Quotes about point
page 30

“I like it to be clean, and that goes with mine as well—I want it to be a clean picture. I don’t want it to be something that doesn’t make sense on their page. It should be crisp and clear and to the point. I follow people because I like to see THEM—not their dog, not food, not their friends—I want to see them. That’s why people follow me.”

Antje Utgaard (1994) American actress

Model Antje Utgaard on how to win at social media https://www.mensfitness.com/life/entertainment/model-antje-utgaard-how-win-social-media (November 15, 2016)

People, Food, Dogs, Sense

“There's no point in going out into space if the future that we'll see there is a sterile future living in tin cans. We have to able to recreate in space habitats which are as beautiful as earth-like as the loveliest parts of planet Earth and we can do that.”

Gerard O'Neill (1927–1992) Physicist, author, and inventor

The High Frontier (1976)

Beauty, Future, Parting

“Privilege is basically a form of property, and as John Locke pointed out, property is what makes a civilization rather than a Libyan war zone of Hobbesian anarchy. The world is a better place when people can work constructively to earn privileges, individual and collective, and pass some of them on to their heirs.”

Steve Sailer (1958) American journalist and movie critic

Checking Iron Age Barbarian Prejudice http://takimag.com/article/checking_iron_age_barbarian_prejudice_steve_sailer/print#ixzz4A7r77jkG, Taki's Magazine, April 22, 2015

War, People, World

“There are some who, for varying reasons, would appease Red China. They are blind to history's clear lesson, for history teaches with unmistakable emphasis that appeasement but begets new and bloodier war. It points to no single instance where this end has justified that means, where appeasement has led to more than a sham peace. Like blackmail, it lays the basis for new and successively greater demands until, as in blackmail, violence becomes the only other alternative.”

Douglas MacArthur (1880–1964) U.S. Army general of the army, field marshal of the Army of the Philippines

1950s, Farewell address to Congress (1951)

War, Peace, History, Success

“To attract people, to win over people to that which I have realised as being true, that is called propaganda. In the beginning there is the understanding, this understanding uses propaganda as a tool to find those men, that shall turn understanding into politics. Success is the important thing. Propaganda is not a matter for average minds, but rather a matter for practitioners. It is not supposed to be lovely or theoretically correct. I do not care if I give wonderful, aesthetically elegant speeches, or speak so that women cry. The point of a political speech is to persuade people of what we think right. I speak differently in the provinces than I do in Berlin, and when I speak in Bayreuth, I say different things from what I say in the Pharus Hall. That is a matter of practice, not of theory. We do not want to be a movement of a few straw brains, but rather a movement that can conquer the broad masses. Propaganda should be popular, not intellectually pleasing. It is not the task of propaganda to discover intellectual truths. Those are found in other circumstances, I find them when thinking at my desk, but not in the meeting hall.”

Joseph Goebbels (1897–1945) Nazi politician and Propaganda Minister

Speech on 9 January 1928 to an audience of party members at the "Hochschule für Politik", a series of training talks for Nazi party members in Berlin
1920s

Love, Women, Men, People

“The Muslim Majilis Mushawarat, which is the united front of Muslim organizations in India, includes… educated Muslims… and orthodox Muslims… The election manifesto of the Mushawarat … contained a 9-point charter of demands which can only be interpreted as asserting that Muslim Indians constituted a 'sovereign' society.”

Hamid Dalwai (1932–1977) Indian social reformer, thinker and writer

Muslim politics, p.80, quoted from Elst, Koenraad (2014). Decolonizing the Hindu mind: Ideological development of Hindu revivalism. New Delhi: Rupa. p. 364-6

Education

“The point to be made clear is that, whatever may be our temperament, or our power in the presence of nature, we have to render what we actually see, forgetting everything that appeared before our own time. Which, I think, should enable the artist to express his personality to the full, be it large or small. Now that I am an old man, about seventy, the sensations of colour which produce light give rise to abstractions that prevent me from covering my canvas, and from trying to define the outlines of objects when their points of contact are tenuous and delicate; with the result that my image or picture is incomplete. For another thing, the planes become confused, superimposed; hence Neo-Impressionism (initiated by Seurat and Paul Signac, ed., where everything is outlined in black, an error which must be uncompromisingly rejected. And nature, if consulted, shows us how to achieve this aim.”

Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) French painter

Quote from Cézanne's letter to Émile Bernard, 23 October 1905; as quoted in Letters of the great artists – from Blake to Pollock, Richard Friedenthal, Thames and Hudson, London, 1963, p. 180
Quotes of Paul Cezanne, after 1900

Error, Nature, Thinking, Light

“In his Experiment in Autobiography (1934), H. G. Wells pointed out that ever since the beginning of life, most creatures have been 'up against it'. Their lives are a drama of struggle against the forces of nature. Yet nowadays you can say to a man: Yes, you earn a living, you support a family, you love and hate, but -- what do you do? His real interest may be in something else -- art, science, literature, philosophy. The bird is a creature of the air, the fish is a creature of the water, and man is a creature of the mind.”

Colin Wilson book From Atlantis to the Sphinx

Source: From Atlantis to the Sphinx (1996), p. 346-347

Love, Life, Hate, Family

“Firstly what does conservation mean? It is not merely the saving from extinction of such species as the Notornis, the Leadbetters Possum or the Leathery Turtle; this is important work but it is only part of the problem. You cannot begin to preserve any species of animal unless you preserve the habitat in which it dwells. Disturb or destroy that habitat and you will exterminate the species as surely as if you had shot it. So conservation means that you have to preserve forest and grassland, river and lake, even the sea itself. This is not only vital for the preservation of animal life generally, but for the future existence of man himself — a point that seems to escape many people.”

Gerald Durrell (1925–1995) naturalist, zookeeper, conservationist, author and television presenter

Two in the Bush (1966)

Life, People, Problem, Future

“I was trying to show colour, but I realized at the private view that the public were prisoners of a preconceived point of view and that, confronted with all these surfaces of different colours, they responded far more to the inter-relationship of the different propositions, they reconstituted the elements of a decorative polychromy.”

Yves Klein (1928–1962) French artist

In 1956; p. 30
before 1960, "Yves Klein, 1928 – 1962, Selected Writings"

“Now, here is Jesus' point: he is not only the culmination of the project, but the project itself, God made brother, offering us to become siblings, but vulnerable to fratricide.”

James Alison (1959) Christian theologian, priest

Source: Faith Beyond Resentment: Fragments Catholic and Gay (2001), "Jesus' fraternal relocation of God", p. 73.

God, Siblings

“Look what the Iraq Study Group came up with. You know, that was a totally nonpartisan group of, you know, 10 wise Americans, you know, some of them Republican, some of then Democrats from different, you know, experiences. They came out with a long list of recommendations. Now, you can say well, I wouldn't agree with that one or wouldn't agree with this one, but the fundamental point they made is that there is no military solution. There is only a political resolution and you've got to bring everybody into the game in order to move it forward, you know. And for whatever reason, this administration rejects that. They won't talk to bad people. That means they won't talk to the Iranians and the Syrians… If they're our enemies, then believe me, I think they are, because they certainly don't wish us any well outcome, then we need to know more about them. I think it's a sign of strength to get into a process with people who you are concerned about their motives, who's really calling the shots. This administration won't do that. So, to a certain extent we're flying blind.”

Hillary Clinton (1947) American politician, senator, Secretary of State, First Lady

Interview http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,244985,00.html with Greta van Susteren on FOX News (19 January 2007) Senate years (2001 – January 19, 2007)

People, Game, Motivation, Thinking

“Know that the figures employed by prophets are of two kinds: first, where every word which occurs in the simile represents a certain idea: and secondly, where the simile, as a whole, represents a general idea, but has a great many points which have no reference whatever to that idea: they are simply required to give to the simile its proper form and order, or better to conceal the idea: the simile is therefore continued as far as necessary, according to its literal sense. Consider this well.”

Maimónides book The Guide for the Perplexed

Guide for the Perplexed (c. 1190), Introduction

Idea, Sense

“Possession is eleven points in the law.”

Colley Cibber (1671–1757) British poet laureate

Woman's Wit, Act I (1697).

Law

“It doesn’t take a genius to see what happens when the entitlement state outgrows the economy upon which it rests. The time of Greece, Cyprus, Portugal, Spain, the rest of insolvent social-democratic Europe — and now Detroit — is the time for conservatives to raise the banner of Stein's Law and yell, ‘Stop.’ You can kick the can down the road, but at some point it disappears over a cliff.”

Charles Krauthammer (1950–2018) American journalist

2010s, 2013, Detroit Ran Into The Inviolable Rule Of Economics (2013)

Law, Time

“What I say in the book is that rather than it being the death of journalism, this whole deluge of information, it to me marks a time when journalism can really come into its own, because as we’re drowning in information, the whole point of a journalist is to signpost what’s important and then to verify whether or not it’s true.”

Heather Brooke (1970) American journalist

Attributed, Chatham House Talk (September 28, 2011)

Death, Books, Time

“Idiots can do what I do. When I first started to do this [projecting photos on the canvas and painting them after having them traced in details with a piece of charcoal] in the 60's, people laughed. I clearly showed that I painted from photographs. It seemed so juvenile. The provocation was purely formal - that I was making paintings like photographs. Nobody asked about what was in the pictures. Nobody asked who my Aunt Marianne was. That didn't seem to be the point.”

Gerhard Richter (1932) German visual artist, born 1932

Richter's aunt had been murdered by the Nazis in the name of euthanasia, a crime for which his father-in-law from his first marriage, a Nazi doctor named Heinrich Eufinger, had been partially responsible. Richter painted a portrait of his aunt in 1965, based on an old photo. It was called 'Tante Marianne' / 9Aunt Marianne).
after 2000, Gerhard Richter: An Artist Beyond Isms' (2002)

People, Photo, Painting

“The theater, which is in no thing, but makes use of everything—gestures, sounds, words, screams, light, darkness—rediscovers itself at precisely the point where the mind requires a language to express its manifestations…. To break through language in order to touch life is to create or recreate the theatre.”

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

Preface: The Theater and Culture
The Theatre and Its Double (1938, translated 1958)

Life, Light

“If you can't make fun of bad movies on serious subjects, what's the point?”

Pauline Kael (1919–2001) American film critic

Interview with Hal Espen, The New Yorker (1994-03-21); reprinted in Espen's Conversations with Pauline Kael (University of Mississippi Press, 1996, ISBN 0-878-05899-0), p. 162.
Interviews

“The point of having nuclear weapons is to deter a war of any kind. They have succeeded in doing so for the past 37 years. To be an effective deterrent a potential aggressor must believe that under certain circumstances such weapons will be used.”

Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013) British stateswoman and politician

Prime Minister's Questions (1 February 1983) http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/105246 First term as Prime Minister

War, Past

“To misperceive the DPRK as a communist state – either of the Stalinist or indigenized kind – is therefore to misunderstand and miscalculate its behavior. I often encounter resistance to this point when lecturing to American audiences. Conservatives do not want communism let off the hook for creating this state, and liberals do not want Washington let off the hook for bullying it. Politically correct college students object to the attribution of racism to non-whites.”

Brian Reynolds Myers (1963) American professor of international studies

2010s, North Korea's State Loyalty Advantage (December 2011)

Behavior, Communication

“This book is intended as an exploratory sketch of a revolutionary scientific perspective and conceptual framework as it might be applied to sociocultural systems. This point of view and still developing framework, as interpreted here, stems from the General Systems Research movement and the now closely allied fields of Cybernetics and information or communication theory.”

Walter F. Buckley (1922–2006) American sociologist

Source: Sociology and modern systems theory (1967), p. vii.

Books, Communication

“We arrive at the point where we, looking over the hundred and twenty five years of independence, can see that the simple government conceived by the revolutionary republicans was a foredoomed failure. It was so because of: 1) the essence of government itself; 2) the essence of human nature; 3) the essence of Commerce and Manufacture.”

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

Anarchism & American Traditions (1908)

Failure, Nature

“And Lincoln pointed out that this argument—which the Court applied to the territories—could also equally well be applied to the states, so that the prospect of slavery becoming national, not only through the spread into the new territories but in the spread to the states, was very great. This was Lincoln’s argument.”

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

2000s, The Real Abraham Lincoln: A Debate (2002), The Lincoln-Douglas Debates

“Nietzsche … explicates his preferred distinction between good and bad individuals as non-condemnatory of the latter. A ‘bad person’ is merely devoid of what Nietzsche personally considers to be noble or virtuous qualities; he is not morally evil. Nietzsche’s aim is … to defuse morality of reactive emotion. … It would be futile, tactless, and cruel, he suggests, to try to change a bad person, one with whom one does not empathize; his formula advises: ‘Where you cannot love, pass by’. No on should be blamed for what he is; there is no point in lamenting fate.”

John Carroll (1944) Australian professor and author

Source: Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974), p. 91

Love, Fate, Evil, Change

“Development of an organism from a single germ cell into a multicellular entity is a self-organizing system from any point of view and I wish to contend that this self-organizing system is a subsystem of the self-organizing system called 'evolution.”

Gordon Pask (1928–1996) British psychologist

Source: An Approach to Cybernetics (1961), p. 103-104, partly cited in: Darren Tofts, Annemarie Jonson, Alessio Cavallaro (2004) Prefiguring Cyberculture: An Intellectual History.

“From a scientific point of view, the risks from climate change are more serious than from nuclear power. Climate change is hard to control, but nuclear power can be controlled to an extent..”

Stephen Shen (1949) Taiwanese politician

Stephen Shen (2013) cited in " No nuclear power, more carbon: minister http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/taiwan/archives/2013/03/21/2003557614" on Taipei Times, 21 March 2013

Change

“Reading, like all work, has its rules. A perfect knowledge of a few writers and a few subjects is more valuable than a superficial one of a great many. The fine points of a piece of writing are seldom apparent at first reading. In youth, one should search among books as one searches the world for friends, and once these friends are found, chosen, and adopted, one must go into retirement with them. Intimacy with Montaigne, Saint Simon, Retz, Balzac, or Proust would be enough to enrich one's whole life.”

André Maurois (1885–1967) French writer

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

Life, Books, Youth, World

“At that point in their lives, everything is clear and everything is possible. They are not afraid to dream, and to yearn for everything they would like to see happen to them in their lives. But, as time passes a mysterious force begins to convince them that it will be impossible for them to realize their destiny.”

Paulo Coelho book The Alchemist

Source: The Alchemist (1988), p. 22.

Dreams, Time

“I am God / So much of the divine / is heaped in me / that I cannot die.
My head burns to the point of bursting.
One of the worlds / hidden in it / wants to be born. / But now I must suffer / to bring it forth.”

Paul Klee (1879–1940) German Swiss painter

Quote (1901), # 155, in The Diaries of Paul Klee, translation: Pierre B. Schneider, R. Y. Zachary and Max Knight; publisher, University of California Press, 1964
1895 - 1902

God, World, Suffering

“The reality is that a person who has always struggled with numbers is unlikely to be a great accountant or statistician… This might sound like a heretical point of view for those of us who grew up believing the essential American myth that we could become anything we wanted. it's clear from [our] research that each person has greater potential for success in specific areas, and the key to human development is building on who you already are.”

Tom Rath (1975) American author

As cited in: Marsha Blackburn (2008), Life Equity. p. 30
StrengthsFinder 2.0, 2007

Reality, Success, Personality

“Sight, when used in the context of nature, creates direct communication with reality. It implies that one is involved in this particular reality and quickly leads a person to action. But when the image has become artificial and is purely a means of knowledge, the reaction persists. I feel directly involved in what I see, just as prehistoric people did. And if I am seeing objects or ideas, I am not truly independent; I cannot really take my distance from these objects. From the intellectual point of view, this means I cannot really exercise my critical faculties. The use of images to transmit knowledge leads to the progressive elimination of distance between a person and his knowledge, because of the way we are made to participate when this means is used (this is, of course, in perfect accord with technical civilization, and to be desired by its standards). The critical faculties and autonomy of the thinking person are also eliminated.”

Jacques Ellul (1912–1994) French sociologist, technology critic, and Christian anarchist

J. Hanks, trans. (1985), p. 212
The Humiliation of the Word (1981)

People, Way, Feeling, Exercises

“For Space, when the position of points is expressed by rectilinear co-ordinates, ds = \sqrt{ \sum (dx)^2 }; Space is therefore included in this simplest case. The next case in simplicity includes those manifoldnesses in which the line-element may be expressed as the fourth root of a quartic differential expression…. I restrict myself… to those manifoldnesses in which the line element is expressed as the square root of a quadric differential expression…. Manifoldnesses in which, as in the Plane and in Space, the line-element may be reduced to the form \sqrt{ \sum (dx)^2 }, are… only a particular case of the manifoldnesses to be here investigated; they require a special name, and therefore these manifoldnesses… I will call flat. In order now to review the true varieties of all the continua which may be represented in the assumed form, it is necessary to get rid of difficulties arising from the mode of representation, which is accomplished by choosing the variables in accordance with a certain principle.”

Bernhard Riemann (1826–1866) German mathematician

On the Hypotheses which lie at the Bases of Geometry (1873)

“Let us imagine that from any given point the system of shortest lines going out from it is constructed; the position of an arbitrary point may then be determined by the initial direction of the geodesic in which it lies, and by its distance measured along that line from the origin. It can therefore be expressed in terms of the ratios dx0 of the quantities dx in this geodesic, and of the length s of this line. …the square of the line-element is \sum (dx)^2 for infinitesimal values of the x, but the term of next order in it is equal to a homogeneous function of the second order… an infinitesimal, therefore, of the fourth order; so that we obtain a finite quantity on dividing this by the square of the infinitesimal triangle, whose vertices are (0,0,0,…), (x1, x2, x3,…), (dx1, dx2, dx3,…). This quantity retains the same value so long as… the two geodesics from 0 to x and from 0 to dx remain in the same surface-element; it depends therefore only on place and direction. It is obviously zero when the manifold represented is flat, i. e., when the squared line-element is reducible to \sum (dx)^2, and may therefore be regarded as the measure of the deviation of the manifoldness from flatness at the given point in the given surface-direction. Multiplied by -¾ it becomes equal to the quantity which Privy Councillor Gauss has called the total curvature of a surface. …The measure-relations of a manifoldness in which the line-element is the square root of a quadric differential may be expressed in a manner wholly independent of the choice of independent variables. A method entirely similar may for this purpose be applied also to the manifoldness in which the line-element has a less simple expression, e. g., the fourth root of a quartic differential. In this case the line-element, generally speaking, is no longer reducible to the form of the square root of a sum of squares, and therefore the deviation from flatness in the squared line-element is an infinitesimal of the second order, while in those manifoldnesses it was of the fourth order. This property of the last-named continua may thus be called flatness of the smallest parts. The most important property of these continua for our present purpose, for whose sake alone they are here investigated, is that the relations of the twofold ones may be geometrically represented by surfaces, and of the morefold ones may be reduced to those of the surfaces included in them…”

Bernhard Riemann (1826–1866) German mathematician

On the Hypotheses which lie at the Bases of Geometry (1873)

Imagination, Parting, Dependency

“I had the company of monsieur Gibert. Such people see clearly, but they have the teacher's eye. As the train was taking us past Alexis' place a staggering subject for a picture came into view towards the east: St-Victoire [later Cezanne made series of paintings of Mont St. Victoire and the crags above Beaurecueil]. I said, 'What a splendid subject'; he replied, 'The lines are too symmetrical'. Referring to 'L'Assommoir' [a novel of Emile Zola ] about which, incidentally, he was the first person to speak to me, he said some very sound things, and praised it, but always from the point of view of technique.”

Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) French painter

Quote in Cézanne's letter to his friend Emile Zola, Aix-en-Provence, 14 April 1878; as quoted in Letters of the great artists – from Blake to Pollock"', Richard Friedenthal, Thames and Hudson, London, 1963, pp. 178-179
Quotes of Paul Cezanne, 1860s - 1870s

People, Teachers, Past, Painting

“I remember sitting down once, [at] three in the morning and probably the only person awake in Stevens Point […] *imitates typing with his fingers* And I stop, and I think: "This is crap! I've spent years of my life writing crap. This will never be published - it isn't good… I've wasted years of my life!" *shrugs and types on* You do it because you like the process. I mean… you write because you like to write.”

Patrick Rothfuss (1973) American fantasy writer

Suvudu interview with Shawn Speakman, June 2010 http://sf-fantasy.suvudu.com/2011/01/video-interview-patrick-rothfuss.html

Life, Thinking, Personality

“Maithripala Sirisena: I must say very clearly there is no allegations regarding 'war crimes', there were war crime allegations during the early stages. But at the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, mainly in the proposals presented in September, there were no war crime allegations against us. They contained allegations of Human Rights violations only. When you consider the facts surrounding the allegations of human rights violations, we're committed as a member of the UN to implementing the main points and proposals. But within that commitment, we will always act in accordance with the sovereignty of our country and in accordance with our constitution. For this work, we can obtain foreign technology in certain areas. In terms of people we definitely do not need outsiders. We have an unbiased independent judiciary in this country. We have a Criminal Investigation Department and other institutions that can carry out unbiased investigations in this regard.”

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

Talk to Al Jazeera - Sri Lankan president: No allegations of war crimes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=udGmG-eqJ6o

War, People, Country

“All history consists of successive excursions from a single starting-point, to which man returns again and again to organize yet another search for a durable scale of values.”

Aldo Leopold book A Sand County Almanac

Source: A Sand County Almanac, 1949, "Wilderness", p. 200.

History, Search, Success

“Woman's great strength lies in being late or absent. Presence immediately reveals the weak points of our beloved; when she is absent she become one of the sylph-like figures of our adolescence whom we endowed with perfection.”

André Maurois (1885–1967) French writer

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

Perfection

“In 1763 a Croatian Jesuit named Roger Joseph Boscovich (1711 - 1787) identified the ultimate implication of this mechanical atomic theory. One of the crucial aspects of Isaac Newton's laws of motion is their predictive capability. If we know how an object is moving at any instant - how fast, and in which direction - and if, furthermore, we know the forces acting on it, we can calculate its future trajectory exactly. This predictability made it possible for astronomers to use Newton's laws of motion and gravity to calculate, for example, when future solar eclipses would happen.
Boscovich realized that if all the world is just atoms in motion and collision, then an all-seeing mind "could, from a continuous arc described in an interval of time, no matter how small, by all points of matter, derive the law [that is, a universal map] of forces itself … Now, if the law of forces were known, and the position, velocity and direction of all the points at any given instant, it would be possible for a mind of this type to foresee all the necessary subsequent motions and states, and to predict all the phenomena that necessarily followed from them."”

Roger Joseph Boscovich (1711–1787) Croat-Italian physicist

Philip Ball, Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another (2006).

World, Law, Universe, Time

“At one point Portillo was polishing his jackboots and planning the next advance. And the next thing is he shows up as a TV presenter. It is rather like Pol Pot presenting the Teletubbies.”

Tony Banks (1942–2006) British politician

Tribune Rally, September 1997; The Right Hon wag http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,,1682818,00.html, The Guardian, 10 January 2006. on Conservative politician Michael Portillo.

“It was difficult to believe these things had taken place such a very long time ago. The events seemed distant, as though he had only read about them and not experienced them at all. He knew that at this point his death was far closer, far more tangible. That was something he could almost touch. One could feel one’s mortal form progressing slowly to ruin, like that old abbey—the signs were undeniable. Things went wrong inside a man and did not come right again. That was the truth that hung over one’s head like a blade. Injuries and illnesses were no longer easily repaired. And as with some part of a painting that he could never get right, the great danger was to see nothing but what was wrong. The trap of age.”

Sean Russell (1952) author

Source: Sea Without a Shore (1996), Chapter 7 (p. 89)

Death, Truth, Age, Feeling

“Hitchens: I've got another question for you, which is this: How many religions in the world do you believe to be false?
Craig: I don't know how many religions in the world there are, so I can’t answer.
Hitchens: Well, could you name... fair enough. I'll see if I can't narrow that down. That was a clumsily asked question, I admit. Do you regard any of the world's religions to be false?
Craig: Excuse me?
Hitchens: Do you regard any of the world's religions to be false preaching?
Craig: Yes, I think—yes, certainly.
Hitchens: Would you name one, then?
Craig: Islam.
Hitchens: That's quite a lot.
Craig: Pardon me?
Hitchens: That's quite a lot.
Craig: Yes.
Hitchens: Do you, therefore—do you think it's moral to preach false religion?
Craig: No.
Hitchens: So religion is responsible for quite a lot of wickedness in the world right there?
Craig: Certainly.
Hitchens: Right.
Craig: I'd be happy to concede (laughs) that. I would agree with that.
Hitchens: So if I was a baby being born in Saudi Arabia today, would you rather it was me or a Wahhabi Muslim?
Craig: Would I be—you rather be what?
Hitchens: Would you rather it was me—it was an atheist baby or a Wahhabi baby?
(Audience and Dr. Craig laugh):
Craig: I-I don't have any preference as to whether you would be... (laughing)
Hitchens: You don’t? As bad as that, O. K. Are there any—I'm sorry. I've only got a few seconds. It's a serious question. I shouldn't squander it. Are there any Christian denominations you regard as false?
Craig: Certainly.
Hitchens: Could I know what they are?
Craig: Well, I am not a Calvinist, for example. I think that certain tenets of Reformed Theology are incorrect. I would be more in the Wesleyan Camp myself. But these are differences among brethren. These are not differences on which we need to put one another in some sort of a cage. So within the Christian camp, there's a large diversity of perspectives. I'm sure there are views that I hold that are probably false, but I'm trying my best to get my theology straight, trying to do the best job. But I think all of us would recognize that none of us agree on every point of Christian doctrine, on every dot and tittle.”

William Lane Craig (1949) American Christian apologist and evangelist

Craig vs Christopher Hitchens debate, Biola University, La Mirada, California, 4th April 2009 http://www.reasonablefaith.org/does-god-exist-craig-vs-hitchens-apr-2009#section_6

Happiness, World, Religion, Question

“There was an NPR story this morning, about the indigenous peoples of Australia, which might make a good column. Apparently they want to preserve their culture, language, and religion because they're slowly disappearing, which is certainly understandable. But, for some reason, they also want more stuff — better education, housing, etc. — from the Australian government. Isn't it odd that it never occurs to such groups that maybe, just maybe, the reason their cultures are evaporating is that they get too much of that stuff already? Indeed, I'm at a loss as to how mastering algebra and biology will make aboriginal kids more likely to believe — oh, I dunno — that hallucinogenic excretions from a frog have spiritual value. And I'm at a loss as to how better clinics and hospitals will do anything but make the shamans and medicine men look more useless. And now that I think about it, that's the point I was trying to get at a few paragraphs ago, when I was talking about the symbiotic relationship between freedom and the hurly-burly of life. Cultures grow on the vine of tradition. These traditions are based on habits necessary for survival, and day-to-day problem solving. Wealth, technology, and medicine have the power to shatter tradition because they solve problems.”

Jonah Goldberg (1969) American political writer and pundit

( August 15, 2001 http://web.archive.org/web/20010105/www.nationalreview.com/goldberg/goldberg081501.shtml) 2000s, 2001

Life, Men, People, Education

“The choice you make this November will shape great things, historic things, and those things will determine the most intimate and important aspects of every American life and every American family. This is an election about America, and it is an election about the American family. All elections matter. This one matters a great deal. Over the years of our nation’s history, choices our fellow citizens have made have changed the country’s course–they were turning points of defining consequence.”

Mitt Romney (1947) American businessman and politician

2012-10-26
http://foxnewsinsider.com/2012/10/26/transcript-mitt-romney-delivers-speech-on-the-economy/
TRANSCRIPT: Mitt Romney Delivers Speech on the Economy
Fox News
2012

Life, Family, History, Change

“The treaty, though it has good points, is a vast trap.”

Robert Erskine Childers (1870–1922) Irish nationalist and author

The Illustrated London News, 31 December 1921.
Literary Years and War (1900-1918), Last Years: Ireland (1919-1922)

“The feeling that we call "I" seems to define our point of view in every moment, and it also provides an anchor for popular beliefs about souls and freedom of will. And yet this feeling, however imperturbable it may appear at present, can be altered, interrupted, or entirely abolished.”

Sam Harris (1967) American author, philosopher and neuroscientist

Source: 2010s, Waking Up (2014), p. 83

Feeling, Soul, Freedom, Appearance

“I think, for me, nature has always been my main point of reference. I think as a child I was fascinated by landscapes and nature wherever I went. I was able to travel all over Denmark, which is not that large, everywhere in this country where I've been I always loved the landscape.”

Margrethe II of Denmark (1940) Queen of Denmark

Interview with Reuters, quoted on ITN. http://www.itnsource.com/shotlist/RTV/2012/01/26/RTV249512/ (26 January 2012). As an Artist

Love, Travel, Nature, Thinking

“If a ship runs into a large bridge, destroying both the bridge and ship, as happened recently in Tasmania, it is very difficult to see what either the naval architect or the bridge designer could have been expected to do about it from the structural point of view. The problem is not one for the structural engineer but for the local Pilotage Association. Again, aircraft cannot be designed to be flown into mountains.”

J.E. Gordon (1913–1998) Materials scientist

Source: Structures (or, Why Things Don't Fall Down) (1978), Chapter 15, A Chapter of accidents

Mountain, Problem

“I laughed. I could see her point completely, because in Spanish you’d never say, “I think I love you,” especially after four years. That would be an insult. You’d say, “I feel love for you so deeply that when I just think of you, I start to tremble and feel my heart flutter.” Why? Because Spanish is a feeling-based language that comes first from the heart, just as English is a thinking-based language that comes first from the head.”

Victor Villaseñor (1940) American writer

Burro Genius: A Memoir (2004)

Love, Feeling, Thinking, Heart

“When… we have a series of values of a quantity which continually diminish, and in such a way, that name any quantity we may, however small, all the values, after a certain value, are severally less than that quantity, then the symbol by which the values are denoted is said to diminish without limit. And if the series of values increase in succession, so that name any quantity we may, however great, all after a certain point will be greater, then the series is said to increase without limit. It is also frequently said, when a quantity diminishes without limit, that it has nothing, zero or 0, for its limit: and that when it increases without limit it has infinity or ∞ or 1⁄0 for its limit.”

Augustus De Morgan (1806–1871) British mathematician, philosopher and university teacher (1806-1871)

Introductory Chapter, pp.9-10
The Differential and Integral Calculus (1836)

Way, Success

“You are born supernaturally through faith, by the grace of God, into the kingdom of righteousness; but you are born a little babe, that is all; and if you make any progress from that point on, it must be by work, by sacrifice, by the practice of Christian virtues, by benevolence, by self-denial, by resisting the adversary, by making valiant war for God and against sin; and on no other basis, am I authorized in giving you a hope that you may come to manhood in Christ Jesus.”

Charles Henry Fowler (1837–1908) American bishop

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 564.

God, War, Faith, Hope

“We somehow believe that our point of view is superior, higher than those of the greatest minds—either because our point of view is that of our time, and our time, being later than the time of the greatest minds, can be presumed to be superior to their times; or else because we believe that each the greatest minds was right from his point of view, but not, as he claims, simply right.”

Leo Strauss (1899–1973) Classical philosophy specialist and father of neoconservativism

“What is liberal education,” pp. 7-8
Liberalism Ancient and Modern (1968)

Time

“How do I produce the effects which I obtain from the piano? … In answer I would say I produce them by listening, criticizing, judging—working over the point, until I get it as I want it. Then I can reproduce it at will, if I want to make just the same effect; but sometimes I want to change and try another.”

Wilhelm Backhaus (1884–1969) German pianist, Knight Commander of Merit

Quoted in Piano Mastery: Talks with Master Pianists and Teachers (1915) by Haeriette Brower

Change

“Who is more blessed than he who had dedicated his life to the service of others, who has obliterated all distinctions between mine and yours, and whose heart bleeds for others sufferings? So hopelessly selfish we have become that we do not feel for people in difficulty, are busy with finding others' weak points, and spreading rumours, and are envious of others' happiness and prosperity. With such traits what else but misery can we expect to befall us? God is mighty pleased with those who engage themselves in serving others without an ulterior motive.”

Swami Adbhutananda Disciple

The Apostles of Sri Ramakrishna

Life, God, Happiness, People

“I must here acknowledge that the best naturall philosophic that I ever coulde learn in this point, was neither out of Aristotle's Physicks, nor Velcurie's Naturall Philosophy, nor garseous meteors, nor out of any of the olde philosophicall fathers, that writ so many hundred years past; but that little which I have, I gathered it on the backside of Moore fieldes, where, by sundrie undoubted argument, I did heare it maintained, that all the elementes doo onely differ in attenuation and condensation: so as earth beeing attenuated becommeth water; and water condensate, becommeth earth; water attenuated becommeth aier, and aier condensate becommeth water; and so likewise aier attenuated becommeth fire, and fire condensate becommeth aier; and thus all of them spring from one roote, which being admitted is a manifeste proofe that there is a greate and neere affinity betweene the lande and the sea, wherein we shall finde salte water enough for our purpose.”

Hugh Plat (1552–1608) writer

As cited in: Robert Kemp Philp (1859, p. 74)
The Jewell House of Art and Nature, 1594

Spring, Learning, Water, Bee

“There are two ways of extending life: firstly by moving the two points "born" and "died" farther away from one another… The other method is to go more slowly and leave the two points wherever God wills they should be, and this method is for the philosophers.”

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–1799) German scientist, satirist

B 22
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook B (1768-1771)

Life, God, Way

“The notion of "intricate and beautiful complexities" is almost an oxymoron. Unix programmers vie with each other for "simple and beautiful" honors — a point that's implicit in these rules, but is well worth making overt.”

Doug McIlroy (1932) American computer scientist, mathematician, engineer, and programmer

Doug McIlroy (2003). The Art of Unix Programming: Basics of the Unix Philosophy http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/html/ch01s06.html

Beauty

“Today's age of politicized and intolerant Christianism seems to me to be one of those moments when Christianity has estranged itself most thoroughly from the priorities and spirit of its founder. But this will pass. Christianity will survive Christianism. Some true followers of Jesus will recover their faith from Caesar's grip at some point.”

Andrew Sullivan (1963) Journalist, writer, blogger

"Christians and Torture" http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2006/03/christians_and_.html, The Daily Dish (23 March 2006)

Age, Faith

“I graduated on June 13, number 4 in a class of 102. General MacArthur gave me my diploma and his "Congratulations, Mr. Taylor" was the last time I heard his voice until, as the new Chief of Staff of the Army, I called on him in the Waldorf Towers in 1956. Although he had done much for the Corps of Cadets during his superintendency, oddly enough he had never made an effort to impress his personality on the cadets through direct communication with them. I do not ever recall his having made a speech to us and only a few cadets were ever asked to his house. Certainly no graduate has left greater evidence of deep affection for West Point and the Corps than MacArthur, but the cadets saw little of this during his superintendency. Upon graduation I had my choice of branch of service, and I took the engineers for two unrelated but, for me, compelling reasons. The first was that Robert E. Lee had been an engineer, and the second was that the Engineer School at Camp Humphreys, Virginia, now Fort Belvoir, was conveniently near Washington where Miss Happer lived. It became the first of the long list of Army stations at which I was to serve.”

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

Source: Swords and Plowshares (1972), p. 28

School, Communication, Effort, Time

“If I were an academician.... or a believer in a higher reality outside me, as most people are (lucky creatures!), I would have no need for any justification for painting landscapes, or portraits, or social realism. I would rely on my so-called common sense, on which I see and feel, and I would enjoy it. Or I would fix one point in the distant haze of that unknown reality, would try to approach it as nearly as I could, and would find solace in the fanatical belief that I am the only one who is portraying that reality which is the only truth.”

Naum Gabo (1890–1977) Russian sculptor

Quote of Naum Gabo (1950), cited in: Eidos: a journal of painting, sculpture and design. Nr.1, p. 32 cited in: Herbert E. Read, Sir Herbert Edward Read (1971) The philosophy of modern art: collected essays. p. 94
1936 - 1977

People, Truth, Feeling, Reality

“The real is the present, conceived not as a mathematical point between the present and the past, but as the union of present and past in a duration or permanence that is at the same time change. Thus the past as past and the future as future do not exist at all, but are purely ideal; the past as living in the present and the future as germinating in the present are wholly real and indeed are just the present itself. It is because of the presence of these two elements in the present… that the present is a concrete and changing reality and not an empty mathematical point.”

R. G. Collingwood (1889–1943) British historian and philosopher

Source: "Some Perplexities about time: with an attempted solution" (1925), p. 149. as cited in: Jonathan Gorman, "The transmission of our understanding of historical time." Historia Social y de la Educación 1.2 (2012): 129-152.

Mathematics, Reality, Change, Time

“The worldly man lives in society, marries, establishes a family; Yoga prescribes absolute solitude and chastity. The worldly man is “possessed” by his own life; the yogin refuses to “let himself live”; to continual movement, he opposes his static posture, the immobility of āsana; to agitated, unrhythmical, changing respiration, he opposes prānāyāma, and even dreams of holding his breath indefinitely; to the chaotic flux of psychomental life, he replies by “fixing thought on a single point,” the first step to that final withdrawal from the phenomenal world which he will obtain through pratyāhāra. All of the yogic techniques invite to one and the same gesture—to do exactly the opposite of what human nature forces one to do. From solitude and chastity to samyama, there is no solution of continuity. The orientation always remains the same—to react against the “normal,” “secular,” and finally “human” inclination.”

Mircea Eliade (1907–1986) Romanian historian of religion, fiction writer and philosopher

Yoga: Immortality and Freedom, W. Trask, trans. (Princeton: 1969), pp. 95–96.

Life, World, Family, Dreams

“The analytical equations, unknown to the ancient geometers, which Descartes was the first to introduce into the study of curves and surfaces, are not restricted to the properties of figures, and to those properties which are the object of rational mechanics; they extend to all general phenomena. There cannot be a language more universal and more simple, more free from errors and from obscurities, that is to say more worthy to express the invariable relations of natural things.
Considered from this point of view, mathematical analysis is as extensive as nature itself; it defines all perceptible relations, measures times, spaces, forces, temperatures; this difficult science is formed slowly, but it preserves every principle which it has once acquired; it grows and strengthens itself incessantly in the midst of the many variations and errors of the human mind.
Its chief attribute is clearness; it has no marks to express confused notions. It brings together phenomena the most diverse, and discovers the hidden analogies which unite them.”

Joseph Fourier book The Analytical Theory of Heat

Preliminary Discourse, p.7 Note: often quoted as Mathematics [or mathematical analysis] compares the most diverse phenomena and discovers the secret analogies that unite them.
The Analytical Theory of Heat (1878)

Error, Mathematics, Nature, Study

“However, Man as the appearance of utmost internality, of spirit, does not possess any point in front, at the side or the back, no fixed point at all towards which he could define a dimension. This explains why in expressing the spiritual, in making spirit an artifact, he will be forced to a moto-stereometric form of expression. This moto-stereometric form of expression represents the appearance of a 4-n dimensional world in a world of three dimensions.”

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

quote by Van Doesburg, as cited in 'Great Masters of Art' in Eenheid no 392, 8 December 1917
1912 – 1919

World, Appearance

“The point is that coordination can be achieved by either of two means: (1) with no one dictating anyone else's precise behavior, but everyone observing a set of rules, or (2) with someone (or perhaps more than one) directing the behavior of others. We refer to the first of the two means as coordination by rules and the second as coordination by command.”

Samuel Bowles (1939) American economist

Source: Understanding Capitalism: Competition, Command, and Change, 2005, p. 202

Behavior

“There comes a point when a man must refuse to answer to his leader if he is also to answer to his own conscience.”

Hartley Shawcross, Baron Shawcross (1902–2003) British politician

Statement as UK prosecutor at the Nuremberg War Crime Trials (1945), as quoted in The Nuremberg Trials (1983) by Ann Tusa and John Tusa, ISBN 0815412622

“Is it with respect to the reference point of American elections? Or is it with respect to the 1999 elections or is it in respect to the 1983 elections in Nigeria or to the 2003 elections? So when people make statements, or even organizations, or even the U. S. State Department, they should qualify such statements and we know the reference point from which they are making their statement against. Once you know the reference point, then it will actually make sense.”

Umaru Yar'Adua (1951–2010) President of Nigeria

Winner of Disputed Nigerian Presidential Election Denies Fraud http://web.archive.org/web/20070527110842/http://www.voanews.com/english/2007-04-23-voa59.cfm (April 23 2007)

People, Sense

“Well, now the American people have returned the Republican party to power; and the question is, what will it do? … For a dozen years and more the Republican party has seemed in a measure paralyzed in the presence of high-handed fraud and brutal violence toward its newly-made citizens. The question now is, will it regain its former health, activity, and power? Will it be as true to its friends in the South as the Democratic party has been to its friends in that section, or will it sacrifice its friends to conciliate its enemies? … Not only the negro but all honest men, north and south, must hold the Republican party in contempt, if it fails to do its whole duty at this point. The Republican party has made the colored man free; and the Republican party must make him secure in his freedom, or abandon its pretensions.”

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

Speech http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/the-nations-problem/

Men, People, Health, Color

“The extensive literature addressed to the definition or characterization of science is filled with inconsistent points of view and demonstrates that an adequate definition is not easy to attain. Part of the difficulty arises from the fact that the meaning of science is not fixed, but is dynamic. As science has evolved, so has its meaning. It takes on a new meaning and significance with successive ages.”

Russell L. Ackoff (1919–2009) Scientist

Source: 1960s, Scientific method: optimizing applied research decisions, 1962, p. 1.

Age, Literature, Science, Success

“One of the many importants ideas introduced by Minkowski into the study of convex bodies was that of gauge function. Roughly, the gauge function is the equation of a convex body. Minkowski showed that the gauge function could be defined in a purely geometric way and that it must have certain properties analogous to those possessed by the distance of a point from the origin. He also showed that conversely given any function possessing these properties, there exists a convex body with the given function as its gauge function.”

Carl Ludwig Siegel (1896–1981) German mathematician

[Lectures on the Geometry of Numbers, https://books.google.com/books?id=dyH4CAAAQBAJ&pg=PA6] (p. 6)

Way, Idea, Gauge, Study

“The Protestant churches generally hold that the elements of the sacrament are flesh and blood only in a tropical sense; they nourish our souls as meat and the juice of it would our bodies. But the Catholics maintain that they are literally just that; although they possess all the sensible qualities of wafer-cakes and diluted wine. But we can have no conception of wine except what may enter into a belief, either —
# That this, that, or the other, is wine; or,
# That wine possesses certain properties.
Such beliefs are nothing but self-notifications that we should, upon occasion, act in regard to such things as we believe to be wine according to the qualities which we believe wine to possess. The occasion of such action would be some sensible perception, the motive of it to produce some sensible result. Thus our action has exclusive reference to what affects the senses, our habit has the same bearing as our action, our belief the same as our habit, our conception the same as our belief; and we can consequently mean nothing by wine but what has certain effects, direct or indirect, upon our senses; and to talk of something as having all the sensible characters of wine, yet being in reality blood, is senseless jargon. Now, it is not my object to pursue the theological question; and having used it as a logical example I drop it, without caring to anticipate the theologian's reply. I only desire to point out how impossible it is that we should have an idea in our minds which relates to anything but conceived sensible effects of things. Our idea of anything is our idea of its sensible effects; and if we fancy that we have any other we deceive ourselves, and mistake a mere sensation accompanying the thought for a part of the thought itself. It is absurd to say that thought has any meaning unrelated to its only function. It is foolish for Catholics and Protestants to fancy themselves in disagreement about the elements of the sacrament, if they agree in regard to all their sensible effects, here or hereafter.
It appears, then, that the rule for attaining the third grade of clearness of apprehension is as follows: Consider what effects, which might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object.”

Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) American philosopher, logician, mathematician, and scientist

The final sentence here is an expression of what became known as the Pragmatic maxim, first published in "Illustrations of the Logic of Science" in Popular Science Monthly, Vol. 12 (January 1878), p. 286

Soul, Motivation, Idea, Question

“No free country will ever again have anything like the 90 percent tax rates that we had in this country. Past a certain point, high marginal tax rates are, indeed, terribly destructive.”

Lawrence H. Summers (1954) Former US Secretary of the Treasury

David Wessel, The Wall Street Journal (April 5, 1998) "Rich now pay more in taxes", Mobile Register, p. F1.
1990s

Past, Country

“Many people fail to grasp this point, apparently because they think of "scientific" evidence as only that produced in laboratories by controlled experiments. This leads them to treat field studies, however careful, thorough and well-documented, as "anecdotal"--mere preparation for the real thing, therefore properly ignored till it bears fruit entitled to be considered by learned persons. This attitude was much like that of cavalry generals in the First World War, waiting patiently for the infantry to clear the ground so that they could make the dashing charges that alone they thought entitled the name of warfare. Because these creatures are complex, only a tiny fraction of important truths about them can ever be seen in laboratories of expressed in control experiments. The same, of course, is true of the human race.”

Mary Midgley (1919–2018) British philosopher and ethicist

Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature (1979). 224.

War, People, Truth, World

“What we need, then, is a new 'paradigm' - a new vision of reality; a fundamental change in our thoughts, perceptions, and values. The beginnings of this change, of the shift from the mechanistic to the holistic conception of reality, are already visible in all fields and are likely to dominate the present decade. The various manifestations and implications of this 'paradigm shift' are the subject of this book. The sixties and seventies have generated a whole series of social movements that all seem to go in the same direction, emphasizing different aspects of the new vision of reality. So far, most of these movements still operate separately and have not yet recognized how their intentions interrelate. The purpose of this book is to provide a coherent conceptual framework that will help them recognize the communality of their aims. Once this happens, we can expect the various movements to flow together and form a powerful force for social change. The gravity and global extent of our current crisis indicate that this change is likely to result in a transformation of unprecedented dimensions, a turning point for the planet as a whole.”

Fritjof Capra book The Turning Point

Preface.
The Turning Point (1982)

Books, Communication, Reality, Change

“blockquote>Quien Soy? (Who Am I?)I am a small point in the eye of the full moon.
I only need one ray of the sun to warm my face.
I need only one breeze from the Alisios to refresh my soul.
What else can I ask if I know that my sons love really love me?.”

Roberto Clemente (1934–1972) Puerto Rican baseball player

Written on Father's Day at Three Rivers Stadium, 1971 or 1972, reproduced in "A Rematch With the Machine" https://books.google.com/books?id=03XsO25A3I8C&pg=PA302 from Roberto Clemente: The Great One (1998) by Bruce Markusen, p. 302 Other, <big><big>1970s</big></big>, <big>1971</big>

Love, Soul, Sun

“Having presented all the relevant nanoscale mechanisms, thus laying down a firm background for the readers’ understanding, the author moves to the topic of architectural challenges in Chapter 7. This field is claimed still to be an unsolved problem so the author gives examples of currently used technologies and points out potential architectural solutions such as self-assembly, carbon nanotubes, or quantum systems. That is why it makes the book even more valuable for those who intend to involve nanonetworks in their research.”

Stephen F Bush

Book Reviews, REVIEWER: JAKUB PALIDER, NANOSCALE COMMUNICATION NETWORKS STEPHEN F. BUSH, ARTECH HOUSE, 2010, ISBN-13: 978-1-60807-003-9, HARDCOVER, 308 PAGES, IEEE Communications Magazine, August 2011.

Books, Understanding, Problem

“Sahl ibn Sa'd reported that the Messenger of Allah, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, said, "I and those who care for orphans will be in the Garden [heaven] like this," and he pointed with his forefinger and middle finger and made an opening between them."”

Muhammad (570–632) Arabian religious leader and the founder of Islam

Riyadh-as-Saliheen by Imam Al-Nawawi, volume 2, hadith number 262
Sunni Hadith

Peace

“In this great problem which is facing the country in years to come, it may be from one side or the other that disaster may come, but surely it shows that the only progress that can be obtained in this country is by those two bodies of men—so similar in their strength and so similar in their weaknesses—learning to understand each other, and not to fight each other…we are moving forward rapidly from an old state of industry into a newer, and the question is: What is that newer going to be? No man, of course, can say what form evolution is taking. Of this, however, I am quite sure, that whatever form we may see…it has got to be a form of pretty close partnership, however that is going to be arrived at. And it will not be a partnership the terms of which will be laid down, at any rate not yet, in Acts of Parliament, or from this party or that. It has got to be a partnership of men who understand their own work, and it is little help that they can get really either from politicians or from intellectuals. There are few men fitted to judge, to settle and to arrange the problem that distracts the country to-day between employers and employed. There are few men qualified to intervene who have not themselves been right through the mill. I always want to see, at the head of these organisations on both sides, men who have been right through the mill, who themselves know exactly the points where the shoe pinches, who know exactly what can be conceded and what cannot, who can make their reasons plain; and I hope that we shall always find such men trying to steer their respective ships side by side, instead of making for head-on collisions.”

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

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1925/mar/06/industrial-peace in the House of Commons (6 March 1925). 1925

Men, Hope, Shoe, Understanding

“[I have] various tricks to actually reach that solitary point of creativity. One of them is pretending I have an idea. But that trick doesn't survive very long because I don't really trust ideas – especially good ones... Rather, I put my trust in the materials that confront me, because they put me in touch with the unknown. It is then that I begin to work.... when I don't have the comfort of sureness and certainty. Sometimes Jack Daniels helps too. Another good trick is fatigue. I like to start working when it's almost too late.... when my sense of efficiency is exhausted.”

Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008) American artist

Quote from 'Robert Rauschenberg: An Audience of One', John Gruen, Art News, 29, February 1977, p. 48
1970's

Idea, Sense, Help

“By this point in HIS first term President Obama already had a Nobel Prize. All President Trump has is a train station in a foreign country--not even a big country. Just a little one. Barely the size of Connecticut. Sad.”

Robert P. George (1955) American legal scholar

Twitter post https://twitter.com/McCormickProf/status/946049282439876609 (27 December 2017) 2017

Sadness, Training, Country

“An example of this way of thinking is an exchange that took place when someone told Goethe that he admired him for his genius, towering over German intellectual life like a gigantic mountain, to which Goethe replied that "great mountains are found only in mountainous landscapes." The traditional history of art is concerned exclusively which such mountain peaks, and often, as Goethe critically pointed out, they are not even seen in relation to each other.”

Asger Jorn (1914–1973) Danish artist

Jorn's quote, on the publication of the book Thidrek of Folk Art (1948)
1949 - 1958, Various sources

Life, Art, Way, History

“It may be possible to get this condition from within Perl if a signal handler runs at just the wrong moment. Another point for Chip…”

Larry Wall (1954) American computer programmer and author, creator of Perl

[199710161546.IAA07885@wall.org, 1997]
Usenet postings, 1997

“Is it men’s disgust of women that makes so many of them treat women with such contempt? Is it that which makes it so easy to point out that the Don Juans and the Lotharios, for all their hunger for women, are often merely trying to see how many women they can punish?”

Theodore Sturgeon book Venus Plus X

Section 36 (p. 114)
Venus Plus X (1960)

Women, Men, Hunger

“Best of things symbolised by Jocelyne's barbell:
"It's a symbol of the need for symbols."
"How life shrapnels us."
"Assistant bank manageress on the outside, primitive on the inside."
"Of whatever I feel like."
"That you can do stupid things at any point in your life."”

Tibor Fischer book The Thought Gang

Page 204.
The Thought Gang (1994)

Life, Stupidity, Feeling

“There are problems in all health-care systems, but at least [Europeans] have a health-care system that covers everyone, and it's not my position or my right or my responsibility to point out the flaws in [your] health-care system — that is your job — it is your job to fix those problems.”

Michael Moore (1954) American filmmaker, author, social critic, and liberal activist

Casa del Cinema press conference, Rome, Italy, (August 2007)
2007

Health, Problem

“What is our ideology? If l were asked whether our revolution is Communist, I would define it as Marxist. Our revolution has discovered by its methods the paths that Marx pointed out.”

Ernesto Che Guevara (1928–1967) Argentine Marxist revolutionary

As quoted in Cuba: A Dissenting Report (1960) by Samuel Shapiro, New Republic

“All the most powerful speeches ever made point to a better future.”

Patrick Dixon book Building a Better Business

Building a Better Business (2005)

Future

“3902. Possession is eleven Points in the Law.”

Thomas Fuller (writer) (1654–1734) British physician, preacher, and intellectual

Introductio ad prudentiam: Part II (1727), Gnomologia (1732)

Law

“This is just a stopping-off point for me but I'll be stopping long enough to make it worth my while finding what people call 'someone to love.”

Javier Marías (1951) Spanish writer

Para mí este territorio es territorio de paso, pero se trata de un paso lo bastante dilatado para que deba procurarme lo que se llama un amor mientras estoy aquí.
Source: Todas las Almas [All Souls] (1989), p. 69

Love, People

“In eight simple ways, my Bill seeks to provide a framework for giving pensioners a decent living standard. First, it would fix old-age pensions for couples at half average industrial earnings, and for single people it would be a third…Secondly, my Bill would require central Government to appoint a Minister responsible for the co-ordination of policy on pensioners. Thirdly, it would require local authorities to produce a comprehensive annual report about their policies on pensioners and on the conditions of pensioners in their communities. Fourthly, every health authority would also be asked to do that. Fifthly, the present anomalous system means that in some parts of the country where there are foresighted Labour local authorities there are concessionary transport schemes — free bus passes. They do not exist in some parts of Britain and the Bill would make them a national responsibility and they would be paid for nationally…My sixth point is one of the most important. It is about the introduction of a flat-rate winter heating allowance instead of the nonsensical system of waiting for the cold to run from Monday to Sunday, and then if it is sufficiently cold a rebate is paid in arrears. Last winter that resulted in many old people living in homes that were too cold because they could not afford to heat them. If they did get any aid, it was far too late. My seventh point concerns the abolition of standing charges on gas, electricity and telephones for elderly people. They are paying about £250 million a year towards the profits of the gas industry and those profits will be about £1.5 billion. Standing charges should be cancelled, unit prices maintained and the cost of the standing charge should be taken from the profits of the gas board or the electricity board — if it ends up being privatised. They could well afford to pay for that rather than forcing old people to live in cold and misery throughout the winter. Finally, the Bill would prohibit the cutting off of gas and electricity in any pensioner household.”

Jeremy Corbyn (1949) British Labour Party politician

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1987/dec/01/elimination-of-poverty-in-old-age-etc in the House of Commons (1 December 1987). 1980s

People, Health, Age, Way

“The Soviet Union died peacefully but that does not have any affect on what will happen in there [Israel]. The Zionist regime will either go two ways. They will peacefully be disbanded and the Holy Land will become a democracy like our good friend Russia. Or the country will forcefully take on itself like Romania. He [Refering to Nicolae Ceauşescu] did not seem to know (or care) what was happening to the Romanians and the people got sick and tired of this to the point they got rid of the fake regime [Ahmadinejad Denounces Communisim] by force. We do not want this option. We want a peacfully let the people choose what they truely want and everything will go right.”

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (1956) 6th President of the Islamic Republic of Iran

Undated interview with Russian news agency.
2007

People, Way, Democracy, Country

“In their effort to misinform students, evolutionists often point out that feathers and scales are both made of the same protein, keratin. They will tell you that this proves that feathers evolved from scales. The book will use fancy terms to make it sound official such as, "dinosaurs had some avian characteristics." Well, a bicycle has certain "automotive characteristics," like a frame and tires; but this does not prove that bicycles turned into cars over millions of years!”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Source: Are you being brainwashed?: Propaganda in science textbooks (2007), p. 20

Books, Cars, Effort

“I was never allowed to play with guns when I was a child. While various friends were able to scamper around the woods with their Johnny Sevens, I had to make do with an old twig. And convincing an eight-year-old he was dead simply because I'd pointed a piece of larch his way was not quite as easy as you might imagine.”

Jeremy Clarkson (1960) English broadcaster, journalist and writer

Source: Clarkson on Cars (1996), p. 52

Way, Imagination, Dead

“What beck'ning ghost, along the moonlight shade
Invites my steps, and points to yonder glade?”

Alexander Pope (1688–1744) eighteenth century English poet

Source: The Works of Mr. Alexander Pope (1717), Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady, Line 1. Compare: "What gentle ghost, besprent with April dew, Hails me so solemnly to yonder yew?", Ben Jonson, Elegy on the Lady Jane Pawlet.

“"What is Bazarov?" Arkady smiled. "Would you like me to tell you, uncle, what he really is?""Please do, nephew.""He is a nihilist!""What?" asked Nikolai Petrovich, while Pavel Petrovich lifted his knife in the air with a small piece of butter on the tip and remained motionless."He is a nihilist," repeated Arkady."A nihilist," said Nikolai Petrovich. "That comes from the Latin nihil, nothing, as far as I can judge; the word must mean a man who… who recognizes nothing?""Say — who respects nothing," interposed Pavel Petrovich and lowered his knife with the butter on it."Who regards everything from the critical point of view," said Arkady."Isn't that exactly the same thing?" asked Pavel Petrovich."No, it's not the same thing. A nihilist is a person who does not bow down to any authority, who does not accept any principle on faith, however much that principle may be revered.""Well, and is that good?" asked Pavel Petrovich. "That depends, uncle dear. For some it is good, for others very bad.""Indeed. Well, I see that's not in our line. We old-fashioned people think that without principles, taken as you say on faith, one can't take a step or even breathe. Vous avez changé tout cela; may God grant you health and a general's rank, and we shall be content to look on and admire your… what was the name?""Nihilists," said Arkady, pronouncing very distinctly."Yes, there used to be Hegelists and now there are nihilists. We shall see how you will manage to exist in the empty airless void; and now ring, please, brother Nikolai, it's time for me to drink my cocoa."”

Ivan Turgenev (1818–1883) Russian writer

Source: Father and Sons (1862), Ch. 5.

God, People, Health, Faith

“We disagree about who should be Americanized. The immigrant, working in some of the industries, and set apart from American life, thinks the native-born needs it most; the American, visiting the crowded quarters of his city, thinks the immigrant needs it more; and there is as yet no common meeting ground of men's minds upon whom to Americanize and especially upon how to go about it. Despite the great contributive value of the Liberty Loan, the Red Cross, the war camp communities, the Councils of Defense, and other activities that are helping to unite the many peoples, the fusion of a youthful race with those wise races of the old world, which have withstood many an enthusiasm and many a peril, cannot be achieved by a popular movement or by sporadic specialized campaigns. Without specific knowledge of points of differentiation and without sympathetic points of contact, anything like real fusion becomes impossible.”

Frances Kellor (1873–1952) American sociologist

What is Americanization? (1919)

Life, Men, War, People

“It seems to be expected of every pilgrim up the slopes of the mathematical Parnassus, that he will at some point or other of his journey sit down and invent a definite integral or two towards the increase of the common stock.”

James Joseph Sylvester (1814–1897) English mathematician

James Joseph Sylvester, Collected Mathematical Papers, Vol. 2 (1908), p. 214.
Bigeometric Calculus: A System with a Scale-Free Derivative by Michael Grossman, p. 31.

Mathematics

“All men are our brothers. As far as the discovery of the truth is concerned, they are all working for the same purpose; they may be separated by the accidents of space and time, and by the exigencies of race, religion, nationality, and other groupings; from the point of view of eternity they are working together.”

George Sarton (1884–1956) American historian of science

Preface.
A History of Science Vol.2 Hellenistic Science and Culture in the Last Three Centuries B.C. (1959)

Men, Truth, Religion, Time

“Most true points are fine points. There never was a dispute between mortals where both sides hadn't a bit of right.”

John Buchan book The Path of the King

Source: The Path of the King (1921), Ch. XIV "The End of the Road", II

Quotes about point page 30

Quotes about point
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