Quotes about possibility (6356 quotes, page 28)

“Resolved, to ask myself at the end of every day, week, month and year, wherein I could possibly in any respect have done better.”

Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758) Christian preacher, philosopher, and theologian

No. 41.
Seventy Resolutions (1722-1723)

“It has been the giver's intention to create as complete a collection of European art as possible, with the aim of illuminating Surrealism and Spontaneous-Abstract art.”

Asger Jorn (1914–1973) Danish artist

refering to his art-gift Jorn made the Mmseum Jorn (1962); as quoted in Silkeborg Kunstmuseum — Jorn Samling by Troels Andersen (1973)
1959 - 1973, Various sources

Art

“The paintings of Francis Bacon to my eye are very beautiful. The paintings of Bosch or Goya are to my eye very beautiful. I've also stood in front of those same paintings with people who've said, "let's get on to the Botticellis as soon as possible."”

Clive Barker (1952) author, film director and visual artist

I have lingered, of course.
American Heroes #174

People , Beauty , Painting

“Your greatest strength, Ray, and possibly your only strength, is in pretending that you don't understand simple things.”

Aron Ra (1962) Aron Ra is an atheist activist and the host of the Ra-Men Podcast

Radio Paul's Radio Rants (September 17th, 2012)

Understanding

“The overall system of a sizeable community struggling to survive in a crowded world may be either socialism or privatism. Either system may work, more or less. But, except in non-critical areas of distribution, commonism cannot possibly work for very long.”

Garrett Hardin (1915–2003) American ecologist

Filters Against Folly (1985)

World , Communication

“The manager's function is not to make people work, but to make it possible for people to work.”

Tom DeMarco (1940) American software engineer, author, and consultant

Source: Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams (1987), p. 34.

People

“The complacent, the self-indulgent, the soft societies are about to be swept away with the debris of history. Only the strong, only the industrious, only the determined, only the courageous, only the visionary who determine the real nature of our struggle can possibly survive.”

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

1961, Address before the American Society of Newspaper Editors

History , Courage , Nature , Strong

“Replacing particles by strings is a naive-sounding step, from which many other things follow. In fact, replacing Feynman graphs by Riemann surfaces has numerous consequences: 1. It eliminates the infinities from the theory. …2. It greatly reduces the number of possible theories. …3. It gives the first hint that string theory will change our notions of spacetime. Just as in QCD, so also in gravity, many of the interesting questions cannot be answered in perturbation theory. In string theory, to understand the nature of the Big Bang, or the quantum fate of a black hole, or the nature of the vacuum state that determines the properties of the elementary particles, requires information beyond perturbation theory… Perturbation theory is not everything. It is just the way the [string] theory was discovered.”

Edward Witten (1951) American theoretical physicist

"The Past and Future of String Theory" in The Future of Theoretical Physics and Cosmology: Celebrating Stephen Hawking's Contributions to Physics (2003) ed. G.W. Gibbons, E.P.S. Shellard & S.J. Rankin

Fate , Way , Understanding , Question

“Such is our ideal – not another museum, another bleak exhibition gallery, another classical building in which insulated and classified specimens of a culture are displayed for instruction, but an adult play-centre, a workshop where work is a joy, a source of vitality and daring experiment. We may be mocked for our naive idealism, but at least it will not be possible to say that an expiring civilisation perished without a creative protest.”

Herbert Read (1893–1968) English anarchist, poet, and critic of literature and art

On the occasion of the opening of Forty Years of Modern Art (February 1948)
Literary Quotes

Joy

“Jaspers sees the historical meaning of existential philosophy as a struggle to awaken in the individual the possibilities of an authentic and genuine life, in the face of the great modern drift toward a standardized mass society.”

William Barrett (philosopher) book Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy

Source: Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy (1958), Chapter Two, The Encounter With Nothingness, p. 28

Life

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

Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007) French sociologist and philosopher

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

Truth , World , Way , Thinking

“They [great works of literature] are invalidated not because of their literary obsolescence. Some of these images pertain to contemporary literature and survive in its most advanced creations. What has been invalidated is their subversive force, their destructive content—their truth. In this transformation, they find their home in everyday living. The alien and alienating oeuvres of intellectual culture become familiar goods and services. Is their massive reproduction and consumption only a change in quantity, namely, growing appreciation and understanding, democratization of culture? The truth of literature and art has always been granted (if it was granted at all) as one of a “higher” order, which should not and indeed did not disturb the order of business. What has changed in the contemporary period is the difference between the two orders and their truths. The absorbent power of society depletes the artistic dimension by assimilating its antagonistic contents. In the realm of culture, the new totalitarianism manifests itself precisely in a harmonizing pluralism, where the most contradictory works and truths peacefully coexist in indifference. Prior to the advent of this cultural reconciliation, literature and art were essentially alienation, sustaining and protecting the contradiction—the unhappy consciousness of the divided world, the defeated possibilities, the hopes unfulfilled, and the promises betrayed. They were a rational, cognitive force, revealing a dimension of man and nature which was repressed and repelled in reality.”

Herbert Marcuse book One-Dimensional Man

Source: One-Dimensional Man (1964), pp. 60-61

Truth , World , Hope , Art

“My approach is simply to seek out very talented people, ensure that the environment at SpaceX is as motivating & enjoyable as possible and establish clear & measurable objectives.”

Elon Musk (1971) South African-born American entrepreneur

Conversation: Elon Musk on Wired Science (2007)

People , Motivation

“I figure that, given our “thrownness,” as Heidegger called it, we should work hard to become as bewildered as possible by this strange state of affairs, asking the most impertinent and audacious questions we can imagine. To do otherwise—and instead hand over the mystery of it all to dubious cults of expertise—is to waste one’s life, I feel.”

James K. Morrow (1947) (1947-) science fiction author

Source: The Philosopher's Apprentice (2008), P. S. (p. 14)

Life , Feeling , Imagination , Question

“The present stage redefines the possibilities of man and nature in accordance with the new means available for their realization.”

Herbert Marcuse book One-Dimensional Man

Source: One-Dimensional Man (1964), p. 65

Nature

“We think we are the victims of time. In reality, the way of the world isn't fixed anywhere. How could that be possible? We are our own journey. And therefore we are time as well. We are the same. Fugitive. Inscrutable. Ruthless.”

Cormac McCarthy book The Crossing

The Crossing (1994)

World , Way , Thinking , Reality

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

Morris Raphael Cohen (1880–1947) American philosopher

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

Life , Art , Courage , Support

“At the present we have no adequate scientific method for representing the psychological life span. In accord with the general methods of psychology, the study of environmental influences began with classification and statistics… they gave us excellent descriptions of the home environment. The method of representation is partly akin to that of the novelist i. e., one trying to make as lifelike picture of the situation as possible by choosing expressive words and bringing out significant traits with examples. In general, the descriptions that have been made valuable to science have not been those made by scientific methods. Where theoretical concepts have been introduced with the concrete description, they often stand out as something alien. In stead of scientific descriptions they are nothing more than speculative interpretation.”

Kurt Lewin (1890–1947) German-American psychologist

Source: 1930s, Principles of topological psychology, 1936, p. 12-13.

Life , Home , Study , Science

“For example, how great the difference was between our days. While my days were jam-packed with meaning, when each step opened a new opportunity, and when every opportunity filled me to the brim, in a way which now is actually incomprehensible, the meaning of his days was not concentrated in individual events but spread over such large areas that it was not possible to comprehend them in anything other than abstract terms.”

Karl Ove Knausgård (1968) Norwegian author

My Struggle -- Book 1 (2009)

Way

“If various races and nationalities can live together peaceably in the United States, why is it not within the bounds of possibility that they can learn to live this way throughout the earth?”

Kirby Page (1890–1957) American clergyman

An American Peace Policy (1925)

Way , Learning

“I began to understand my sensations, to know what I wanted, at around the age of forty.... but only vaguely. At fifty, that is in 1880, I formulated the idea of unity, without being able to render it. At sixty, I am beginning to see the possibility of rendering it.”

Camille Pissarro (1830–1903) French painter

(c. 1890); as quoted in Painting Outside the lines, Patterns of Creativity in Modern Art, David W. Galenson, Harvard University Press, 30 Jun 2009, p. 84
1890's

Age , Idea , Understanding

“God himself has made it possible for you to live without the dark place and the pains that rush out and flood out and take you over. Your choice of wanting to see and work is essential to you if you want to get rid of your feeling of emptiness, of futility. You've lied to yourself and said, 'I know what to do to get rid of the pain.' You've never gotten rid of the pain and that's evidence of self-deceit. You have to stop playing cruel tricks on yourself. So stop. Now.”

Vernon Howard (1918–1992) American writer

Your Power of Natural Knowing

God , Pain , Feeling

“It is not possible to set out in the Christian profession with a more instructive or impressive idea than this — Life is the seed-time for eternity.”

John Angell James (1785–1859) British abolitionist

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 380.

Life , Idea , Time

“He fixed his definition thus: reflection is the possibility of the relation, consciousness is the relation, the first form of which is contradiction. He soon noted that, as a result, the categories of reflection are always dichotomous. For example ideality and reality, soul and body, to recognize – the true, to will – the good, to love – the beautiful, God and the world, and so on, these are categories of reflection. In reflection, these touch each other in such a way that a relation becomes possible. The categories of consciousness, on the other hand, are trichotomous, as language itself indicates, for when I say I am conscious of this, I mention a trinity. Consciousness is mind and spirit, and the remarkable thing is that when in the world of mind or spirit one is divided, it always becomes three and never two. Consciousness, therefore, presupposes reflection. If this were not true it would be impossible to explain doubt. True, language seems to contest this, since in most languages, as far as he knew, the word ‘doubt’ is etymologically related to the word ‘two’. Yet in his opinion this only indicated the presupposition of doubt, especially because it was clear to him that as soon as I, as spirit, become two, I am eo ipso three. If there were nothing but dichotomies, doubt would not exist, for the possibility of doubt lies precisely in that third which places the two in relation to each other. One cannot therefore say that reflection produces doubt, unless one expressed oneself backwards; one must say that doubt presupposes reflection, though not in a temporal sense. Doubt arises through a relation between two, but for this to take place the two must exist, although doubt, as a higher expression, comes before rather than afterwards.”

Sören Kierkegaard (1813–1855) Danish philosopher and theologian, founder of Existentialism

Johannes Climacus (1841) p. 80-81
1840s, Johannes Climacus (1841)

Love , God , World , Beauty

“That will become clear in the next few months as we see just what kind of minority the Sunnis in Iraq intend to be. If they come around, a decent outcome in Iraq is still possible, and we should stay to help build it. If they won't, then we are wasting our time. We should arm the Shiites and Kurds and leave the Sunnis of Iraq to reap the wind.”

Thomas Friedman (1953) American journalist and author

New York Times (28 May 2005) "The Endgame in Iraq".
"The next … months" in Iraq

Time , Help

“As we speak cruel time is fleeing. Seize the day, believing as little as possible in the morrow.”
Dum loquimur, fugerit invida Aetas: carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero.

Horace book Odes

Book I, ode xi, line 7
John Conington's translation:
:In the moment of our talking, envious time has ebbed away,
Seize the present, trust tomorrow e'en as little as you may.
Odes (c. 23 BC and 13 BC)

Time

“Here my idea is to declare that art is the only possibility for evolution, the only possibility to change the situation in the world. But then you have to enlarge the idea of art to include the whole creativity. And if you do that, it follows logically that every living being is an artist – an artist in the sense that he can develop his own capacity. And therefore it's necessary at first that society cares about the educational system, that equality of opportunity for self-realization is guaranteed.”

Joseph Beuys (1921–1986) German visual artist

Source: 1970's, Joseph Beuys... Public Dialogue' 1974, p. 5

World , Education , Art , Idea

“When making the analysis of matter we impliedly admitted two propositions: first, that sensation is the tertium quid which is interposed between the excitant of our sensory nerves and ourselves; secondly, that the aggregate of our sensations is all we can know of the outer world, so that it is correct to define this last as the collection of our present, past, and possible sensations.”

Alfred Binet (1857–1911) French psychologist and inventor of the first usable intelligence test

Source: The Mind and the Brain, 1907, p. 60; Definition of sensation

World , Past

“Among all the world's races, some obscure Bedouin tribes possibly apart, Americans are the most prone to misinformation. This is not the consequence of any special preference for mendacity, although at the higher levels of their public administration that tendency is impressive. It is rather that so much of what they themselves believe is wrong.”

John Kenneth Galbraith (1908–2006) American economist and diplomat

The United States (1971)

World

“Today it's possible to paint one canvas with the calmness of an ancient Greek and the next with the anxiety of a Van Gogh. Either of these emotions, and any in between, is valid to me... I work on many canvasses at once. In the morning I line them up against the wall of my studio. Some speak, some do not. They are my mirrors. They tell me what I am like at that moment.”

William Baziotes (1912–1963) American painter

I Cannot Evolve Any Concrete Theory, William Baziotes, in Possibilities, Vol. I, no. 1, New York, winter 1947-48, p. 2
1940s

Painting

“Societies such as ours that once had democratic traditions or periods when relative openness was possible are often the most easily seduced into totalitarian systems because those who rule and build totalitarian structures continue to pay outward fealty to the ideals, practices and forms of the old system.”

Chris Hedges (1956) American journalist

40:35
“ Our Only Hope Will Come Through Rebellion http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TOlg_2qAbUA” (2014)

“Easy things should be easy, and hard things should be possible.”

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

Amazon.com Interview: Larry Wall http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?ie=UTF8&docId=7137.
Other

“All our steps in creating or absorbing material of the record proceed through one of the senses — the tactile when we touch keys, the oral when we speak or listen, the visual when we read. Is it not possible that some day the path may be established more directly?”

Vannevar Bush book As We May Think

As We May Think (1945)

Sense , Reading

“Metaphysics, because it opens out a limitless vista of possibilities, must take care never to lose sight of the inexpressible, which indeed constitutes its very essence.”

René Guénon book Introduction to the Study of the Hindu Doctrines

Introduction générale à l'étude des doctrines hindoues (Introduction to the Study of the Hindu Doctrines) (1921)

“When an individual (or a group of individuals) is kept in a situation of inferiority, the fact is that he is inferior. But the significance of the verb to be must be rightly understood here; it is in bad faith to give it a static value when it really has the dynamic Hegelian sense of "to have become." Yes, women on the whole are today inferior to men; that is, their situation affords them fewer possibilities. The question is: should that state of affairs continue?
Many men hope that it will continue; not all have given up the battle.”

Simone de Beauvoir book The Second Sex

Introduction : Woman as Other
The Second Sex (1949)

Women , Men , Faith , Hope

“The general method involved may be very simply stated. In cases where the equilibrium values of our variables can be regarded as the solutions of an extremum (maximum or minimum) problem, it is often possible regardless of the number of variables involved to determine unambiguously the qualitative behavior of our solution values in respect to changes of parameters.”

Paul A. Samuelson book Foundations of Economic Analysis

Source: 1940s, Foundations of Economic Analysis, 1947, Ch. 2 : The Theory of Maximizing Behavior

Behavior , Problem , Change

“So I ask that these papers be taken for what they merely are: exercises, trials, tryouts, a means of displaying possibilities, not establishing fact.”

Erving Goffman (1922–1982) Sociologist, writer, academic

Erving Goffman (1981, p. 1); As cited in: Trevino (2003,, p. 34).
1970s-1980s

Exercises

“”Jewish Peril” exposed.
Historic “Fake.”
Details of the forgery.
More parallels.
We published yesterday an article from our Constantinople Correspondent, which showed that the notorious “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” – one of the mysteries of politics since 1905 – were a clumsy forgery, the text being based on a book published in French in 1865. The book, without title page, was obtained by our correspondent from a Russian source, and we were able to identify it with a complete copy in the British Museum.
The disclosure, which naturally aroused the greatest interest among those familiar with Jewish questions, finally disposes of the “Protocols” as credible evidence of a Jewish plot against civilization.
We publish below a second article, which gives further close parallels between the language of the Protocols and that attributed to Machiavelli and Montesquieu in the volume dated from Geneva.
Plagiarism at Work.
(From our Constantinople Correspondent.)
While the Geneva Dialogue open with an exchange of compliments between Monsequieu and Machiavelli, which covers seven pages, the author of the Protocols plunges at once in medias res.
One can imagine him hastily turning over those first seven pages of the book which he has been ordered to paraphrase against time, and angrily ejaculating, “Nothing here.” But on page 8 of the Dialogues he finds what he wants.
Publisher: Good work Graves…we finally paid your émigré £ 300 for it…now if we can find Golovinski and get his confession…
Graves: He joined the Bolsheviks.
Golovinski became a party ‘’’activist’’’ and rose to be an adviser to Trotsky. But he ‘’’died’’’ last year!
Publisher: Well, that’s that!
Publisher: Oh but Graves, “The Times” is influential… after our expose we’ll probably hear no more of this fraud!
Graves: I’m not sure!
Anti-Bolsheviks, White Russians, published thousands of copies! Here’s a page from Nilus’ “The Great in the Small.”
Publisher: Astonishing…mystical symbols…eh?
The “Protocols” quickly began to circulate around the world.
A French edition this year…and in America Henry Ford, the auto magnate, has been serializing it in his paper, the “Dearborn independent”!
Publisher: When did it first appear in Europe?
Graves: The German edition…dated 1919, was the first!
This is an evil book…a fake designed to malign a whole group of people.
Publisher: I know, I know! …Ugly stuff, Graves.
Graves: Well, what are we to do about it?
Publisher: Your report exposed it as a foul fraud!
Publisher: Y’forget the power of the press, graves! “The Times” has tremendous worldwide influence.
This fraud will soon be well known everywhere…so, my boy, ‘’’what harm can the “protocols” possibly do now?”

Will Eisner (1917–2005) American cartoonist

Source: The Plot: The Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (10/2/2005), pp. 91-94

People , Books , World , Imagination

“So to sleep on the sleeping porch required preparation. First, you put on long underwear, pajamas, jeans, a sweatshirt, your grandfather’s old cardigan and bathrobe, two pairs of woolen socks on your feet and another on your hands, and a hat with earflaps tied beneath the chin. Then you climbed into bed and were immediately covered with a dozen bed blankets, three horse blankets, all the household overcoats, a canvas tarpaulin, and a piece of old carpet. I’m not sure that they didn’t lay an old wardrobe on top of that, just to hold everything down. It was like sleeping under a dead horse. For the first minute or so it was unimaginably cold, shockingly cold, but gradually your body heat seeped in and you became warm and happy in a way you would not have believed possible only a minute or two before. It was bliss. Or at least it was until you moved a muscle. The warmth, you discovered, extended only to the edge of your skin and not a micron farther. There wasn’t any possibility of shifting positions. If you so much as flexed a finger or bent a knee, it was like plunging them into liquid nitrogen.”

Bill Bryson (1951) American author

Source: The Life And Times of the Thunderbolt Kid (2006), p. 140

Way , Sleep , Horse , Dead

“Recently I was visited by a very good friend who had just returned from a long walk in the woods, and I asked her what she had observed. “Nothing in particular,” she replied. I might have been incredulous had I not been accustomed to such responses, for long ago I became convinced that the seeing see little.
How was it possible, I asked myself, to walk for an hour through the woods and see nothing worthy of note? I who cannot see find hundreds of things to interest me through mere touch. I feel the delicate symmetry of a leaf. I pass my hands lovingly about the smooth skin of a silver birch, or the rough, shaggy bark of a pine. In spring I touch the branches of trees hopefully in search of a bud, the first sign of awakening Nature after her winter’s sleep. I feel the delightful, velvety texture of a flower, and discover its remarkable convolutions; and something of the miracle of Nature is revealed to me.”

Helen Keller (1880–1968) American author and political activist

Three Days to See (1933)

Feeling , Search , Spring , Flowers

“I thought fit to… explain in detail in the same book the peculiarity of a certain method, by which it will be possible… to investigate some of the problems in mathematics by means of mechanics. This procedure is… no less useful even for the proof of the theorems themselves; for certain things first became clear to me by a mechanical method, although they had to be demonstrated by geometry afterwards… But it is of course easier, when we have previously acquired, by the method, some knowledge of the questions, to supply the proof than it is to find it without any previous knowledge.”

Archimedes book The Method of Mechanical Theorems

The Method of Mechanical Theorems

Books , Mathematics , Question , Knowledge

“Great changes have come over the world since Lafayette first came here desirous of aiding the cause of freedom. His efforts in behalf of an American republic have been altogether successful. In no other country in the world was economic opportunity for the people ever so great as it is here. In no other country was it ever possible in a like degree to secure equality and justice for all. Just as he was passing off the stage, the British adopted their reform measures giving them practically representative government. His own France has long since been welcomed into the family of republics. Many others have taken a like course. The cause of freedom has been triumphant. We believe it to be, likewise, the cause of peace. But peace must have other guarantees than constitutions and covenants. Laws and treaties may help, but peace and war are attitudes of mind. American citizens, with the full sympathy of our Government, have been attempting with apparent success to restore stricken Europe.”

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

1920s, Ordered Liberty and World Peace (1924)

War , People , World , Family

“We live in a capitalist economy, and I have no particular objection to honorable self-interest. We cannot hope to make the needed, drastic improvement in primary and secondary education without a dramatic restructuring of salaries. In my opinion, you cannot pay a good teacher enough money to recompense the value of talent applied to the education of young children. I teach an hour or two a day to tolerably well-behaved near-adults—and I come home exhausted. By what possible argument are my services worth more in salary than those of a secondary-school teacher with six classes a day, little prestige, less support, massive problems of discipline, and a fundamental role in shaping minds.”

Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) American evolutionary biologist

In comparison, I only tinker with intellects already largely formed.
"The Dinosaur Rip-off", pp. 101–102
Bully for Brontosaurus (1991)

Money , Children , Education , School

“Recently a courageous group of Arab and Muslim intellectuals wrote me a letter. In it, they said this: "The shore of reform is the only one on which any lights appear, even though the journey demands courage and patience and perseverance." The United Nations was created to make that journey possible. Together we must support the dreams of good and decent people who are working to transform a troubled region -- and by doing so, we will advance the high ideals on which this institution was founded.”

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

2000s, 2006, United Nations General Assembly speech (September 2006)

People , Dreams , Courage , Support

“In addition to promoting awareness of nonviolence, it’s just possible – indeed it is absolutely critical – that we work with undaunted determination to create a sane firearms policy that makes it harder for disturbed individuals to secure weapons of mass murder. We can no longer afford to shirk this urgent responsibility.”

Bernice King (1963) American minister, daughter of Martin Luther King, Jr.

"A Call for Prayer – and Action -- Against Violence in America" (2012)

“Luck can often mean simply taking advantage of a situation at the right moment. It is possible to make your luck by being always prepared.”

Michael Korda (1933) British writer

Source: Success! (1977), p. 40

“We [The Futurists] stand for a use of colour free from the imitation of objects and things as coloured objects. We stand for an aerial vision in which the material of colour is expressed in all of the manifold possibilities our subjectivity can create.”

Carlo Carrà (1881–1966) Italian painter

Carlo Carrà's art statement on Futurism in 1913, as quoted in Abstract Art Anna Moszynska, Thames and Hudson 1990, p. 26
1910's

“Punk: This is completely ridiculous on multiple, multiple levels. I mean there's so many things going through my head right now. This doesn't belong to you [holds Slammy award and looks at Ric Flair]. You haven't even been here in the past calender year. And the fact that anybody even voted for John Cena to be Superstar of the Year is absolutely atrocious. This is possibly the worst year of John Cena's life. He got beat by a guy that I'm gonna decimate at the Royal Rumble, I beat him at Summerslam…he lost last night, he's the first superstar to cash in his Money in the Bank contract and lose, he's a loser like everybody in Phildelphia, and he's a loser like you”

Phil Brooks (1978) American professional wrestler and mixed martial artist

points to Flair
December 17, 2012 (2012 Slammy Awards)
WWE Raw

Life , Money , Guy , Past

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

Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) French painter and sculptor

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

Idea , Understanding , Sense

“Our result thus far is, that determinism and freedom, when justly thought out, are in idea entirely reconcilable. Determinism proves to need no fatalistic meaning, but to be, possibly enough, simply the definite order characteristic of intelligence; while so far from freedom's being indeterminism, chance, or caprice, these are seen to be incompatible with it, and freedom proves to be, like determinism, the spontaneous definiteness of active intelligence.”

George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) American philosopher

Source: The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905), The Harmony of Determinism and Freedom, p.324

Intelligence , Idea , Freedom , Chance

“For instance, if you have by a lie hindered a man who is even now planning a murder, you are legally responsible for all the consequences. But if you have strictly adhered to the truth, public justice can find no fault with you, be the unforeseen consequence what it may. It is possible that whilst you have honestly answered Yes to the murderer’s question, whether his intended victim is in the house, the latter may have gone out unobserved, and so not have come in the way of the murderer, and the deed therefore have not been done; whereas, if you lied and said he was not in the house, and he had really gone out (though unknown to you) so that the murderer met him as he went, and executed his purpose on him, then you might with justice be accused as the cause of his death. For, if you had spoken the truth as well as you knew it, perhaps the murderer while seeking for his enemy in the house might have been caught by neighbours coming up and the deed been prevented.”

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) German philosopher

On a Supposed Right to Tell Lies from Benevolent Motives (1797)

Death , Truth , Lie , Justice

“It is possible to apply statistical methods to the calculation of nuclear processes provided that the energies involved are large in comparison with the lowest excitation energies of nuclei.”

Victor Frederick Weisskopf (1908–2002) Austrian-born American theoretical physicist

[V. Weisskopf, Statistics and nuclear reactions, Physical Review, 52, 4, 1937, 295–303, https://journals.aps.org/pr/abstract/10.1103/PhysRev.52.295]

“Without perfect sympathy with the animals around them, no gentleman's education, no Christian education, could be of any possible use.”

John Ruskin (1819–1900) English writer and art critic

At the annual meeting of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (1877), in Arrows of the Chase, vol. 2 (in The Complete Works of John Ruskin, vol. 23 https://books.google.it/books?hl=it&id=Gpc3AAAAYAAJ), p. 129.

Education , Animals , Perfection

“While it was long possible and sometimes tempting for physicists to deny the usefulness of the molecular hypothesis, we economists have the good luck of being some of the ‘molecules’ of economic life ourselves, and of having the possibility through human contacts to study the behavior of other ‘molecules’.”

Tjalling Koopmans (1910–1985) Dutch American economist

Tjalling Koopmans in: Review of economics and statistics, Vol. 31 -(1949), p. 87

Life , Behavior , Study

“Power is action, and the elective principle is discussion. There is no policy, no statesmanship possible where discussion is permanent.”

Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) French writer

Le pouvoir est une action, et le principe électif est la discussion.Il n'y a pas de politique possible avec la discussion en permanence.
About Catherine de' Medici (1842), Introduction

“There may come, or perhaps has come, a time when no further progress in truthful representation is possible. There are those who say that such a point has been reached, an attempt to substitute a more and more simplified and decorative calligraphy. This direction is sterile and without hope to those who wish to give painting a richer and more human meaning and a wider scope. No one can correctly forecast the direction that painting will take in the next few years, but to me at least there seems to be a revulsion against the invention of arbitrary and stylized design.”

Edward Hopper (1882–1967) prominent American realist painter and printmaker

1911 - 1940, Notes on Painting - Edward Hopper (1933)

Truth , Hope , Time , Painting

“In this initial illimitableness of possibilities that characterizes one who has no nature there stands out only one fixed, pre-established, and given line by which he may chart his course, only one limit: the past.”

José Ortega Y Gasset (1883–1955) Spanish liberal philosopher and essayist

“Man has no nature”
History as a System (1962)

Nature , Past

“There is another responsibility of the states. It is quite aside from this one of jurisdiction. It is the subject of law enforcement. We are not a lawless people, but we are too frequently a careless one. The multiplicity of laws, the varied possibilities of appeals, the disposition to technicality in procedure, the delays and consequent expense of litigation which inevitably inure to the advantage of wealth and specialized ability — all these have many times been recounted as reproaches to us. It is strange that such laxities should persist in a time like the present, which is marked by a determined upward movement in behalf of the social welfare. But they do exist. They demonstrate a need for better, prompter, less irksome, and expensive administration of the laws. They point the necessity for simplification and codification of laws; for uniformity of procedure; for more accurate delimitation of State and Federal authority.”

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

1920s, The Reign of Law (1925)

People , Law , Time , Wealth

“As always, when the opportunity arose, Joe took a long, astute look at the girl whom, if he could have managed it, he would have had as his mistress, or, even better, his wife. It did not seem possible that Wendy Wright had been born out of blood and internal organs like other people. In proximity to her he felt himself to be a squat, oily, sweating, uneducated nurt whose stomach rattled and whose breath wheezed. Near her he became aware of the physical mechanisms which kept him alive; within him machinery, pipes and valves and gas-compressors and fan belts had to chug away at a losing task, a labor ultimately doomed. Seeing her face, he discovered that his own consisted of a garish mask; noticing her body made him feel like a low-class windup toy. All her colors possessed a subtle quality, indirectly lit. Her eyes, those green and tumbled stones, looked impassively at everything; he had never seen fear in them, or aversion, or contempt. What she saw she accepted. Generally she seemed calm. But more than that she struck him as being durable, untroubled and cool, not subject to wear, or to fatigue, or to physical illness and decline. Probably she was twenty-five or -six, but he could not imagine her looking younger, and certainly she would never look older. She had too much control over herself and outside reality for that.”

Philip K. Dick book Ubik

Source: Ubik (1969), Chapter 5 (pp. 58-59)

People , Fear , Color , Feeling

“That was the line he took, and he did not try to settle the matter of what would be done if universal emancipation came. No intelligent politician tries to raise questions that will divide his followers. He tries to take positions that will unite his followers. And Lincoln did the best that anybody could have possibly done to unite his followers on the questions of principle, which applied directly to the great issue of public policy, which at that time was slavery in the territories. And I think my time is up.”

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

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

Intelligence , Question , Thinking , Universe

“For all human beings, love is a constant preoccupation—a never-ending central theme. Indeed, the ultimate motivation behind interactions among people is often the desire to experience some form of love. The fact that love is so important has major implications for leadership. In particular, the degree to which leaders acknowledge the value of love in their own lives and in the lives of others can determine the success or failure of their undertakings. Far from being irrelevant or impractical, the intention to express love is fundamental for effective leadership. This is so because in the final analysis, a leader’s motivation is communicated to others in countless subtle ways. Leaders whose actions are perceived as self-serving often create disharmony, resentment, and disloyalty. On the other hand, those who base their behavior upon a genuine empathy and concern for others can gain loyalty and support that make the attainment of even difficult goals possible.”

Bhakti Tirtha Swami (1950–2005) American Hindu writer

Source: Books, Leadership For An Age of Higher Consciousness, Volume 1: Administration from a Metaphysical Perspective (Hari-Nama Press, 1996), Chapter 1: The Phenomenon of Love

Love , People , Way , Behavior

“Freud pointed out, in his Problem of Lay Analysis, that it is extremely unlikely that a young man who would throw the best years of his life into the cloistered drudgery of getting an M. D. degree, could possibly make a good psychoanalyst; so he preferred to look for young analysts among the writers, the lawyers, the mothers of families, those who had chosen human contact. But in their economic wisdom, the Psychoanalytic Institute of Vienna (and New York) overruled him.”

Paul Goodman book Growing Up Absurd

Source: Growing Up Absurd (1956), pp. 145-146.

Life , Wisdom , Family , Problem

“The legend of King Midas has been generally misunderstood. Most people think the curse that turned everything the old miser touched into gold, leaving him unable to eat or drink, was a lesson in the perils of avarice. But Midas’s true sin was his failure to understand monetary economics. What the gods were really telling him is that gold is just a metal. If it sometimes seems to be more, that is only because society has found it convenient to use gold as a medium of exchange—a bridge between other, truly desirable, objects. There are other possible mediums of exchange, and it is silly to imagine that this pretty, but only moderately useful, substance has some irreplaceable significance.”

Paul Krugman (1953) American economist

"The Gold Bug Variations", Originally published in Slate (Nov. 23, 1996)
The Accidental Theorist: And Other Dispatches From The Dismal Science (1998)

God , People , Imagination , Failure

“Present-day computers are designed primarily to solve preformulated problems or to process data according to predetermined procedures. The course of the computation may be conditional upon results obtained during the computation, but all the alternatives must be foreseen in advance. … The requirement for preformulation or predetermination is sometimes no great disadvantage. It is often said that programming for a computing machine forces one to think clearly, that it disciplines the thought process. If the user can think his problem through in advance, symbiotic association with a computing machine is not necessary.
However, many problems that can be thought through in advance are very difficult to think through in advance. They would be easier to solve, and they could be solved faster, through an intuitively guided trial-and-error procedure in which the computer cooperated, turning up flaws in the reasoning or revealing unexpected turns in the solution. Other problems simply cannot be formulated without computing-machine aid. … One of the main aims of man-computer symbiosis is to bring the computing machine effectively into the formulative parts of technical problems.
The other main aim is closely related. It is to bring computing machines effectively into processes of thinking that must go on in "real time," time that moves too fast to permit using computers in conventional ways. Imagine trying, for example, to direct a battle with the aid of a computer on such a schedule as this. You formulate your problem today. Tomorrow you spend with a programmer. Next week the computer devotes 5 minutes to assembling your program and 47 seconds to calculating the answer to your problem. You get a sheet of paper 20 feet long, full of numbers that, instead of providing a final solution, only suggest a tactic that should be explored by simulation. Obviously, the battle would be over before the second step in its planning was begun. To think in interaction with a computer in the same way that you think with a colleague whose competence supplements your own will require much tighter coupling between man and machine than is suggested by the example and than is possible today.”

J. C. R. Licklider Man-Computer Symbiosis

Man-Computer Symbiosis, 1960

Way , Error , Imagination , Problem

“If no appeal were possible, I have no great hesitation in saying that this would not be a desirable country to live in.... It is quite true that there is enough difficulty in appealing as it is; but if there is to be no appeal at all possible the system would be intolerable.”

Charles Bowen (1835–1894) English judge

The Queen v. Justices of County of London, &c. (1893), L. R. 2 Q. B. 492.

Country

“Man has the possibility of existence after death. But possibility is one thing and the realization of the possibility is quite a different thing.”

G. I. Gurdjieff (1866–1949) influential spiritual teacher, Armenian philosopher, composer and writer

In Search of the Miraculous (1949)

Death

“Several offers have been made for the purchase of this property. Probably none of them represent final terms. Much costly experimentation is necessary to produce commercial nitrogen. For that reason it is a field better suited to private enterprise than to Government operation. I should favor a sale of this property, or long-time lease, tinder rigid guaranties of commercial nitrogen production at reasonable prices for agricultural use. There would be a surplus of power for many years over any possibility of its application to a developing manufacture of nitrogen. It may be found advantageous to dispose of the right to surplus power separately with such reservations as will allow its gradual withdrawal and application to nitrogen manufacture. A subcommittee of the Committees on Agriculture should investigate this field and negotiate with prospective purchasers. If no advantageous offer be made, the development should continue and the plant should be dedicated primarily to the production of materials for the fertilization of the soil.”

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

1920s, Second State of the Union Address (1924)

Time

“Boyle entertains the hypothesis of a universal matter, the concept of atoms of different shapes and sizes, and the possibility of existence of substances that might properly be called elements… The atomic theory as originally conceived by Democritus and Epicurus, developed by Lucretius, and resurrected by Gassendi from about 1647 on, was doubtless the source from which Boyle derived his ideas, …as he cites both Epicurus and Gassendi. Boyle, however… avoids any dogmatic assertion of these hypotheses. It is plain, however, that these atoms or "corpuscles" as he calls them are a constant element of his thought.”

John Maxson Stillman (1852–1923) American chemist

John Maxson Stillman, The Story of Alchemy and Early Chemistry (1924)

Idea , Universe

“Scholars have an inordinate respect for long books, and have a terrible rancune against those that attempt to cheat on them. They cannot bear to imagine that short-cuts are possible, that specialism is not an inevitability, that learning need not be stoically endured. They cannot bear writers allegro, and when they read such texts—and even pretend to revere them—the result is (this is not a description without generosity) 'unappetizing'.”

Nick Land (1962) British philosopher

Source: The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism (1992), Chapter 2: "The curse of the sun", p. 25 (original emphasis)

Books , Imagination , Learning , Reading

“The more I reflect on it, the more I must admire how completely nature had taught him; how completely he was devoted to his work, to the task of his life, and content to let all pass by unheeded that had not relation to this. It is a singular fact, for example, that though a man of such openness and clearness, he had never, I believe, read three pages of Burns's poems. Not even when all about him became noisy and enthusiastic, I the loudest, on that matter, did he feel it worth while to renew his investigation of it, or once turn his face towards it. The poetry he liked (he did not call it poetry) was truth, and the wisdom of reality. Burns, indeed, could have done nothing for him. As high a greatness hung over his world as over that of Burns — the ever-present greatness of the Infinite itself. Neither was he, like Burns, called to rebel against the world, but to labor patiently at his task there, uniting the possible with the necessary to bring out the real, wherein also lay an ideal.”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

1880s, Reminiscences (1881)

Life , Wisdom , Truth , World

“So there is a big transformation. Also if you see the average lifespan, which was 28–29 in 1947, is now 64–65. In Kerala it is 74 or so. I am sure soon it will become 80–90. That is partly also because of food, because without nutrition, it is not possible. So we have had a transformation in our economic wellbeing. But that is not spread evenly in society; there are still very poor people, the highly deprived. In my view, the first task of both science and society is to address this issue”

M. S. Swaminathan (1925) Indian scientist

On changes in the living conditions in India since Indepencnce in 1947 pdf, In Conversation: M. S. Swaminathan, 25 October 2011, Current Science http://www.currentscience.ac.in/Volumes/101/08/0996.pdf,

People , Food , Science

“Capitalism subordinates men to machines instead of using machines to liberate men from the burden of mechanical and repetitive work. it subordinates all, inherent in every commodity, fully unfolds itself in this contradictory nature of capitalist machinery. When capitalism is not overthrown once it has created the material and social preconditions for a classless society of associated producers, this contradiction implies the possibility of a steadily increasing transformation of the forces of production into forces of destruction, in the most literal sense of the word: not only forces of destruction of wealth (crises and wars), of human wealth and human happiness, but also forces of destruction of life tout court.”

Ernest Mandel (1923–1995) Belgian economist and Marxist philosopher

Introduction to Capital. Introduction to volume 1 (1976)

Life , Men , War , Nature

“I myself was not born a little Conservative. I was brought up as a Liberal, and afterwards as a Liberal Unionist. The fact that I am here, accepted by you Conservatives as your Leader, is to my mind a demonstration of the catholicity of the Conservative Party, of that readiness to cover the widest possible field which has made it this great force in the country and has justified the saying of Disraeli that the Conservative Party was nothing if it was not a National Party.”

Neville Chamberlain (1869–1940) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech in Caxton Hall, London (31 May 1937) upon his election as Conservative leader, quoted in The Times (1 June 1937), p. 18.
Prime Minister

Country

“There was no simple riddance to the power of a dangerous political idea; no assassination possible to avert a disruptive change in technology; no natural death to be counted on to stop an economic change that ripped up ancestral estates or stirred up class discontent.”

Robert L. Heilbroner (1919–2005) American historian and economist

Source: The Future As History (1960), Chapter I, Part 6, The Inevitability of Progress, p. 31

Death , Idea , Nature , Change

“My current situation is, I always want to find a new possibility. China is in a changing stage, and that puts me in a very difficult situation, because anytime a new condition is announced there is a lot of struggle between the new and the old. So the establishment really becomes extremely nervous because they are refusing to meet very basic human rights or values. I don’t know how long I can still struggle in China, but I will try my best. Because this is a land I am very familiar with, and we have been in the same kind of struggle for generations. I think it’s a time for change.”

Ai Weiwei (1957) Chinese concept artist

Ai Weiwei, “In China, Is Censorship the Mother of Creativity?” Interview on The Stream, Aljazeera, April 16, 2012.
2010-, 2012

Thinking , Change , Time

“Introspection with inference and meaning left out as much as possible becomes a dull taxonomic account of sensory events which, since they suggest almost no functional value for the organism, are peculiarly uninteresting to the American scientific temper.”

Edwin Boring (1886–1968) American psychologist

Source: "A history of introspection." 1953, p. 174; As cited in: Danziger (1980;257)

“Inner experience, unable to have principles either in dogma (a moral attitude), or in science (knowledge can be neither its goal nor its origin), or in a search of enriching states (an experimental, aesthetic attitude), it cannot have any other concern nor other goal than itself. Opening myself to inner experience, I have placed in it all value and authority. Henceforth I can have no other value, no other authority (in the realm of mind). Value and authority imply the discipline of a method, the existence of a community.
I call experience a voyage to the end of the possible of man. Anyone may choose not to embark on this voyage, but if he does embark on it, this supposes the negation of the authorities, the existing values which limit the possible. By virtue of the fact that it is negation of other values, other authorities, experience, having a positive existence, becomes itself positively value and authority.
Inner experience has always had objectives other than itself in which one invested value and authority. … If God, knowledge, and suppression of pain were to cease to be in my eyes convincing objectives, … would inner experience from that moment seem empty to me, henceforth impossible without justification? …
I received the answer [from Blanchot]: experience itself is authority.”

Georges Bataille (1897–1962) French intellectual and literary figure

Source: L’Expérience Intérieure (1943), p. 7

God , Pain , Search , Communication

“The meaning of my total existence involves knowing the possibilities of my future as well as my past, where I'm going as well as where I've been.”

Daniel Keyes book Flowers for Algernon

Flowers for Algernon (1966)

Past , Future

“According to the teaching of the Church, men and women with homosexual tendencies 'must be accepted with respect, compassion and sensitivity. Every sign of unjust discrimination in their regard should be avoided'. They are called, like other Christians, to live the virtue of chastity. The homosexual inclination is however 'objectively disordered' and homosexual practices are 'sins gravely contrary to chastity'.In those situations where homosexual unions have been legally recognized or have been given the legal status and rights belonging to marriage, clear and emphatic opposition is a duty. One must refrain from any kind of formal cooperation in the enactment or application of such gravely unjust laws and, as far as possible, from material cooperation on the level of their application. In this area, everyone can exercise the right to conscientious objection.”

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

Doctrinal document Considerations Regarding Proposals to Give Legal Recognition to Unions between Homosexual Persons, July 31, 2003
2003

Women , Men , Marriage , Law

“Isolation is the worst possible counselor.”

Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936) 19th-20th century Spanish writer and philosopher

Civilization is Civilism

“The advent of Atombomb into a world of varying moral standards and uncertain international friendships has made everyone aware for the first time of the awful fact that, if the world ever lost its spiritual and moral equilibrium, it was now possible completely to eliminate life itself.”

Jayachamarajendra Wadiyar (1919–1974) Indian writer

During his scholarly lecture tours as a philosopher, in Ghana, quoted in "Jayachamaraja Wodeyar – A Princely scholar".

Life , Friendship , World , Time

“But the ingenious machinery contrived by the Gods for reducing human possibilities of amelioration to a minimum — which arranges that wisdom to do shall come pari passu with the departure of zest for doing — stood in the way of all that.”

Thomas Hardy book The Mayor of Casterbridge

Source: The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), Ch. 44

Wisdom , God , Way , Departure

“There is another form of selection best illustrated by the automatic telephone exchange. You dial a number and the machine selects and connects just one of a million possible stations. It does not run over them all. It pays attention only to a class given by a first digit, and so on; and thus proceeds rapidly and almost unerringly to the selected station.”

Vannevar Bush book As We May Think

As We May Think (1945)

“I always try to make myself as widely understood as possible, and if I don't succeed I consider it's my own fault.”

Dmitri Shostakovich (1906–1975) Russian composer and pianist

New York Times, February 9, 1942.

“Yoga is possible for anybody who really wants it. Yoga is universal…. But don’t approach yoga with a business mind looking for worldly gain.”

K. Pattabhi Jois (1915–2009) Indian yoga teacher

Quoted in Kelsie Besaw, The Little Red Book of Yoga Wisdom, Skyhorse Publishing, 2013, p. 22 http://books.google.it/books?id=4BeNAgAAQBAJ&pg=PT22.

Business , Universe

“Hardly is there anywhere in the United States a church possessing originality which has been built after 1840. The houses of God are usually misplaced gothic or romanesque imitations squeezed in between dismal railway stations or surging skyscrapers. It is even more shocking to see the abortive efforts of town planning, or the utopian habit of naming streets after mere numbers or letters. A cultured man cannot possibly live in room 6489 on the sixty-fourth floor of a house on the corner of 109th Street and 10th Avenue. This may be fitting for one of the unfortunate creatures in Huxley's Brave New World but not for man created in the image of God.”

Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn (1909–1999) Austrian noble and political theorist

Pgs 268-269
The Menace of the Herd (1943)

God , World , Effort , Housing

“While they create a way of seeing and suggest a way of acting, they also tend to create ways of not seeing, and eliminate the possibility of actions associated with alternative views of the world.”

Gareth Morgan book Images of Organization

Source: Images of Organization (1986), p. 202

World , Way

“A second possible approach to general systems theory is through the arrangement of theoretical systems and constructs in a hierarchy of complexity, roughly corresponding to the complexity of the "individuals" of the various empirical fields… leading towards a "system of systems."… I suggest below a possible arrangement of "levels" of theoretical discourse.”

Kenneth E. Boulding (1910–1993) British-American economist

1950s, General Systems Theory - The Skeleton of Science, 1956

“Two people may be at the same spot in manners and behaviour, and yet one may be getting better, and the other worse, which is the greatest of differences that could possibly exist between them.”

George MacDonald book The Princess and Curdie

The Princess and Curdie (1883)

People

“You who represent the more recent accretions to our population, know how generously you have been received. You know how free and unquestioned has been your access to the opportunities of this land. You have been expected to do your honest share of the day's work in a community which ranked productive toil as a distinction rather than a degradation. We have all taken our chance on that condition. Because we have been willing to do so, we have been prospered in material things and, what is ever more worth while, in the things of the spirit. Generation after generation, from the beginnings of permanent settlement here, the country has been able to receive and absorb a great number of newcomers from the older countries. That was possible so long as there was cheap land for settlement, and the assurance that industry could put value into it.”

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

1920s, The Genius of America (1924)

Communication , Chance , Country

“I am sure it would be sensible to restrict as much as possible the work of these gentlemen, who are capable of doing an immense amount of harm with what may very easily degenerate into charlatanry. The tightest hand should be kept over them, and they should not be allowed to quarter themselves in large numbers among Fighting Services at the public expense.”

Winston S. Churchill book The Second World War

On psychiatrists, in a letter to John Anderson, Lord President of the Council (December 19, 1942)
In The Second World War, Volume IV : The Hinge of Fate (1951), Appendix C.
The Second World War (1939–1945)

Fight

“It's very possible that I could be the first presidential candidate to run and make money on it.”

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

Reported by Jerry Useem, "What Does Donald Trump Really Want?" http://fortune.com/2000/04/03/what-does-donald-trump-really-want/, Fortune, 3 April 2000.
2000s

Money

“One of the redeeming things about being an athlete is redefining what is humanly possible.”

Lance Armstrong (1971) professional cyclist from the USA

As quoted in "What's Possible" in Fast Company (19 December 2007) http://www.fastcompany.com/articles/2001/04/al0401.html
Unsourced variant: Being a champion is redefining what's humanly possible.

“I delay typing as long as possible. When I read a poem in longhand I'm hearing it, when in typescript I'm reading it. A poem can appear finished just because of the cleanness of the typescript.”

Mark Strand (1934–2014) Canadian-American poet, essayist, translator

Paris Review Interview (1998)

Appearance , Reading

“Now he was far from bored but feeling many of the same stresses that had caused him to retire from active duty in the first place. Was it possible to find a station in life with just the right level of interest? Was it possible to be normal without being someone’s dupe?”

Neal Stephenson book Reamde

Sokolov, Day 2
Reamde (2011), Part I: Nine Dragons

Life , Feeling

“By the basis of power we mean the relationship between O and P which is the source of that power. It is rare that we can say with certainty that a given empirical case of power is limited to one source. Normally, the relation between O and P will be characterized by several qualitatively different variables which are bases of power (30). Although there are undoubtedly many possible bases of power which may be distinguished, we shall here define five which seem especially common and important. These five bases of O's power are:
(a) reward power, based on P's perception that O has the ability to mediate rewards for him;
(b) coercive power, based on P's perception that O has the ability to mediate punishments for him;
(c) legitimate power, based on the perception by P that O has a legitimate right to prescribe behavior for him;
(d) referent power, based on P's identification with O;
(e) expert power, based on the perception that O has some special knowledge or expertness.”

John R. P. French (1913–1995) American psychologist

Source: "The bases of social power." 1959, p. 155-6

Behavior , Knowledge

“Why is there such a gap between nonspeaking animals and speaking man, when there is no other such gap in nature?
Is it possible that a theory of man is nothing more nor less than a theory of the speaking creatures?”

Walker Percy book The Message in the Bottle

The Message in the Bottle (1975)

Nature , Animals

“I had the feeling that another kind of life -- perhaps in a transcendental area -- would give me a better possibility to influence, or to work, or to act within this contradiction. So, this was my general feeling: on the one side, this beautiful undamaged nature form which I took a lot and had a lot of possibilities for contemplation, meditation, research, collecting things, making a kind of system; and on the other side, this social debacle that I felt already as a coming dilemma.”

Joseph Beuys (1921–1986) German visual artist

Source: 1980's, Interview with Kate Horsefield, 1980, p. 62; also quoted in: Video Data Bank, School/Art Institute Chicago, (1981) Profile, Volume 1

Life , Beauty , Feeling , Nature

“The plastic expression of space is inconceivable without light. Light and space complete one another. In architecture light represents an element of plastic expression – in fact, the most important one. An organic relationship between 'space' and 'material' is possible only with the aid of light. The highest achievements in architecture can be accomplished only if light also is treated as plastic form.”

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

Quote in van Doesburg's article: 'Space – time and colour' in 'De Stijl', Aubette Issue, series xv, 87-9, 1928, pp. 26–27
1926 – 1931

Light

“There are moments in life where the question of knowing whether one might think otherwise than one thinks and perceive otherwise than one sees is indispensable if one is to continue to observe or reflect… What is philosophy today… if it does not consist in, instead of legitimizing what we already know, undertaking to know how and how far it might be possible to think otherwise?… The ‘essay’ —which must be understood as a transforming test of oneself in the play of truth and not as a simplifying appropriation of someone else for the purpose of communication—is the living body of philosophy, if, at least, philosophy is today still what it was once, that is to say, an askesis, an exercise of the self, in thought.”

Michel Foucault (1926–1984) French philosopher

Il y a des moments dans la vie où la question de savoir si on peut penser autrement qu’on ne pense et percevoir autrement qu’on ne voit est indispensable pour continuer à regarder ou à réfléchir… Qu’est-ce donc que la philosophie aujourd’hui… si elle ne consiste pas, au lieu de légitimer ce qu’on sait déjà, à entreprendre de savoir comment et jusqu’où il serait possible de penser autrement ?… L’ « essai »—qu’il faut entendre comme épreuve modificatrice de soi-même dans le jeu de la vérité et non comme appropriation simplificatrice d’autrui à des fins de communication—est le corps vivant de la philosophie, si du moins celle-ci est encore maintenant ce qu’elle était autrefois, c’est-à-dire une « ascèse », un exercice de soi, dans la pensée.
Vol. II : L’usage des plaisirs p. 15-16.
History of Sexuality (1976–1984)

Life , Truth , Exercises , Communication

Quotes about possibility page 28

Quotes about possibility
page 28