Quotes about potential
page 3

“We cannot have the government or the Labor party go to the next election with a person leading the party and a person floating around as the potential alternative leader. Anybody who enters the ballot tonight should do it on the following conditions: that if you win you're Labor leader, that if you lose you retire from politics.”

Julia Gillard (1961) Australian politician and lawyer, 27th Prime Minister of Australia

Calling for a vote of confidence "Australia politics: Gillard, Rudd in leadership vote" http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-23058602, in BBC News website, 26 June 2013

Personality

“Science develops best when its concepts and conclusions are integrated into the broader human culture and its concerns for ultimate meaning and value. Scientists cannot, therefore, hold themselves entirely aloof from the sorts of issues dealt with by philosophers and theologians. By devoting to these issues something of the energy and care they give to their research in science, they can help others realize more fully the human potentialities of their discoveries. They can also come to appreciate for themselves that these discoveries cannot be a genuine substitute for knowledge of the truly ultimate. Science can purify religion from error and superstition; religion can purify science from idolatry and false absolutes. Each can draw the other into a wider world, a world in which both can flourish.”

Pope John Paul II (1920–2005) 264th Pope of the Catholic Church, saint

Letter to the Rev. George V. Coyne, S.J., Director of the Vatican Observatory, 1 June 1988
Source: [Russell, Robert J., Stoeger, William R., Pope John Paul II, Coyne, George V., 1990, John Paul II on science and religion: reflections on the new view from Rome, Vatican Observatory Publications]

World, Religion, Error, Knowledge

“In his discussion on slavery Aristotle said that when the shuttle wove by itself and the plectrum played by itself chief workmen would not need helpers nor masters slaves. At the time he wrote, he believed that he was establishing the eternal validity of slavery; but for us today he was in reality justifying the existence of the machine. Work, it is true, is the constant form of man's interaction with his environment, if by work one means the sum total of exertions necessary to maintain life; and the lack of work usually means an impairment of function and a breakdown in organic relationship that leads to substitute forms of work, such as invalidism and neurosis. But work in the form of unwilling drudgery or of that sedentary routine which… the Athenians so properly despised—work in these forms is the true province of machines. Instead of reducing human beings to work-mechanisms, we can now transfer the main part of burden to automatic machines. This potentially… is perhaps the largest justification of the mechanical developments of the last thousand years.”

Lewis Mumford book Technics and Civilization

Source: Technics and Civilization (1934), Ch. 6, sct. 4

Life, Reality, Time, Parting

“Inflation is a simple idea: imagine that the universe begins in a tiny patch of space dominated by the potential energy of some scalar field, a kind of super-dense dark energy. This causes that patch to expand at a terrifically accelerated rate, smoothing out the density and diluting away any unwanted relics. Eventually the scalar field decays into ordinary matter and radiation, reheating the universe into a conventional Big Bang state, after which things proceed as normal.”

Sean Carroll (1966) American theoretical cosmologist

[The Eternally Existing, Self-reproducing, Frequently Puzzling Inflationary Universe, Preposterous Universe blog, 21 October 2011, http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2011/10/21/the-eternally-existing-self-reproducing-frequently-puzzling-inflationary-universe/]

Imagination, Idea, Universe

“Neoclassical economic theory forms the central discourse and behavioral model of contemporary management education. Drawing on research and insights from game theory and behavioral economics we have argued that many of the core assumptions underlying this model are flawed. While we cannot say that the widespread reliance on the Homo economicus model has caused the highly level of observed managerial malfeasance, it may well have, and it surely does not act as a healthy influence on managerial morality. Students have learned this flawed model and in their capacity as corporate managers, doubtless act daily in conformance with it. This, in turn, may have contributed to the weakening of socially functional values and norms like honesty, integrity, self-restraint, reciprocity and fairness, to the detriment of the health of the enterprise. Simultaneously, this perspective has legitimized, or at least not delegitimized, such behaviors as material greed and optimizing with guile. We noted that this model has become highly institutionalized in business education. Fortunately, we believe that the potential for moving away from this flawed model is significant and thus can end this chapter on a more optimistic note for the future of business education.”

Rakesh Khurana (1967) American business academic

Herbert Gintis and Rakesh Khurana. " What Happened When Homo Economicus Entered Business School https://evonomics.com/what-happens-when-you-introduce-homo-economicus-into-business/," in: evonomics.com, July 14, 2016.

Health, Education, Behavior, Game

“There is a vast amount of energy which disappears inside organisations, or is expended going in directions which don't end up leading anywhere. If all that energy is properly directed, it can add up to a huge amount of power that can be used to produce visible results. That's why I think that over the last three years, as the level of awareness shared by the staff has increased, each individual's understanding has also developed. I believe this has meant that the total amount of energy in the company has increased more than it would have by simply increasing the number of staff. That is to say, the overall potential within the company has become more fully realised.”

Satoru Iwata (1959–2015) Japanese video game programmer and businessman

Iwata's Ask: Special Edition Interview http://iwataasks.nintendo.com/interviews/#/wii/special_edition_interview

Understanding, Thinking

“I used to think that television could be potentially the most powerful medium for the dissemination of knowledge that the world has ever known, it could be a very rich and rewarding thing if handled properly and that the problem was in the execution. I've now come, after ten years in the business, five years of which was as a television critic, to taking the very extreme view point. I think television itself is bad.
The idea of television, the act of watching television kills the imagination. It's not like radio, with radio you had to listen, had to make things, you had to build things in your mind. Movies do that. Television is something else again. Television lays it all out there in a very prescribed way and the bare minimum of imagination on the part of the viewer is needed and I really fear for all of us.”

Harlan Ellison (1934–2018) American writer

Interview in 1979, quoted in The Online Copywriter's Handbook (2002) by Robert W. Bly, p. 19

World, Fear, Way, Imagination

“I want to bring us together as a nation to recognize the humanity and support the potential of all of our people.”

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

Presidential campaign (April 12, 2015 – 2016), Speech in Orlando, Florida (September 21, 2016)

People, Support

“The guts of honey bee workers contain a distinctive community of bacterial species. They are microaerophilic or anaerobic, and were not clearly deliniated by earlier studies relying on laboratory culture of isolates under atmospheric oxygen levels. Recently, a more complete picture of the potential metabolism and functions of these bacteria have been possible, using genomic approaches based on metagenomic samples, as well as cultured isolates. Of these, most are host-restricted and are generally absent outside adult guts.”

Nancy A. Moran (1954) American biologist

[Current Opinion in Insect Science, 10, August 2015, 22–28, Genomics of the honey bee microbiome, 10.1016/j.cois.2015.04.003]

Communication, Study, Bee

“As a noun, design is the named (although sometimes unnamable) structure or behavior of a system whose presence resolves or contributes to the resolution of a force or forces on that system. A design thus represents one point in a potential decision space. A design may be singular (representing a leaf decision) or it may be collective (representing a set of other decisions).
As a verb, design is the activity of making such decisions. Given a large set of forces, a relatively malleable set of materials, and a large landscape upon which to play, the resulting decision space may be large and complex. As such, there is a science associated with design (empirical analysis can point us to optimal regions or exact points in this design space) as well as an art (within the degrees of freedom that range beyond an empirical decision; there are opportunities for elegance, beauty, simplicity, novelty, and cleverness).
All architecture is design but not all design is architecture. Architecture represents the significant design decisions that shape a system, where significant is measured by cost of change.”

Grady Booch (1955) American software engineer

Grady Booch (2006) " On design https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/community/blogs/gradybooch/entry/on_design?lang=en" cited in: Frank Buschmann, ‎Kevlin Henney, ‎Douglas C. Schmidt (2007) Pattern-Oriented Software Architecture, On Patterns and Pattern Languages. p. 214

Beauty, Art, Behavior, Optimism

“Anton Chekhov wrote that “one must not put a loaded rifle on stage if no one is thinking of firing it.” Good drama requires spare and purposive action, sensible linking of potential causes with realized effects. Life is much messier; nothing happens most of the time. Millions of Americans (many hotheaded) own rifles (many loaded), but the great majority, thank God, do not go off most of the time. We spend most of real life waiting for Godot, not charging once more unto the breach.”

Stephen Jay Gould book Dinosaur in a Haystack

"Speaking of Snails and Scales", p. 345
Dinosaur in a Haystack (1995)

Life, God, Thinking, Time

“The approach that dominates organizational theory, teaching, and practice for most of the twentieth century looked at organizations from the top-down, starting with a view of the CEO as the "leader" who shapes the organization's strategy, structure, culture, and performance potential. The nature of work and the role of the workforce enter the analysis much later, after considerations of technology and organization design have been considered. However, if the key source of value in the twenty-first-century organization is to be derived from the workforce itself, an inversion of the dominant approach will be needed. The new perspective will start not at the top of the organization, but at but at the front lines, with people and the work itself — which is where value is created. Such an inversion will lead to a transformation in the management and organization of work workers, and knowledge.”

Thomas A. Kochan (1947) American academic

Source: "Beyond McGregor’s Theory Y", 2002, p. 2: introduction; Republished in: Douglas McGregor. The Human Side of Enterprise 1960/2006. p. 366

People, Nature, Knowledge

“The President has so much good publicity potential that hasn't been exploited. He should just sit down one day and make a list of all the things that people are embarrassed to do that they shouldn't be embarrassed to do, and then do them all on television.”

Andy Warhol (1928–1987) American artist

Source: 1975, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (1975), Ch. 6: Work

People

“"You must tell them that there must be a new union or there will be chaos," he [Shevardnadze] implored me. That evening, when I hosted republic leaders for dinner — a mixed group of presidents, prime ministers, and foreign ministers — I saw around the table and in the conversation a microcosm of the post-coup Soviet Union’s potential — and its problems. Whatever euphoria that they felt with their post-putsch independence declarations had given way to a marked degree of realism. "Independence sounds nice, but we have to live, and we have to be practical," observed the Prime Minister of Moldova, Valeriu Muravsky. That was the persistent theme that I heard from every one of the republic leaders, with the sole exception of the Georgian Prime Minister, Vissarion Gugushvili, though even he spoke of the need for economic cooperation once Georgian independence was recognized internationally.”

James Baker (1930) Former U.S. Secretary of State

The Politics of Diplomacy: Revolution, War and Peace 1989-1992 (1995) by James Addison Baker, p. 531
1995

Way, Problem

“Voting for politicians who tell you what you want to hear has all but destroyed civilization, giving in to outrage in the hope of avoiding trouble has all but destroyed freedom, and looking for the easy road to success in bodybuilding has all but destroyed the actually great potential value of weight training.”

Arthur Jones (inventor) (1926–2007) American inventor

The New High Intensity Training (2004)

Hope, Freedom, Success, Training

“The cosmos exploded, actualizing its potentiality of space and time. The centers of power, like fragments of a bursting bomb, were hurled apart. But each one retained in itself, as a memory and a longing, the single spirit of the whole; and each mirrored in itself aspects of all the others throughout all the cosmical space and time.”

Olaf Stapledon book Star Maker

Source: Star Maker (1937), Chapter XIII: The Beginning and the End; 3. The Supreme Moment and After (p. 162)

Memory, Time

“When program developers are not territorial about their code and encourage others to look for bugs and potential improvements, progress speeds up dramatically.”

Gerald M. Weinberg (1933–2018) American computer scientist

M. B. Douthwaite (2002) Enabling Innovation: A Practical Guide to Understanding and Fostering Technological Change. p. 116

Speed

“Social power [is the] potential influence, the ability of a person or group to induce or prevent change in another. Social control [is] the process by which members of a social entity are influenced to adhere to values and principles of proper behavior deemed appropriate for that social entity.”

Bertram Raven (1926) American psychologist

Source: "Influence, Power, Religion, and the Mechanisms of Social Control," 1999, p. 161

Behavior, Change, Personality

“When you are deprived of something that you long for desperately, the mind finds ways of doing the same thing in different ways; it creates the potential which you never knew you had – the potential to create something out of nothing.”

Lydia Canaan Lebanese singer-songwriter

As quoted in an interview with Sudha Chandran, Gulf Today/Panorama, November 24, 2000

Way

“We now live, as Earth always has (see my 1996 book Full House), in an Age of Bacteria. These simplest organisms will dominate our planet (if conditions remain hospitable for life at all) until the sun explodes. During our current, and undoubtedly brief, geological moment, they watch with appropriate amusement as we strut and fret our hour upon the stage. For we are, to them, only transient and delectable islands ripe for potential exploitation.”

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, Books, Age, Sun

“To me, capital punishment is a form of societal self-defense. It should not be employed indiscriminately, but in cases of the most heinous crimes, the death penalty may be the only appropriate punishment. Some people believe it is right to take a life to save the life of someone else, but they would not vote to take the life of a convicted criminal, no matter how horrible the crime. Others believe that killing another person for any reason is simply wrong. I respect those opinions, but I disagree with them. I'm convinced that government has a duty to promote community defense. The death penalty, when applied in appropriate cases, can be a strong deterrent to crime. It is certainly a deterrent to the convicted criminal sentenced to death, and it is also a deterrent to other potential capital offenders.”

John Ashcroft (1942) American politician

Source: Never Again: Securing America and Restoring Justice (2006), p. 112

Life, Death, People, Penalty

“The police aren't hired to protect you. They're hired to keep an eye on you to see what you did that was wrong so that they can book you. That's their function. They are not protectors. They are not hired to be protectors. They are hired to keep an eye on all of us as potential criminals. Now, do you think they're going to make you safe? They weren't hired to make you safe.”

Robert LeFevre (1911–1986) American libertarian businessman

Rampart Institute (Society for Libertarian Life edition), speech from 1978, p. 16.
Does Government Protection Protect (1979)

Books, Thinking

“What these tests tell employers about potential employees is hard to imagine, since the "right" answers should be obvious to anyone who has ever encountered the principle of hierarchy and subordination. Do I work well with others? You bet, but never to the point where I would hesitate to inform on them for the slightest infraction. Am I capable of independent decision making? Oh yes, but I know better than to let this capacity interfere with a slavish obedience to orders. At The Maids, a housecleaning service, I am given something called the "Accutrac personality test," which warns at the beginning that "Accutrac has multiple measures which detect attempts to distort or 'psych out' the questionnaire." Naturally, I "never" find it hard "to stop moods of self-pity," nor do I imagine that others are talking about me behind my back or believe that "management and employees will always be in conflict because they have totally different sets of goals."”

Barbara Ehrenreich (1941) American writer and journalist

The real function of these tests, I decide, is to convey information not to the employer but to the potential employee, and the information conveyed is always: You will have no secrets from us.
Source: Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America (2001), Ch. 2: Scrubbing in Maine (p. 59)

Secret, Imagination, Mood, Nature

“I’ve lost a lot of young, brilliant friends. Andy Wood and Layne [Staley] and Jeff Buckley, who was a good friend, and Kurt [Cobain], and Shannon Hoon [of Blind Melon] was a friend, and Mike Starr [Alice In Chains] was a friend, the list can kind of go on if I sit here and try and remember. And they’re all young and these guys all had limitless potential in their lives in front of them. And I think there’s something so inspiring about that – that is like the miracle of youth. And to see that be the final chapter so young is a really hard thing to swallow every time.”

Chris Cornell (1964–2017) American singer-songwriter, musician

The Life & Times of Chris Cornell, Rolling Stone Australia, 17 September 2015 https://rollingstoneaus.com/music/post/the-life-and-times-of-chris-cornell/2273, Solo career Era

Youth, Guy, Thinking, Time

“Knowledge is a potential for a certain type of action, by which we mean that the action would occur if certain tests were run. For example, a library plus its user has knowledge if a certain type of response will be evoked under a given set of stipulations.”

C. West Churchman (1913–2004) American philosopher and systems scientist

Source: 1960s - 1970s, The Design of Inquiring Systems (1971), p. 11

Knowledge

“Now the following questions must be raised: Have we become happier since occupying these other countries? Has the individual German gained anything from such conquests? Will we not get into trouble with another powerful nation at some point--if not tomorrow, then the day after? Making ourselves bigger will not diminish potential conflicts of interest.”

Friedrich Kellner (1885–1970) German Justice inspector

October 7, 1940; Vol. 1, p. 92.
Diary (1939 - 1945)

Question, Country

“But the First Amendment protects against the Government; it does not leave us at the mercy of noblesse oblige. We would not uphold an unconstitutional statute merely because the Government promised to use it responsibly. […] The Government’s assurance that it will apply [a statutory provision] more restrictively than its language provides is pertinent only as an implicit acknowledgment of the potential constitutional problems with a more natural reading.”

John Roberts (1955) Chief Justice of the United States

United States v. Stevens, 559 U.S. ___, 130 S.Ct. 1577 (2010) (Opinion of the Court).

Nature, Problem, Reading

“The pivotal struggle which must be waged in the ranks of the working class is consequently the open, unreserved battle against entrenched racism. The white worker must become conscious of the threads which bind him to a James Johnson, Black auto worker, member of UAW, and a political prisoner presently facing charges for the killings of two foremen and a job setter. The merciless proliferation of the power of monopoly capital may ultimately push him inexorably down the very same path of desperation. No potential victim of the fascist terror should be without the knowledge that the greatest menace to racism and fascism is unity!”

Angela Davis (1944) American political activist, scholar, and author

If They Come in The Morning (1971)

Knowledge

“I feel it is our inherent duty as a humane society, above any intangible responsibility, to invest in our world's children’s potential, passion and confidence.”

Masiela Lusha (1985) Albanian actress, writer, author

Quoted in the Tolucan Times http://tolucantimes.info/section/inside-this-issue/young-author-makes-her-mark-in-the-world-of-children’s-literature/

Children, World, Feeling, Confidence

“He is potentially brilliant, and he is going to be exciting, but potential is nothing unless you can produce it. I would think he's way, way, way, miles away from international World Cup football.”

Theo Walcott (1989) English association football player

Bobby Robson, former manager of England, 2006 ( Source http://www.cnn.com/2006/SPORT/football/05/08/england.gamble/index.html) About

World, Way, Thinking, Football

“An even more basic reason why we are commanded to love is expressed explicitly in Jesus' words, "love your enemies…. that ye may be children of your father which is in heaven." We are called to this difficult task in order to realize a unique relationship with God. We are potential sons of God. Through love that potentiality becomes actuality. We must love our enemies, because only loving them can we know God and experience the beauty of His holiness.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

1950s, Loving Your Enemies (Christmas 1957)

Love, God, Children, Beauty

“If we do not cut emissions, we face even more devastating consequences, as unchecked they could raise global average temperature to 4C or more above pre-industrial levels by the end of the century. The shift to such a world could cause mass migrations of hundreds of millions of people away from the worst-affected areas. That would lead to conflict and war, not peace and prosperity. … We also underestimated the potential importance of strong feedbacks, such as the thawing of the permafrost to release methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, as well as tipping points beyond which some changes in the climate may become effectively irreversible.”

Nicholas Stern, Baron Stern of Brentford (1946) British economist and academic

"Flooding and storms in UK are clear signs of climate change, says Lord Stern. Author of 2006 report says recent weather is part of international pattern and demonstrates urgent need to cut carbon emissions" http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/feb/13/flooding-storms-uk-climate-change-lord-stern?CMP=EMCNEWEML6619I2, The Guardian (13 February 2014).

War, People, World, Peace

“The infinity of All ever bringing forth anew, and even as infinite space is around us, so is infinite potentiality, capacity, reception, malleability, matter.”

Giordano Bruno (1548–1600) Italian philosopher, mathematician and astronomer

I 1 as translated in Giordano Bruno : His Life and Thought with annotated translation of his work On the Infinite Universe and Worlds (1950) by Dorothea Waley Singer http://www.positiveatheism.org/hist/bruno03.htm De immenso (1591)

“Gordon Tullock, on the other hand, might be characterized as the somewhat cynical pragmatist, who set out to understand the world, not to change it. This side of Tullock is visible in his early paper on simple majority rule, and is perhaps most apparent in his work on rent seeking. These differences should not be pushed too far, however. Buchanan (1980) also contributed to the rent-seeking literature, and often has described public choice as “politics without romance.” One of the most dispiriting contributions to the public choice literature has to be Kenneth Arrow’s (1951) famous impossibility theorem. In a too little appreciated article, Tullock (1967b) demonstrated with the help of a somewhat torturous geometrical analysis, that the cycling that underlies the impossibility theorem is likely to be constrained to a rather small subset of Pareto-optimal outcomes, and thus Arrow’s theorem was “irrelevant,” a rather happy result, and one which anticipated work appearing more than a decade later on the uncovered set. In Chap. 10 of Toward a Mathematics of Politics, Tullock (1967a) engages in a bit of wishful thinking about constitutional design by describing how one could achieve an ideal form of proportional representation in a legislative body. He also was an early enthusiast of the potential for using a demand-revelation process to reveal individual preferences for public goods”

Dennis Mueller (1940) American economist

Tideman and Tullock 1976
James Buchanan, Gordon Tullock, and The Calculus (2012)

Happiness, World, Literature, Mathematics

“Responsible parenthood involves decades devoted to the child’s proper nurture. To sentence a woman to bear a child against her will is an unspeakable violation of her rights: her right to liberty (to the functions of her body), her right to the pursuit of happiness, and, sometimes, her right to life itself, even as a serf. Such a sentence represents the sacrifice of the actual to the potential, of a real human being to a piece of protoplasm, which has no life in the human sense of the term. It is sheer perversion of language for people who demand this sacrifice to call themselves ‘right-to-lifers.’”

Leonard Peikoff (1933) Canadian-American philosopher

Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand (1993), Chapter 10: Government
1990s

Life, Happiness, People, Sense

“I'm just telling you the structure of the story. It's something like… There was Paradise at the beginning of time. And then some cataclysm occurred and people fell into history, and history is: limitation, and mortality, and suffering, and self-consciousness. But there's a mode of being – or potentially the establishment of the state – that will transcend that. And that's what time is aiming at. That's the idea of the story.”

Jordan Peterson (1962) Canadian clinical psychologist, cultural critic, and professor of psychology

Other

People, History, Idea, Suffering

“If human beings were or had to be this or that substance, this or that destiny, no ethical experience would be possible… This does not mean, however, that humans are not, and do not have to be, something, that they are simply consigned to nothingness and therefore can freely decide whether to be or not to be, to adopt or not to adopt this or that destiny (nihilism and decisionism coincide at this point). There is in effect something that humans are and have to be, but this is not an essence nor properly a thing: It is the simple fact of one's own existence as possibility or potentiality.”

Giorgio Agamben (1942) Italian philosopher

Source: The Coming Community (1993), Ch. 11 : Ethics

“On his experience with streaming, illegal downloading: Every Christmas we got a nice little present off God, you know, with sales of The Best Of… and since it’s gone in to YouTube the shortfall is over 90 per cent because people don’t need to buy the record. They would but you’re offering them Driving Home For Christmas for 32p. […] You see, I’m lucky - we did very well. I feel sorry for the young Chris Reas who aren’t pop stars but love music, but they don’t have anywhere to go with the music, you know? I mean Derek Trucks, it’s just criminal what’s happened to his potential sales because of what’s happened to the business.”

Chris Rea (1951) English singer-songwriter

David Mead (2017 June 15) " Chris Rea on his guitar origins, Strats, the blues and La Passione http://www.musicradar.com/news/guitars/chris-rea-on-his-guitar-origins-strats-the-blues-and-la-passione-638813" by MusicRadar 2017

Love, God, People, Music

“The firm achieving focus may also potentially earn above-average returns for its industry. Its focus means that the firm either has a low cost position with its strategic target, high differentiation, or both.”

Michael E. Porter (1947) American engineer and economist

Source: Competitive strategy, 1980, p. 39

“I've told a dark story. The truth is more mixed. A technology has given us a new freedom. Slowly, some begin to understand that this freedom need not mean anarchy. We can carry a free culture into the twenty-first century, without artists losing and without the potential of digital technology being destroyed. … Common sense must revolt. It must act to free culture. Soon, if this potential is ever to be realized.”

Lawrence Lessig book Free Culture

Free Culture (2004)

Truth, Understanding, Sense, Freedom

“Every man is a potential genius until he does something.”

Herbert Beerbohm Tree (1852–1917) English actor and theatre manager

Page 110.
Beerbohm Tree (1956)

“We’ve never had a president whose business created as many potential conflicts of interest as Donald Trump, and at the same time we’ve never had a president who cared less about conflicts of interest as Donald Trump. Indeed, he and his children are making it quite clear that they will use the presidency as a tool to make as much money as they can. And Republicans, particularly Congress, have apparently decided that if Trump does it, it’s okay.”

Paul Waldman (1968) American op-ed columnist and writer

Republicans are already making it clear: Trump can do whatever he wants (December 5, 2016)

Money, Children, Business, Time

“In the absence of truth there is no necessity, and this observation may serve as an index to the position of the modern egotist. Having become incapable of knowing, he becomes incapable of working, in the sense that all work is a bringing of the ideal from potentiality into actuality. … The modern worker does not, save in rare instances, respond to the ideal in the task.”

Richard M. Weaver (1910–1963) American scholar

Source: Ideas have Consequences (1948), p. 73.

Truth, Sense

“I call myself bisexual because I acknowledge that I have in myself the potential to be attracted – romantically and/or sexually – to people of more than one sex and/or gender, not necessarily at the same time, not necessarily in the same way, and not necessarily to the same degree.”

Robyn Ochs (1958) American activist

Getting Bi: Voices of Bisexuals Around the World

People, Sex, Way, Time

“Laxman could potentially play shots on either side of the wicket to any given ball.”

V. V. S. Laxman (1974) former Indian cricketer

Muttiah Muralitharan http://www.scrolldroll.com/quotes-about-vvs-laxman-that-show-he-is-truly-very-very-special/

“I have to let him know that he's potentially destroying his movie, that he could be making a terrible, terrible error. I needed to let him know that I didn't know or think that I was capable of doing this.”

Larry David (1947) American comedian, writer, actor, and television producer

When Woody Allen asked him to appear in a film. Interview, Esquire, September 18, 2009 http://www.esquire.com/features/the-screen/larry-david-interview-0709

Error, Thinking

“Novelist Michael Crichton wrote Jurassic Park as a screenplay option for the Steven Spielberg flick. I am ambiguous about Crichton’s body of work, as it includes dubious anti-scientific elements. But I can’t be too upset about a fellow who includes me in the acknowledgements of his bestselling novel. I ended up doing some preliminary studies of Tyrannosaurus and Deinonychus for the movie(s). These were significantly altered by Spielberg and Stan Winston and his effects team for copyright purposes. In the film, some of my skeletals show up posted on Sam Neill's (ak. a. Dr. Grant's) trailer wall. I was accidentally responsible for the avian term 'raptor' being improperly applied to dromaeosaurs. In another Hunteria paper and PDW, I synonymized Deinonychus with Velociraptor, which Crichton picked up on and shortened into the convenient handle 'raptor'. The movie was okay, but I will never forgive them for presenting Brachiosaurus as such a heavy limbed clunker. I had nothing to do with that. I thought it was too bad the potentially omnivorous brachiosaurs – which were unlikely to have been as placid as cattle – missed the opportunity to snarf up the bratty kids when they were up in the tree.”

Gregory Scott Paul (1954) U.S. researcher, author, paleontologist, and illustrator

Autobiography, part IV http://gspauldino.com/part4.html, gspauldino.com

Forgiveness, Tree, Study

“But if you think it's going to get any better, let me burst that bubble of optimism now because I was fortunate enough last year to be invited to the First Republican Presidential Candidate Debate in Simi Valley in California, which, interestingly, was exactly as much fun as it sounds. But it was, obviously a privilege to be there and I did get to witness one incredible moment of political theater when all, at that point, ten of the potential leaders of the free world were asked the same question. And that question was "Who here doesn't believe in evolution?" And three of those men raised their hands. And then none of those three men put their hands down and said "Only joking."”

John Oliver (1977) English comedian

And their confidence was seductive!
John Oliver: Terrifying Times (2008)

Men, World, Confidence, Optimism

“…ignoring the potential force possessed by a homogeneous race, bemused by the slogans of human equality, all parliaments adopted the dogma of infinite toleration. Tolerance toward the alien, the hostile, and the aggressive was seen as a highly humanitarian achievement, but was, as the history of the nineteenth and especially of our present century shows, merely an ever-greater abandoning of ourselves.”

Alfred Rosenberg (1893–1946) German architect and politician

"The Russian-Jewish Revolution", Auf Gut Deutsch magazine, February 1919. Quoted in Roderick Stackelberg, Sally A. Winkle, The Nazi Germany Sourcebook: An Anthology of Texts. Routledge, 2013 (p.50). Also in Barbara Miller Lane and Leila J. Rupp, Nazi Ideology Before 1933: A Documentation. University of Texas Press, 2014 (p.12).

Hostility, History

“Long-term potentiation helps stabalize the internal representation of space, and… attention, a defining feature of explicit memory storage, modulates the representation of space.”

Eric R. Kandel (1929) American neuropsychiatrist

In Search of Memory (2006)

Memory, Help

“The virus was not helping. He had hoped that it would, but the feelings it brought were too superficial. When he most needed their succour he could feel them for the paper-thin façades they were. Just because the virus was tickling the parts of his brain that produced feelings of religious experience didn’t mean he was able to turn off the other parts of his mind that recognised these feelings as having been induced artificially. He truly felt himself to be in the presence of something sacred, but he also knew, with total clarity, that this was due to neuroanatomy. Nothing was really with him: the organ music, the stained-glass windows in the sky, the sense of proximity to something huge and timeless and infinitely compassionate were all explicable in terms of neural wiring, firing potentials, synaptic gaps.”

Alastair Reynolds book Absolution Gap

Source: Absolution Gap (2003), Chapter 9 (p. 136)

Hope, Music, Feeling, Sense

“Tonight, I should watch the sun set, and think of the impending darkness as a metaphor for my wasted life: once it was bright, and full of potential, and now it is dark and hopeless and bleak. I should not make the mistake of thinking that the moon and the stars represent slim glimmers of hope, or evidence that there is light on the other side. Even if there is light somewhere I will never walk in it again.”

John S. Hall (1960) Poet, author, singer, lawyer

March 25
Quotes from Daily Negations (2007)

Life, Hope, Star, Thinking

“Computer programming is like the ability or skill to see what Picasso saw from all the different angles at once. If it is an art, the crucial element of art is to look at things from an angle that produces new insight or at least has that potential.”

Erik Naggum (1965–2009) Norwegian computer programmer

Re: Guide to Lisp, v1.20 http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/f7bc99564506e851 (Usenet article). Usenet articles, Miscellaneous

Art

“More generally (and this applies to Christianity no less than to Islam), what is really pernicious is the practice of teaching children that faith itself is a virtue. Faith is an evil precisely because it requires no justification and brooks no argument. Teaching children that unquestioned faith is a virtue primes them - given certain other ingredients that are not hard to come by - to grow up into potentially lethal weapons for future jihads or crusades.”

Richard Dawkins book The God Delusion

Source: The God Delusion (2006), pp. 347-348 of the Black Swan paperback edition of 2007

Children, Faith, Evil, Future

“My view of the world is a holistic one. I view the world as being interconnected and interdependent. All things have a way of expressing their identity through one powerful immanent reality. As each one of us makes a choice, that choice impacts the world. We can then come to a realization of the power that each individual has, and the tremendous expressiveness and potential of our existence. The principles that animate my life and involvement have to do with this understanding of the essential interconnectedness of all humanity. Therefore, we should be aware that we affect others in the choices that we make. We affect not only other people, we affect other species as well. So we must take care to be respectful of this planet and of all those who participate in the life of this planet.”

Dennis Kucinich (1946) Ohio politician

Interview with Monte Leach, Peace is possible, peace is inevitable, Share International (July 2003) http://www.share-international.org/magazine/old_issues/2003/july_03.htm#voice.

Life, People, World, Way

“Trying to assess the true importance and function of the Internet now is like asking the Wright brothers at Kitty Hawk if they were aware of the potential of American Airlines Advantage miles.”

Bran Ferren (1953) American technologist

Quoted by Kevin Roberts (CEO of Saatchi & Saatchi), in Strategies for Peak Performance, September 8, 2013 http://www.saatchikevin.com/Strategies_for_Peak_Performance/,, and Arthur Ochs Sulzberger (publisher of the New York Times), in NYT publisher Sulzberger spoke yesterday about journalism's future, 2007-10-17, The Tufts Daily, en-US, 2017-01-17 http://tuftsdaily.com/archives/2007/10/17/nyt-publisher-sulzberger-spoke-yesterday-about-journalisms-future/,

“Our common actions in reality are simply the sackcloth covering which hides the cloth-of-gold - the meaning of the pattern. For us artists there waits the joyous compromise through art with all that wounded or defeated us in daily life; in this way, not to evade destiny, as the ordinary people try to do, but to fulfil it in its true potential—the imagination.”

Lawrence Durrell The Alexandria Quartet

The Alexandria Quartet (1957–1960), Justine (1957)

Life, People, Art, Way

“The concepts of purposive behavior and teleology have long been associated with a mysterious, self-perfecting or goal-seeking capacity or final cause, usually of superhuman or super-natural origin. To move forward to the study of events, scientific thinking had to reject these beliefs in purpose and these concepts of teleological operations for a strictly mechanistic and deterministic view of nature. This mechanistic conception became firmly established with the demonstration that the universe was based on the operation of anonymous particles moving at random, in a disorderly fashion, giving rise, by their multiplicity, to order and regularity of a statistical nature, as in classical physics and gas laws. The unchallenged success of these concepts and methods in physics and astronomy, and later in chemistry, gave biology and physiology their major orientation. This approach to problems of organisms was reinforced by the analytical preoccupation of the Western European culture and languages. The basic assumptions of our traditions and the persistent implications of the language we use almost compel us to approach everything we study as composed of separate, discrete parts or factors which we must try to isolate and identify as potential causes. Hence, we derive our preoccupation with the study of the relation of two variables. We are witnessing today a search for new approaches, for new and more comprehensive concepts and for methods capable of dealing with the large wholes of organisms and personalities.”

Lawrence K. Frank (1890–1968) American cyberneticist

L.K. Frank (1948) "Foreword". In L. K. Frank, G. E. Hutchinson, W. K. Livingston, W. S. McCulloch, & N. Wiener, Teleological mechanisms. Ann. N. Y. Acad. Sc., 1948, 50, 189-96; As cited in: Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1968) "General System Theory: Foundations, Development, Applications". p. 16-17

Law, Behavior, Search, Fashion

“Actually I think CGI has the potential to equal or even surpass what the human hand can do.”

Hayao Miyazaki (1941) Japanese animator, film director, and mangaka

on the topic of CGI animation (2005) The Guardian article http://www.theguardian.com/film/2005/sep/14/japan.awardsandprizes On Animation

Thinking

“Elementarism has been born partly in reaction to an over-dogmatic and often narrow-minded application of NeoPlasticism [a critic on his former artist-companion Piet Mondrian, partly as its consequence but ultimately from what is primarily a radical correction of Neo-plastic ideas. Elementarism rejects the demands of pure statics which led to sterility and to the laming of creative potentialities. Instead of denying Time and Space, Elementarism acknowledge these elements to be the most elementary means for creating a new plastic expression... In contrast to the Neo-plastic [= De Stijl] manner of expression, which is restricted to two dimensions [the plane], Elementarism acknowledges a form of plastic expression in four dimensions, the realm of space-time. In opposition to the orthogonal style of plastic expression, which is 'homogeneous' with natural construction, Elementarism postulates a 'heterogeneous' contrasting, unstable manner of plastic expression based upon planes oblique in relation to the static, perpendicular axis of gravitation”

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

Quote of van Doesburg, in van 'Painting and plastic art': Elementarism – fragment of a manifesto' Paris, December 1926 – April 1927; in De Stijl, Theo van Doesburg – series XIII, 78, 1926–27, pp. 82–87
1926 – 1931

Idea, Nature, Time

“If the engineer does not honor the nature of the steel or the wood or the stone, his or her failure will go well beyond aesthetics: the bridge or the building will collapse and put human life in peril.
The human self also has a nature, limits as well as potentials. If you seek vocation without understanding the material you are working with, what you build with your life will be ungainly and may well put lives in peril, your own and some of those around you. “Faking it” in the service of high values is no virtue and has nothing to do with vocation. It is an ignorant, sometimes arrogant, attempt to override one’s nature, and it will always fail.”

Parker Palmer (1939) American theologian

Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation (1999)

Life, Failure, Understanding, Nature

“My mentors are those individuals who saw potential in me long before I perceived it in myself – or who challenged me to do more – the people who helped guide me toward excellence.”

Ben Carson (1951) 17th and current United States Secretary of Housing and Urban Development; American neurosurgeon

Source: Think Big (1996), p. 57

People, Help

“The future is the place of all potential monsters.”

Jordan Peterson (1962) Canadian clinical psychologist, cultural critic, and professor of psychology

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast #35 [@1:51:22]
Podcast

Future

“For me chemistry represented an indefinite cloud of future potentialities which enveloped my life to come in black volutes torn by fiery flashes, like those which had hidden Mount Sinai. Like Moses, from that cloud I expected my law, the principle of order in me, around me, and in the world. I was fed up with books, which I still continued to gulp down with indiscreet voracity, and searched for a key to the highest truths; there must be a key, and I was certain that, owing to some monstrous conspiracy to my detriment and the world's, I would not get in school. In school they loaded with me with tons of notions that I diligently digested, but which did not warm the blood in my veins. I would watch the buds swell in spring, the mica glint in the granite, my own hands, and I would say to myself: "I will understand this, too, I will understand everything, but not the way they want me to. I will find a shortcut, I will make a lock-pick, I will push open the doors."
It was enervating, nauseating, to listen to lectures on the problem of being and knowing, when everything around us was a mystery pressing to be revealed: the old wood of the benches, the sun's sphere beyond the windowpanes and the roofs, the vain flight of the pappus down in the June air. Would all the philosophers and all the armies of the world be able to construct this little fly? No, nor even understand it: this was a shame and an abomination, another road must be found.”

Primo Levi book The Periodic Table

"Hydrogen"
The Periodic Table (1975)

Life, Truth, Books, World

“Anyone could snap anywhere; anyone's a suspect. And that means that employees go out of their way to make sure they're not perceived as being potentially dangerous, no matter how cruelly they are treated… even the slightest hint of disgruntlement could be grounds for a visit from police, a forced psychological examination, and a destroyed career.”

Mark Ames (1965) American writer and journalist

Part IV: Wage Rage, page 120.
Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion, From Reagan's Workplaces to Clinton's Columbine and Beyond (2005)

Way

“I suspect that the vast majority of people, not knowing in advance whether they will either end up in a permanently vegetative state or be diagnosed with cancer, would prefer that any resources that would be spent on PVS care be reallocated to cancer research--or some similar enterprise that has the potential to help human beings who might actually recover.”

Jacob M. Appel (1973) American author, bioethicist, physician, lawyer and social critic

"Rational Rationing vs. Irrational Rationing" http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jacob-m-appel/rational-rationing-vs-irr_b_622057.html, The Huffington Post (2010-06-23)

People, Help

“My wish [c. 1911].... of compiling a book (a kind of Almanac) in which all the contributions should be written by artists. I dreamt primarily of painters and musicians. The ruinous separation of the arts from each other, and of 'Art' from folk-art and from children's art, the distinction between 'Art' and 'Ethnography' [folk-art].... the solid walls erected between phenomena that in my eyes were so closely related, even identical: in a word, the potentialities for synthesis left me no peace. It may well seem strange today [1930] that for a long time I could not find any co-workers or any means to promote this idea..”

Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944) Russian painter

as quoted by de:Wolf-Dieter Dube, in Expressionism; Praeger Publishers, New York, 1973, p. 102
1920 - 1930

Children, Books, Peace, Art

“With humanity's long proud history of standing firm against natural enemies, sometimes in the face of almost certain defeat and extinction, we would be cowardly and stupid to leave the field on the eve of our greatest potential victory.”

John Steinbeck (1902–1968) American writer

Nobel Prize acceptance speech (1962)

Stupidity, History, Nature, Victory

“Hinduism always used violence as creed. For Hinduism, for Hindu dharma, resolving of a conflict is only by killing. There is no other discourse. Debate is not there. You have to kill the enemy. Whereas Buddha believed in discourse and resolving the conflict. So in a system where you have the two streams of thought, debate and discourse, human rights and anti-human rights, even the left has to take that historical tradition and examine its potential and use it for its propaganda systems. It is in this context that I have been saying that there is no use if you simply borrow concepts from the West. Christianity has a different ethic; it was an ethic of sacrifice. Christ's crucifixion is a symbol of sacrifice, it is not a killing symbol. The lamb is a productive symbol.”

Kancha Ilaiah (1952) Indian scholar, activist and writer

"The State of Dalit Mobilization : An Interview with Kancha Ilaiah" in Ghadar Vol. 1, No. 3 (26 November 1997).

“This is the first time that Maidenhead has had its own Member of Parliament. In view of the potential origin of the town's name in the symbol of the maiden's head, it is perhaps appropriate that it should now be represented by a maiden—although I must confess to using the term somewhat loosely.”

Theresa May (1956) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Maiden speech to Parliament https://www.theyworkforyou.com/debates/?id=1997-06-02a.59.0 (02 June 1997)

Time

“Adaptive system — whether on the biological, psychological, or sociocultural level — must manifest (1) some degree of "plasticity" and "irritability" vis-a-vis its environment such that it carries on a constant interchange with acting on and reacting to it; (2) some source or mechanism for variety, to act as a potential pool of adaptive variability to meet the problem of mapping new or more detailed variety and constraints in a changeable environment; (3) a set of selective criteria or mechanisms against which the "variety pool" may be sifted into those variations in the organization or system that more closely map the environment and those that do not; and (4) an arrangement for preserving and/or propagating these "successful" mappings.”

Walter F. Buckley (1922–2006) American sociologist

Source: Sociology and modern systems theory (1967), p. 491.

Problem, Success

“It is an honour to be invited to address this conference today. For some time the Australian Defence Organisation has formally observed International Women’s Day. That is altogether appropriate. However, as all of you are no doubt aware, such formalities are rendered much less meaningful unless they are underpinned by tangible progress for women. And that necessarily implies cultural change in environments which have not been as conducive as they must be to women realising their full potential.”

David Morrison (1956) Australian army general

Address at the International Women's Day Conference (2013)

Women, Change, Time

“Once I got into it, I (realized) in this medium, you can use musical theater to connect and make a dream come true, like fly on stage. Through stagecraft you can wow (the audience) and make them feel that sense of wonder. … You’re singing, you’re dancing, and you’re performing a feat of wonder. I couldn’t stop thinking in those terms. There was so much potential.”

Misty Lee (1976) Magician, voice actress, comedian

Mt. Clemens native Misty Lee hangs with Houdini, Princess Leia, Spidey https://www.freep.com/story/entertainment/2016/10/22/misty-lee-magician-voice-actress/92484578/ (October 22, 2016)

Dreams, Music, Feeling, Thinking

“Should we worry about social media sites sharing everything they know about us with third-party commercial interests? Of course, no one wants to be pestered by targeted advertising. More sinister, however, is the prospect of health insurance companies learning whether you had been Googling research on specific illnesses or prospective employers prying into your personal social history by analyzing your data trail on the Web to spot potential quirks, idiosyncrasies, or even possible antisocial behavior.”

Jeremy Rifkin (1945) American economist

The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism (2014)

Health, Behavior, History, Learning

“The trick is to make fear your friend. Fear forces you to prepare more rigorously and see potential problems more quickly.”

Lewis Pugh (1969) Environmental campaigner, maritime lawyer and endurance swimmer

Website

Fear, Problem

“Many forms of new knowledge are potentially dangerous, the energy of the atom being a preeminent example. But instead of curtailing inquiry Western societies have in general assumed that the better policy is to continue exploration in confidence that the rewards can be reaped and the risks managed. It is hard to see why exploration of the human genome and its racial variations should be made an exception to this principle, even though researchers and their audience must first develop the words and concepts to discuss a dangerous subject objectively.”

Nicholas Wade (1942) British writer

A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History (2014)

Confidence, Knowledge

“Trump is a potential disaster as commander-in-chief—uninformed, volatile, poor judgment. Hard to believe this is the candidate of a major political party.”

Barry McCaffrey (1942) United States Army general

As quoted in "What Does the Military Think of Donald Trump?" https://www.yahoo.com/news/does-military-think-donald-trump-204408128.html (15 June 2016), Time

“So it was better to think of formulations which could explain the creation of matter without violating the law of conservation of matter…For that we used what is called as negative energy, which at that time was considered unrealistic. There was a good example of negative energy, mainly Newtonian gravity. Newtonian gravity is a negative energy system because gravitational potential energy is negative and we i. e, Fred Hoyle and me, worked out a fairly consistent method of describing this whole thing. Today what people call phantom fields, an idea which is catching up with people trying to explain some problems of the big-bang, these phantom fields are what we had proposed way back in the 1960’s.”

Jayant Narlikar (1938) Indian physicist

An Exclusive Interview with Prof. Jayant Vishnu Narlikar

People, Law, Way, Idea

“I was evidence of the theory that books are made out of other books... But I did not remain so for long, nor do I believe any potential writer could.”

Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) South african Nobel-winning writer

Writing and Being (1991)

Books

“Giant predator lizards can't evolve in the presence of big mammal predators. So the lesson is that mammals suppress much of the evolutionary potential of modern lizards. Is the Komodo dragon a good working model of how dinosaurs succeeded? Absolutely not. Dinosaurs suppressed the evolutionary potential of mammals, not the other way around. And dinosaurs carried out this supression everywhere, on all the continents, not merely on a few tiny tropical isles. Dinosaurs succeeded where Komodo dragons fail.”

Robert T. Bakker book The Dinosaur Heresies

The Dinosaur Heresies: A Revolutionary View of Dinosaurs (1986), Longman Scientific & Technical, p. 81
The Dinosaur Heresies (1986)

Way

“Knowledge can be considered as a collection of information, or as an activity, or as a potential. If we think of it as a collection of information, then the analogy of a computer's memory is helpful, for we can say that knowledge about something is like the storage of meaningful and true strings of symbols in a computer.”

C. West Churchman (1913–2004) American philosopher and systems scientist

Source: 1960s - 1970s, The Design of Inquiring Systems (1971), p. 9; cited in Daniel J. Power (2004) Decision Support Systems: Frequently Asked Questions. p. 23

Knowledge, Thinking, Memory, Help

“The modern reading of ancient literature involves a mode of reception that is not merely scholarly or antiquarian. Instead, aesthetic experience allows for a direct relationship between reader and work, despite the historical distance. Today’s consumer cannot participate in the ancient economy by trying to use an Athenian coin as legal tender; but today’s reader can participate in the ancient literary imagination though an authentic engagement with the Homeric text (no matter how much contemporary circumstances necessarily also enter into that encounter with the ancient text). Thus the historicist imperative of periodization evidently stands at odds with the potential for immediacy associated with literary reception and aesthetic experience.”

Russell Berman (1950) American academic

Source: Fiction Sets You Free: Literature, Liberty and Western Culture (2007), p. 14.

Imagination, Literature, Reading

“I dream of a time when the people will retake their airways and use them to achieve a voice to rediscover democracy, and to see the divine potential of man.”

Gerry Spence (1929) American lawyer

Source: Give Me Liberty! (1998), Ch. 20 : The Media : The Perpetual Voice of the Master, the Abiding Ear of the Slave, p. 243. Dream 7 : A Propaganda for People, Not Things

People, Dreams, Democracy, Time

“It is commonly observed — but not commonly enough! — that old folks removed from their homes to hospital settings are put at a tremendous disadvantage, even though their basic bodily needs are well provided for. They often appear to be quite demented — to be utterly incapable of feeding, clothing, and washing themselves, let alone engaging in any activities of greater interest. Often, however, if they are returned to their homes, they can manage quite well for themselves. How do they do this? Over the years, they have loaded their home environments with ultrafamiliar landmarks, triggers for habits, reminder of what to do, where to find the food, how to get dressed, where the telephone is, and so forth. An old person can be a veritable virtuoso of self-help in such a hugely overlearned world, in spite of his or her brain's increasing imperviousness to new bouts of learning… Taking them out of their homes is literally separating them from large parts of their minds — potentially just as devastating a development as undergoing brain surgery.”

Daniel Dennett (1942) American philosopher

Kinds of Minds (1996)

World, Food, Home, Learning

“Let us begin with the simplest illustration possible: let us, emulating Bastiat, choose a broken pane of glass.A young hoodlum, say, heaves a brick through the window of a baker’s shop. The shopkeeper runs out furious, but the boy is gone. A crowd gathers, and begins to stare with quiet satisfaction at the gaping hole in the window and the shattered glass over the bread and pies. After a while the crowd feels the need for philosophic reflection. And several of its members are almost certain to remind each other or the baker that, after all, the misfortune has its bright side. It will make business for some glazier. As they begin to think of this they elaborate upon it. How much does a new plate glass window cost? Fifty dollars? That will be quite a sum. After all, if windows were never broken, what would happen to the glass business? Then, of course, the thing is endless. The glazier will have $50 more to spend with other merchants, and these in turn will have $50 more to spend with still other merchants, and so ad infinitum. The smashed window will go on providing money and employment in ever-widening circles. The logical conclusion from all this would be, if the crowd drew it, that the little hoodlum who threw the brick, far from being a public menace, was a public benefactor.Now let us take another look. The crowd is at least right in its first conclusion. This little act of vandalism will in the first instance mean more business for some glazier. The glazier will be no more unhappy to learn of the incident than an undertaker to learn of a death. But the shopkeeper will be out $50 that he was planning to spend for a new suit. Because he has had to replace a window, he will have to go without the suit (or some equivalent need or luxury). Instead of having a window and $50 he now has merely a window. Or, as he was planning to buy the suit that very afternoon, instead of having both a window and a suit he must be content with the window and no suit. If we think of him as a part of the community, the community has lost a new suit that might otherwise have come into being, and is just that much poorer.The glazier’s gain of business, in short, is merely the tailor’s loss of business. No new “employment” has been added. The people in the crowd were thinking only of two parties to the transaction, the baker and the glazier. They had forgotten the potential third party involved, the tailor. They forgot him precisely because he will not now enter the scene. They will see the new window in the next day or two. They will never see the extra suit, precisely because it will never be made. They see only what is immediately visible to the eye.”

Henry Hazlitt book Economics in One Lesson

Economics in One Lesson (1946), The Broken Window (ch. 2)

Death, Money, People, Feeling

“The ground of democratic ideas and practices is faith in the potentialities of individuals, faith in the capacity for positive developments if proper conditions are provided. The weakness of the philosophy originally advanced to justify the democratic movement was that it took individuality to be something given ready-made, that is, in abstraction from time, instead of as a power to develop.”

John Dewey (1859–1952) American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer

Time and Individuality (1940)

Faith, Idea, Time

“The ethnic composition of the population - and the particular mixture of nationalities, languages and cultures - is a matter of importance to all nations. The selection of immigrants should not be seen primarily as a test of which nationalities are best. It is more important to select immigrants with an eye to the collective effect on the nation. An immigration policy is not a symbol, a banner, of a nation's attitude to other peoples or races; and to reject potential immigrants is in no way to doubt the worthiness of their nationality or culture.”

Geoffrey Blainey book All for Australia

All for Australia (1984)

People, Way

“Good political leadership for me involves getting the big decisions right - however difficult, however controversial, however potentially divisive and then being able to take people with you. And that requires something else as well - being wise enough to know when it's time to listen.”

Charles Kennedy (1959–2015) British politician

Speech given to the 2005 Liberal Democrat Party Conference

People, Decision, Time

“Whoever challenged the racial hierarchy was marked a potential victim of the mob. The endless roster of the dead came to include every sort of insurgent—from the owners of successful Black businesses and workers pressing for higher wages to those who refused to be called “boy” and the defiant women who resisted white men’s sexual abuses. Yet public opinion had been captured, and it was taken for granted that lynching was a just response to the barbarous sexual crimes against white womanhood.”

Angela Davis (1944) American political activist, scholar, and author

Women, Race and Class (1983)

Women, Men, Boy, Business

“This essay touches bottom for twentieth century man. …it is one many signals marking the end of "Antiman," with his hopeless relativism, and announcing "Unitary Man," …able to be more harmonious because he has become aware of the ordering processes at all levels in nature, without and within. …here at last subject and object are potentially fused in a single insight.”

Lancelot Law Whyte (1896–1972) Scottish industrial engineer

The Universe of Experience: A Worldview Beyond Science and Religion (1974)

Nature

“The measure of information to be developed here will also be related to freedom of choice; that is, it will be a function of the probabilities of choice associated with the alternative courses of action… The measure developed here is a function of m, the number of alternative potential courses of action.”

Russell L. Ackoff (1919–2009) Scientist

Source: 1970s, On purposeful systems., 1972, p. 145, as cited in: Galjaard (2009, p. 89): About the information-concept of Ackoff.

Freedom

“I know it's tedious, but you aren't SL4 until you appreciate the depth of human irrationality. Yes rationality is there, but at a level that just barely shows up when measured with precise instruments. This is important with respect to non-human intelligences, because super-rationality, almost as much as superintelligence, is potentially overwhelming and because intelligence bootstraping moves a system towards rationality. Appreciate how far humans are from rational and you appreciate how utterly transformed, and essentially recreated, they would be by haphazard bootstrapping. Appreciate how formidable rationality is and you see why a highly rational infrahuman GAI would still be a massive existential threat.”

Michael Vassar (1979) President of the Singularity Institute

"Another reminder of irrationality" http://sl4.org/archive/0602/14276.html, February 2006

Intelligence

“It's a different animal. The action movie requires much more physical dedication and focus, you have to be careful because of potential injuries and so it's very hard and you have to be cautious, while the drama taxes the emotions, and so if you're using some past experienced trauma and try to use it for a scene it might move you beyond expectations.”

Wesley Snipes (1962) film actor, Martial artist, film producer

Wesley Snipes, Interview - Wesley Snipes on Blade 2 http://www.iofilm.co.uk/feats/interviews/w/wesley_snipes.shtml, iofilm,

Past, Animals

“At the same time, as Hayek maintained elsewhere, the facts of the social sciences do not lend themselves to the same degree of prediction, or explanation, as the facts of the natural sciences—it is for this reason that there are degrees of prediction or explanation. Prediction may be expressed numerically, moreover, “not as a unique value or magnitude but as a range,” narrow in the natural sciences and potentially very broad in the social sciences. In the social sciences, Hayek modified the conception of a numerical range to a “range of phenomena to expect.””

Alan O. Ebenstein (1959) American political scientist, educator and author

This was his concept of pattern prediction, or explanation of the principle, broad, general predictions.
Hayek's Journey: The Mind of Friedrich Hayek (2003)

Nature, Science, Time

“The fall of communism confirms century-old libertarian claims that equity and justice cannot be imposed by force, that interpreting "to each according to work" as "to each according to the marginal revenue product of one's labor" rationalizes privilege, and that central planning stifles workers' creative potentials. Clearly, enterprises whose inputs and outputs have been determined by a central planning procedure exclude workers and consumers from decision making, separate conceptual and manual tasks, and offer unequal consumption and work opportunities. For the Soviet, East German, Polish, Czechoslovakian, and Hungarian people to reject these injustices is encouraging. But it is dishonest to say this demonstrates that capitalism is optimal. It only bespeaks a lack of alternatives.”

Robin Hahnel (1946) American economist

Michael Albert and Robin Hahnel. The political economy of participatory economics. Princeton University Press, 1991. p. 3

People, Justice, Communication, Optimism

“After a few months in my parents' basement, I took an apartment near the state university, where I discovered both crystal methamphetamine and conceptual art. Either one of the these things are dangerous, but in combination they have the potential to destroy entire civilizations.”

David Sedaris book Me Talk Pretty One Day

Me Talk Pretty One Day (2000)

Art, Parent, Universe

“Government succeeds by failing: the more incompetence, the greater the potential reward in the arena of the public sector.”

L. K. Samuels (1951) American writer

Source: In Defense of Chaos: The Chaology of Politics, Economics and Human Action, (2013), p. 246

“We do not inhabit a perfected world where natural selection ruthlessly scrutinizes all organic structures and then molds them for optimal utility. Organisms inherit a body form and a style of embryonic development; these impose constraints upon future change and adaptation. In many cases, evolutionary pathways reflect inherited patterns more than current environmental demands. These inheritances constrain, but they also provide opportunity. A potentially minor genetic change […] entails a host of complex, nonadaptive consequences. […] What “play” would evolution have if each structure were built for a restricted purpose and could be used for nothing else? How could humans learn to write if our brain had not evolved for hunting, social cohesion, or whatever, and could not transcend the adaptive boundaries of its original purpose?”

Stephen Jay Gould book Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes

"Hyena Myths and Realities", p. 156
Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes (1983)

World, Optimism, Nature, Learning

“Those who created yesterday’s pain cannot control tomorrow’s potential.”

T. B. Joshua (1963) Nigerian Christian leader

In a special Christmas message - "Choose The Path Of A Champion" http://www.ghanaweb.com/GhanaHomePage/religion/Choose-The-Path-Of-A-Champion-T-B-Joshua-s-Seasons-Greetings-200153 Ghana Web (December 25 2010)

Pain

“At the time the Danes decided to back wind power, the cost of electricity produced this way was many times greater than that produced by fossil fuels. The Danish government, however, could see its potential and supported the industry until costs came down. Today Denmark leads the world in both wind power production and the building of turbines; and wind now supplies 21 percent of the country’s electricity. One striking aspect of the way that wind power has developed there is that some 85 percent of the capacity is owned by individuals or wind cooperatives, and so power lies in the hands of the people.”

Tim Flannery book The Weather Makers

Source: The Weather Makers (2005), Chapter 29 (p. 268)

People, World, Way, Support

Quotes about potential page 3

Quotes about potential
page 3