Quotes about point
page 42

“Robinson (1952) pointed out some limits to approaching map symbolization and design from a purely artistic viewpoint, as he suggested was the guiding perspective at the time. Maps, like buildings that are designed primarily for artistic impact, are often not functional… Robinson (1952) argued that treating maps as art can lead to "arbitrary and capricious" decisions. He saw only two alternatives: either standardize everything so that no confusion can result about the meaning of symbols, or study and analyze characteristics of perception as they apply to maps so that symbolization and design decisions can be based on "objective" rules… Robinson's dissertation, then, signaled the beginning of a more objective approach to map symbolization and design based on testing the effectiveness of alternatives, an approach that followed the positivist model of physical science. In his dissertation, Robinson cited several aspects of cartographic method for which he felt more objective guidelines were required (e. g., lettering, color, and map design). He also suggested that this objective look at cartographic methods should begin by considering the limitations of human perception. One goal he proposed was identification of the "least practical differences" in map symbols”

Alan MacEachren (1952) American geographer

e.g., the smallest difference in lettering size that would be noticeable to most readers
Source: How Maps Work: Representation, Visualization, and Design (1995), p. 2-3

Art, Color, Decision, Study

“Neither in any if the stars, nor in the sun, nor in the planets that are most operant in the world, can organs be disntinguished or imagined by us; nevertheless, they live and endow with life small bodies at the earth's elevated points. If there is aught of which man may boast, that of a surety is soul, is mind; and the other animals, too, are ennobled by soul; even God, by whose rod all things are governed, is soul.”

William Gilbert (astronomer) book De Magnete

As quoted in Gilbert, William. 2013 ed. De Magnete https://books.google.com.mx/books?id=QsLDAgAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false. Courier Corporation, pp. 130-131. De Magnete (1600)

Life, God, World, Soul

“Look the point is … er, what is the point? It is a tough job but somebody has got to do it.”

Boris Johnson (1964) British politician, historian and journalist

Toby Helm, "Boris Johnson named shadow arts minister", Daily Telegraph, 7 May 2004, p. 12.
On being appointed Shadow Arts Minister.
2000s, 2004

“The Hindus' sense of gratitude knows no bounds to Muslim rulers like Zayn al-‘Abidin (1420-70) of Kashmir, ‘Alau d-Din Husayn Shah (1493-1519) of Bengal, and Akbar the Great Mughal, who behaved towards Indians as Indians and at whose hands they could heave a sigh of relief from religious persecution. The three rulers tried their utmost to Indianize their rule and restore the dignity of Hindu community and culture, the latter essaying the uphill task of integrating Islam therewith, followed in this behalf by Prince Dara Shukoh. Who that has even the faintest sense of history can dispute the point that they were all intensely Indian, putting many a Hindu to shame in their patriotic fervour.”

Zain-ul-Abidin

Harsh Narain, Myths of Composite Culture and Equality of Religions (1990)

History, Communication, Sense, Gratitude

“There is the necessity for the spiritual point of focus to be embodied on earth. This is the one thing that has been lacking.”

Martin Cecil, 7th Marquess of Exeter (1909–1988) Marquess of Exeter

Thus It Is, 1989, p. 110
As of a Trumpet, On Eagle's Wings, Thus It Is

“Debates on the definitions of culture versus barbarism, or on the question of who is civilized and who is modern are best discussed in the light of Islamic doctrine. Quite significantly, this point must be kept in mind, particularly as a matter of concern to individuals of the educated classes of Islamic societies upon whom lies the burden of responsibility and leadership of the Umma.”

Ali Shariati (1933–1977) Iranian academic and activist

Source: Reflections of Humanity, (1984), p. 17; Lead paragraph.

Education, Question, Light

“The idea of evil as it appears in modern secular thought is an inheritance from Christianity. To be sure, rationalists have repudiated the idea; but it is not long before they find they cannot do without it. What has been understood as evil in the past, they insist, is error – a product of ignorance that human beings can overcome. Here they are repeating a Zoroastrian theme, which was absorbed into later versions of monotheism: the belief that ‘as the “lord of creation” man is at the forefront of the contest between the powers of Truth and Untruth.’ But how to account for the fact that humankind is deaf to the voice of reason? At this point rationalists invoke sinister interests – wicked priests, profiteers from superstition, malignant enemies of enlightenment, secular incarnations of the forces of evil. As so often is the case, secular thinking follows a pattern dictated by religion while suppressing religion’s most valuable insights. Modern rationalists reject the idea of evil while being obsessed by it. Seeing themselves as embattled warriors in a struggle against darkness, it has not occurred to them to ask why humankind is so fond of the dark. They are left with the same problem of evil that faces religion. The difference is that religious believers know they face an insoluble difficulty, while secular believers do not. Aware of the evil in themselves, traditional believers know it cannot be expelled from the world by human action. Lacking this saving insight, secular believers dream of creating a higher species. They have not noticed the fatal flaw in their schemes: any such species will be created by actually existing human beings.”

John Gray (1948) British philosopher

The Faith of Puppets: The Faith of Puppets (p. 18-9)
The Soul of the Marionette: A Short Enquiry into Human Freedom (2015)

Truth, World, Religion, Dreams

“When we talk of a resurgent Asia, people think of the great changes that have come about in Shanghai. I share this aspiration to transform Mumbai in the next five years in such a manner that people would forget about Shanghai and Mumbai will become a talking point.”

Manmohan Singh (1932) 13th Prime Minister of India

Comparing Mumbai and Shanghai, as quoted in "Mumbai struggles to catch up with Shanghai" http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/GC16Df02.html, Asia Times (16 March 2005) 2001-2005

People, Thinking, Change, Forgetting

“This is the moment which I call epiphany. First we recognise that the object is one integral thing, then we recognise that it is an organised composite structure, a thing in fact: finally, when the relation of the parts is exquisite, when the parts are adjusted to the special point, we recognise that it is that thing which it is. Its soul, its whatness, leaps to us from the vestment of its appearance. The soul of the commonest object, the structure of which is so adjusted, seems to us radiant. The object achieves its epiphany.”

James Joyce book Stephen Hero

Stephen Hero (1944)
Context: Now for the third quality. For a long time I couldn't make out what Aquinas meant. He uses a figurative word (a very unusual thing for him) but I have solved it. Claritas is quidditas. After the analysis which discovers the second quality the mind makes the only logically possible synthesis and discovers the third quality. This is the moment which I call epiphany. First we recognise that the object is one integral thing, then we recognise that it is an organised composite structure, a thing in fact: finally, when the relation of the parts is exquisite, when the parts are adjusted to the special point, we recognise that it is that thing which it is. Its soul, its whatness, leaps to us from the vestment of its appearance. The soul of the commonest object, the structure of which is so adjusted, seems to us radiant. The object achieves its epiphany.

Soul, Appearance, Parting

“The ever-changing display of plant forms, which I have followed for so many years, awakens increasingly within me the notion: The plant forms which surround us were not all created at some given point in time and then locked into the given form, they have been given… a felicitous mobility and plasticity that allows them to grow and adapt themselves to many different conditions in many different places. …How they can be brought together under one concept has slowly become clear to me and that this conception can be enlivened at a higher level [of consciousness]: thus I began to recognize, in the sense perceptible form, a supersensible archetype. Whoever has felt what a rich, saturated thought… has to say, will admit what a passionate movement comes to life in the spirit when we are enthused, and we anticipate the totality of what will evolve step by step…”

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) German writer, artist, and politician

Goethe's Story of My Botanical Studies (1831) attributed by Frank Teichmann (tr. Jon McAlice) "The Emergence of the Idea of Evolution in the Time of Goethe" http://www.waldorfresearchinstitute.org/pdf/BAIdeaEvolTeich.pdf Attributed

Life, Sense, Passion, Change

“Many historians make it a principal part of their business to investigate and explain the unfamiliar beliefs we encounter in past societies. But what is the relationship between our provision of such explanations and our assessment of the truth of such beliefs? The question is obviously a highly intractable one, but no practising historian can hope to evade it, as many philosophers have recently and rightly pointed out.”

Quentin Skinner (1940) British historian

Visions of Politics (2002), "Interpretation, rationality and truth"

Truth, Hope, Question, Business

“The view of things [called Pantheism] … — that all plurality is only apparent, that in the endless series of individuals, passing simultaneously and successively into and out of life, generation after generation, age after age, there is but one and the same entity really existing, which is present and identical in all alike; — this theory … may be carried back to the remotest antiquity. It is the alpha and omega of the oldest book in the world, the sacred Vedas, whose dogmatic part, or rather esoteric teaching, is found in the Upanishads. There, in almost every page this profound doctrine lies enshrined; with tireless repetition, in countless adaptations, by many varied parables and similes it is expounded and inculcated. That such was, moreover, the fount whence Pythagoras drew his wisdom, cannot be doubted … That it formed practically the central point in the whole philosophy of the Eleatic School, is likewise a familiar fact. Later on, the New Platonists were steeped in the same … In the ninth century we find it unexpectedly appearing in Europe. It kindles the spirit of no less a divine than Johannes Scotus Erigena, who endeavours to clothe it with the forms and terminology of the Christian religion. Among the Mohammedans we detect it again in the rapt mysticism of the Sufi. In the West Giordano Bruno cannot resist the impulse to utter it aloud; but his reward is a death of shame and torture. And at the same time we find the Christian Mystics losing themselves in it, against their own will and intention, whenever and wherever we read of them! Spinoza's name is identified with it.”

Arthur Schopenhauer book On the Basis of Morality

Part IV, Ch. 2, pp. 269 https://archive.org/stream/basisofmorality00schoiala#page/269/mode/2up-272 On the Basis of Morality (1840)

Life, Death, Wisdom, Books

“Hoda Abdel Hamid (Interviewer for Al Jazeera): Mr. President, I'd like to move onto to the war crimes probe. This is a bit of a sore point, and sometimes it's seems that Sri Lanka is at odd with the international community over this point. Yet, your government, and your country did co-sponser resolution 30, of the UN Human Rights Council which clearly calls for a judicial mechanism where international experts would have a role. Then there was talk about a hybrid court and just recently, you said that there was no need for any international involvement in the probe. It's a bit confusing, so what is going on exactly?”

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, Communication, Country

“In order to understand the meaning of the phrase dialogue among civilizations as defined here, one has no choice but to closely pay attention to a number of points one of which is the relationship between a politician and an artist, and the other is the relationship between ethics and politics.”

Mohammad Khatami (1943) Iranian prominent reformist politician, scholar and shiite faqih.

UNESCO 1999
Attributed

Understanding

“It is chiefly the psychologists of the school of Freud who have pointed out that many of man's thoughts and actions are compensatory substitutes for desires which he has been obliged to suppress. A thing may be desired not for its intrinsic worth or usefulness, but because he has unconsciously come to see in it a symbol of something else, the desire for which he is ashamed to admit to himself…This general principle, that men are very largely actuated by motives which they conceal from themselves, is as true of mass as of individual psychology…Human desires are the steam which makes the soial machine work. Only by understanding them can the propagandist control that cast, loose-jointed mechanism which is modern society.”

Edward Bernays book Propaganda

Page 75 as quoted in Historical Archaeologies of Capitalism edited by Mark P. Leone, Jocelyn E. Knauf, p.40
Propaganda (1928)

Men, School, Motivation, Understanding

“His work is full of the signs of those two cardinal sins from which (as Kafka pointed out) all the others spring: impatience and laziness. The work of every artist is conditioned by the way in which he resists or yields to these temptations.”

Patrick Swift (1927–1983) British artist

Some Notes on Caravaggio (1956)

Way, Spring

“In the [past] one thousand years many parts of our country had been ruled by the Muslims and then by the British, but the nation had never compromised, in principle, its sovereignty over any part of the motherland. As a result, our nation had never ceased to strive for throwing out the aggressors and liberate those parts. And history tells us that ultimately it did succeed in freeing the entire land from the clutches of foreign invaders. However, for the first time, Partition conceded the moral and legal right to them over certain parts of the country and declared an ignominious finale to the one thousand years old heroic struggle for freedom. Thus it was an act of humiliating surrender on the point of principle. The usual interpretation of Partition, however, does not utter a word about this aspect. Even while conceding Partition to be a tragedy, it is sought to be made out as the only practical way out then available - as the inevitable price for achieving freedom.”

H.V. Sheshadri (1926–2005) Indian writer

Source: The Tragic Story of Partition (1982), p.12.

Way, History, Freedom, Time

“Mr. Lincoln simply contented himself at the outset by saying, that he was not in favor of social and political equality between the white man and the negro, and did not desire the law so changed as to make the latter voters or eligible to office. I am glad that I have at last succeeded in getting an answer out of him upon this question of negro citizenship and eligibility to office, for I have been trying to bring him to the point on it ever since this canvass commenced.”

Stephen A. Douglas (1813–1861) American politician

Fourth Lincoln-Douglass Debate http://www.nps.gov/liho/learn/historyculture/debate4.htm (September 1858) 1850s

Law, Question, Change

“To put it quite clearly: we have an economic programme. Point No. 13 in that programme demands the nationalisation of all public companies, in other words socialisation, or what is known here as socialism. … the basic principle of my Party’s economic programme should be made perfectly clear and that is the principle of authority… the good of the community takes priority over that of the individual. But the State should retain control; every owner should feel himself to be an agent of the State; it is his duty not to misuse his possessions to the detriment of the State or the interests of his fellow countrymen. That is the overriding point. The Third Reich will always retain the right to control property owners. If you say that the bourgeoisie is tearing its hair over the question of private property, that does not affect me in the least. Does the bourgeoisie expect some consideration from me?… Today’s bourgeoisie is rotten to the core; it has no ideals any more; all it wants to do is earn money and so it does me what damage it can. The bourgeois press does me damage too and would like to consign me and my movement to the devil.”

Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) Führer and Reich Chancellor of Germany, Leader of the Nazi Party

Hitler's interview with Richard Breiting, 1931, published in Edouard Calic, ed., “First Interview with Hitler, 4 May 1931,” Secret Conversations with Hitler: The Two Newly-Discovered 1931 Interviews, New York: John Day Co., 1971, pp. 31-33. Also published under the title Unmasked: Two Confidential Interviews with Hitler in 1931, published by Chatto & Windus in 1971
1930s

Money, Feeling, Communication, Question

“Men stood up in Parliament and pointed to the American facts. What had created the clipper ships? Not the American government. Not protection, but lack of protection. What made the British marine second-rate? Safety, shelter, protection under the British Navigation Acts… The result was catastrophe. American clipper ships ran away with the Indian trade. They ran away with the trade in England's own home ports.”

Rose Wilder Lane (1886–1968) American journalist

Source: Discovery of Freedom: Man's Struggle Against Authority (1943), p. 238

https://mises.org/system/tdf/The%20Discovery%20of%20Freedom_2.pdf?file=1&type=document Discovery of Freedom: Man's Struggle Against Authority

Men, Home

“The Sultan is not slack in jihad. He never lets go of his spear or bridle in pursuing jihad by land and sea routes. This is his main occupation which engages his eyes and ears. He has spent vast sums for the establishment of the faith and the spread of Islam in these lands, as a result of which the light of Islam has reached the inhabitants and the flash of the true faith brightened among them. Fire temples have been destroyed and the images and idols of Budd have been broken, and the lands have been freed from those who were not included in the darul Islam, that is, those who had refused to become zimmis. Islam has been spread by him in the far east and has reached the point of sunrise. In the words of Abu Nasr al-Aini, he has carried the flags of the followers of Islam where they had never reached before and where no chapter or verse (of the Quran) had ever been recited. Thereafter he got mosques and places of worship erected, and music replaced by call to prayers (azan), and the incantations of fire-worshippers stopped by recitations of the Quran. He directed the people of Islam towards the citadels of the infidels and, by the grace of Allah, made them (the believers) inheritors of wealth and land and that country which they (the believers) had never trodden upon.”

Muhammad bin Tughluq (1290–1351) Turkic Sultan of Delhi

Tughlaq Kalina Bharata, Persian texts translated into Hindi by S.A.A. Rizvi, 2 Volumes, Aligarh, 1956-57. p. 325 ff. Vol I. (Shihabuddin Al Umari.) Also quoted (using a different translation) in Jain, Meenakshi (2011). The India they saw: Foreign accounts. 8th to 15th Centuries, p. 274.

People, Faith, Music, Light

“Greatness loves itself, and all healthy instincts decline to flagellate themselves daily with the whip of altruism. What is great must will to do more than its mere duty; it must give, make others happy, and, be it at the cost of itself, its own wellbeing, its own money or life, it must will to pour forth its blessing over others, to the extent even of self-sacrifice—but not, as Christianity demands, from unegoistic motives; the impulse must come from a sense of pleasure, from overflowing energy, from need of bloodletting, so as to unburden the full heart. All acts then derived from conscience and duty, or done with a wry countenance out of obedience to the Categorical Imperative, seem to the great man, from his point of view, through this very fact contemptible, even as he has an unsurmountable prejudice against men and nations who are always prating of those words, conscience and duty.”

Oscar Levy (1867–1946) German physician and writer

Source: The Revival of Aristocracy (1906), p. 81.

Love, Life, Men, Money

“A single observation that is inconsistent with some generalization points to the falsehood of the generalization, and thereby 'points to itself.”

Ian Hacking (1936) Canadian philosopher

Source: The Emergence Of Probability, 1975, Chapter 4, Evidence, p. 34.

“We do not mechanically connect the sensation of white with the idea of light, any more than we connect the sensation of black with the idea of darkness. We admit that a black jewel, even if of a dead black, may be more luminous than the white or pink satin of its case. Loving light, we refuse to measure it, and we avoid the geometrical ideas of the focus and the ray, which imply the repetition-contrary to the principle of variety which guides us-of bright planes and sombre intervals in a given direction. Loving colour, we refuse to limit it, and subdued or dazzling, fresh or muddy, we accept all the possibilities contained between the two extreme points of the spectrum, between the cold and the warm tone.”

Albert Gleizes (1881–1953) French painter

1910s, Du Cubisme (1912)

Love, Idea, Light, Dead

“Every face on Mt. Rushmore was a third party candidate at some point or another.”

Gary Johnson (1953) American politician, businessman, and 29th Governor of New Mexico

Gary Johnson: ‘Every face on Mt. Rushmore was a third party candidate at some point
The Raw Story
2012-10-03
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/10/04/gary-johnson-every-face-on-mt-rushmore-was-a-third-party-candidate-at-some-point/
2012-10-04
Miscellaneous

“A number of statistical assumptions are made in the application of his (Thurstone's) attitude scale e. g. that the scale values of the statements are independent of the attitude distribution of the readers who sort the statements assumptions which as Thurstone points out, cannot always be verified. The method is more over laborious. It seems legitimate to Enquirer whether it actually does its work better than the simple scales which may be employed and the same breath to ask also whether it is not possible to construct equally reliable scales without making unnecessary statistical assumptions.”

Rensis Likert (1903–1981) American statistician

Likert, Rensis. "A technique for the measurement of attitudes." Archives of psychology (1932). p. 7

“There are no perfectly honorable men; but every true man has one main point of honor and a few minor ones.”

George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) Irish playwright

#68
1900s, Maxims for Revolutionists (1903)

Men

“I give you joy of having left Winchester. Now you may own how miserable you were there; now it will gradually all come out, your crimes and your miseries — how often you went up by the Mail to London and threw away fifty guineas at a tavern, and how often you were on the point of hanging yourself, restrained only, as some ill-natured aspersion upon poor old Winton has it, by the want of a tree within some miles of the city.”

Jane Austen (1775–1817) English novelist

Letter to J. Edward Austen (1816-12-16) [Letters of Jane Austen -- Brabourne Edition]
Letters

Nature, Tree, Joy

“What point of morals, of manners, of economy, of philosophy, of religion, of taste, of the conduct of life, has he not settled? What mystery has he not signified his knowledge of? What office, or function, or district of man's work, has he not remembered? What king has he not taught state, as Talma taught Napoleon? What maiden has not found him finer than her delicacy? What lover has he not outloved? What sage has he not outseen? What gentleman has he not instructed in the rudeness of his behavior?”

Ralph Waldo Emerson Music

Shakespeare; or, The Poet
1850s, Representative Men (1850)

Life, Religion, Behavior, Lovers

“The imbalance between developed and underdeveloped countries - caused by the relationships of dependence - becomes more acute if the cultural point of view is taken into consideration.”

Gustavo Gutiérrez (1928) Peruvian theologian

Source: A Theology of Liberation - 15th Anniversary Edition, Chapter Six, The Process Of Liberation In Latin America, p. 53

Dependency, Country

“I may not be smart enough to debate you point-for-point on this, but I have the feeling about 60% of what you say is crap.”

David Letterman (1947) American comedian and actor

Source: To Bill O'Reilly, in discussion about the supposed War on Christmas, as quoted in "In Letterman appearance, O'Reilly repeated false claim that school changed 'Silent Night' lyrics" http://mediamatters.org/items/200601040009, Media Matters for America, (4 January 2006).

Feeling

“Among organization theorists general, if not universal agreement obtains that it is proper to view the development of organization theory as divided into three periods. Conventionally, this "history" is regarded as beginning early in this century; and the three periods are customarily are designed by the terms classic, neo-classic and modern… The classical period has its beginning, in the conventional view, with Frederick W. Taylor and Henri Fayol… [and] reaches its high point in the thirties with the work of James Mooney and of the editors and authors of the Paper in the Science of Administration. The neo-classical wave is seen as beginning with the Hawthorne experiments in the late twenties. These experiments challenge the formality and rationality of classical theory with the "discovery"of human relations.”

Dwight Waldo (1913–2000) American political scientist

Dwight Waldo (1978), "Organization Theory: Revisiting the Elephant," Public Administration Review, 38 (November/December): p. 589

History, Universe, Science

“The Republican Party is part of a larger American discussion about the tension between equality of opportunity and protection of property, which is sort of the point of the book, that this is a much larger American discussion, and Republicans began under Lincoln with the attempt to turn the discrepancy between the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution into, at the time, a modern-day political solution. The Republican Party would manage, they hoped, to turn the principle of the Declaration of Independence, that everybody should have equality of opportunity, into a political reality. The Declaration of Independence was, of course, a set of principles; it wasn't any kind of law or codification of those principles. The Constitution went ahead and codified that the central idea of America was the protection of property, so the Republicans began with the idea that they would be the political arm of the Declaration of Independence's equality of opportunity. Throughout their history, three times now, they have swung from that pole through a sort of racist and xenophobic backlash against that principle, tied themselves to big business, and come out protecting the other American principle, which is the protection of property. That tension between equality of opportunity and the protection of property, both of which are central tenets of America, played out in the Republican Party.”

Heather Cox Richardson American historian

as quoted in "'Not the true Republican Party': How the party of Lincoln ended up with Ted Cruz" http://www.salon.com/2014/09/29/not_the_true_republican_party_how_the_party_of_lincoln_ended_up_with_ted_cruz/ (29 September 2014), by Elias Isquith, Salon

Books, Law, Hope, History

“The sum of the whole matter is this — He who is one in will and heart with God is a Christian. He who loves God is one in will and heart with Him. He who trusts Christ loves God. That is Christianity in its ultimate purpose and result. That is Christianity in its means and working forces. That is Christianity in its starting-point and foundation.”

Alexander Maclaren (1826–1910) British minister

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 104.

Love, God, Heart, Christ

“What is the point of all this violence? Nothing is being proven, nothing is being won. Just a massive waste of life. God help us. Love>death”

Amy Lee (1981) American singer-songwriter and pianist

Amy Lee on Twitter

Love, Life, Death, God

“Whence a geometrically moving point approaching a fixed one has its velocities proportionate to its distances from the fixed one.”

John Napier (1550–1617) Scottish mathematician

The Construction of the Wonderful Canon of Logarithms (1889)

“My poetry journey into the wilderness of language was a journey where each point of arrival turned out to be a stepping stone rather than a destination.”

Seamus Heaney (1939–2013) Irish poet, playwright, translator, lecturer

From Nobel Prize for Literature speech 1995
Other Quotes

“Nature knows no tragedies or catastrophes. It knows no good or evil. It knows only creation and destruction. and one can never truly be happy and free, in the way we were as children before learning of our mortality, without at some point confronting our destruction. And all we can ask for, all we can hope for, all we can beseech God for, is to win a few battles in a war we will ultimately lose.”

Neil Strauss book Emergency: This Book Will Save Your Life

Emergency: This Book Will Save Your Life (2009)

God, War, Happiness, Children

“It is pointed out convincingly by George Sarton in The Life of Science that the development of science, as contrasted with that of art, is cumulative and progressive. Every scientist is educated in the current knowledge of his age and, making use of all he has learned, attempts to add something of his own to the existing body of knowledge. For this reason it is essentially impossible to isolate his personal achievements from the total pattern of scientific development. It follows that one cannot write the scientific life story of an isolated scholar, but only the history of the branches of science in which he participated.”

Eduard Jan Dijksterhuis (1892–1965) Dutch historian

p 14
Simon Stevin: Science in the Netherlands around 1600, 1970

Life, Age, Education, Art

“Now, the American people have got to go about their business. We cannot let the terrorists achieve the objective of frightening our nation to the point where we don't conduct business, where people don't shop.”

George W. Bush (1946) 43rd President of the United States

Press conference http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2001/10/20011011-7.html (11 October 2001). 2000s, 2001

People, Business

“I am now engaged on the refutation of Luther's book, which refutation you will see about September 1st. I am indeed wholly averse to this kind of fighting; but what do they think is to be done by him who is attacked with edge and point? Do not all believe that in repelling an enemy he is to be kept away, and if this is to be accomplished in no other way, he is to be cut down? And must we not oppose engines to those battering-rams which caus enot theology but faith adn truth to be overthrown, friendship to perish, and whatever is sacred and in moderation to be held in contempt among mortals? That book of Luther's, what else is it than an example of denying what you a little while ago? or a fog through which you cannot see rightly the mystery of Christ? I shall put forth nothing wild against Luther - a thing hehimself ought not to have done. Since he has done it I shall remember piety and Christian decorum.”

Huldrych Zwingli (1484–1531) leader of the Protestant Reformation in Switzerland, and founder of the Swiss Reformed Churches

Letter, July 21, ibid, p.288

Friendship, Truth, Books, Faith

“Data management housekeeping is not the only problem to plague oversimplified approaches to high speed computation. The physical problems which are of practical interest tend to have rather significant complications. Examples of these complications are as follows: boundaries are likely to be irregular; interiors are likely to be inhomogeneous; computations required may be dependent on the states of the variables at each point; propagation rates of different physical effects may be quite different; the rate of convergence, or convergence at all, may be strongly dependent on sweeping through the array along different axes on succeeding passes; etc. The effect of each of these complications is very severe on any computer organization based on geometrically related processors in a paralleled processing system.”

Gene Amdahl (1922–2015) American physicist

Source: Validity of the single processor approach... (1967), p. 483

Problem, Dependency, Speed

“Difficult as the course is, the dangers do not come from the difficulties; they come from extremists in India and at home. I will tell you what I mean. I am firmly convinced that such writings as appear in such papers as the Daily Mail will do more to lose India for the British Empire, will do more to cause a revolutionary spirit, than anything that can be done in any way by anyone else. I got many letters, I need hardly say, of all points of view. I had a very characteristic one last week… It was from a colonel; he was an old man, you could tell that by his writing; and he used this phrase: He said, "You and Lord Irwin are negrophiles." Perhaps he was a member of the United Empire party. That is not the way to cement the Empire. This sort of thing, and the spirit behind it, will break up our Empire infallibly, and that is what I am out to fight.”

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

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1931/mar/12/india in the House of Commons (12 March 1931). 1931

Way, Home, Appearance, Fight

“There are two kinds of thinkers, scholars and scientists. The first are the 'trail blazers' who propose new revolutionary ideas, point to new directions for scientific and intellectual developments, create new paradigms of science and scholarship, but leave the details to others. The second are those who follow the new trail, carry out careful experimentation and research within the established paradigm, and work out the precise formulations of theories in a particular domain of knowledge.”

Thaddus E. Weckowicz (1919–2000) Canadian psychologist

Source: Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1901-1972) (1989), p. 2

Idea, Knowledge, Science

“The reduction of poverty is the over-arching objective of the MDGs. Progress is not measured by national or global averages, but by how well the health of the poor improves. If we miss the poor, we miss the point. A health system that lacks commodities for managing high-mortality infectious diseases and the main killers of mothers and young children will not have an adequate impact.”

Margaret Chan (1947) Director-General of the World Health Organization

"Exclusive Interview with WHO's Dr. Margaret Chan" http://www.usaid.gov/news-information/frontlines/global-healthiraq/exclusive-interview-whos-dr-margaret-chan, April-May 2011.

Children, Health, Disease

“There came a point in time when Michael was under a great deal of pressure to alter the film in a way that was just disturbing to him. I had not seen the movie, yet. He phoned me in July of '92 to look at his version. It was exactly what was released two months later with the exception of a couple of reaction shots which we went back in to get. I liked the movie very much and asked him what the studio's problem was. I felt that he was at a point where they might have worn him down”

Madeleine Stowe (1958) American actress

if that's at all possible
Mohican Press interview (2005)

Way, Problem, Time

“…by action on man all known force may be measured. Indeed, few men of science measured force in any other way. After once admitting that a straight line was the shortest distance between two points, no serious mathematician cared to deny anything that suited his convenience, and rejected no symbol, proved or unproveable, that helped him to accomplish work. The symbol was force, as a compass-needle or a triangle was force.”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

Men, Way, Science, Help

“The Hindus introduced negative numbers… The first known use is Brahmagupta about 628; he also states the rules for the four operations with negative numbers. Bhāskara points out that the square root of a positive number is twofold, positive and negative. He brings up the matter of the square root of a negative number but says that there is no square root because a negative number is not a square. No definitions, axioms, or theorems are given.
The Hindus did not unreservedly accept negative numbers. Even Bhāskara, while giving 50 and -5 as two solutions of a problem, says, "The second value is in this case not to be taken, for it is inadequate; people do not approve of negative solutions."”

Morris Kline (1908–1992) American mathematician

However, negative numbers gained acceptance slowly.
Source: Mathematical Thought from Ancient to Modern Times (1972), p. 185.

People, Problem

“Rushdie had written a book of nonfiction which offered critical but decided support to the Nicaraguan revolution. He had also been eloquent about the rights of the ever-relegated Palestinians. What more natural, when he was threatened with assassination by contract, than to jubilate about a terrorist-symp who had been caught in his own logic? I counted some ten newspaper and magazine columns from the Podhoretz school, all making this same point in the same words — demonstrating the impressive Zhdanovite discipline that is the special mark of the faction. All of them seemed to regard the affair as some sort of heavenly revenge for the sin of radical promiscuity; much as they have represented the AIDS crisis as a vengeance as on sixties morality. The ethical nullity of these positions never got beyond mere gloating, and will one day help to illustrate the essential distinction between irony and brutish sarcasm.”

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

"Siding with Rushdie" (1989).
1990s, For the Sake of Argument: Essays and Minority Reports (1993)

Books, School, Support, Revenge

“Wedding: the point at which a man stops toasting a woman and begins roasting her.”

Helen Rowland (1875–1950) American journalist

Syncopations
A Guide to Men (1922)

Wedding, Wedding

“A programming language is like a natural, human language in that it favors certain metaphors, images, and ways of thinking. The language used strongly colors the computer culture. It would seem to follow that educators interested in using computers and sensitive to cultural influences would pay particular attention to the choice of language. But nothing of the sort has happened. On the contrary, educators… have accepted certain programming languages in much the same way as they accepted the QWERTY keyboard. An informative example is the way in which the programming language BASIC has established itself as the obvious language to use in teaching children how to program computers… Today, and in fact for several years now, the cost of computer memory has fallen to the point where any remaining economic advantages of using BASIC are insignificant. Yet in most high schools, the language remains almost synonymous with programming, despite the existence of other computer languages that are demonstrably easier to learn and are richer in the intellectual benefits that can come from learning them. The situation is paradoxical. The computer revolution has scarcely begun, but is already breeding its own conservatism.”

Seymour Papert book Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas

Source: Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas (1980), Chapter 1, Computers and Computer Cultures

Children, Education, School, Color

“Art begins with resistance — at the point where resistance is overcome. No human masterpiece has ever been created without great labor.”

André Gide (1869–1951) French novelist and essayist

Poétique

Art

“The point they (Lissitzky, Rodchenko, Tatlin, Gabo, the neo-Plasticists, and so on) all had in common was to be inside and outside at the same time... For me, to be inside and outside is to be in an unheated studio with broken windows in the winter, or taking a nap on somebody's porch in the summer.”

Willem de Kooning (1904–1997) Dutch painter

Willem de Kooning, MOMA Bull, pp. 7,6, as quoted in Abstract Expressionist Painting in America, W.C, Seitz, Cambridge Massachusetts, 1983, p. 134.
1980's

Winter, Time, Summer

“Ben Stein: What do think is the possibility that intelligent design might turn out to be the answer to some issues in genetics, or in evolution?
Richard Dawkins: Well, it could come about in the following way: it could be that at some earlier time, somewhere in the universe, a civilization evolved by probably some kind of Darwinian means to a very, very high level of technology, and designed a form of life that they seeded onto, perhaps, this planet. Now that is a possibility, and an intriguing possibility. And I suppose it's possible that you might find evidence for that if you look at the details of our chemistry, molecular biology, you might find a signature of some sort of designer, and that designer could well be a higher intelligence from elsewhere in the universe. But that higher intelligence would itself have had to have come about by some explicable, or ultimately explicable, process. It couldn't have just jumped into existence spontaneously. That's the point.”

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

Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed ()

Life, Way, Intelligence, Thinking

“Pagan renaissance is overdue. It is necessary for Europe to heal its psyche. Under Christianity, Europe learned to reject its ancestors, its past, which cannot be good for its future also. Europe became sick because it tore apart from its own heritage, it had to deny its very roots. If Europe is to be healed spiritually, it must recover its spiritual past--at least, it should not hold it in such dishonor…. For self-recovery, these countries have to revive their old gods. But this is a task which cannot be done mechanically. They have to recapture the consciousness which expressed itself in the language of many gods… In my book, The Word as Revelation: Names of Gods, I spoke of a new kind of pilgrimage: a return to the time of the Gods. Meanwhile, European scholars can do a lot. They should write a history of Europe from the Pagan point of view, which would show how profoundly persecuted Paganism was. They should compile a directory of Pagan temples destroyed, Pagan groves and sacred spots desecrated. European Pagans should also revive some of these sites as their places of pilgrimage.”

Ram Swarup (1920–1998) Indian historian

Interview in the June, 1996, issue of Antaios, http://web.archive.org/web/20080407092807/https://www.hinduismtoday.com/archives/1999/7/1999-7-07.shtml

God, Books, History, Learning

“Many people today lack hope. They are perplexed by the questions that present themselves ever more urgently in a confusing world, and they are often uncertain which way to turn for answers. They see poverty and injustice and they long to find solutions. They are challenged by the arguments of those who deny the existence of God and they wonder how to respond… Where can we look for answers? The Spirit points us towards the way that leads to life, to love and to truth. The Spirit points us towards Jesus Christ. In him we find the answers we are seeking.”

Pope Benedict XVI (1927) 265th Pope of the Catholic Church

2008, Young Pilgrims (13 July 2008)

Love, Life, God, People

“Neither do I say that man is not immortal. Upon that point I admit that I do not know, and the declarations of all the priests in the world upon that subject give me no light, and do not even tend to add to my information on the subject, because I know that they know that they do not know.”

Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–1899) Union United States Army officer

"The Brooklyn Divines." Brooklyn Union (Brooklyn, NY), 1883.

World, Light

“Often I think the Almighty is like a snow bunting abandoned in all weathers. Such a bird is about the weight of a postage stamp. Yet he does not blow away when he stands in the open in a tempest... He wields this fragile head against the gale, with his beak to the ground, wings folded close to his sides and his tail pointing upwards; and the wind can get no hold on him, and cleaves.”

Halldór Laxness book Kristnihald undir Jökli (bók)

Pastor Jón Prímus
Kristnihald undir Jökli (Under the Glacier/Christianity at Glacier) (1968)

Bird, Thinking, Weather

“Solutions require thinking through a series of interrelated steps or stages, analyzing a number of rules at each point, and always keeping in mind conclusions reached at earlier points.”

John Thibaut (1917–1986) American social psychologist

Harold Kelley and John W. Thibaut. "Group problem solving." The handbook of social psychology 4 (1969): 1-101; p. 69-70

Thinking

“I’m always interested in finding ways to innovate …. It’s a blend; it’s not a point focus.”

Paul Allen (1953–2018) American inventor, investor and philanthropist

The Seattle Times: "Passion for arts and science drives Paul Allen’s eclectic approach" https://www.seattletimes.com/business/passion-for-arts-and-science-drives-paul-allens-eclectic-approach/ (29 July 2007)

Way

“For two hours I'd felt myself stretching tighter and tighter, like a rubber band pulled to the point of snapping. And now, I could feel the smaller, weaker part of myself beginning to fray, tiny bits giving way before the big break.”

Sarah Dessen book Dreamland

Dreamland (2000)

Way, Feeling, Parting

“I've heard all the usual Sweetness and Light that kids get pushed at them—how they should always forgive, how there’s some good in the worst of us, etc. But when I see a black widow, I step on it; I don’t plead with it to be a good little spider and please stop poisoning people. A black widow spider can’t help it—but that’s the point.”

Robert A. Heinlein book Have Space Suit—Will Travel

Source: Have Space Suit—Will Travel (1958), Chapter 10

People, Forgiveness, Light, Help

“The preference for [the term] 'queer' represents, among other things, an aggressive impulse of generalizations; it rejects a minoritizing logic of toleration or simple political interest-representation in favor of a more thorough resistance to regimes of the normal. … For both academics and activists, 'queer' gets a critical edge by defining itself against the normal rather than the heterosexual. … The insistence on 'queer' … has the effect of pointing out a wide field of normalization, rather than simple intolerance, as the site of violence.”

Michael Warner (1958) American writer

Warner, Michael (1993). "Introduction", Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory, p. xxvi. Ed. Michael Warner. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

“As we walked homeward across the fields, the sun dropped and lay like a great golden globe in the low west. While it hung there, the moon rose in the east, as big as a cart-wheel, pale silver and streaked with rose colour, thin as a bubble or a ghost-moon. For five, perhaps ten minutes, the two luminaries confronted each other across the level land, resting on opposite edges of the world.
In that singular light every little tree and shock of wheat, every sunflower stalk and clump of snow-on-the-mountain, drew itself up high and pointed; the very clods and furrows in the fields seemed to stand up sharply. I felt the old pull of the earth, the solemn magic that comes out of those fields at nightfall. I wished I could be a little boy again, and that my way could end there.”

Willa Cather book My Ántonia

Book IV, Ch. 4
My Antonia (1918)

World, Way, Mountain, Boy

“It has been fashionable in the twentieth century not only to debunk myth, … but to pretend that that reasonable and educated people could avoid the embarrassment of religion and the risk of metaphysics by sticking close to demonstrable facts and testable hypotheses. However, in the course of reducing our beliefs and hopes to certainties and proofs, we impoverished and deluded ourselves. The modern anti-myth reduced human life to a story without a point, a tale told by an idiot, a process without a purpose, a journey without a goal, an affair without a climax (Godot never comes), an accidental collision of mindless atoms. … We have hardly noticed that economics, technology and politics have become the new myth and metaphysic. We haven’t avoided myth and metaphysics, only created demeaning ones.”

Sam Keen (1931) author, professor, and philosopher

Source: The Passionate Life (1983), p. 22

Life, People, Education, Religion

“Hitler's dictatorship differed in one fundamental point from all its predecessors in history. His was the first dictatorship in the present period of technical development, a dictatorship which made complete use of all technical means for the domination of its own country. Through technical means like the radio and the loud-speaker, eighty million people were deprived of independent thought. It was thereby possible to subject them to the will of one man.”

Albert Speer (1905–1981) German architect, Minister of Armaments and War Production for Nazi Germany

1946. Quoted in "Nuremberg: The War Crimes Trial" by Richard Norton-Taylor, Nicolas Kent - Drama - (1997)

People, History, Country

“The masses on the contrary, have just reached the point where the ancestors of today's scientists were standing two generations back. They are convinced that the scientific picture of an arbitrary abstraction from reality is a picture of reality as a whole and that therefore the world is without meaning or value. But nobody likes living in such a world. To satisfy their hunger for meaning and value, they turn to such doctrines as nationalism, fascism and revolutionary communism. Philosophically and scientifically, these doctrines are absurd; but for the masses in every community, they have this great merit: they attribute the meaning and value that have been taken away from the world as a whole to the particular part of the world in which the believers happen to be living.”

Aldous Huxley book Ends and Means

Ends and Means (1937)

Hunger, World, Communication, Reality

“This past summer I realized that I am not the sort of woman to stand alone in life. Apart from the eternal worries about money, it is precisely the freedom I have had which was able to lure me away from myself. I would so much like to get to the point where I can create something that is me. It is up to the future to determine for us whether I'm acting bravely or not. The main thing now is peace and quiet for my work, and I have that most of all when I am at Otto Modersohn's side.”

Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876–1907) German artist

In a letter to her friend Clara Rilke-Westhoff, 17 November 1906; as quoted in Voicing our visions, – Writings by women artists; ed. Mara R. Witzling, Universe New York, 1991, p. 206
1906 + 1907

Life, Money, Peace, Freedom

“The matter of color is more confusing. Not every property of a system can be stated as a definite spatio-temporal state of affairs. A system's tendency, for instance, to move from State A to State B, but not from State B to State A... a tendency like this is not any specific event which you can point to in space and time. These nonspecific properties correspond to overall gestalts in the Hilbert Space coloring. Alternating bands of red and green light might, for example, represent a particle which is moving from left to right but which has no specific location. A good mood could be a golden haze not tied to any particular cause.”

Rudy Rucker (1946) American mathematician, computer scientist, science fiction author and philosopher

Source: The Sex Sphere (1983), p. 134

Color, Mood, Light, Time

“The author has the reputation of being against color. I am indeed against color when it masks incompetence; when it allows the superimposition of characteristics to the point of absurdity; when people believe it capable of representing ordered data.”

Jacques Bertin (1918–2010) French geographer and cartographer

Source: Graphics and graphic information processing (1981), p. 222; partly cited in: Laura R. Novick and Sean M. Hurley (2001) " To Matrix, Network, or Hierarchy: That Is the Question http://homepage.psy.utexas.edu/homepage/faculty/Markman/PSY394/NovHur.pdf" in: Cognitive Psychology 42, 158–216 (2001)

People, Color

“Then again, in the human body the central point is naturally the navel. For if a man be placed flat on his back, with his hands and feet extended, and a pair of compasses centered at his navel, the fingers and toes of his two hands and feet will touch the circumference of a circle described therefrom.”

Vitruvius book De architectura

Source: De architectura (The Ten Books On Architecture) (~ 15BC), Book III, Chapter I, Sec. 3

Nature

“It is to the influence of the opinion of those whom the multitude [the populous] judges best informed, and to whom it has been accustomed to give its confidence in regard to the most important matters of life, that the propagation of those errors is due, which in times of ignorance, have covered the face of the earth. Magic and astrology offer us two great examples. These errors… having for a basis only universal credence, have maintained themselves during a very long time; but at last the progress of science has destroyed them in the minds of enlightened men, whose opinion consequently has caused them to disappear… through the power of imitation and habit which had so generally spread them… This power, the richest resource of the moral world, establishes and conserves in a whole nation ideas entirely contrary to those… elsewhere… What indulgence ought we not then to have for opinions different from ours, when this difference often depends only upon the various points of view where circumstances have placed us! Let us enlighten those whom we judge insufficiently instructed; but first let us examine critically our own opinions, and weigh with impartiality, their respective probabilities.”

Pierre-Simon Laplace book Philosophical Essay on Probabilities

p, 125
Philosophical Essay on Probabilities (1902)

Life, Men, World, Error

“In one sense, this is a healthy response because it recognizes that race matters and racism matter, and and create different experiences for people in this country. But there is also something important to be said for solidarity…. It's important to say that solidarity is not charity. Historically, solidarity has meant the recognition that all our struggles are connected. In the socialist movement and the labor movement, there's the old saying that "." The point is to understand that when the majority of people are divided and standing up for one another, the chances of losing are much greater--but when we stand together, we have a better chance of winning.”

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor (1950) American academic and author

The fight against racism doesn't stop here (2013)

People, Understanding, Sense, Chance

“I had very happy high school years; I was not a very diligent student, but I had good achievements – I was a winner of biology and chemistry national competition, which gave me a lot of points when I decided to take the entrance examination for medicine, not being completely convinced of the medical profession, since there was never a doctor in my family.”

Marek Sanak (1958) Polish scientist

Kobos, Andrzej (2012). Po drogach uczonych. 5. Polska Akademia Umiejętności. pp. 317–335. ISBN 978-83-7676-127-5.

Happiness, School, Family

“Like all great churches, that are not mere store-houses of theology, Chartres expressed, besides whatever else it meant, an emotion, the deepest man ever felt,— the struggle of his own littleness to grasp the infinite. You may, if you like, figure in it a mathematic formula of infinity,— the broken arch, our finite idea of space; the spire, pointing, with its converging lines, to Unity beyond space; the sleepless, restless thrust of the vaults, telling the unsatisfied, incomplete, overstrained effort of man to rival the energy, intelligence and purpose of God. Thomas Aquinas and the schoolmen tried to put it in words, but their church is another chapter. In act, all man's work ends there;— mathematics, physics, chemistry, dynamics, optics, every sort of machinery science may invent,— to this favor come at last, as religion and philosophy did before science was born.”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

Mont Saint Michel and Chartres (1904)

God, Religion, Intelligence, Mathematics

“It was something that came up right from the get-go, but as you know, from the beginning we kind of thought we were going to kill Shiro at one point. And so we’re like, ‘Y’know what? We don’t really want to kill off our gay representation. Maybe we’ll find it somewhere else.’ But then we found out pretty soon after that, Shiro wasn’t allowed to die. Well, all right, we go back to plan one and yeah, it just took us a little while to get to the point in the story where we were able to reveal it. But he was kind of always in the works to be our [gay] representation.
It’s a very normal part of his life and it’s just a very normal part of our story. It wasn’t supposed to be, like, scandalous or surprising or--
It’s just daily life. And I think we kind of try to envision a world where all of those things are just normal and accepted and people don’t freak out about them.
It doesn’t change who he is at all.”

Lauren Montgomery (1980) artist

26 July 2018 article on ScreenRant https://screenrant.com/voltron-shiro-gay-boyfriend-adam/

Life, People, World, Thinking

“The selecting of men is one of the important functions in business and yet one that has not received much scientific attention. I feel sure that the time is ripe for action for two reasons. The psychologists have during the past few years made distinct advance in Mental Tests. My proposal is this: You get from your Class A members data as to their methods of selecting men. Any statements as to actual experience and as to principles or methods will be very valuable. I would make a study of these data and would have some of the men from our School of Commerce go over them with me. We would try to criticize them constructively. Perhaps we could make some suggestions that would be worth while. We would try to indicate the good points used and thus be of assistance to all members of the organization.”

Walter Dill Scott (1869–1955) President of Northwestern university and psychologist

Source: Influencing men in business, 1911, p. 398 ; cited in: Edmund C. Lynch. "Walter Dill Scott: Pioneer Industrial Psychologist," The Business History Review, Vol. 42, No. 2 (Summer, 1968), pp. 149-170

Men, School, Feeling, Business

“I became aware of Louise Bourgeois in my first or second year at Brighton Art College. One of my teachers, Stuart Morgan, curated a small retrospective of her work at the Serpentine, and both he and another teacher, Edward Allington, saw something in her, and me, and thought I should be aware of her. I thought the work was wonderful. It was her very early pieces, The Blind Leading the Blind, the wooden pieces and some of the later bronze works. Biographically, I don't really think she has influenced me, but I think there are similarities in our work. We have both used the home as a kind of kick-off point, as the space that starts the thoughts of a body of work. I eventually got to meet Louise in New York, soon after I made House. She asked to see me because she had seen a picture of House in the New York Times while she was ironing it one morning, so she said. She was wonderful and slightly kind of nutty; very interested and eccentric. She drew the whole time; it was very much a salon with me there as her audience, watching her. I remember her remarking that I was shorter than she was. I don't know if this was true but she was commenting on the physicality of making such big work and us being relatively small women. When you meet her you don't know what's true, because she makes things up. She has spun her web and drawn people in, and eaten a few people along the way.”

Louise Bourgeois (1911–2010) American and French sculptor

Rachel Whiteread, " Kisses for Spiderwoman http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2007/oct/14/art2," The Guardian, 14 Oct. 2007:

Women, People, Art, Way

“9:00: I don't know what I want. I just point at the Dollar Menu and say, 'Give me all of that.”

Tucker Max (1975) Internet personality; blogger; author

The Absinthe Donuts Story http://www.tuckermax.com/archives/entries/date/the_absinthe_donuts_story.phtml#280, The Tucker Max Stories

“If … we meet a man of acknowledged mental superiority, whether generally or in his special department, it is our social duty by intelligent questioning, by an anxiety to learn from him, to force him to condescend to our ignorance, or join in our fun, till his broader sympathies are awakened, and he plays with us as if we were children. Indeed this very metaphor points out one of the very remarkable instances of social equality asserted by an inferior—I mean the outspoken freedom of the child—which possesses a peculiar charm, and often thaws the dignity or dissipates the reserve of the great man and woman whose superiority is a perpetual obstacle to them in ordinary society.”

John Pentland Mahaffy (1839–1919) Irish classicist and polymathic scholar

Conversation (1896), p. 104 http://books.google.com/books?id=1yEVAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA104

Children, Intelligence, Question, Freedom

“And it is just as important for the Republicans to read Jefferson's words because they are as bad and perhaps worse than the Democrats. As the decades of Democratic abuse of America's young unfolded, the Republicans have been utterly craven, seeking to save the young, the Constitution, and the republic with words alone when in opposition, and doing virtually nothing substantive to arrest the republic's decline when they hold power. Today, the Republicans cower, mumble, and equivocate when called 'extremists' by those heroic Democratic champions of murdering the unborn, they follow like murmuring sheep the shrill martial words of Senators Graham and McCain and so get young Americans uselessly killed and maimed in wars that are either unnecessary or ones they have no intention of winning, and they are barely brave enough to raise economic points and words of I-told-you-so to oppose the coming, liberty-killing indentured servitude of America's young in the name of Obamacare. Indeed, the Republicans seem increasingly like those gassy, self-righteous, and hell-bound rhetoricians.”

Michael Scheuer (1952) American counterterrorism analyst

As quoted in "Obama and his party offer America's young … death, misery, and slavery" http://non-intervention.com/1143/obama-and-his-party-offer-america%E2%80%99s-young-%E2%80%A6-death-misery-and-slavery/ (2013), by M. Scheuer, Michael Scheuer's Non-Intervention. 2010s

War, Hell, Reading

“Systems Are Seductive. They promise to do a hard job faster, better, and more easily than you could do it by yourself. But if you set up a system, you are likely to find your time and effort now being consumed in the care and feeding of the system itself. New problems are created by its very presence. Once set up, it won't go away, it grows and encroaches. It begins to do strange and wonderful things. Breaks down in ways you never thought possible. It kicks back, gets in the way, and opposes its own proper function. Your own perspective becomes distorted by being in the system. You become anxious and push on it to make it work. Eventually you come to believe that the misbegotten product it so grudgingly delivers is what you really wanted all the time. At that point encroachment has become complete. You have become absorbed. You are now a systems person.”

John Gall (1925–2014) American physician

Source: General systemantics, an essay on how systems work, and especially how they fail..., 1975, p. 90 as cited in: Robert B. Seidensticker (2006) Future Hype: The Myths of Technology Change. p. 45

Way, Problem, Effort, Time

“[intention to make a voyage of discovery through The Netherlands] … with the aim to apply it as a painter, as well as in my quality of entomologist [specialism, snout beetle].... what parts, provinces or regions of our country [ are] 'least' visited from an entomological point of view..?”

Willem Roelofs (1822–1897) Dutch painter and entomologist (1822-1897)

translation from original Dutch: Fons Heijnsbroek
(original Dutch: citaat van Willem Roelofs, in het Nederlands:) [intentie tot het maken van een ontdekkingsreis door Holland] ..zowel met het doel van die op te nemen als schilder als in mijne qualiteit van entomoloog [specialisme snuitkevers].. ..welke gedeelten, provincieën of streken van ons land [zijn] 'het minst' uit entomologisch oogpunt bezocht..?
In a letter to his Entomologische friend {{w|nl:Samuel Constantinus Snellen van Vollenhoven|S.C. Snellen]], from Brussels, 18 Dec. 1870; as cited in Willem Roelofs 1822-1897 De Adem der natuur, ed. Marjan van Heteren & Robert-Jan te Rijdt; Thoth, Bussum, 2006, p. 14 - ISBN13 * 978 90 6868 432 2
1870's

Parting, Country

“after throwing the defendant and his witness out of the courtroom: I have other things to do today. I have to get home! [points to her wristwatch] JUDGE JUDY IS ON!!! [audience laughs]”

Judith Sheindlin (1942) American lawyer, judge, television personality, and author

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kt3L8c0Dv_M&feature=related
Quotes from Judge Judy cases, Being funny

Home

“The criticism of ideology must therefore invert the linking of causality as perceived by the totalitarian gaze: far from being the positive cause of social antagonism, the Jew is just an embodiment of a certain blockage - of the impossibility which prevents the society from achieving its full identity as a closed, homogenous totality. Far from being the positive cause of social negativity, the Jew is a point at which social negativity as such assumes another formula of the basic procedure of the criticism of ideology, supplementing the one given above: to detect, in a given ideological edifice, the element which represents within it its own impossibility. Society is not prevented from achieving its full identity because of Jews: it is prevented by its own antagonistic nature, by its own immanent blockage, and it projects this internal negativity into the figure of the Jew. In other words, what is excluded from the Symbolic (from the frame of the corporalist socio-symbolic order) returns in the Real as a paranoid construction of the Jew.”

Slavoj Žižek book The Sublime Object of Ideology

143
The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989)

Nature

“To change the subject, he said, “I’ve been thinking a lot.”
“What about?”
“Free will.”
“Free will?”
“Yeah,” he said, trying not to fidget, a weird feeling in his head. “I reckon free will is bullshit.”
“You need to get some sleep, Spider.”
“No, no, I feel okay, more or less.”
“Free will,” she said, shaking her head.
“It’s an illusion. That’s all it is. Everything is already sorted out, every decision, every possibility, it’s all determined, scripted, whatever.”
Iris was looking at him as if she was worried. “Where’d all this come from?”
“I’ve been to the End of bloody Time, Iris. From that perspective, everything is done and settled. Basically, everything that could happen has happened. It’s all mapped out, documented, diagrammed, written up in great big books, and ignored.”
“You’re a crazy bastard, you know that, Spider?”
“Maybe not crazy enough,” he said.
Iris was still struggling for traction on the conversation. “You think everything is predetermined? Is that it? But what about—”
“No. You just think you have free will.”
“So, according to you,” Iris said, looking bewildered, “a guy who kills his wife was always going to kill her. She was always going to die.”
“From his point of view, he doesn’t know that, and neither does she, but yeah. She was always a goner, so to speak.”
“There is no way I can accept this,” she said. “It’s intolerable. It robs individual people of moral agency. According to you nobody chooses to do anything; they’re just following a script. That means nobody’s responsible for anything.”
“I said free will is an illusion. We think we’ve got moral agency, we think we make choices. It’s a perfect illusion. It just depends on your point of view.”
“It’s a bloody pathway to madness, I reckon,” Iris said.
“I dunno,” he said. “Right now, sitting here, thinking about everything, I think it makes a lot of sense. Kinda, anyway.””

K. A. Bedford book Time Machines Repaired While-U-Wait

“Think you’ll find that’s just an illusion,” she said, and flashed a tiny smile.
Source: Time Machines Repaired While-U-Wait (2008), Chapter 22 (pp. 271-272)

People, Books, Smile, Way

“Moving to Turkey was the turning point in my life.”

Tarkan (1972) Turkish singer

Tarkan Q & A, Tarkan Translations, April 10, 2003 http://tarkantr.blogspot.com/2005/05/q.html,

Life

“My favorite form is the short story. From an aesthetics stand point you really have to pare down to the bone. You can't write a throw-away scene.”

Roger Zelazny (1937–1995) American speculative fiction writer

Phlogiston interview (1995)

“The rhythmic pattern of the poem, which forces continuity of attention – incites a pleasurable compulsion to ‘follow’ – is either a tried metrical suasion-contrivance or a specially invented pattern of physical insistences, equally, if not more, binding in its effect on the reader. From a straight linguistic point of view, there is room for wonder if there is not latent vice in this environment in which pleasurable physically-compelled responses, produced by incidents of poetic utterance, are identified with the Good.”

Laura Riding Jackson (1901–1991) poet, critic, novelist, essayist and short story writer

"The Promise of Words" in London Review of Books, Vol. 17, No. 17, p. 23

Pleasure

“Dorothy looked, and gave a little cry of fright. There, indeed, just under the corner of the great beam the house rested on, two feet were sticking out, shod in silver shoes with pointed toes.”

L. Frank Baum book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900)

Shoe, Housing, Cry

“This is a reality that our investigators repeatedly encountered in their interviews of police and city officials, their conversations with local residents, and their review of thousands of pages of records and documents. This evidence pointed to an unfortunate and unsustainable situation that has not only severely damaged relationships between law enforcement and members of the community, but made professional policing vastly more difficult – and unnecessarily placed officers at increased risk. And today – now that our investigation has reached its conclusion – it is time for Ferguson’s leaders to take immediate, wholesale and structural corrective action. Let me be clear: the United States Department of Justice reserves all its rights and abilities to force compliance and implement basic change.”

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

2010s, Update on Investigations in Ferguson (2015)

Justice, Law, Communication, Reality

“The Army which I joined in 1922 was drab and unexhilarating after West Point. Most of our citizens assumed that World War I had ended all wars and hence regarded a standing army as useful as "a chimney in summer," to use an old English phrase. Promotion was strictly by seniority, and a large bloc of contemporary officrs taken into the Regular Army at the end of the war constituted a discouraging "hump" in the promotion list just ahead of my contemporaries and me. As a result it took me thirteen years to become a captain, and such distinguished officers as Generals Gruenther, McAuliffe, Palmer, and Wedemeyer, who graduated a few years before me, took seventeen years. Under such conditions of stagnation, many of the most promising officers resigned and sought their fortune in civil life. But for some unaccountable reason a remarkable number stayed in the service to become the military leaders of World War II.”

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

Source: Swords and Plowshares (1972), p. 29

Life, War, World, Summer

“You don't have to start a fight
I'm a man who can't say no
If you've got a little risky business
Just point me where you want to go
Take me to the power
Take me to the heat
Take me to the cleaners
If it's open to the street
Something's got to pay off
Something's got to break
Someone's got a fortune that they're begging
Me to take.”

Billy Joel (1949) American singer-songwriter and pianist

Easy Money.
Song lyrics, An Innocent Man (1983)

Business, Fight

“Treat nature in terms of the cylinder, the sphere, and the cone, the whole put into perspective so that each side of an object, or of a plane, leads towards a central point. Lines parallel to the horizon give breadth, whether a sections of nature, or, if you prefer, of the spectacle which Pater omnipotens aeterne Deus unfolds before your eyes. Lines perpendicular to this horizon give depth... Everything I am telling you [ Joachim Gasquet ] about - the sphere, the cone, cylinder, concave shadow – on mornings when I'm tired these notions of mine get me going, they stimulate me, I soon forget them once I start using my eyes.”

Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) French painter

Source: Quotes of Paul Cezanne, after 1900, Cézanne, - a Memoir with Conversations, (1897 - 1906), pp. 163-164, in: 'What he told me – I. The motif'

Nature, Forgetting

“It is God’s will that we set the point of our thought in this blissful beholding as often as we may, — and as long time keep us therein with His grace; for this is a blessed contemplation to the soul that is led of God, and full greatly to His worship, for the time that it lasteth.”

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

The Fifteenth Revelation, Chapter 63

God, Soul, Time

“[watching a baseball game in Los Angeles]
This guy from L. A. sits down next to me, and he goes, "You like baseball?" I said, "Oh, man, I love baseball." He goes, "Did you know that, if Jesus had played ball, he'd have been the greatest ball player ever?" Like I'm gonna argue that point. So I sat there for a second, I turned to him, and I said, "Did you know that if Babe Ruth had been the Messiah, the Catholics would have beer and hot dogs at Communion?"”

Bill Engvall (1957) American comedian and actor

He left.
Now That's Awesome (2000)

Love, Dogs, Angels, Guy

“Creation exists for its Creator. Years of anthropocentrism have almost completely obscured this simple but fundamental point. What follows from this is that animals should not be seen simply as means to human ends. The key to grasping this theology is the abandoning of the common but deeply erroneous view that animals exist in a wholly instrumental relationship to human beings.”

Andrew Linzey (1952) British theologian and divine

Source: Animal Theology (1994), p. 24

Animals

“I've been & am absurdly over-estimated. There are no supermen & I'm quite ordinary, & will say so whatever the artistic results. In that point I'm one of the few people who tell the truth about myself.”

T. E. Lawrence (1888–1935) British archaeologist, military officer, and diplomat

Letter in T.E. Lawrence: The Selected Letters (1989) edited By Malcolm Brown, as quoted in "The Hero Our Century Deserved" by Paul Gray in TIME magazine (15 May 1989) http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,957680,00.html

People, Truth

“Some other idea must then be come to with regard to the mode in which the Divine Author proceeded in the organic creation. Let us seek in the history of the earth's formation for a new suggestion on this point.”

Robert Chambers (publisher, born 1802) book Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation

Source: Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), p. 153

History, Idea

“In the department of physical optics, the phenomena of halos and parhelia have been explained, upon principles not entirely new, but long forgotten: the functions of the eye have been minutely examined, and the mode of its accommodation to the perception of objects at different distances ascertained: the various phenomena of coloured light have been copiously described, and accurately represented by coloured plates; and some new cases of the production of colours have been pointed out, and have been referred to the general law of double lights, by which a great variety of the experiments of former opticians have also been explained; and this law has been applied to the establishment of a theory of the nature of light, which satisfactorily removes almost every difficulty that has hitherto attended the subject.”

Thomas Young (scientist) (1773–1829) English polymath

Preface
A Course of Lectures on Natural Philosophy and the Mechanical Arts (1807)

Law, Nature, Light

Quotes about point page 42

Quotes about point
page 42