Quotes about possibility
page 30

“The ancient educational thinking also emphasized the importance of a certain atmosphere in which alone any worthwhile education is possible. First, there must be a complete rapport between the teacher and the taught. "May we study together. May God protect us both. May we never spite each other", that is the prayer of the teacher and the pupil with which several Upanishads open. There must be an atmosphere of serious inquiry, of hankering for truth for its own sake, of affection, deference, service and respect. Hindus believed that without this environment, no higher education is possible.”

Ram Swarup (1920–1998) Indian historian

On Hinduism (2000)

God, Truth, Education, Thinking

“An illness is a failure to solve a mental or psychological problem in the correct manner... The energy that would be used to solve the problem instead is spent maintaining the illness. It is therefore necessary that an attempt be made as soon as possible to solve the problem, which of course must first be discovered by the ego, which has avoided it.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Session 159, Page 68
The Early Sessions: Sessions 1-42, 1997, The Early Sessions: Book 4

Failure, Problem

“I was born in 1953, a child of the Cold War era, raised amid the constant fear of a conflict with the potential to destroy humanity. Whatever other dangers may exist, no such fear exists today. Mine is the first generation able to contemplate the possibility that we may live our entire lives without going to war or sending our children to war. That is a prize beyond value.”

Tony Blair (1953) former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Martin Bentham, "You're the boss, Tony", The Sun, 28 May 1997, p. 2.
Speech at a summit in Paris between NATO and Russia, 27 May 1997.
1990s

War, Children, Fear

“There is another objection to the Suffern's or Pompton position, which is, the advantage it gives the enemy of dividing our attention, by taking post at King's Ferry. It will be impossible for us to deter mine which is their object, the camp or West Point; and it will be almost as dangerous to expose our camp as these garrisons, especially early in the spring, when we have all our baggage about us, and no possibility of moving it off. If we take a position near Morris, we can always tell, by the motions of the enemy, what is their object; and, having our camp in a secure situation, should they turn their force to wards this place, we can march to its relief in such force as to give certain support, and at the same time leave our camp in perfect security.”

Nathanael Greene (1742–1786) American general in the American Revolutionary War

Letter to George Washington (November 1779)

Spring, Support, Time, Perfection

“What we mean by the laws of nature, are those laws which are deduced from that series of events, which, by divine appointment, follow each other in the moral and physical world; the former of which we shall here have occasion principally to consider, the present question altogether, respecting the moral government of God — a consideration which our author has entirely neglected, in his estimation of the credibility of miracles. Examining the question therefore upon this principle, it is manifest, that the extraordinary nature of the fact is no ground for disbelief, provided such a fact, in, a moral point of view, was, from the condition of man, become necessary; for in that case, the Deky, by dispensing his assistance in proportion to our wants, acted upon the same principle as in his more 'ordinary operations. For however ' opposite the physical effects may be, if their moral tendency be the same, they form a part of the jmoral law. Now in those actions which are called miracles, the Deity is directed by the same moral principle as in his usual dispensations; and therefore being influenced by the same motive to accomplish the same end, the laws of God's moral government are not violated, such laws being established by the motives and the ends produced, and not by the means employed. To prove therefore the moral laws to be the same in those actions called miraculous, as in common events, it is not the actions thetnselves which are to be considered, but the principles by which they were directed, and their consequences, for if these be the same, the Deity acts by the same laws. And here, moral analogy will be found to confirm the truth of the miracles recorded in scripture. But as the moral government of God is directed by motives which lie beyond the reach of human investigation, we have no principles by which we can judge concerning the probability of the happening of any new event which respects the moral world; we cannot therefore pronounce any extraordinary event of that nature to be a violation of the moral law of God's dispensations; but we can nevertheless judge of its agreement with that law, so far as it has fallen under our observation. But our author leaves out the consideration of God's moral government, and reasons simply -on the facts which arc said to have nappened, without any reference to an end; we will therefore examine how far his conclusions are just upon this principle.
He defines miracles to be "a violation of the laws of nature;" he undoubtedly means the physical laws, as no part of his reasoning has any reference to them in a moral point of view. Now these laws must be deduced, either from his own view of events only, or from that, and testimony jojntly; and if testimony beallowed on one part, it ought also to be admitted on the other, granting that there is no impossibility in the fact attested. But the laws by which the Deity governs the universe can, at best, only be inferred from the whole series of his dispensations from the beginning of the world; testimony must therefore necessarily be admitted in establishing these laws. Now our author, in deducing the laws of nature, rejects all well authenticated miraculous events, granted to be possible, and therefore not altogether incredible and to be rejected without examination, and thence establishes a law to prove against their credibility; but the proof of a position ought to proceed upon principles which are totally independent of any supposition of its being either true or falser. His conclusion therefore is not deduced by just reasoning from acknowledged principles, but it is a necessary consequence of his own arbitrary supposition. "Tis a miracle," says he, "that a dead man should come to life, because that has never been observed in any age or country." Now, testimony, confirmed by every proof which can tend to establish a true matter of fact, asserts that such an event; has happened. But our author argues against the credibility of this, because it is contrary to the laws of nature; and in establishing these laws, he rejects all such extraordinary facts, although they are authenticated by all the evidence which such facts can possibly admit of; taking thereby into consideration, events of that kind only which have fallen within the sphere of his own observations, as if the whole series of God's dispensations were necessarily included in the course of a few years. But who shall thus circumscribe the operations of divine power and infinite wisdom, and say, "Hitherto shall thou go, and no further."”

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

Before he rejected circumstances of this kind in establishing the laws of nature, he should, at least, have shewn, that we have not all that evidence for them which we might "have had" upon supposition that they were true ; he should also have shewn, in a moral point of view, that the events were inconsistent with the ordinary operations of Providence ; and that there was no end to justify the means. Whereas, on the contrary, there is all the evidence for them which a real matter of fact can possibly have ; they are perfectly consistent with all the moral dispensations of Providence and at the same time that the resurrection of Jesus Christ is most unexceptionably attested, we discover a moral intention in the miracle, which very satisfactorily accounts for that exertion of divine power? Source: The Credibility of Christianity Vindicated, p. 48; As quoted in " Book review http://books.google.nl/books?id=52tAAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA259," in The British Critic, Volume 12 (1798). F. and C. Rivington. p. 259-261

Life, Wisdom, God, Truth

“All life on earth - everything from bacteria to mushrooms to hippos - shares an astonishing range of detailed biochemical similarities, including the structure of heredity in DNA and RNA, and the universal use of ATP as an energy-storing compound. Two possible scenarios, with markedly different implications for the nature of life, might explain these regularities: either all earthly life shares these features because no other chemistry can work, or these similarities only record the common descent of all organisms on earth from a single origin that happened to feature this chemistry as one possibility among many.”

Stephen Jay Gould book Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms

"War of the Worldviews", p. 352
Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms (1998)

Life, Nature, Universe

“The mind of the man who dreams is fully satisfied by what happens to him. The agonizing question of possibility is no longer pertinent. Kill, fly faster, love to your heart's content. And if you should die, are you not certain of re-awaking among the dead? Let yourself be carried along, events will not tolerate your interference. You are nameless. The ease of everything is priceless.”

André Breton (1896–1966) French writer

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

Love, Dreams, Question, Heart

“There's no way I could be president of the United States, I have no; military experience, I've never run a business, for God's sakes I mean - who could possibly clear that bar? The great thing about President Obama is he's actually left the presidential bar on the floor, anyone can walk over that bar now. If Barack Obama can be President of the United States literally anybody in the planet can be President of the United States.”

Bill Whittle (1959) author, director, screenwriter, editor

Bill Whittle's speech https://vimeo.com/55934224 at the David Horowitz Freedom Center's 2012 Restoration Weekend on Nov. 15-18, 2012. 2010s

God, Way, Business

“We call “happiness” a certain set of circumstances that makes joy possible. But we call joy that state of mind and emotions that needs nothing to feel happy.”

André Gide (1869–1951) French novelist and essayist

“An Unprejudiced Mind,” p. 326
Pretexts: Reflections on Literature and Morality (1964)

Happiness, Feeling, Joy

“Of all the conditions of his youth which afterwards puzzled the grown-up man, this disappearance of religion puzzled him most. The boy went to church twice every Sunday; he was taught to read his Bible, and he learned religious poetry by heart; he believed in a mild deism; he prayed; he went through all the forms; but neither to him nor to his brothers or sisters was religion real. Even the mild discipline of the Unitarian Church was so irksome that they all threw it off at the first possible moment, and never afterwards entered a church. The religious instinct had vanished, and could not be revived, although one made in later life many efforts to recover it.

That the most powerful emotion of man, next to the sexual, should disappear, might be a personal defect of his own; but that the most intelligent society, led by the most intelligent clergy, in the most moral conditions he ever knew, should have solved all the problems of the universe so thoroughly as to have quite ceased making itself anxious about past or future, and should have persuaded itself that all the problems which had convulsed human thought from earliest recorded time, were not worth discussing, seemed to him the most curious social phenomenon he had to account for in a long life.”

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

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

Life, Youth, Religion, Intelligence

“With the possible exception of sex, there is no more basic human activity than eating, rendering it an appropriate candidate for Jewish rituals designed to maintain our focus on Godliness. The table is seen as an altar, and the concern with Kashrut extends to removing knives, instruments of war, from the table during the Birkat HaMazon (blessing after the meal). Tsaar baalei khayim, the concern for the pain of all living things and the reverence for life, is another essential aspect of kashrut. Vegetarianism is clearly the Torah's ideal; the Garden of Eden is a vegetarian society.”

Bonnie Koppell American rabbi

Source: Vegetarianism, p. 37

Life, Pain, War, Sex

“Machine consciousness refers to attempts by those who design and analyse informational machines to apply their methods to various ways of understanding consciousness and to examine the possible role of consciousness in informational machines.”

Igor Aleksander (1937) scientist

Igor Aleksander (2008) " Machine consciousness http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Machine_consciousness" in: Scholarpedia, 3(2):4162.

Way, Understanding

“I didn't start with rock or jazz musicians. It was just my great dear friend whom I miss very much who is no more, Yehudi Menuhin, Lord Yehudi Menuhin. We got very friendly from the year 1952. And when I came to Europe and started performing, we cut three albums in those days, known as "West Meets East." And then I did many other things later on, of course. My student George Harrison, who is like my son, and a great friend of mine, whom I taught sitar initially but later on he was so interested he composed a lot of songs being influenced by our Indian music and Indian spiritual and religious teachings, things like that. And I've done a lot of experimentations, which I don't like to call fusion or trying to mix Indian music or Western music like a cocktail to make it interesting. Genuinely what I wanted to do is have the base as pure as possible Indian music within the framework of raga and tala, and use non-Indian musicians, non-Indian instruments for a special sound, for the range, for the volume, for the colors and all that. And I think some of them came out nice. Of course I was very much criticized also for it…”

Ravi Shankar (1920–2012) Indian musician and sitar player

Ravi Shankar during his talk with Gross.

Music, Color, Thinking

“I went to a pizzeria, I ordered a slice of pizza, the fucker gave me the smallest slice possible. If the pizza was a pie chart for what people would do if they found a million dollars, the fucker gave me the "donate it to charity" slice. I would like to exchange this for the "keep it!"”

Mitch Hedberg (1968–2005) American stand-up comedian

track 2, "Sandwiches"
Mitch All Together (2003)

People

“I started eating vegan purely for health/athletic reasons originally. But as the years have gone by, I care very much about trying to cause as little harm to other creatures as possible. I really love animals and respect them very much, and I don’t want to see them hurt or forced into unnatural lives. I’m not so much out to change the world, as to change myself, but I would love to see all the people taking care of all living creatures, humans included. Wouldn’t that be something? With being vegan and avoiding animal products of any kind, my policy has always been to just do the best I can. No one’s perfect, but we can’t let that stop us from trying to be better, right?”

Steph Davis (1973) American rock climber

"Talking About Sports Nutrition" http://stephdavis.co/blog/talking-about-sports-nutrition/, on her blog (April 10, 2008).

Love, People, Health, World

“He thought for a moment, brought back from his reflections. "It was only possible for me to do it," he said, "because it was necessary. I either had to write the book or be reduced to despair; it was the only means of saving me from nothingness, chaos and suicide. The book was written under this pressure and brought me the expected cure, simply because it was written, irrespective of whether it was good or bad. That was the only thing that counted. And while writing it, there was no need for me to think at all of any other reader but myself, or at the most, here and there another close war comrade, and I certainly never thought then about the survivors, but always about those who fell in the war. While writing it, I was as if delirious or crazy, surrounded by three or four people with mutilated bodies — that is how the book was produced."”

Hermann Hesse book Journey to the East

Journey to the East (1932)

War, People, Books, Thinking

“The only way to escape misrepresentation is never to commit oneself to any critical judgement that makes an impact – that is, never to say anything. I still, however think that the best way to promote profitable discussion is to be as clear as possible with oneself about what one sees and judges, to try and establish the essential discriminations in the given field of interest, and to state them as clearly as one can”

F. R. Leavis book The Great Tradition

for disagreement, if necessary
The Great Tradition: George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad (London: Chatto & Windus, 1948) p. 1

Way, Thinking

“He best honors God who makes his intellect as like God as possible.”

Quintus Sextius Roman philosopher

Sentences of Sextus

God

“I write fantasy. The only science fiction I have written is Fahrenheit 451. It's the art of the possible. Science fiction is the art of the possible. It could happen. It has happened.”

Ray Bradbury (1920–2012) American writer

Art, Science

“I love sleep because it is both pleasant and safe to use. Pleasant because one is in the best possible company and safe because sleep is the consummate protection against the unseemliness that is the invariable consequence of being awake. What you don't know won't hurt you. Sleep is death without the responsibility.”

Fran Lebowitz book Metropolitan Life

"Why I Love Sleep" (p. 91).
Metropolitan Life (1978)

Love, Death, Sleep, Hurt

“But what if it turns out, as it just possibly might, that William Shakespeare of Stratford was not the author of the plays ascribed to him? There is a theory, advanced by reputable scholars, seriously and, in my opinion, plausibly, that Shakespeare merely lent his name as a cover for the literary activities of another person, perhaps the Earl of Oxford. If, by some terrible chance, this theory should be proved, then straightway Stratford's tourist business would dwindle. It would become just one more, and honestly not one in the first ten, of England's picturesque small towns.”

Tyrone Guthrie (1900–1971) English actor and director

New York Times Magazine. The New York Times. pp. 12, 60–61.

Business, Chance, Personality

“History knew a midnight, which we may estimate at about the year 1000 A. D., when the human race lost the arts and sciences even to the memory. The last twilight of paganism was gone, and yet the new day had not begun. Whatever was left of culture in the world was found only in the Saracens, and a Pope eager to learn studied in disguise in their unversities, and so became the wonder of the West. At last Christendom, tired of praying to the dead bones of the martyrs, flocked to the tomb of the Saviour Himself, only to find for a second time that the grave was empty and that Christ was risen from the dead. Then mankind too rose from the dead. It returned to the activities and the business of life; there was a feverish revival in the arts and in the crafts. The cities flourished, a new citizenry was founded. Cimabue rediscovered the extinct art of painting; Dante, that of poetry. Then it was, also, that great courageous spirits like Abelard and Saint Thomas Aquinas dared to introduce into Catholicism the concepts of Aristotelian logic, and thus founded scholastic philosophy. But when the Church took the sciences under her wing, she demanded that the forms in which they moved be subjected to the same unconditioned faith in authority as were her own laws. And so it happened that scholasticism, far from freeing the human spirit, enchained it for many centuries to come, until the very possibility of free scientific research came to be doubted. At last, however, here too daylight broke, and mankind, reassured, determined to take advantage of its gifts and to create a knowledge of nature based on independent thought. The dawn of the day in history is know as the Renaissance or the Revival of Learning.”

Carl Gustav Jacob Jacobi (1804–1851) German mathematician

"Über Descartes Leben und seine Methode die Vernunft Richtig zu Leiten und die Wahrheit in den Wissenschaften zu Suchen," "About Descartes' Life and Method of Reason.." (Jan 3, 1846) C. G. J. Jacobi's Gesammelte werke Vol. 7 https://books.google.com/books?id=_09tAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA309 p.309, as quoted by Tobias Dantzig, Number: The Language of Science (1930).

Life, World, Faith, Law

“On the 26th of January 1950, we are going to enter into a life of contradictions. In politics we will have equality and in social and economic life we will have inequality. In politics we will be recognizing the principle of one man one vote and one vote one value. In our social and economic life, we shall, by reason of our social and economic structure, continue to deny the principle of one man one value. How long shall we continue to live this life of contradictions? How long shall we continue to deny equality in our social and economic life? If we continue to deny it for long, we will do so only by putting our political democracy in peril. We must remove this contradiction at the earliest possible moment or else those who suffer from inequality will blow up the structure of political democracy which is Assembly has to laboriously built up.”

Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (1891–1956) Father of republic India, champion of human rights, father of India's Constitution, polymath, revolutionary…

Political Science for Civil Services Main Examination (2010)

Life, Democracy, Suffering

“There will be a prize of half a crown for the longest essay, irrespective of any possible merit.”

Evelyn Waugh book Decline and Fall

Decline and Fall (1928)

“I would like to testify that you did more than any former British Statesman to make a true friendship between the peoples of our two countries possible, and, if the task has not been completed, that it has not been for want of goodwill on your part. I hope that you may still be able to work for, and that we may both be spared to see, the realisation of our dreams,—to see our two peoples living side by side with a deep neighbourly sense of their value one to another, and with a friendship which will make possible whole-hearted co-operation between them in all matters of common interest.”

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

Eamon de Valera to Chamberlain (15 May 1940), quoted in Keith Feiling, Neville Chamberlain (London: Macmillan, 1946), p. 311.
About

Friendship, People, Dreams, Hope

“… without New Testament Greek there would be no Christian Theology, or possibly no Christianity. The Athanasian Creed, the dogma of Christ the Homiousios, of the same essence as the Father, the dogma of Christ, fully God and Fully Human, The dogma of the Holy Trinity, 'that Christ is the incarnation of the indivisible source of the Divine Godhead through the power of the Holy Spirit " could only have been formulated by the Church Fathers within the linguistic structures and concepts provided by early century Greek language and thought., e. g concepts such as the God/man, a concept that which does not exist in the Hebrew and is totally foreign to Hebrew culture. Hence Shelley's assertion that the Greeks /the Hellenes "gave us our religion."”

Angelique Rockas South African actress and founder of Internationalist Theatre, London

On Orthodoxia
Interview on Helenism .net (September 2011)

God, Religion, Christ

“In order to see the difference which exists between… studies,—for instance, history and geometry, it will be useful to ask how we come by knowledge in each. Suppose, for example, we feel certain of a fact related in history… if we apply the notions of evidence which every-day experience justifies us in entertaining, we feel that the improbability of the contrary compels us to take refuge in the belief of the fact; and, if we allow that there is still a possibility of its falsehood, it is because this supposition does not involve absolute absurdity, but only extreme improbability.
In mathematics the case is wholly different… and the difference consists in this—that, instead of showing the contrary of the proposition asserted to be only improbable, it proves it at once to be absurd and impossible. This is done by showing that the contrary of the proposition which is asserted is in direct contradiction to some extremely evident fact, of the truth of which our eyes and hands convince us. In geometry, of the principles alluded to, those which are most commonly used are—
I. If a magnitude is divided into parts, the whole is greater than either of those parts.
II. Two straight lines cannot inclose a space.
III. Through one point only one straight line can be drawn, which never meets another straight line, or which is parallel to it.
It is on such principles as these that the whole of geometry is founded, and the demonstration of every proposition consists in proving the contrary of it to be inconsistent with one of these.”

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

Source: On the Study and Difficulties of Mathematics (1831), Ch. I.

Truth, Feeling, History, Mathematics

“So today, let's write a program simply. But let's also realize that tomorrow, we're going to make it more complex, because tomorrow it's going to do more. So we'll take that simplicity and we'll lose some of it. But tomorrow, hopefully tomorrow's program is as simple as possible for tomorrow's needs. Hopefully we'll preserve simplicity as the program grows.”

Ward Cunningham (1949) American computer programmer who developed the first wiki

A Conversation with Ward Cunningham (2003), The Simplest Thing that Could Possibly Work

“The world has arisen in some way or another. How it originated is the great question, and Darwin's theory, like all other attempts to explain the origin of life, is thus far merely conjectural. I believe he has not even made the best conjecture possible in the present state of our knowledge.”

Louis Agassiz (1807–1873) Swiss naturalist

Evolution and Permanence of Type (1874)

Life, World, Way, Question

“Nadia Boulanger was quite aware that as a composition teacher she labored under two further disadvantages: she was not herself a regularly practicing composer and in so far as she composed at all she must of necessity be listed in that unenviable category of the woman composer. Everyone knows that the high achievement of women musicians as vocalists and instrumentalists has no counterpart in the field of musical composition. This historically poor showing has puzzled more than one observer. … Is it possible that there is a mysterious element in the nature of musical creativity that runs counter to the nature of the feminine mind? … The future may very well have a different tale to tell; for the present, however, no woman's name will be found on the list of world-famous composers.”

Aaron Copland (1900–1990) American composer, composition teacher, writer, and conductor

Copland on Music (1960) ISBN 0393001989.

Women, World, Music, Nature

“Although I am not as strict a vegetarian as I once was, I do continue to choose to eat more like a vegetarian than not. I would call myself a "conscious eater". It all started with my desire to be as lean and healthy as possible as a teenager around 17-years-old. With more education, as well as trial and error, it also turned into an expression of my attempt to show compassion for all living things.”

Charlene Wong (1966) Canadian figure skater

" Charlene Wong: Everything is okay in the end and if it's not okay, it's not the end", in Lifeskate.com (15 December 2008) http://www.lifeskate.com/skate/2008/12/charlene-wong-everything-is-okay-in-the-end-and-if-its-not-okay-its-not-the-end.html

Education, Error

“The summer before, Mr. Ford told me to block off the experimental room for Joe Galamb, a momentous event occurred which would affect the entire automotive industry. The first heat of vanadium steel in the country was poured at the United Steel Company's plant in Canton, Ohio.
Early that year we had several visits from J. Kent Smith, a noted English metallurgist from a country which had been in the forefront of steel development…
Ford, Wills, and I listened to him and examined his data. We had already read about this English vanadium steel. It had a tensile strength nearly three times that of steels we were using, but we'd never seen it. Smith demonstrated its toughness and showed that despite its strength it could be machined more easily than plain steel. Immediately Mr. Ford sensed the great possibilities of this shock-resisting steel. "Charlie," he said to me after Smith left, "this means entirely new design requirements, and we can get a better, lighter, and cheaper car as a result of it."”

Charles E. Sorensen (1881–1968) American businessman

Source: My Forty Years with Ford, 1956, p. 98 ; As cited in: EyeWitness to History (2005)

Cars, Sense, Time, Reading

“In go, when my stones are in difficulty I look for a ko to try to live—when those possibilities all fail there is nothing I can do.”

Honinbo Sansa (1559–1623) go player, founder of the prestigious Hon'inbō school

Last words, as reported in Dictionary of Basic Tesuji by Fujisawa Shuko, trans. Steven Bretherick (Slate & Shell, 2007), Vol. IV, p. 23

“This means that if in a city seven accidents occur each week, then (assuming that all possible distributions are equally likely) practically all weeks will contain days with two or more accidents, and on the average only one week out of 165 will show a uniform distribution of one accident per day.”

William Feller (1906–1970) Croatian-American mathematician

Source: An Introduction To Probability Theory And Its Applications (Third Edition), Chapter II, Elements Of Combinatorial Analysis, p. 32.

“On the other hand, the constructive and often scholarly criticism is almost always helpful in thinking about or rethinking decisions. It is my view that constructive criticism goes with the turf, especially when the stakes are so high and the cases arouse passions and emotions. And, in a free society, the precious freedom of speech and the strength of ideas, we at the court could not possibly claim exemption from such criticism. Moreover, we are not infallible, just final.”

Clarence Thomas (1948) Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

1990s, I Am a Man, a Black Man, an American (1998)

Idea, Thinking, Decision, Freedom

“Fermat couldn't possibly have had this proof.”

Andrew Wiles (1953) British mathematician

Nova Interview

“One way to clarify the origin and character, if not the justification, of the ideal inspiring our programmatic institutional ideas is to say that our program arises from the generalization of aims broadly shared by the great secular doctrines of emancipation of the recent past—both liberal and socialist—and by the social theories that supported them. At the heart of each of these doctrines lay the belief that the weakening of social divisions and hierarchies would reveal deeper commonalities and liberate productive and creative powers. The theoretical and practical consequences of this belief were drastically constricted by dogmatic assumptions about the possible forms of social change and their possible institutional expressions. We have attacked the second set of constraints and therefore, by implication, the first. The result is a more generalized or radicalized version of the social ideal. Our attack on these constraints has led us to rethink the content of the progressive cause.”

Roberto Mangabeira Unger (1947) Brazilian philosopher and politician

Source: The Critical Legal Studies Movementː Another Time, A Greater Task (2015), p. 104-5

Way, Idea, Support, Change

“Obama: But you would rule in the possibility to fight against ISIS.
Trump: Well, I'm never gonna rule anything out. And I wouldn't wanna say. Even if I felt -- it wasn't going -- I wouldn't wanna tell you that because, at a minimum, I want them to think maybe that we would use it.”

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

As part of a conversation with Barack Obama about ruling out the use of nuclear weapons (March 23, 2016) reported 24 March 2016 by CBS https://www.cbsnews.com/news/donald-trump-open-to-nuclear-retaliation-after-brussels-attack/ 2010s, 2016, March

Thinking, Fight

“Under a cabinet constitution at a sudden emergency this people can choose a ruler for the occasion. It is quite possible and even likely that he would not be ruler before the occasion. The great qualities, the imperious will, the rapid energy, the eager nature fit for a great crisis are not required—are impediments—in common times. A Lord Liverpool is better in everyday politics than a Chatham—a Louis Philippe far better than a Napoleon. By the structure of the world we want, at the sudden occurrence of a grave tempest, to change the helmsman—to replace the pilot of the calm by the pilot of the storm.”

Walter Bagehot book The English Constitution

No. I, "The Cabinet", p. 29
The English Constitution (1867)

People, World, Nature, Change

“The conflict about the meaning of free speech went on through the 1920s, Holmes and Brandeis persisting in their view and expressing it in strongly worded dissents. In one sense it was a curious performance by the two of them, for each had a deep commitment to the Supreme Court as an institution and thought that division among the justices should be avoided when possible.”

Anthony Lewis (1927–2013) American journalist

[82-83, Anthony, Lewis, w:Anthony Lewis, Make No Law: The Sullivan Case and the First Amendment, Vintage, 1992, 0679739394, http://books.google.com/books?id=YElZ5GgC7E0C&lpg=PA1&pg=PT127#v=onepage&q&f=false]

Justice, Sense

“We want a better America, an America that will give its citizens, first of all, a higher and higher standard of living so that no child will cry for food in the midst of plenty. We want to have an America where the inventions of science will be at the disposal of every American family, not merely for the few that can afford them. An America that will have no sense of insecurity and which will make it possible for all groups, regardless of race, creed, or color to live in friendship, to be real neighbors; an an America that will carry its great mission of helping other countries to help themselves, thinking not in terms of exploitation, but of creating plenty abroad so we can all enjoy it here in America.”

Sidney Hillman (1887–1946) American labor leader

Speech, reported in The New Republic, Vol. 115 (1946), p. 379

Friendship, Family, Food, Color

“Then there is the further question of what is the relationship of thinking to reality. As careful attention shows, thought itself is in an actual process of movement. That is to say, one can feel a sense of flow in the stream of consciousness not dissimilar to the sense of flow in the movement of matter in general. May not thought itself thus be a part of reality as a whole? But then, what could it mean for one part of reality to 'know' another, and to what extent would this be possible?”

David Bohm book Wholeness and the Implicate Order

Wholeness and the Implicate Order (1980)

Feeling, Question, Thinking, Reality

“Séances lost their popularity with the invention of infrared photography when it became possible to see what mediums were doing in the dark. Nowadays, spiritualists’ fakery is more ambiguous and subtle.”

Derren Brown (1971) British illusionist

TV Series and Specials (Includes DVDs), Trick of the Mind (2004–2006)

“The first thing you see will be the two Cyanean Rocks, at the end of the straits. To the best of my knowledge, no one has ever made his way between them, for not being fixed to the bottom of the sea they frequently collide, flinging up the water in a seething mass which falls on the rocky flanks of the straits with a resounding roar. Now if, as I take it, you are god-fearing travellers and men of sense, you will be advised by me: you will not rashly throw away your lives or rush into danger with the recklessness of youth. Make an experiment first. Send out a dove from Argo to explore the way. If she succeeds in flying in between the Rocks and out across the sea, do not hesitate to follow in her path, but get a firm grip on your oars and cleave the water of the straits. For that is the time when salvation will depend, not on your prayers, but on your strength of arm. So think of nothing else, be firm, and spend your energies on what will pay you best. By all means pray to the gods, but choose an earlier moment. And if the dove flies on, but comes to grief midway, turn back. It is always better to submit to heaven; and you could not possibly escape a dreadful end. The Rocks would crush you, even if Argo were an iron ship.”

Apollonius of Rhodes book Argonautica

Source: Argonautica (3rd century BC), Book II. Onward to Colchis, Lines 317–340

Men, God, Youth, Fear

“But the bilingualists simplistically scorn the value and necessity of assimilation. They do not seem to realize that there are two ways a person is individualized. So they do not realize that while one suffers a diminished sense of private individuality by becoming assimilated into public society, such assimilation makes possible the achievement of public individuality. Supporters of bilingual education thus want it both ways. They propose bilingual schooling as a way of helping students acquire the skills of the classroom crucial for public success. But they likewise insist that bilingual instruction will give students a sense of their identity apart from the public. Behind this screen there gleams an astonishing promise: One can become a public person while still remaining a private person. At the very same time one can be both! There need be no tension between the self in the crowd and the self apart from the crowd! Who would not want to believe such an idea?”

Richard Rodríguez (1944) American journalist and essayist

Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez (1982)

Education, School, Way, Idea

“It is not possible to escape from the results of the irruption of faith into the structures of our knowledge.”

Jacques Maritain (1882–1973) French philosopher

Science and Wisdom (1954), p. 109.

Faith, Knowledge

“Our theories stand. We both see clearly; we know what’s right. Even if it’s not always possible to act on it, don’t you think it matters to be able to call things by their true names?”

Ellen Kushner book The Privilege of the Sword

Part IV, Chapter V (p. 386)
The Privilege of the Sword (2006)

Thinking

“The other judges were all in suits and fancy clothes, and they didn't want to jump on a trampoline, or ride the go-cart in the dirt. I did every demo possible to see if the things would do what they were promising they would do.”

Doug Hall (1944) American television personality

Denver Post Doug Hall of "Inventor" invents a lot, but not the truth http://www.denverpost.com/entertainment/ci_3645379

Clothes

“He had seen fire, but only when Ara, the lightning, had destroyed some great tree. That any creature of the jungle could produce the red-and-yellow fangs which devoured wood and left nothing but fine dust surprised Tarzan greatly, and why the black warrior had ruined his delicious repast by plunging it into the blighting heat was quite beyond him. Possibly Ara was a friend with whom the Archer was sharing his food.
But, be that as it may, Tarzan would not ruin good meat in any such foolish manner, so he gobbled down a great quantity of the raw flesh, burying the balance of the carcass beside the trail where he could find it upon his return.”

Edgar Rice Burroughs book Tarzan of the Apes

Source: Tarzan of the Apes (1912), Ch. 9 : Man and Man

Food, Tree

“Among civilized and thriving nations, on the contrary, though a great number of people do no labor at all, many of whom consume the produce of ten times, frequently of a hundred times more labour than the greater part of those who work; yet the produce of the whole labour of the society is so great, that all are often abundantly supplied, and a workman, even of the lowest and poorest order, if he is frugal and industrious, may enjoy a greater share of the necessaries and conveniencies of life than it is possible for any savage to acquire.”

Adam Smith (1723–1790) Scottish moral philosopher and political economist

Introduction and Plan of the Work, p. 2.
(1776)

Life, People, Time, Parting

“God was feeling sardonic the day He created the Universe. So it's rather up to at least one man every few centuries to pop up and come just as close to making him swallow his laughter as possible.”

L. Ron Hubbard (1911–1986) American science fiction author, philosopher, cult leader, and the founder of the Church of Scientology

A letter to his wife Polly (October 1938), quoted in Bare-faced Messiah: The True Story of L. Ron Hubbard (1987), p. 81.

God, Feeling, Laughter, Universe

“Fame without the money to insulate you from it is one of the most wretched human conditions possible.”

Douglas Coupland book Generation A

Source: Generation A (2009), p. 80

Money

“Reinhold Niebuhr tells us that man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man’s inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary. Yet, democracy means different things to different people. It is more than the ballot box, more than just majority rule. It means participation in decision-making and the opportunity to choose policy.”

Alfred de Zayas (1947) American United Nations official

United Nations General Assembly - Promotion of a democratic and equitable international order http://www.ohchr.org/Documents/Issues/IntOrder/A-68-284_en.pdf. 2013

People, Justice, Democracy, Decision

“Born in a prison, with burdens on our shoulders and our thoughts, we could not reach the end of a single day if the possibilities of ending it all did not incite us to begin the next day all over again.”

Emil M. Cioran book A Short History of Decay

A Short History of Decay (1949)

“Some people collect paperweights, or pre-Columbian figures, or old masters, or young mistresses, or tombstone rubbings, or five-minute recipes, or any of a thousand other things including bruises, most of them satisfying, depending on the genes and the bank account and where the heart lies.
My own collection is sunrises; and I find that they have their advantages. Sunrises are usually handsome, they can't possibly be dusted, and they take only a little room, so long as it has a window to see them from. Moreover, I can't give way to the urge to show off my collection to my friends. I can only talk about it, and they needn't listen.”

Peg Bracken (1918–2007) American writer

I Didn't Come Here to Argue, "The Sunrise Collector: What to Do till Your Horoscope Gets There," (1969), Fawcett Crest edition, page 37.

People, Way, Heart, Dependency

“I have no doubt that the elimination of poverty and deprivation is possible by 2020.”

C.K. Prahalad book The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid

Source: The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, 2009, p. 138

“Americans are well aware that there has been a revolution. In morals. In manners. In speech. In crime rates. In riots. In violence. In drugs. In sex. In pornography. In politics. In movies. In education. In music. What most of us failed to realize at the moment was how important the music revolution would become. It turned out to be the catalyst for all the rest. It became the prod to promote drugs, the advertiser of sex in the hedonism manner, the mind-conditioner for four-letter gutter speech, and eventually the blatant propaganda funnel for political subversion. It also became the seductive Jezebel for a modern philosophy of no God, of Man as merely a graduate beast of the jungle, of Jesus Christ as a phoney actor--a superstar, of peace and prosperity being possible only under communism, of America as the enemy of the world, of Russia as the hope of the world.”

W. Cleon Skousen (1913–2006) ex FBI agent, conservative United States author and faith-based political theorist

Preface to Rock 'N' Reality: Mirrors of Rock Music--Its Relationship to Sex, Drugs, Family and Religion (1971)

God, World, Education, Peace

“For although it is certainly true that quantitative measurements are of great importance, it is a grave error to suppose that the whole of experimental physics can be brought under this heading. We can start measuring only when we know what to measure: qualitative observation has to precede quantitative measurement, and by making experimental arrangements for quantitative measurements we may even eliminate the possibility of new phenomena appearing.”

Hendrik Casimir (1909–2000) Dutch physicist

in his memoirs, as quoted by [Jean Matricon, G. Waysand, Charles Glashausser, The cold wars: a history of superconductivity, Rutgers University Press, 2003, 0813532957, 18]

Error, Appearance

“The possibility of divorce renders both marriage partners stricter in their observance of the duties they owe to each other. Divorces help to improve morals and to increase the population.”

Denis Diderot (1713–1784) French Enlightenment philosopher and encyclopædist

Observations on the Drawing Up of Laws (1774)

Marriage, Help

“In films, we are trained by the American way of moviemaking to think we must understand and 'get' everything right away. But this is not possible. When you eat a potato, you don't understand each atom of the potato!”

Jean-Luc Godard (1930) French-Swiss film director, screenwriter and film critic

from The Christian Science Monitor - August 3, 1994. David Sterritt

Way, Understanding, Thinking, Training

“Inherent in human beings are possibilities which we now can't even entertain. Before the space launch, space travel to many of us was the stuff of fantasy, of science fiction. We know what it is to explore the limits of what we consider to be a human being, but if we were to transform our understanding of ourselves, if we were to transform what we knew a human being to be, new possibilities of expression would open. We could function in a more creative way. In a more humane way. In the past we were transformed by the thrust of evolution or by accidental forces. This time we should transform ourselves with a conscious, committed degree of self-awareness.”

Werner Erhard (1935) Critical Thinker and Author

Interview with USA Today, "Mankind Must Find a New Self Awareness", Dan Neuharth and Miles White, December 14, 1982

Way, Travel, Understanding, Science

“You will not find much about what the Prime Minister does in the text-books. What he does is partly made up of convention and custom, but the nature of the office depends a great deal on the person who holds it. … Make it [the Cabinet] as small as possible. Democracy means government by discussion, but it is only effective if you can stop people talking. Some of my early Cabinets were very small, but I arrived at the conclusion that 16 is the right number.”

Clement Attlee (1883–1967) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Address to the Oxford University Law Society (14 June 1957), quoted in The Times (15 June 1957), p. 4.
Later life

People, Books, Democracy, Nature

“To be in contact with scientists, to become in a small way a scientist myself if possible, perhaps to cast new light on physical phenomena, to be able to uncover what is real and definitive, was my life's great dream.”

Ernest Solvay (1838–1922) Belgian chemist, industrialist, philanthropist

quoted by [Pierre Marage, Grégoire Wallenborn, The Solvay Councils and the Birth of Modern Physics, Birkhäuser Verlag, 1999, 3-764-35705-3]

Life, Dreams, Way, Light

“Addition is the combination of any arbitrary repetitions of the above-mentioned simplest act into a single act; from it in a similar way arises multiplication. While the performance of these two operations is always possible, that of the inverse operations, subtraction and division, proves to be limited. Whatever the immediate occasion may have been, whatever comparisons or analogies with experience, or intuition, may have led thereto; it is certainly true that just this limitation in performing the indirect operations has in each case been the real motive for a new creative act; thus negative and fractional numbers have been created by the human mind; and in the system of all rational numbers there has been gained an instrument of infinitely greater perfection. This system, which I shall denote by R, possesses first of all a completeness and self-containedness which I have designated… as characteristic of a body of numbers [Zahlkőrper] and which consists in this, that the four fundamental operations are always performable with any two individuals in R, i. e., the result is always an individual of R, the single case of division by the number zero being excepted.”

Richard Dedekind (1831–1916) German mathematician

p, 125
Stetigkeit und irrationale Zahlen (1872)

Way, Motivation, Perfection

“It remains to mention some of the ways in which people have spoken misleadingly of logical form. One of the commonest of these is to talk of ' the logical form' of a statement; as if a statement could never have more than one kind of formal power; as if statements could, in respect of their formal powers, be grouped in mutually exclusive classes, like animals at a zoo in respect of their species. But to say that a statement is of some one logical form is simply to point to a certain general class of, e. g., valid inferences, in which the statement can play a certain role. It is not to exclude the possibility of there being other general classes of valid inferences in which the statement can play a certain role.”

P. F. Strawson (1919–2006) British philosopher

Source: Introduction to Logical Theory (1952), p. 53 as cited in: Ian Hacking (1975) Why Does Language Matter to Philosophy?, p. 83.

People, Way, Animals

“It is a better world with some buffalo left in it, a richer world with some gorgeous canyons unmarred by signboards, hot-dog stands, super highways, or high-tension lines, undrowned by power or irrigation reservoirs. If we preserved as parks only those places that have no economic possibilities, we would have no parks. And in the decades to come, it will not be only the buffalo and the trumpeter swan who need sanctuaries. Our own species is going to need them too. It needs them now.”

Wallace Stegner (1909–1993) American historian, writer, and environmentalist

This is Dinosaur: Echo Park Country and its Magic Rivers is a collection of essays and photographs edited by Wallace Stegner and published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1955. This passage is from the collection's first essay, "The Marks of Human Passage", which is by Stegner (page 17).

World, Dogs

“You see by what has happened that we are superior to you in intelligence, in size of army, and in number of supporters. Surely you were easily trapped, captured without a struggle. It is in my power to do with you what I wish when I wish. Helpless and prostrate, you lie before us now, victims of our might. But if one looks for a punishment equal to the crimes you have committed, it is impossible to find a suitable one. You murdered your revered and benevolent old emperor, the man whom it was your sworn duty to protect. The empire of the Roman people, eternally respected, which our forefathers obtained by their valiant courage or inherited because of their noble birth, this empire you shamefully and disgracefully sold for silver as if it were your personal property. But you were unable to defend the man whom you yourselves had chosen as emperor. No, you betrayed him like the cowards you are. For these monstrous acts and crimes you deserve a thousand deaths, if one wished to do to you what you have earned. You see clearly what it is right you should suffer. But I will be merciful. I will not butcher you. My hands shall not do what your hands did. But I say that it is in no way fit or proper for you to continue to serve as the emperor's bodyguard, you who have violated your oath and stained your hands with the blood of your emperor and fellow Roman, betraying the trust placed in you and the security offered by your protection. Still, compassion leads me to spare your lives and your persons. But I order the soldiers who have you surrounded to cashier you, to strip off any military uniform or equipment you are wearing, and drive you off naked. 9. And I order you to get yourselves as far from the city of Rome as is humanly possible, and I promise you and I swear it on solemn oath and I proclaim it publicly that if any one of you is found within a hundred miles of Rome, he shall pay for it with his head.”

Septimius Severus (145–211) Emperor of Ancient Rome

Herodian, Book II.

Death, People, Lie, Way

“Convicted fraud and pseudoscience charlatan, Mister Kent Hovind argues that what has already been directly-observed and shown to be certainly true is (in his opinion) impossible, and the only option he thinks is possible is that an imperceptible (and possibly imaginary) mystical being poofed everything out of nothing by magic. The irony is that what he proposes is physically impossible because it defies all natural laws, and it’s logically implausible since it has neither precedent nor parallel anywhere in reality to imply that it could still be true anyway. Where is there evidence anywhere that such a thing actually exists, or that anything even could have any of these abilities?”

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

"14th Foundational Falsehood of Creationism" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MYsnVMjG4lk Youtube (January 3, 2009) Youtube, Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism

Law, Fraud, Nature, Thinking

“If thus you would deign to do this, the sword and the bilious spite of hatred and all evil sufferings will cease; and all will know that there is only one religion in the variety of rites. But if perhaps this difference of rites cannot be removed or if it is not expedient to do so in order that the diversity may contribute to devotion, as when any region expends a more attentive effort in performing its ceremonies as if they would become the more pleasing to you, the King: at any rate, just as you are one, there should be one religion and one veneration of worship. Therefore, may you be appeased, O Lord, for your wrath is compassion and your justice mercy: spare your weak creature. So we, your deputies, whom you have placed as keepers for your people and whom you see here, humbly beseech your majesty by every means of entreaty possible to us”

Nicholas of Cusa (1401–1464) German philosopher, theologian, jurist, and astronomer

De Pace Fidei (The Peace of Faith) (1453)

People, Religion, Justice, Effort

“The “magnificent Psalm of Praise to the Creator with which Genesis opens” is filled with magnificent mistakes, and is utterly absurd. “The beautiful legend of the first sin and its fateful consequences” is probably the most contemptible story that was ever written, and the treatment of the first pair by Jehovah is unparalleled in the cruelty of despotic governments. According to this infamous account, God cursed the mothers of the world, and added to the agonies of maternity. Not only so, but he made woman a slave, and man something, if possible, meaner—a master.”

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

Answer to Lyman Abbott (unfinished), responding to Abbott, Lyman. "Flaws in Ingersollism." The North American Review 150, no. 401 (1890): 446-457.

God, Fate, World, Beauty

“They are trying as directly as possible to sell you experiences, i. e. what you are able to do with the car, not the car as a product itself. An extreme example of this is this existing economic marketing concept, which basically evaluates the value of you as a potential consumer of your own life. Like how much are you worth, in the sense of all you will spend to buy back your own life as a certain quality life. You will spend so much in doctors, so much in beauty, so much in transcendental meditation, so much for music, and so on. What you are buying is a certain image and practice of your life. So what is your market potential, as a buyer of your own life in this sense?”

Slavoj Žižek (1949) Slovene philosopher

Interview in The Believer magazine, (July 2004) http://www.believermag.com/issues/200407/?read=interview_zizek

Life, Beauty, Music, Cars

“The science of agriculture does not lay down any positive rules, but it develops the motives by which the best possible method of proceeding may be discovered and successfully pursued. In fact, the art executes some law given and received, but it is from science that law emanates.”

Albrecht Thaer (1752–1828) German agronomist and an avid supporter of the humus theory for plant nutrition

Source: The Principles of Agriculture, 1844, Section I: The fundamental principles, p. 2.

Law, Art, Motivation, Science

“The family is the cradle of the world’s misinformation. There must be something in family life that generates factual error. Over-closeness, the noise and heat of being. Perhaps even something deeper like the need to survive. Murray says we are fragile creatures surrounded by a world of hostile facts. Facts threaten our happiness and security. The deeper we delve into things, the looser our structure may seem to become. The family process works towards sealing off the world. Small errors grow heads, fictions proliferate. I tell Murray that ignorance and confusion can’t possibly be the driving forces behind family solidarity. What an idea, what a subversion. He asks me why the strongest family units exist in the least developed societies. Not to know is a weapon of survival, he says. Magic and superstition become entrenched as the powerful orthodoxy of the clan. The family is strongest where objective reality is most likely to be misinterpreted. What a heartless theory, I say. But Murray insists it’s true.”

Don DeLillo book White Noise

White Noise (1984)

Life, Hostility, Happiness, World

“Dalissem chuckled. It felt like being grinned at by a big mountain cat—delightful for the beauty of the animal, disturbing for the possible sequel.”

Michael Shea book Nifft the Lean

Part 1, Chapter 2 (p. 27)
Nifft the Lean (1982)

Beauty, Mountain, Cats, Animals

“Democracy is spreading across the world. Democracy is only possible with easy access to information and good communications. And technology is a way of facilitating communications.”

Tom Clancy (1947–2013) American author

1990s, Schafer interview (1995)

World, Way, Democracy, Communication

“What agents would choose in certain well- defined conditions of ignorance (in the “original position”) is, for Rawls, an important criterion for determining which conception of “justice” is normatively acceptable. Why should we agree that choice under conditions of ignorance is a good criterion for deciding what kind of society we would wish to have? William Morris in the late nineteenth century claimed to prefer a society of more or less equal grinding poverty for all (e. g., the society he directly experienced in Iceland) to Britain with its extreme discrepancies of wealth and welfare, even though the least well-off in Britain were in absolute terms better off than the peasants and fishermen of Iceland.” This choice seems to have been based not on any absolute preference for equality (or on a commitment to any conception of fairness), but on a belief about the specific social (and other) evils that flowed from the ways in which extreme wealth could be used in an industrial capitalist society.” Would no one in the original position entertain views like these? Is Morris’s vote simply to be discounted? On what grounds? The “veil of ignorance” is artificially defined so as to allow certain bits of knowledge “in” and to exclude other bits. No doubt it would be possible to rig the veil of ignorance so that it blanks out knowledge of the particular experiences Morris had and the theories he developed, and renders them inaccessible in the original position, but one would then have to be convinced that this was not simply a case of modifying the conditions of the thought experiment and the procedure until one got the result one antecedently wanted.”

Raymond Geuss book Philosophy and Real Politics

Source: Philosophy and Real Politics (2008), pp. 87-88.

Justice, Way, Knowledge, Evil

“The photographer’s gesture as the search for a viewpoint onto a scene takes place within the possibilities offered by the apparatus. The photographer moves within specific categories of space and time regarding the scene: proximity and distance, bird- and worm’s-eye views, frontal- and side-views, short or long exposures, etc. The Gestalt of space–time surrounding the scene is prefigured for the photographer by the categories of his camera. These categories are an a priori for him. He must ‘decide’ within them: he must press the trigger.”

Vilém Flusser (1920–1991) Czech philosopher and photographer

Flusser, Vilém (2012) [1980], "Towards a Theory of Techno-Imagination", Philosophy of Photography (POP) 2 (2), p. 198.

Search, Bird, Time

“If you mean by "military victory" an Iraqi government that can be established and whose writ runs across the whole country, that gets the civil war under control and sectarian violence under control in a time period that the political processes of the democracies will support, I don't believe that is possible.”

Henry Kissinger (1923–2023) United States Secretary of State

Commenting on the Iraq War in a BBC interview of 19 November 2006, as quoted in "Kissinger: Iraq military win impossible" by Tariq Panja, Associated Press, at Yahoo! News (20 November 2006) http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20061120/ap_on_re_mi_ea/britain_iraq_kissinger 2000s

War, Democracy, Support, Time

“I do feel strongly that this is nonsense! … So perhaps I could entertain future historians by saying I think all this superstring stuff is crazy and is in the wrong direction. I think all this superstring stuff is crazy and is in the wrong direction. … I don’t like it that they’re not calculating anything. … why are the masses of the various particles such as quarks what they are? All these numbers … have no explanations in these string theories – absolutely none! … I don’t like that they don’t check their ideas. I don’t like that for anything that disagrees with an experiment, they cook up an explanation—a fix-up to say, “Well, it might be true.” For example, the theory requires ten dimensions. Well, maybe there’s a way of wrapping up six of the dimensions. Yes, that’s all possible mathematically, but why not seven? When they write their equation, the equation should decide how many of these things get wrapped up, not the desire to agree with experiment. In other words, there’s no reason whatsoever in superstring theory that it isn’t eight out of the ten dimensions that get wrapped up and that the result is only two dimensions, which would be completely in disagreement with experience. So the fact that it might disagree with experience is very tenuous, it doesn’t produce anything.”

Richard Feynman (1918–1988) American theoretical physicist

interview published in Superstrings: A Theory of Everything? (1988) edited by Paul C. W. Davies and Julian R. Brown, p. 193-194

Way, Feeling, Mathematics, Idea

“And at that point, too, in Buddhist India as in Babylon, in Rome as in our own cities, a man's choice of the woman who is to be, not mother of his children as amongst peasants and primitives, but his own "companion for life", becomes a problem of mentalities. The Ibsen marriage appears, the "higher spiritual affinity" in which both parties are "free"—free, that is, as intelligences, free from the plantlike urge of the blood to continue itself, and it becomes possible for a Shaw to say "that unless Woman repudiates her womanliness, her duty to her husband, to her children, to society, to the law, and to everyone but herself, she cannot emancipate herself." The primary woman, the peasant woman, is mother. The whole vocation towards which she has yearned from childhood is included in that one word. But now emerges the Ibsen woman, the comrade, the heroine of a whole megalopolitan literature from Northern drama to Parisian novel. Instead of children, she has soul-conflicts; marriage is a craft-art for the achievement of "mutual understanding"….
At this level all Civilizations enter upon a stage, which lasts for centuries, of appalling depopulation. The whole pyramid of cultural man vanishes. It crumbles from the summit, first the world-cities, then the provincial forms, and finally the land itself, whose best blood has incontinently poured into the towns, merely to bolster them up awhile. At the last, only the primitive blood remains, alive, but robbed of its strongest and most promising elements. This residue is the Fellah type.
If anything has demonstrated the fact that Causality has nothing to do with history, it is the familiar "decline" of the Classical, which accomplished itself long before the irruption of Germanic migrants. The Imperium enjoyed the completest peace; it was rich and highly developed; it was well organized; and it possessed in its emperors from Nerva to Marcus Aurelius a series of rulers such as the Caesarism of no other Civilization can show. And yet the population dwindled, quickly and wholesale. The desperate marriage-and-children laws of Augustus—amongst them the Lex de maritandis ordinibus, which dismayed Roman society more than the destruction of Varus's legions—the wholesale adoptions, the incessant plantation of soldiers of barbarian origin to fill the depleted country-side, the immense food-charities of Nerva and Trajan for the children of poor parents—nothing availed to check the process.”

Oswald Spengler book The Decline of the West

Vol. II, Alfred A. Knopf, 1928, pp. 104–06 https://archive.org/stream/Decline-Of-The-West-Oswald-Spengler/Decline_Of_The_West#page/n573/mode/2up/search/depopulation The Decline of the West (1918, 1923)

Life, Marriage, Children, World

“The more rigorously criticism historicizes a work of art, in the sense of lodging it in the context of the moment of its production, the less likely it becomes for criticism to be able to explain either its own subsequent interest in the work or the possibility of lay—that is, nonacademic—interest in reading it.”

Russell Berman (1950) American academic

Source: Fiction Sets You Free: Literature, Liberty and Western Culture (2007), pp. 5-6.

Art, Sense, Reading

“A musician would not willingly consent that his lyre should be out of tune, nor a leader of a chorus that his chorus should not sing in the strictest possible harmony; but shall each individual person be at variance with himself, and shall he exhibit a life not at all in agreement with his words?”

Basil of Caesarea (329–379) Christian Saint

Source: On Greek Literature, p. 401

Life, Singing, Personality

“Fortunately, there is a strategy that does double duty: it both helps you keep control of your own insights, and makes those insights accessible to others. The strategy is: always try to express your ideas in the simplest possible model. The act of stripping down to this minimalist model will force you to get to the essence of what you are trying to say (and will also make obvious to you those situations in which you actually have nothing to say). And this minimalist model will then be easy to explain to other economists as well.”

Paul Krugman (1953) American economist

How I Work (1993)

Idea, Help

“There is no species of poetry which is better adapted to the taste of a melancholy man than a sonnet. Its brevity precludes the possibility of it becoming tiresome.”

Henry Kirke White (1785–1806) English poet

Melancholy hours, The Poetical Works and remains of Henry Kirke White, G. Routledge, London 1835.
Melancholy Hours

“At the movies, we are gradually being conditioned to accept violence as a sensual pleasure. The directors used to say they were showing us its real face and how ugly it was in order to sensitize us to its horrors. You don't have to be very keen to see that they are now in fact desensitizing us. They are saying that everyone is brutal, and the heroes must be as brutal as the villains or they turn into fools. There seems to be an assumption that if you're offended by movie brutality, you are somehow playing into the hands of the people who want censorship. But this would deny those of us who don't believe in censorship the use of the only counterbalance: the freedom of the press to say that there's anything conceivably damaging in these films — the freedom to analyze their implications. If we don't use this critical freedom, we are implicitly saying that no brutality is too much for us — that only squares and people who believe in censorship are concerned with brutality. Actually, those who believe in censorship are primarily concerned with sex, and they generally worry about violence only when it's eroticized. This means that practically no one raises the issue of the possible cumulative effects of movie brutality. Yet surely, when night after night atrocities are served up to us as entertainment, it's worth some anxiety. We become clockwork oranges if we accept all this pop culture without asking what's in it. How can people go on talking about the dazzling brilliance of movies and not notice that the directors are sucking up to the thugs in the audience?”

Pauline Kael book Deeper into Movies

"Stanley Strangelove" (January 1972) http://www.visual-memory.co.uk/amk/doc/0051.html, review of A Clockwork Orange Deeper into Movies (1973)

People, Pleasure, Fools, Sex

“Oh unsurpassed generosity of God the Father, Oh wondrous and unsurpassable felicity of man, to whom it is granted to have what he chooses, to be what he wills to be! The brutes, from the moment of their birth, bring with them, as Lucilius says, “from their mother’s womb” all that they will ever possess. The highest spiritual beings were, from the very moment of creation, or soon thereafter, fixed in the mode of being which would be theirs through measureless eternities. But upon man, at the moment of his creation, God bestowed seeds pregnant with all possibilities, the germs of every form of life. Whichever of these a man shall cultivate, the same will mature and bear fruit in him. If vegetative, he will become a plant; if sensual, he will become brutish; if rational, he will reveal himself a heavenly being; if intellectual, he will be an angel and the son of God. And if, dissatisfied with the lot of all creatures, he should recollect himself into the center of his own unity, he will there become one spirit with God, in the solitary darkness of the Father, Who is set above all things, himself transcend all creatures.”
O summam Dei patris liberalitatem, summam et admirandam hominis foelicitatem! Cui datum id habere quod optat, id esse quod velit. Bruta simul atque nascuntur id secum afferunt (ut ait Lucilius) e bulga matris quod possessura sunt. Supremi spiritus aut ab initio aut paulo mox id fuerunt, quod sunt futuri in perpetuas aeternitates. Nascenti homini omnifaria semina et omnigenae vitae germina indidit Pater. Quae quisque excoluerit illa adolescent, et fructus suos ferent in illo. Si vegetalia planta fiet, si sensualia obrutescet, si rationalia caeleste evadet animal, si intellectualia angelus erit et Dei filius. Et si nulla creaturarum sorte contentus in unitatis centrum suae se receperit, unus cum Deo spiritus factus, in solitaria Patris caligine qui est super omnia constitutus omnibus antestabit.

Giovanni Pico della Mirandola book Oration on the Dignity of Man

6. 24-31; translation by A. Robert Caponigri
Alternate translation of 6. 28-29 (Nascenti homini omnifaria semina et omnigenae vitae germina indidit Pater. Quae quisque excoluerit illa adolescent, et fructus suos ferent in illo.):
The Father infused in man, at birth, every sort of seed and sprouts of every kind of life. These seeds will grow and bear their fruit in each man who will cultivate them.
Oration on the Dignity of Man (1496)

Life, God, Angels, Birth

“One night at Socko and a year of probation were no comparison to the punishment at home. My rehabilitation was one of the fastest in adolescent history. I had it coming, and it taught me that moral rehab is possible. I behaved during my term of probation and stopped all of my criminal activity. But I would always retain my strong impulse to challenge authority and to think and act on my own whenever possible. There is room for such types in America, even in the disciplined confines of the United States Army. I’m a big believer in the value of unconventional men and women. They are the innovators and risk takers. Apple, one of the world’s most creative and successful high-tech companies, lives by the vision of transformation through exception. “Here’s to the crazy ones,” Apple’s campaign says. “The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.” If you talk to my colleagues, they’ll tell you that I’m cut from the same cloth. My military biography starts badly. I was a miserable dropout in my freshman year of college (1.2 GPA), enlisted in a delayed-entry Marine Corps program, went to work as a lifeguard at a local beach, and then came the first of several miracles: an Army ROTC scholarship. Little did I know that my rebellious activities, such as skipping class and sundry other mistakes, would lead me to playing basketball (which I was very good at) with an ROTC instructor who saw something in me. Not only that, he took surprising initiative.”

Michael T. Flynn (1958) 25th United States National Security Advisor

Introduction
The Field of Fight: How We Can Win the Global War Against Radical Islam and Its Allies (2016)

Women, Men, People, World

“The difference between the revolutionary and the terrorist lies in the reason for which each fights. For whoever stands by a just cause and fights for the freedom and liberation of his land from the invaders, the settlers and the colonialists cannot possibly be called terrorist, otherwise the American people in their struggle for liberation from the British colonialists would have been terrorists; the European resistance against the Nazis would be terrorism, the struggle of the Asian, African and Latin American peoples would also be terrorism, and many of you who are in this Assembly hall were considered terrorists.”

Yasser Arafat (1929–2004) former Palestinian President, and Nobel Peace Prize recipient

1970s, Speech to UN General Assembly (1974)

People, Freedom, Fight

“As poets we do not ask permission before we begin to practise, for there is no authority to license us. We do not inquire whether it is still possible to pen a drama, for the answer to that question is ours alone to give. It is our drama, spoken or sung, that asserts our right to the title of poet. It is our decision that counts, and not the opinion of some theatre management, or the ponderings of the critic, or even the advice of our friendliest mentors.”

James Fenton (1949) poet

Source: An Introduction to English Poetry (2002), Ch. 22: Poetic Drama and Opera (p. 125)

Question, Decision

“While there are those who think we would be exposed to peril by adhering to this court, I am unable to attach great weight to their arguments. Whatever differences, whatever perils exist for us in the world, will come anyway, whether we oppose or support the court. I am one of those who believe we would be safer and that we would be meeting our duties better by supporting it and making every possible use of it. I feel confident that such action would make a greater America, that it would be productive of a higher and finer national spirit, and of a more complete national life.”

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

1920s, Freedom and its Obligations (1924)

Life, World, Feeling, Confidence

“Broadly speaking, the object of industry is to set up economic ways and means of satisfying human wants and in so doing to reduce everything possible to routines requiring a minimum amount of human effort.”

Walter A. Shewhart (1891–1967) American statistician

Source: Economic Control of Quality of Manufactured Product,1931, p. vii

Way, Effort

“[Her message to women and girls of the world] You are more powerful than you can possibly imagine. You are more powerful than you can possibly imagine. And it is incumbent upon you to use that power--not only for yourself, but for everyone else around you.”

Jennifer Beals (1963) American actress and a former teen model

Global Health TV Interview at Women Deliver Conference (16 June 2010) http://www.globalhealthtv.com/news/v/jennifer_beals_attends_women_deliver_as_guest_of_united_nations_fund/to/latest_news/.

Women, World, Imagination, Girl

“Politicians are all on the same platform when it comes down to me. I think it’s because they think that if they can satisfy the Muslim fundamentalists they will get votes. I believe I am a victim of votebank politics. This also shows that how weak the democracy is and politicians ask votes by banning a writer … Even though I am not staying there, she (Banerjee) has not allowed my book ‘Nirbasan’ to be published. Also, she has stopped the broadcast of a TV serial scripted by me after Muslim fundamentalists objected to it. She is not allowing me to enter the state… This is a dangerous opposition … I wrote to Mamata Banerjee. But there was no response to that… No I am not going to write to her again. I do not think she will consider my request. I feel very hopeless because I expected something positive. I think when it comes down to me, she has similar vision like that of the Left leaders…. I do not consider India as a foreign country. The history of this country is my history. It’s the country of my forefathers. I love this country and in Kolkata, I feel at home because I can relate that place to my homeland. … I have sacrificed my freedom and have been sacrificing for a big cause… All these (problems) are because of my writings. I could have stopped writing against fundamentalists and possibly the bans would have been removed and I had got back my freedom and allowed to enter my motherland again. But I will never do that. … I have spoken of humanism and equal rights for women and secularism stating that religion and nation should be treated separately. One should not get confused with nation and religion. Rules should be made based on equality, and not on religion. … I know that only by writing I will not be able to change an entire society. The laws need to be changed. Equal rights cannot be established in a short time, it requires a long time and huge efforts … I have got many awards but the best is when people come forward and tell me that my writings have help them change their vision,… I do not think I would have been treated in the same manner if I was born there (Europe). I am a writer, not an activist… I write with a pen and if you have any problem why do not you pick up a pen to protest…. The surprising thing in this part of the world is that they have picked up arms against me because I have expressed my views. I have never enforced my thoughts on anybody ever, then why they are trying to kill me. I am not a supporter of violence.”

Taslima Nasrin (1962) Poet, columnist, novelist

Taslima Nasrin about Mamata, Indian Express https://indianexpress.com/article/india/mamata-banerjee-turned-out-harsher-than-left-in-my-case-taslima-nasreen-4486028/

Love, Women, People, Books

“To Leonardo a landscape, like a human being, was part of a vast machine, to be understood part by part and, if possible, in the whole. Rocks were not simply decorative silhouettes. They were part of the earth's bones, with an anatomy of their own, caused by some remote seismic upheaval. Clouds were not random curls of the brush, drawn by some celestial artist, but were the congregation of tiny drops formed from the evaporation of the sea, and soon would pour back their rain into the rivers.”

Kenneth Clark (1903–1983) Art historian, broadcaster and museum director

Source: Leonardo da Vinci (1939), Ch. Six: 1497-1503

Parting, Sea

“My father once told me that the art of receiving a compliment is, of all things, the sign of a civilized man. He died soon afterwards, leaving my education in this important matter sadly incomplete; I'm only glad that, on this, the occasion of the rarest compliment he ever could have dreamed of, that he isn't here to see his son so publicly at a loss. In receiving a compliment, or in trying to, the words are all worn out by now. They're polluted by ham and corn. And, when you try to scratch around for some new ones, it's just an exercise in empty cleverness. What I feel this evening, is not very clever. it's the very opposite of emptiness. The corny old phrase is the only one I know to say it: my heart is full; with a full heart, with all of it, I thank you. This is Samuel Johnson, on the subject of what he calls contrarieties: "there are goods, so opposed that we cannot seize both, and, in trying, fail to seize either. Flatter not yourself, he says, with contrarieties. Of the blessings set before you, make your choice. No man can, at the same time, fill his cup from the source, and from the mouth of the nile." For this business of contrarieties has to do with us. With you, who are paying me this compliment, and for me, who has strayed so far from this hometown of ours. Not that I am alone in this, or unique, I am never that; but there are a few of us left in this conglomerated world of us who still trudge stubbornly along this lonely rocky road; and this is in fact our contrariety. We don't move nearly as fast as our cousins on the freeway; we don't even get as much accomplished just as the family sized farm can't possibly raise as many crops or get as much profit as the agricultural factory of today. What we do come up with has no special right to call itself better it's just.. different. No if there's any excuse for us it all, it's that we're simply following the old American tradition of the maverick, and we are a vanishing breed. This honor I can only accept in the name of all the mavericks. And also, as a tribute to the generosity of all the rest of you; to the givers, to the ones with fixed addresses. A maverick may go his own way but he doesn't think that it's the only way, or ever claim that it's the best one, except maybe for himself. And don't imagine that this raggle-taggle gypsy-o is claiming to be free. It's just that some of the necessities to which I am a slave are different from yours. As a director, for instance, I pay myself out of my acting jobs. I use my own work to subsidize my work (in other words I'm crazy). But not crazy enough to pretend to be free. But it's a fact that many of the films you've seen tonight could never have been made otherwise. Or, if otherwise, well, they might have been better, but certainly they wouldn't have been mine. The truth is I don't believe that this great evening would ever have brightened my life if it wasn't for this: my own, particular, contrariety. Let us raise our cups, then, standing as some of us do on opposite ends of the river, to what really matters to us all: to our crazy, beloved profession, to the movies — to good movies, to every possible kind.”

Orson Welles (1915–1985) American actor, director, writer and producer

Speech given upon his acceptance of the AFI Lifetime Achievement award. Viewable http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oXJnxClGamA&list=HL1349840607&feature=mh_lolz

Life, Truth, World, Education

“I think there are three possible scenarios for the future of Chinese writing, in all of which the government plays a major role. In the first, and at present apparently the least likely scenario, the government abandons its hostility to an expanded role for Pinyin and instead fosters a climate of digraphia and biliteracy in which those who can do so become literate in both characters and Pinyin, and those who cannot are at least literate in Pinyin. This is essentially a reversion to the Latinization movement of the 1930s and 1940s, when Mao Zedong and other high Communist Party officials like Xu Teli, the commissioner of education in Yan'an, lent their prestigious support to the New Writing. Such a change within the governing bureaucracy would in all likelihood result in an explosion of activity that might end in Pinyin ascendancy in use over characters in less than a generation.
In the second scenario the government adopts a policy of benign indifference that involves abandoning its hostility toward Pinyin but without actively supporting it, leaving it up to the rival protagonists of the two systems to contest for supremacy among themselves. This is likely to result in a somewhat longer struggle.
In the third scenario the government continues its present policy of repression, resulting in a much more protracted struggle (though surely not as long as the fascinating parallel struggle between Latin and Italian in Italy, where it took 500 [! ] years after Dante’s start in 1292 for academics, the last holdouts, to finally abandon their long resistance and start using Italian in university lectures).47 In this long struggle, PCs and mobile phones and other innovations still to come will undoubtedly allow more and more advocates of writing reform to escape the stranglehold of officialdom, to the point where (in a century or so?) characters are finally relegated to the status of Latin in the West.
My own view is that this is actually the least likely scenario, the most probable one being that the Chinese pragmatism that has manifested itself so strongly in economics will extend further into writing, and that, perhaps sooner rather than later, given the success of the promotion of Mandarin, some influential Party bureaucrats will finally arrive at the conclusion that the "some day in the future" anticipated by Mao has arrived, and that wholehearted Party support should now be unleashed for his anticipated "basic reform."”

John DeFrancis (1911–2009) American linguist

In any case it is basically all a matter of time. And the decisive factor that will seal the ultimate fate of Chinese characters is the new reality, noted by a perceptive observer, that "the PC is mightier than the Pen." "The Prospects for Chinese Writing Reform" (2006, p. 20-21) http://sino-platonic.org/complete/spp171_chinese_writing_reform.pdf "The Prospects for Chinese Writing Reform" (2006)

Hostility, Fate, Education, Support