisfaction.”

John Thibaut (1917–1986) American social psychologist

Source: The social psychology of groups. 1959, p. 81

“The reality of the situation is obscured when population is expressed as a percentage proportion taken over the whole of the United Kingdom. The ethnic minority is geographically concentrated, so that areas in which it forms a majority already exists, and these areas are destined inevitably to grow. It is here that the compatibility of such an ethnic minority with the functioning of parliamentary democracy comes into question. Parliamentary democracy depends at all levels upon the valid acceptance of majority decision, by which the nation as a whole is content to be bound because of the continually available prospect that what one majority has decided another majority can subsequently alter. From this point of view, the political homogeneity of the electorate is crucial. What we do not, as yet, know is whether the voting behaviour of our altered population will be able to use the majority vote as a political instrument and not as a means of self-identification, self-assertion and self-enumeration. It may be that the United Kingdom will escape the political consequences of communalism; but communalism and democracy, as the experience of India demonstrates, are incompatible. That is the spectre which the Conservative party's policy of assisted repatriation in the 1960s aimed to banish; but time and events have swept over and passed the already outdated remedies of the 1960s. We are entering unknown territory where the only certainty for the future is the relative increase of the ethnic minority due to the age structure of that population which has been established.”

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

Article on the 25th anniversary of his 'Rivers of Blood speech', The Times (20 April 1993), p. 18
1990s

Age, Democracy, Communication, Question

“Not believing in something is not in itself a belief or a philosophy: it is the 'ism' at the end that tends to cause the trouble. Both atheists and believers can be as arrogant and witless as each other in frustrated debate, and people may choose strong and unapologetic words to raise awareness of the agenda. But despite the name-calling, it is still a fair point that to not believe in God is no more a 'belief in itself' than to not believe in the Loch Ness Monster, Poseidon or anything else one might personally consider far-fetched. Beyond that, there is only how you choose to express yourself.”

Derren Brown (1971) British illusionist

Books, Tricks of the Mind (2006)

God, People, Strong, Personality

“You can think of the curriculum as the shadows cast on a wall by the light of education itself as it shines over, under, around, and through the myriad phases of our experience. It is a mistake to be sure to take these shadows for the reality, but they are something that helps us find or grasp or intuit that reality. The false notions that there is a fixed curriculum, that there is a list of things that an educated person ought to know, and that the shadow-exercises on the wall themselves are the content of education—these false notions all come from taking too seriously what was originally a wise recognition—the recognition that the shadows do in fact provide a starting point in our attempt to fully envision reality.”

Andrew Abbott (1948) American sociologist and Professor of Sociology at the University of Chicago.

Abott (2002) “Welcome to the University of Chicago http://www.ditext.com/abbott/abbott_aims.html Aims of Education Address. 2002

Education, Exercises, Thinking, Reality

“At a point of life when one is through with boyhood, but has not yet discovered how to be a man, it was my fortune to travel with the most marvelously appealing of teams.”

Roger Kahn (1927–2020) American baseball writer

Source: The Boys Of Summer, Lines On The Transpontine Madness, p. xi

Life, Travel

“Alexander Bain was probably the first modern thinker whose primary concern was with psychology itself He has been credited with writing the first 'comprehensive treatise having psychology as its sole purpose'. His two-volume systematic work, The Senses and the Intellect (1855) and The Emotions and the Will (1859), was the standard British text for almost half a century, until Stout's replaced it. He also founded Mind (1876-), the first psychological journal in any country. His work requires close attention, because it is the meeting-point of experimental sensory-motor physiology and the association psychology. His influence on the conceptions of later workers was direct and extremely important. Ferrier studied classics and philosophy under Bain at Aberdeen (first class honours, 1863). When he and Jackson acknowledge their intellectual debts or make references to psychology, the names most often mentioned are Bain and Spencer-the figures whose work was the culmination of the association psychology in its traditional form.”

Robert Maxwell Young (1935–2019) American medical historian

Mind, Brain, and Adaptation in the Nineteenth Century, 1970. p. 101

Sense, Study, Country

“Trade unions up to a certain point have been recognised now as organs for good. They are the only means by which workmen can protect themselves from the tyranny of those who employ them. But the moment that trade unions become tyrants in their turn, they are engines for evil: they have no right to prevent people from working on any terms that they choose.”

Nathaniel Lindley, Baron Lindley (1828–1921) English judge

Lyons & Sons v. Wilkins (1896), 74 L. T. Rep. (N. S.) 364. Compare Mogul Steamship Co. v. MacGregor, Gow, & Co., 66 L. T. Rep. (N. S.) 1; Temperton v. Russell and others, 69 L. T. Rep. (N. S.) 78.

People, Evil

“What's the point of a revolution
without general
copulation copulation copulation”

Peter Weiss Marat/Sade

Chorus, act 2, scene 30 (p. 92)
Marat/Sade (1963)

“Bombardment by a new device of centres essential to the British war effort. The action was long delayed, but who can deny that the moment selected for it was chosen most appropriately from the military point of view? Germany has more secret weapons than one.”

William Joyce (1906–1946) British fascist and propaganda broadcaster

Broadcast, German European Service in English, 17 September 1944.
Refers to the first attack by the Vergeltungswaffe-1, or "reprisal weapon".

War, Secret, Effort

“Those unknown heroes whose whitened bones have been piously gathered here, and whose green graves we now strew with sweet and beautiful flowers, choice emblems alike of pure hearts and brave spirits, reached, in their glorious career that last highest point of nobleness beyond which human power cannot go. They died for their country.”

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

1870s, The Unknown Loyal Dead (1871)

Beauty, Flowers, Heart, Country

“Freud very rightly brought his critical faculties to bear upon the dream. It is, in fact, inadmissible that this considerable portion of psychic activity (since, at least from man’s birth until his death, thought offers no solution of continuity, the sum of the moments of the dream, from the point of view of time, and taking into consideration only the time of pure dreaming, that is the dreams of sleep, is not inferior to the sum of the moments of reality, or, to be more precisely limiting, the moments of waking) has still today been so grossly neglected.”

André Breton (1896–1966) French writer

Le Manifeste du Surréalisme, Andre Breton (Manifesto of Surrealism; 1924)

Death, Dreams, Birth, Reality

“So long as it doesn't get to the point where you don't remember whose opera you're listening to, I'm willing to experiment.”

Beverly Sills (1929–2007) opera soprano

As quoted in Newsweek, Vol. 103, (1984), p. iv

“Now when naturalists observe a close agreement in numerous small details of habits, tastes and dispositions between two or more domestic races, or between nearly-allied natural forms, they use this fact as an argument that all are descended from a common progenitor who was thus endowed; and consequently that all should be classed under the same species. The same argument may be applied with much force to the races of man.

As it is improbable that the numerous and unimportant points of resemblance between the several races of man in bodily structure and mental faculties (I do not here refer to similar customs) should all have been independently acquired, they must have been inherited from progenitors who were thus characterised.”

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

volume I, chapter VII: "On the Races of Man", page 233 http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?pageseq=246&itemID=F937.1&viewtype=image The Descent of Man (1871)

Nature

“In s (in which 180° = \pi [radians]). Further, each full line (great circle) is of finite length 2 \pi R, and any two full lines meet in two points—there are no parallels!”

Howard P. Robertson (1903–1961) American mathematician and physicist

Geometry as a Branch of Physics (1949)

“To challenge and to cope with this paradoxical state of things, we need a paradoxical way of thinking; since the world drifts into delirium, we must adopt a delirious point of view. We must no longer assume any principle of truth, of causality, or any discursive norm. Instead, we must grant both the poetic singularity of events and the radical uncertainty of events. It is not easy. We usually think that holding to the protocols of experimentation and verification is the most difficult thing. But in fact the most difficult thing is to renounce the truth and the possibility of verification, to remain as long as possible on the enigmatic, ambivalent, and reversible side of thought.”

Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007) French sociologist and philosopher

The Vital Illusion (2000) "The Murder of the Real". Wellek Library Lectures given May 1999 at the University of California, Irvine
New millennium

Truth, World, Way, Thinking

“The strong equilibrium point f just described is one of "unrelenting ferocity" against offenders. It exhibits a zeal for meting out justice that is entirely oblivious to the sometimes dire consequences to oneself or to the other faitheful——i. e., those who have not deviated.”

Robert Aumann (1930) Israeli-American mathematician

"Acceptable Points in General Cooperative n-Person Games," in Contributions to the Theory of Games IV, Annals of Mathematics Study 40, edited by A. W. Tucker and R. D. Luce, Princeton University Press, 1959, pp. 287-324.

Faith, Justice, Strong

“There's a point you reach before you're perverted and tainted by all the things that drag you into the music business, like avarice or a lust for fame. The original reason why I started was some feeling of community, equality, wanting to fight for things you believe in. Any kid who's gone to a state school knows what it's all about - bullying, racism. And you've just got to make a stand.”

Pete Doherty (1979) English musician, writer, actor, poet and artist

2004, The Socialist Review; on why it was important to do the Love Music, Hate Racism gig
Music and politics

School, Music, Feeling, Communication

“What makes The Present Age and The Difference Between a Genius and an Apostle important is not so much that the former essay anticipates Heidegger and the latter, Barth: it would be more accurate to say that Heidegger’s originality is widely overestimated, and that many things he says at great length in his highly obscure German were said earlier by various writers who had made the same points much more elegantly, and that some of these writers, including Kierkegaard, were known to Heidegger. Why should Kierkegaard’s significance depend on someone else’s, quite especially when many points that others copied from him may be wrong?”

Walter Kaufmann (1921–1980) American philosopher

Walter Kaufmann, Preface to The Present Age, by Soren Kierkegaard, Dru translation 1962 p. 15-16
Other books

Age, Dependency

“Nature is just a dictionary, you hunt in it for words.... you find in it the elements which make a phrase or a story; but nobody would regard a dictionary as a composition in the poetic sense of the term. Besides, nature is far from being always interesting from the point of view of the effect of the whole... If each detail is perfect in some way, the union of these details seldom gives an effect equivalent to that which arises, in the work of a great artist, from the total composition.”

Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863) French painter

Delacroix, quoted by Paul Signac: in D'Eugene Delacroix au Neo-impressionnisme, Chap. I.; as quoted by John Rewald, in Georges Seurat', a monograph https://ia800607.us.archive.org/23/items/georges00rewa/georges00rewa.pdf; Wittenborn and Compagny, New York, 1943. p.10 + note 15 Quotes, undated

Way, Nature, Sense, Perfection

“The realization of the pathetic frailty of the knowledge or beliefs on which our life depends thus leads not to despair but to open-eyed courage. But it also points to a most intimate connection between scientific method and liberal civilization. Science is not, as is popularly conceived, a new set of dogmas taught by a newer and better set of priests called scientists. It is rather a method which is based on a critical attitude to all plausible and self-evident propositions. It seeks not to reject them, but to find out what evidence there is to support them rather than their possible alternatives. This open eye for possible alternatives, each to receive the same logical treatment before we can determine which is the better grounded, is the essence of liberalism in art, morals, and politics.... Like science, liberalism insists on a critical examination of the content of all our beliefs, principles, or initial hypotheses and on subjecting them to a continuous process of verification so that they will be progressively better founded in experience and reason.”

Morris Raphael Cohen (1880–1947) American philosopher

Language in Thought and Action, p. 271, (1939), S.I. Hayakawa

Life, Art, Courage, Support

“Art has nothing to do with taste, art is not there to be 'tasted'. Yet a certain mayor believes that art exists to be 'judged', and the most modern art to be 'judged from a business point of view'. That such an original thought could emerge from a mayor's brain! What the mayor wants is exactly what the critics of the large and small dailies actually do. They set out to judge art. That is a very pleasant occupation, because no matter how wrong a judgment may be, you never have to revise it. The art judges talk about 'ability' and complain that the 'younger generation' has lost this ability. Sometimes their complaints are even seriously intended. But, gentlemen, do you really know what that is — ability? No, you don't.”

Max Ernst (1891–1976) German painter, sculptor and graphic artist

As quoted in Max Ernst: Sculptures (1996) by Max Ernst, Jürgen Pech, and Ida Gianelli, p. 11
posthumous

Art, Business

“Now, there were many reasons why the south did not appeal to the right of revolution. One reason was that there were no abuses that they had been subject to, comparable to the ones enumerated in the Declaration of Independence. Lincoln, in his inaugural address, said that there was not a single constitutional right which anybody could point to, to say that that had been violated. They were exercising this right as something that was to their pleasure, for their own purposes, but that had nothing to do with the Constitution, and yet they were claiming it as a Constitutional right to withdraw from the Union.”

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

2000s, The Real Abraham Lincoln: A Debate (2002), The Right of Secession Is Not the Right of Revolution

Pleasure, Exercises

“The truth is the United States has to this point never recognized that Taiwan is part of China.”

Mark Chen

Mark Chen (2016) cited in " US ‘one China’ policy debated at forum http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/front/archives/2016/12/15/2003661235" on Taipei Times, 15 December 2016

Truth, Parting

“God's country. He could have made it smaller and still made the same point.”

John Updike book Rabbit at Rest

Rabbit at Rest (1990)

God, Country

“You will get your difficulties with the point electron.”

Paul Ehrenfest (1880–1933) Dutch physicist

as quoted by Hendrik Casimir in an interview http://www.aip.org/history/ohilist/4550_1.html by Thomas Kuhn, Léon Rosenfeld, Aage Bohr and Erik Ruedinger at the Institute for Theoretical Physics, Copenhagen, 5 and 6 July, 1963. Attributed

“The point is that, like Richard Hell says, rock 'n' roll is an arena in which you recreate yourself, and all this blathering about authenticity is just a bunch of crap. The Clash are authentic because their music carries such brutal conviction, not because they're Noble Savages.”

Lester Bangs (1948–1982) American music critic and journalist

"The Clash" (December 1977), p. 227
Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung (1988)

Music, Hell

“The scientific point of view is that such claims of postmodernism are a travesty that comes from mixing ideology and politics with science.”

Mordechai Ben-Ari (1948) Israeli computer scientist

Source: Just a Theory: Exploring the Nature of Science (2005), Chapter 7, “Postmodernist Critiques of Science: Is Science Universal?” (p. 128)

Science

“If you had 5 photos of anuses, I could not point mine out”

Karl Pilkington (1972) English television personality, social commentator, actor, author and former radio producer

The Moaning of Life, Karl on Happiness

Photo

“…we were not aware of this and the seditious character of the poem (Balagtas' Florante and Laura) until Epifanio de los Santos discovered and pointed them out”

Epifanio de los Santos (1871–1928) Filipino politician

Leopoldo Y. Babes "A brief survey of Iloko literature from the beginnings to its present development, with a bibliography of works pertaining to the Iloko people and their language" Manila Oriental Co. 1924, p. 56-57.
BALIW

“I looked down on a quilt of clouds, bordered on the horizon by the blood-orange streaks of the setting sun. As the steady hum of the engine drowned out the chatter around me, I realized that I would probably be thinking about the implications of Watergate for the rest of my life. For the country, and for me it had been a significant point in time.”

Fred Thompson (1942–2015) American politician and actor

page 263
At That Point in Time, Impact of Watergate

Life, Thinking, Time, Sun

“At any given time, ninety-nine-point-nine-five per cent of the human race are a confounded nuisance”

Tom Holt book Flying Dutch

Flying Dutch (1991)

Time

“C++ is a horrible language. It's made more horrible by the fact that a lot of substandard programmers use it, to the point where it's much much easier to generate total and utter crap with it.”

Linus Torvalds (1969) Finnish-American software engineer and hacker

Message to gmane.comp.version-control.git mailing list, 2007-09-06, Torvalds, Linus, 2007-09-22 http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/57918, 2000s, 2007

“The old San Francisco is under attack to the point where it's disappearing”

Nancy Peters (1936) American writer and publisher

Simon Davis, "'Beat city' fights dotcom gold rush", http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2000/09/06/wsan06.xml The Daily Telegraph, 2001-06-19. : After City Lights was granted landmark status to prevent its eviction by a computer company. 2000s

“Perhaps some day soon we will have arrived at the point when we can look back with irony at the barbaric old times when in order to be free we had to keep our own brothers and sisters slaves or to be equal we were constrained to inhuman sacrifices of freedom.”

Antonio Negri book Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

Sister, Freedom, Time

“He [Chomsky] has now been impeached by his own standards, since scrutiny of the evidence does not bear him out on Serbia or Afghanistan or Iraq. It didn't bear him out on Cambodia either, though he was never a "Holocaust denier" or anything like it. And he has, I think, ceased to be of any use to young people who might pardonably doubt the official story. The position he took, comparing the attack on the World Trade Center to an admittedly criminal Clintonian strike on Sudan (and virtually concluding that the latter was worse!) showed the absolute exhaustion of the glib "double standards" school, as I point out extensively in Love, Poverty and War. But his decline and fall is a loss, and you miss the point by denying it.”

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

"Love, Poverty and War" http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=C78DC231-4599-4745-9CA5-A398398916A0, FrontPageMagazine.com (2004-12-29): On Noam Chomsky 2000s, 2004

Love, War, People, World

“Chinese medicine, oh, Chinese medicine! "But there are billions of Chinese, Chinese medicine must be working." Here's the skinny on Chinese medicine. A hundred years ago the average life expectancy in China was 30. The life expectancy in China at the moment is 73. And it's not feckin' tiger penis that turned it around for the Chinese. Didn't do much for the tiger, if you don't mind me pointing out.”

Dara Ó Briain (1972) Irish comedian and television presenter

Dara Ó Briain Talks Funny: Live in London (2008)

Life

“They are, of course, Nazis. They have a kind of Nazi attitude. They are the left wing of Nazism. These guys don't want any other point of view. They don't even feel guilty using tax dollars to spout their propaganda. They are basically Air America with government funding to keep them alive.”

Roger Ailes (1940–2017) Television executive

Howard
Kurtz
Fox News Chief Blasts NPR 'Nazis'
The Daily Beast
2010-11-17
http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-11-17/fox-news-chief-roger-ailes-blasts-national-public-radio-brass-as-nazis/
2011-02-10
on NPR firing Juan Williams for remarks he made on Fox News about fearing airplane passengers in Muslim garb

Guy, Feeling

“I have read with very great interest Mr. Metcalfe's paper, as we at the Midvale Steel Co. have had the experience, during the past ten years, of organizing a system very similar to that of Mr. Metcalfe. The chief idea in our system, as in his, is, that the authority for doing all kinds of work should proceed from one central office to the various departments, and that there proper records should be kept of the work and reports made daily to the central office, so that the superintending department should be kept thoroughly informed as to what is taking place throughout the works, and at the same time no work could be done in the works without proper authority. The details of the system have been very largely modified as time went on, and a consecutive plan, such as Mr. Metcalfe proposed, would have been of great assistance to us in carrying out our system. There are certain points, however, in Mr. Metcalfe's plan, which I think our experience shows to be somewhat objectionable. He issues to each of the men a book, something like a check-book, containing sheets which they tear out, and return to the office after stating on them the work which they have done. We have found that any record which passes through the average workman's hands, and which he holds for any length of time, is apt either to be soiled or torn. We have, therefore, adopted the system of having our orders sent from the central office to the small offices in the various departments of the works, in each of which there is a clerk who takes charge of all orders received from, and records returned to, the central office, as well as of all records kept in the department.”

Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856–1915) American mechanical engineer and tennis player

F.W. Taylor (1886), " Comment to "The Shop-Order System of Accounts https://archive.org/stream/transactionsof07amer#page/475/mode/1up," by Henry Metcalfe in: Transactions of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, Vol 7 (1885-1886), p. 475; Partly cited in: Charles D. Wrege, ‎Ronald G. Greenwood (1991), Frederick W. Taylor, the father of scientific management. p. 204.

Men, Books, Idea, Thinking

“Many women would like to dream with men without sleeping with them. Someone should point out to them that this is utterly impossible.”

Karl Kraus (1874–1936) Czech playwright and publicist

Half-Truths and One-And-A-Half Truths (1976)

Women, Men, Dreams, Sleep

“In a way, your law school becomes part of your extended family. I say this because once you graduate with your Juris Doctor degree you are essentially married to that particular institution. No matter what your experience or opinion of the place, your alma mater is a name you cannot escape. The individuals that attend law school with you will be your life-long partners as you progress from a common starting point. Understanding the basic principles of professional networking, and utilizing the knowledge while on your law school campus, will reap a lifetime of rewards and provide you with many genuinely enhancing relationships.”

Don West, Jr.

in [Ann K. Levine, Esq., The Law School Admission Game: Play Like An Expert http://www.lawschoolexpertbook.com/, Abraham Publishing, Inc, 2009, 978-0-615-27183-5, 148-149]

Life, School, Family, Law

“Another important point which you so very accurately sensed concerns the idea that the glass in actual fact is not meant to be looked at (with 'aesthetic' eyes). It should be accompanied by a 'literary' text, as amorphous as possible, which never took shape. And the two elements, glass for the eyes, text for the ears and understanding, should complement each other and above all prevent one or the other from taking on an aesthetic-plastic or literary form. All in all, I am hugely indebted to you for having stripped bare my Bride stripped bare”

Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) French painter and sculptor

the complete title is: The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass), c. 1915 – 1923
Quote from a letter to fr:Jean Suquet (art historian), New York 25 December 1949; as quoted in The Duchamp Book, ed. Gavin Parkinson, Tate Publishing, London 2008 p. 163
1921 - 1950

Idea, Understanding, Sense