Quotes about practice
page 14

“What do we mean by this Liberalism of which we talk? … I should say it means the acknowledgement in practical life of the truth that men are best governed who govern themselves; that the general sense of mankind, if left alone, will make for righteousness; that artificial privileges and restraints upon freedom, so far as they are not required in the interests of the community, are hurtful; and that the laws, while, of course, they cannot equalise conditions, can, at least, avoid aggravating inequalities, and ought to have for their object the securing to every man the best chance he can have of a good and useful life.”

Henry Campbell-Bannerman (1836–1908) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

The Liberal Magazine (January 1898), p. 530, quoted in John Wilson, C.B.: A Life of Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman (London: Constable, 1973), p. 232

Life, Men, Truth, Law

“Worried thought prevents practical thought which could prevent worried thought.”

Vernon Howard (1918–1992) American writer

A Treasury of Trueness

“It was in making education not only common to all, but in some sense compulsory on all, that the destiny of the free republics of America was practically settled.”

James Russell Lowell (1819–1891) American poet, critic, editor, and diplomat

Literary Essays, vol. II (1870–1890), New England Two Centuries Ago

Education, Sense

“I do not disbelieve that in some mysterious transcendental sense, as involved in the system of the entire universe, with so vast an arc that no faculty of man can apprehend its curve, that in some such sense the Catholic doctrine of the atonement may be true. But a doctrine out of which, with our reason, our feeling, our logic, I at least can gather any practical instruction for mankind — any deeper appreciation of the attributes of God, any deeper love for Him, any stimulant towards our own obedience — such a doctrine I cannot find it. I bury what I am to think of it in the deepest corner of my own heart, where myself I fear to look.”

James Anthony Froude book The Nemesis of Faith

Letter X
The Nemesis of Faith (1849)

Love, God, Fear, Feeling

“The next day, I called one of them and asked if I could come to his office to discuss the briefing. Fine with him, so off I went. I sat down and asked him a question: “Norm, how did you decide so exactly where the bomb would explode?” He looked at me as if I were a country bumpkin and explained how SAC calculated its bombing accuracy and he had gotten the accuracy of this particular drop straight from the horse’s mouth. Now I don’t want to bore you with how SAC arrived at planning estimates for the delivery accuracy of its nuclear bombers, except to say that it was a statistical process based on thousands of practice sorties, whose results would be mathematically analyzed to allow estimates to be made of the results of a large bombing campaign; not one bomber flying over one city and one bombardier, with the lives of perhaps millions of Muscovites at his fingertips, dropping one bomb. This I pointed out to Norm, implying that he had gone to all that fuss and bother for naught. His response was that in doing his calculations as a mathematician, he was going by the accepted ground rules. The bombing accuracy he had assumed had been provided to him by others. His was not to reason why.”

Samuel T. Cohen (1921–2010) American physicist

F*** You! Mr. President: Confessions of the Father of the Neutron Bomb (2006)

Mathematics, Question, Horse, Flying

“This naturally leads us to the subject to Continence. Our soi-disant manly man with a false sneer of bravado and utter lack of stability considers that Continence is not possible, and like the ostrich tries to hide from the truth. For not only is Continence possible but it is practiced with brilliant success, voluntarily, by hundreds and hundreds of men and women in all walks of life and by all castes and creeds. (Please note the stress on the word voluntarily.) But its attainment needs courage and determination of the highest degree and which is naturally out of the reach of our flabby indolent moderns, who succumb to the slightest temptation and want to drag everyone down to their own low moral levels.”

Peter de Noronha (1897–1970) Indian businessman

The Pageant of Life (1964), On Promiscuity & Continence

Life, Women, Men, Truth

“More than any of his predecessors Plato appreciated the scientific possibilities of geometry... By his teaching he laid the foundations of the science, insisting upon accurate definitions, clear assumptions, and logical proof. His opposition to the materialists, who saw in geometry only what was immediately useful to the artisan and the mechanic is… clear. …That Plato should hold the view… is not a cause for surprise. The world's thinkers have always held it. No man has ever created a mathematical theory for practical purposes alone. The applications of mathematics have generally been an afterthought.”

David Eugene Smith (1860–1944) American mathematician

Source: History of Mathematics (1923) Vol.1, p. 90

World, Mathematics, Science

“Now, practically all reviewers have academic aspirations. The people from the universities are used to a captive audience, but the literary journalist has to please his audience.”

V.S. Pritchett (1900–1997) British writer and critic

As quoted in "V.S. Pritchett Himself" http://www.nytimes.com/books/00/06/18/specials/theroux-pritchett.html?_r=1&oref=slogin by Paul Theroux in The New York Times (22 May 1977)

People, Universe

“So it was that the Catherines poured water and spooned gruel, while the Clares prayed for the intercession of the saints. The Catherines changed sheets. The Clares practiced mortification of the flesh. The Catherines employed antibiotics. The Clares made a public display of a kneecap of their patron saint.
It was soon widely know to which hospital one went to get well, and to which one went to die.”

Michael Swanwick book Jack Faust

Source: Jack Faust (1997), Chapter 9, “The Plague Kitchen” (p. 141)

Water, Change

“Republican presidents who've talked and acted conservatively are as elusive as Big Foot. There hasn't been a sighting in maybe a century. A purist would cite Democrat Grover Cleveland as America's last conservative president. He preached and practiced the maxim that 'the people must support the government, but the government must not support the people.”

Ilana Mercer South African writer

"Trump Doesn’t Need to Talk Like A Conservative," http://www.unz.com/imercer/trump-doesnt-need-to-talk-like-a-conservative/ The Unz Review, March 19, 2016. 2010s, 2016

People, Support

“There probably has to be a worldview for practical men who must be strong enough to get their hands dirty in political practice without getting dirty themselves, and even if they do, who cares? And a second worldview for youths, simpletons, women, and sensitive souls, for whom “purity” is just the right thing. One could call it a division of labor among temperaments.”

Peter Sloterdijk (1947) German philosopher

Source: Kritik der zynischen Vernunft [Critique of Cynical Reason] (1983), p. 44

Women, Men, Youth, Soul

“It is not a little Surprising that Christianity, whose chief excellence consists of softening the human heart, in cherishing and improving its finer Feelings, should encourage a Practice so totally repugnant to the first Impression of Right and Wrong. What adds to the wonder is that this Abominable Practice has been introduced in the most enlightened Ages.”

Patrick Henry (1736–1799) attorney, planter, politician and Founding Father of the United States

As quoted in We Hold These Truths https://books.google.com/books?id=QQH6lsN4TIIC&pg=PA72, by Randall Norman Desoto, pp. 72&ndash;73 1770s, Letter to Robert Pleasants (1773)

Age, Feeling, Heart

“Dalits have faced a unique discrimination in our society that is fundamentally different from the problems of minority groups in general. The only parallel to the practice of untouchability was apartheid.”

Manmohan Singh (1932) 13th Prime Minister of India

Comparing the caste system with apartheid, as quoted in "Indian leader likens caste system to apartheid regime" http://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/dec/28/india.mainsection, The Guardian (UK) (28 December 2006) 2006-2010

Problem

“We call the mind that wants to make the way of the Universe clear and to put it into practice the mind that seeks truth. However clever a dog or a monkey may be, they cannot realize the universal mind. Only human beings have the privilege and capacity to realize it. If you have a mind that seeks truth, you are happy because this is the proof that you are a real human being.”

Koichi Tohei (1920–2011) Japanese aikidoka

18 : The mind that seeks truth
Ki Sayings (2003)

Happiness, Truth, Dogs, Way

“The standard Christian conscience does not permit the believer to look upon the self and find beauty, goodness, natural kindness, strength. Self-knowledge is tainted with self-hatred. The rules of the game of the Christian conscience are such that, when I look within, I must take the blame for all evil, all hardness of the heart that I find, but give God all the credit for any evidence of love. … It is not surprising that the practice of meditation … has remained under a cloud in the West, and that we have, consequently, created a culture of extroverts.”

Sam Keen (1931) author, professor, and philosopher

Source: The Passionate Life (1983), p. 162

Love, God, Beauty, Game

“What we have now come to regard as typical of Middle Eastern regimes is not typical of the past. The regime of Saddam Hussein, the regime of Hafiz al Assad, this kind of government, this kind of society, has no roots either in the Arab or in the Islamic past. It is due and let me be quite specific and explicit it is due to an importation from Europe, which comes in two phases.
Phase one, the 19th century, when they are becoming aware of their falling behind the modern world and need desperately to catch up, so they adopt all kinds of European devices with the best of intentions, which nevertheless have two harmful effects. One, they enormously strengthen the power of the state by placing in the hands of the ruler, weaponry and communication undreamt of in earlier times, so that even the smallest petty tyrant has greater powers over his people than Harun al-Rashid or Suleyman the Magnificent, or any of the legendary rulers of the past.
Second, even more deadly, in the traditional society there were many, many limits on the autocracy, the ruler. The whole Islamic political tradition is strongly against despotism. Traditional Islamic government is authoritarian, yes, but it is not despotic. On the contrary, there is a quite explicit rejection of despotism. And this wasn't just in theory; it was in practice too because in Islamic society, there were all sorts of established orders in society that acted as a restraining factor. The bazaar merchants, the craft guilds, the country gentry and the scribes, all of these were well organized groups who produced their own leaders from within the group. They were not appointed or dismissed by the governments. And they did operate effectively as a constraint.”

Bernard Lewis (1916–2018) British-American historian

Books, Islam and the West: A Conversation with Bernard Lewis (2006)

People, World, Communication, Time

“People who say this cracker is literally and physically the body of their god and that I'm doing this great act of heresy and sacrilege and horror -- even though I didn't actually do anything to it -- is disturbing. It's like discovering there are witch doctors lurking in your community and they've been doing weird practices.”

PZ Myers (1957) American scientist and associate professor of biology

Commenting on a Eucharist in [Paul Schmelzer, http://minnesotaindependent.com/view/mnindy-interview, Unrepentant science-heathen PZ Myers still intends to prove 'this cracker is nothing', Minnesota Independent, 2008-07-15]

God, People, Communication

“The theory and practice of gamesmanship; or, The art of winning games without actually cheating.”

Stephen Potter (1900–1969) British writer

Title of book (1947)

Art, Game, Cheating

“The characteristic method of social invention in general and of the development of negative capability in particular is to seize on deviant, subsidiary, or repressed elements in present or remembered experience and to push them toward a dominant position, all the while changing them in the course of this extension…. [T]he most successful transmutations over the long run—the ones least vulnerable to subversion by practical rivalry, moral indignation or aspiration, and by theoretical insight—are likely to be those that permit or invite further tinkering. Thus, they may be repeatedly corrected rather than entirely replaced.”

Roberto Mangabeira Unger (1947) Brazilian philosopher and politician

Source: False Necessityː Anti-Necessitarian Social Theory in the Service of Radical Democracy (1987), p. 336

Change, Success

“Pat Buchanan…was fired by MSNBC for doing nothing more than voicing his rock-solid conservative thoughts on the otherwise failing network…. The real message of the left is intolerance, zealotry, bigotry and hate. The left has no use for the First Amendment or the rest of the Constitution unless it fits their multicultural, euro-socialist agenda, which is failing all across Europe and everywhere it is practiced.”

Ted Nugent (1948) American rock musician

Washington Times op-ed by Nugent criticizing MSNBC for firing Pat Buchanan, February 20, 2012.

Hate

“My profession often gets bad press for a variety of sins, both actual and imagined: arrogance, venality, insensitivity to moral issues about the use of knowledge, pandering to sources of funding with insufficient worry about attendant degradation of values. As an advocate for science, I plead “mildly guilty now and then” to all these charges. Scientists are human beings subject to all the foibles and temptations of ordinary life. Some of us are moral rocks; others are reeds. I like to think (though I have no proof) that we are better, on average, than members of many other callings on a variety of issues central to the practice of good science: willingness to alter received opinion in the face of uncomfortable data, dedication to discovering and publicizing our best and most honest account of nature's factuality, judgment of colleagues on the might of their ideas rather than the power of their positions.”

Stephen Jay Gould book Dinosaur in a Haystack

"The Razumovsky Duet", p. 270
Dinosaur in a Haystack (1995)

Life, Imagination, Idea, Nature

“It is some improvement that for married couples – or male-female couples in general – the fertility indicator expressing the nation’s demographic situation has risen from 1.2 to 1.44, and this is promising, but 1.44 is still very far from 2. In order to feel safe demographically, the average statistical ratio of children to Hungarian couples should be 2.1. In practice this is hard to implement, but this is the average figure we should have. Until we reach that point, Hungarians must be seen as an endangered species demographically; and the people – but the Government above all – should understand the imperative which is implicit in this.”

Viktor Orbán (1963) Hungarian politician, chairman of Fidesz

Children, People, Feeling, Understanding

“Even if there never have been actions arising from such pure sources, what is at issue here is not whether this or that happened; that, instead, reason by itself and independently of all appearances commands what ought to happen; that, accordingly, actions of which the world has perhaps so far given no example, and whose very practicability might be very much doubted by one who bases everything on experience, are still inflexibly commanded by reason … because … duty … lies, prior to all experience, in the idea of a reason determing the will by means of apriori grounds.”

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) German philosopher

Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785)

World, Idea, Appearance

“The successful scientist and the raving crank are separated by the quality of their inspirations. But I suspect that this amounts, in practice, to a difference, not so much in ability to notice analogies as in ability to reject foolish analogies and pursue helpful ones.”

Richard Dawkins book The Blind Watchmaker

Source: The Blind Watchmaker (1986), Chapter 8 “Explosions and Spirals” (pp. 195–196)

Success, Help

“There is no greater fallacy than the belief that aims and purposes are one thing, while methods and tactics are another, This conception is a potent menace to social regeneration. All human experience teaches that methods and means cannot be separated from the ultimate aim. The means employed become, through individual habit and social practice, part and parcel of the final purpose; they influence it, modify it, and presently the aims and means become identical.”

Emma Goldman book My Disillusionment in Russia

My Disillusionment in Russia (1923)

Parting

“It seems strange indeed that so practical and pressing a truth as that of purgatory should be dismissed, while so remote and impractical a doctrine as the absolute everlastingness of hell should be insisted on.”

Leslie Weatherhead (1893–1976) English theologian

Source: The Christian Agnostic (1965), p.287

Truth, Hell

“If you refuse to take account of theory, then you have forgotten that practice is often an offspring of theory.”

Fausto Cercignani (1941) Italian scholar, essayist and poet

Examples of self-translation (c. 2004), Quotes - Zitate - Citations - Citazioni

“A course of precedents and judicial proceedings in Courts of justice make the law: it would be endless to cite cases upon it. A course of practice for a few years has been held to controul an Act of Parliament.”

John Eardley Wilmot (1709–1792) English judge

Wilkes' Case (1770), 19 How. St. Tr. 1130.

Justice, Law

“The most effective way to distort reality is to deny it; if we tell ourselves there isn't a problem, then we never have to worry about what to do about it. And the most effective way to deny a reality is to make it invisible. … As with any violent ideology, the populace must be shielded from direct exposure to the victims of the system, lest they begin questioning the system or their participation in it. This truth speaks for itself: why else would the meat industry go to such lengths to keep its practices invisible?”

Melanie Joy book Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows

Source: Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows (2010), p. 40

Truth, Way, Question, Problem

“The question is: can they now be prevented from taking back into their own hands the decision about their identity and their form of government which truly was theirs all along? I do not believe they can be prevented: for they are now, at a general election, provided with a clear, definite and practicable alternative, namely, a fundamental renegotiation directed to regain free access to world food markets and recover or retain the powers of Parliament, a renegotiation to be followed in any event by a specific submission of the outcome to the electorate, a renegotiation protected by an immediate moratorium or stop on all further integration of the UK into the Community. This alternative is offered, as such an alternative must be in our parliamentary democracy, by a political party capable of securing a majority in the House of Commons and sustaining a Government.”

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

Speech in Birmingham advising people to vote Labour (23 February 1974), quoted in Reflections of a Statesman. The Writings and Speeches of Enoch Powell (London: Bellew, 1991), p. 458
1970s

World, Food, Democracy, Communication

“Conditions became intolerable by the time of Shahjahan when, according to Manucci, peasants were compelled to sell their women and children to meet the revenue demand. Manrique writes that the peasants were “carried off… to various markets and fairs, (to be sold) with their poor unhappy wives behind them carrying their small children all crying and lamenting…” Bernier too affirms that the unfortunate peasants who were incapable of discharging the demands of their rapacious lords, were bereft of their children, who were carried away as slaves. Here was also confirmation, if not actually the beginning, of the practice of bonded labour in India.”

Shah Jahan (1592–1666) 5th Mughal Emperor

Manucci, II, p. 451.,Manrique II, p. 272., Bernier, p.205., quoted from Lal, K. S. (1992). The legacy of Muslim rule in India. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan. Chapter 7

Women, Children, Time, Cry

“Nothing is more perishable than worn-out apparel, yet, thanks to documentary evidence, to the custom of burying people of high rank in their robes, and to the practice of wrapping up relics of saints in pieces of precious stuffs, we are enabled to form a veiy good idea of what these stuffs were like and where they came from. In the first instance they appear to have come from Byzantium, and from the East generally; but the manufacture afterwards extended to Sicily, and received great impetus at the Norman conquest of that island; Roger I. even transplanting Greek workmen from the towns sacked by his army, and settling them in Sicily. Of course many of the workers would be Mohammedans, and the old patterns, perhaps with the addition of sundry animals, would still continue in use; hence the frequency of Arabic inscriptions in the borders, the Cufic character being one of the most ornamental ever used. In the Hotel de Clu^ny at Paris are preserved the remains of the vestments of a bishop of Bayonne, found when his sepulchre was opened in 1853, the date of the entombment being the twelfth century. Some of these remains are cloth of gold, but the most remarkable is a very deep border ornamented with blue Cufic letters on a gold ground; the letters are fimbriated with white, and from them issue delicate red scrolls, which end in Arabic sort of flowers: this tissue probably is pure Eastern work. On the contrary, the coronation robes of the German emperors, although of an Eastern pattern, bear inscriptions which tell us very clearly where they were manufactured: thus the Cufic characters on the cope inform us that it was made in the city of Palermo in the year 1133, while the tunic has the date of 1181, but then the inscription is in the Latin language. The practice of putting Cufic inscriptions on precious stuffs was not confined to the Eastern and Sicilian manufactures; in process of time other Italian cities took up the art, and, either because it was the fashion, or because they wished to pass off" their own work as Sicilian or Eastern manufacture, imitations of Arabic characters are continually met with, both on the few examples that have come down to us of the stuffs themselves, or on painted statues or sculptured effigies. These are the inscriptions which used to be the despair of antiquaries, who vainly searched out their meaning until it was discovered that they had no meaning at all, and that they were mere ornaments. Sometimes the inscriptions appear to be imitations of the Greek, and sometimes even of the Hebrew. The celebrated ciborium of Limoges work in the Louvre, known as the work of Magister G. Alpais, bears an ornament around its rim which a French antiquary has discovered to be nothing more than the upper part of a Cufic word repeated and made into a decoration.”

William Burges (1827–1881) English architect

Quote was introduced with the phrase: In the lecture on the weaver's art, we are reminded of the superiority of Indian muslins and Chinese and Persian carpets, and the gorgeous costumes of the middle ages are contrasted with our own dark ungraceful garments. The Cufic inscriptions that have so perplexed antiquaries, were introduced with the rich Eastern stuffs so much sought after by the wealthy class, and though, as Mr. Burges observes Source: Art applied to industry: a series of lectures, 1865, p. 85; Cited in: " Belles Lettres http://books.google.com/books?id=0EegAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA143" in: The Westminster Review, Vol. 84-85. Baldwin, Cradock, and Joy, 1865. p. 143

People, Art, Search, Flowers

“Political skepticism is the source of so many of our dilemmas. Even if free markets worked as advertised, it would be hard to claim that they constituted a sufficient basis for the well-lived life. So what precisely is it that we find lacking in unrestrained financial capitalism, or ‘commercial society’ as the 18th century had it? What do we find instinctively amiss in our present arrangements and what can we do about them? What is it that offends our sense of propriety when faced with unfettered lobbying by the wealthy at the expense of everyone else? What have we lost?
We are all children of the Greeks. We intuitively grasp the need for a sense of moral direction: it is not necessary to be familiar with Socrates to feel that the unexamined life is not worth much. Natural Aristotelians, we assume that a just society is one in which justice is habitually practiced; a good society one in which people behave well. But in order for such an implicitly circular account to convince, we need to agree on the meaning of ‘just’ or ‘well’.”

Tony Judt (1948–2010) British historian

Ill Fares the Land (2010), Ch. 5 : What Is to be Done?

Life, Children, People, Justice

“A dangerous tendency has shown itself of late among many of our personnel -- an unwillingness to share weal and woe with the masses, a concern for personal fame and gain. This is very bad. One way of overcoming it is to streamline our organizations in the course of our campaign to increase production and practice economy, and to transfer cadres to lower levels so that a considerable number will return to productive work. We must see to it that all our cadres and all our people constantly bear in mind that ours is a large socialist country but an economically backward and poor one, and that this is a very big contradiction. To make China prosperous and strong needs several decades of hard struggle, which means, among other things, pursuing the policy of building up our country through diligence and thrift, that is, practicing strict economy and fighting waste.”

Mao Zedong (1893–1976) Chairman of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China

On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People
Original: (zh-CN) 在我们的许多工作人员中间，现在滋长着一种不愿意和群众同甘苦，喜欢计较个人名利的危险倾向，这是很不好的。我们在增产节约运动中要求精简机关，下放干部，使相当大的一批干部回到生产中去，就是克服这种危险倾向的一个方法。要使全体干部和全体人民经常想到我国是一个社会主义的大国，但又是一个经济落后的穷国，这是一个很大的矛盾。要使我国富强起来，需要几十年艰苦奋斗的时间，其中包括执行厉行节约、反对浪费这样一个勤俭建国的方针。

People, Way, Strong, Fight

“Remember we had a big debate about partial birth abortion? Well, here is a guy, who, in the Senate of Illinois, voted against a bill that was aimed at making sure that hospitals could no longer take babies who were born alive after a botched abortion — these are living babies, wholly separate from the mother, and are there in a nurse's arms, and in a case that I know of, the nurse is begging the doctors to please help, to do something for this child. And she is told to put the child aside, and let it die. That's not abortion. That is infanticide. That is the taking of a child's life. That is simply murder, by neglect. And there was a bill to stop it. And the United States Senate, in a similar bill, passed ninety-eight to zero. Even Teddy Kennedy and Barbara Mikulski could not find it in their abortion-seared consciences to vote for this practice. But Barack Obama voted to let it continue.”

Alan Keyes (1950) American politician

National Federation of Republican Assemblies, NYC, August 31, 2004. http://renewamerica.us/archives/speeches/04_08_31nfra.htm. 2004 Illinois U.S. Senate race

Life, Guy, Birth, Help

“Is it not plain that the law of good will has a universal application? There is no event, no act, no word, no supreme crisis of life in which man may let the good will go, and turn on the forces of ill will, egotism, and selfishness. Letting the good will go out of him, he lapses straightway into the child or the savage. Keeping the flow of the serene good will in his soul, he walks the earth, fearless, erect, with God’s sunshine on his face. To live thus is the essence of civilization; the individual and the social welfare are thus secured and harmonized. To live thus is practical religion; the more thoroughly we try, test, and experience it, the more completely it will be found to grow out of, and to illustrate, a Theology, that is, a divine plan of the universe. This Theology matches the needs of civilized men in a civilized world.”

Charles Fletcher Dole (1845–1927) Unitarian minister, speaker, and writer

The Theology of Civilization (May 1899)

Life, Men, God, World

“Part of our struggle is to make the international community understand that we are a poor country not because there is an insufficiency of resources and investment, but because we are deprived of the basic institutions and practices that make for good government.”

Aung San Suu Kyi (1945) State Counsellor of Myanmar and Leader of the National League for Democracy

Please Use Your Liberty to Promote Ours (1997)

Communication, Understanding, Parting, Country

“We must never forget that spiritual experience is above all a practical experience of love. And with love, there are no rules.”

Paulo Coelho (1947) Brazilian lyricist and novelist

As translated by Alan R. Clarke (1996).
By The River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept (1994)

Love, Forgetting

“A great deal of study has been directed to denning 'best decisions,' particularly since the pioneering work of mathematical statisticians (such as Wald), of mathematicians (such as von Neumann), of economists (such as Arrow)… The main effect of this development on the practice of OR has been the growing realization that there are decision objectives other than maximizing expected return and minimizing maximum loss. That is, in many practical situations there are criteria of optimality that are more appropriate than these two mentioned.”

Russell L. Ackoff (1919–2009) Scientist

Source: 1950s, The development of operations research as a science, 1956, p. 270.

Mathematics, Optimism, Decision, Study

“Appropriate patterns of reproductive, gender, and sexual conduct are all products of specific cultures and all can be viewed as examples of socially scripted conduct. Western societies now have a system of gender and sexual learning in which gender differential scripts are learned prior to sexual scripts, but take their origins in part from the previously learned gender scripts… There are two important points: The first is that both gender and sexuality are learned forms of social practice, and the second is that looking to "natural differences" between women and men for lessons about sexual conduct is an error.”

John Gagnon

"The Explicit and Implicit Use of the Scripting Perspective in Sex Research", Annual Review of Sex Research, Vol. 1, (1990), 5

Women, Men, Error, Nature

“Next follows the seventh step, the noblest and most elevated that it is possible to realize in the life of time or eternity. It is attained when, above all knowledge and science, we find within us a limitless ignorance; when, passing beyond every name given to God or creatures we expire and pass to an eternal Unnamable where we are lost; when, further than any practice of Virtue, we contemplate and discover within us everlasting Repose, or immeasurable Beatitude where none can act; when we contemplate above all blessed Spirits an essential Beatitude where all are one, melted, lost, in their Superessence in the bosom of a darkness defying all determination or knowledge.”

John Ruysbroeck (1293–1381) Flemish mystic

Source: The Seven Steps of the Ladder of Spiritual Love, p. 151-2

Life, God, Knowledge, Science

“My career as a teacher, researcher, and consultant has been focused on the education of practicing executives to direct their attention to the need for defining the purposes of their own lives and those of their organizations, and to the fact that such purposes should be worth pursuing in terms of profit outcomes and social responsibility.”

Kenneth R. Andrews (1916–2005) Business scholar

Kenneth Andrews, quoted in: Harper W. Moulton. "Profiles in executive education: Ken Andrews." Business Horizons, Vol. 38, Issue 5, Sept.–Oct. 1995, pp. 75-78
Quote

Education, Teachers

“My own experience of mescalin is described in the appendix of Beyond the Outsider. My 'trip' was pleasant enough, although I experienced none of the visual effects described by Huxley; I was plunged into an agreeable but sluggish dreaminess. In this torpid state, I became aware of the problem mentioned by Huxley: 'How was this cleansed perception to be reconciled with a proper concern with human relations…?' -- in my case, with my concern for my wife and three-year-old daughter? Although I personally felt nothing but a sense of relaxation and trustfulness, I was aware that, in practice, the world is full of dangers, and in this state, I was incapable of the necessary vigilance; it made me feel guilty. I was neglecting my job of looking after them. Moreover, my ability to think was impaired. Huxley remarks that he found his own ability to remember and 'think straight' to be little, if at all, reduced. I could 'think straight', but I could not think to any purpose. Even the feeling of universal love was not particularly pleasant; I compared it to having a large alsation dog who puts his paws on your shoulder and licks your face.”

Colin Wilson (1931–2013) author

Source: Frankenstein's Castle (1980), p. 59-60

Love, World, Dogs, Feeling

“If some New Testament miracle stories find no parallel in contemporary experience. they do have parallels, often striking ones, in other ancient writings that no one takes to be anything other than mythical or legendary. …The Gospels come under serious suspicion because there is practically nothing in them that does not conform to this “Mythic Hero Archetype.””

Robert M. Price (1954) American theologian

[Price, Robert M., w:Robert M. Price, Incredible Shrinking Son of Man: How Reliable Is the Gospel Tradition?, https://books.google.com/books?id=GmlB-KXsX8kC&pg=PA21, 2003, Prometheus Books, Publishers, 978-1-61592-028-0, 21]

“The Buddha Dhamma is not based on the fear of the unknown, but is founded on the bedrock of facts which can be tested by ourselves and verified by experience. Buddhism is, therefore rational and intensely practical.Such a rational and practical system cannot contain mysteries or esoteric doctrines. Blind faith, therefore, is foreign to Buddhism. Where there is no blind faith there cannot be any coercion or persecution or fanaticism. To the unique credit of Buddhism it must be said that throughout its peaceful march of 2500 years no drop of blood was shed in the name of the Buddha, no mighty monarch wielded his powerful sword to propagate the Dhamma, and no conversion was made either by force or by repulsive methods. Yet, the Buddha was the first and the greatest missionary that lived on earth.”

Narada Maha Thera (1898–1983) Sri Lankan monk and missionary

Buddhism in a Nutshell

Fear, Peace, Faith

“There are many ways to practice and make art. There are also various ways to express, such as comedy, sculpture, music, painting etc. Dimensions can be immense even in such small spaces as the head of a pin.”

Eugenio Cruz Vargas (1923–2014) Chilean poet and painter

Quote Source: Famous phrase of Eugenio Cruz Vargas http://www.angelred.com/urls/arte.htm| Source: Sky http://viaf.org/viaf/13641853/| Source: From Library of Congress Name Authority File of U.S.A. http://id.loc.gov/authorities/names/n81126660.html|

Art, Music, Way, Painting

“No matter how [haram terrorists'] life has been, if they wanna get to heaven, they just have to kill non-Muslims in a holy jihad. That's all they have to do, then they get to heaven. It's like an easy "card out" for Muslims who've behaved badly their whole life. And we've seen this time and time again with the terrorists that we find. They say, "He wasn't a practicing Muslim". No, but because of the scripture in Islam, he genuinely believes he is going to eternal hell fire for the life that he's lived. He sees going and running down 20 or 40 people, and killing coppers, and killing innocent people, he sees that as a "get out" because of the scripture in Islam. That's why.”

Tommy Robinson (1982) English right-wing activist

Tommy Robinson Interview on Westminster Terror Attack https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G54TKESUoLU, YouTube (22 March 2017)

Life, People, Hell, Time

“Peace has an economic foundation to which too little attention has been given. No student can doubt that it was to a large extent the economic condition of Europe that drove those overburdened countries headlong into the World War. They were engaged in maintaining competitive armaments. If one country laid the keel of one warship, some other country considered it necessary to lay the keel of two warships. If one country enrolled a regiment, some other country enrolled three regiments. Whole peoples were armed and drilled and trained to the detriment of their industrial life, and charged and taxed and assessed until the burden could no longer be borne. Nations cracked under the load and sought relief from the intolerable pressure by pillaging each other. It was to avoid a repetition of such a catastrophe that our Government proposed and brought to a successful conclusion the Washing- ton Conference for the Limitation of Naval Armaments. We have been altogether desirous of an extension of this principle and for that purpose have sent our delegates to a preliminary conference of nations now sitting at Geneva. Out of that conference we expect some practical results. We believe that other nations ought to join with us in laying aside their suspicions and hatreds sufficiently to agree among themselves upon methods of mutual relief from the necessity of the maintenance of great land and sea forces. This can not be done if we constantly have in mind the resort to war for the redress of wrongs and the enforcement of rights. Europe has the League of Nations. That ought to be able to provide those countries with certain political guaranties which our country does not require. Besides this there is the World Court, which can certainly be used for the determination of all justifiable disputes. We should not underestimate the difficulties of European nations, nor fail to extend to them the highest degree of patience and the most sympathetic consideration. But we can not fail to assert our conviction that they are in great need of further limitation of armaments and our determination to lend them every assistance in the solution of their problems. We have entered the conference with the utmost good faith on our part and in the sincere belief that it represents the utmost good faith on their part. We want to see the problems that are there presented stripped of all technicalities and met and solved in a way that will secure practical results. We stand ready to give our support to every effort that is made in that direction.”

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

1920s, Ways to Peace (1926)

Life, War, People, World

“By Christianity I do not mean charity, mercy, kindness, forgiveness. I mean no natural virtue, because all the natural virtues existed and had been practiced by hundreds and thousands of millions before Christ was born. There certainly were some good men even in the days of Christ in Jerusalem, before his death. By Christianity I mean the ideas of redemption, atonement, a good man dying for a bad man, and the bad man getting a receipt in full. By Christianity I mean that system that insists that in the next world a few will be forever happy, while the many will be eternally miserable. Christianity, as I have explained it, must be protected, guarded, and sustained by law. It was founded by the sword that is to say, by physical force,—and must be preserved by like means.”

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

Interview with the Chicago Times, Feb. 14, 1881.

Death, Men, Happiness, World

“I find that I would like now, best of all, to be a good conversationalist. I know I'm not one at present. Oh, I can sit and talk a little of this and that, but I realize that I haven't any definite or profound knowledge. I won't be satisfied with just a patter, a surface glaze of information. I don't want short-cuts to learning. I want to know all about the thing I study.
I'd like to be able to hold my own, to meet on a common ground, with scientists, inventors, clerics, doctors, athletes, authors.
The most worthwhile thing in life is to store your mind with knowledge.
I wish now that I had been able to go to college, if only so that I might have had appreciations earlier in the game.
People often say to me now that I have my home, my career, fame (if you call it that), there must be nothing left for me to live for. But there is everything left to live for. All the things I don't know about, all the things I want to know about.
Pictures, I've discovered, were practically all I did know about up to very recently. I've had to work so hard, to concentrate so closely, that I never have had time to read or to travel or to think about other things. I'm just at the beginning of living…”

Harold Lloyd (1893–1971) American film actor and producer

"Discoveries About Myself". Motion Picture, October 1930, pg. 58 & 90. (Brewster Publications). https://archive.org/stream/motionpicture1923040chic#page/n563/mode/2up https://archive.org/stream/motionpicture1923040chic#page/n595/mode/2up

Life, People, Travel, Home

“To drink pure water from a shallow pond one should gently take the water from the surface without disturbing the pond in the least. If it is disturbed, the sediments rise up and make the whole water muddy. If you desire to be pure, have firm faith, and slowly go on with your devotional practices, without wasting your energy in useless scriptural discussions and arguments. Your little brain will otherwise be muddled.”

Ramakrishna (1836–1886) Indian mystic and religious preacher

Source: Sayings of Sri Ramakrishna (1960), p. 580

Faith, Drink, Water

“I'm a Christian. I'm a South African. I'm an Afrikaner. I'm a lawyer. I love my country, and I think that this country has a great future. In that sense of the word, I`m a practical idealist.”

F. W. de Klerk (1936) South African politician

As quoted in "New S. African Leader`s Reforms Irk Left, Right" http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1990-01-01/news/9001010094_1_klerk-whites-only-zambian-president-kenneth-kaunda (1 January 1990), by Tom Masland, Chicago Tribune 1980s

Love, Thinking, Sense, Future

“I have resolved to demonstrate by a certain and undoubted course of argument, or to deduce from the very condition of human nature, not what is new and unheard of, but only such things as agree best with practice.”

Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) Dutch philosopher

Source: Political Treatise (1677), Ch. 1, Introduction

Nature

“Suffering for love is how I have learned practically everything I know, love of grandmother up and on.”

Djuna Barnes (1892–1982) American Modernist writer, poet and artist

Letter to Emily Holmes Coleman (2 February 1934) http://www.case.edu/artsci/engl/VSALM/mod/brandelmcdaniel/index/library.htm

Love, Suffering, Learning

“The new vision…. does not proceed from a fixed point. Its viewpoint is everywhere, and not limited to any one position [in space]. Nor is it bound by space or time (in accordance with the theory of relativity) [of Einstein ]. In practice, the viewpoint is in front of the plane… Thus this new vision sees architecture as a multiplicity of planes; again flat. This multiplicity composes itself (in an abstract sense) into a flat image [in contrast to Theo van Doesburg who emphasized the dynamic position of the viewer – a central idea of Futurism in 1919].”

Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) Peintre Néerlandais

Quote, 1919, as cited in Mondrian, -The Art of Destruction, Carel Blotkamp, Reaktion Books LTD. London 2001, p. 148
1910's

Idea, Sense, Time, Future

“Whatever the practical origins of aesthetic discernment may have been, it has been used to create great works of art. When the very loftiest human creations are seen to derive from humble origins and functions, what needs revision is not our esteem for these creations but our notion of nobility.”

Robert Nozick book The Nature of Rationality

The Nature of Rationality (1993), Ch. V : Instrumental Rationality and Its Limits; Rationality's Imagination, p. 181

Art

“We have learned coordination of mind and body and the "ki breathing methods". Therefore we can bring the ki of the universe into our bodies at anytime. When a water pump is dried out, no water can flow from the well up through the pump. To start this flow again we must put some water back into the pump. In the same way, ki does not flow strongly in a person suffering from illness or misfortune. Let us practice "kiatsuho" to put back into these people, stimulate their own flow of ki, and give them a fresh start to happiness.”

Koichi Tohei (1920–2011) Japanese aikidoka

16. Kiatsuho - pressing with ki
Ki Sayings (2003)

Happiness, People, Way, Suffering

“You don't love yourself enough. Or you'd love your nature too, and what it demands of you. People who love what they do wear themselves down doing it, they even forget to wash or eat. Do you have less respect for your own nature than the engraver does for engraving, the dancer for the dance, the miser for money or the social climber for status? When they're really possessed by what they do, they'd rather stop eating and sleeping than give up practicing their arts. Is helping others less valuable to you? Not worth your effort?”

Marcus Aurelius book Meditations

Hays translation
V, 1
Meditations (c. 121–180 AD), Book V

Love, Money, People, Art

“Know what makes a sentence more than a random list, practice constructing sentences and explaining what you have done, and you will know how to make sentences forever and you will know too when what you are writing doesn't make the grade because it has degenerated into a mere pile of discrete items.”

Stanley Fish (1938) American academic

Source: How To Write A Sentence And How To Read One (2011), Chapter 3, It's Not The Thought That Counts, p. 33

“All agree that under the Constitution slavery in the States is beyond the reach of any human power except that of the respective States themselves wherein it exists. May we not, then, hope that the long agitation on this subject is approaching its end, and that the geographical parties to which it has given birth, so much dreaded by the Father of his Country, will speedily become extinct? Most happy will it be for the country when the public mind shall be diverted from this question to others of more pressing and practical importance. Throughout the whole progress of this agitation, which has scarcely known any intermission for more than twenty years, whilst it has been productive of no positive good to any human being it has been the prolific source of great evils to the master, to the slave, and to the whole country. It has alienated and estranged the people of the sister States from each other, and has even seriously endangered the very existence of the Union. Nor has the danger yet entirely ceased. Under our system there is a remedy for all mere political evils in the sound sense and sober judgment of the people. Time is a great corrective. Political subjects which but a few years ago excited and exasperated the public mind have passed away and are now nearly forgotten. But this question of domestic slavery is of far graver importance than any mere political question, because should the agitation continue it may eventually endanger the personal safety of a large portion of our countrymen where the institution exists. In that event no form of government, however admirable in itself and however productive of material benefits, can compensate for the loss of peace and domestic security around the family altar. Let every Union-loving man, therefore, exert his best influence to suppress this agitation, which since the recent legislation of Congress is without any legitimate object.”

James Buchanan (1791–1868) American politician, 15th President of the United States (in office from 1857 to 1861)

Inaugural address (4 March 1857).

Love, Happiness, People, Family

“Ironically, conventional quantum mechanics itself involves a vast expansion of physical reality, which may be enough to avoid Einstein Insanity. The equations of quantum dynamics allow physicists to predict the future values of the wave function, given its present value. According to the Schrödinger equation, the wave function evolves in a completely predictable way. But in practice we never have access to the full wave function, either at present or in the future, so this “predictability” is unattainable. If the wave function provides the ultimate description of reality — a controversial issue!”

Frank Wilczek (1951) physicist

we must conclude that “God plays a deep yet strictly rule-based game, which looks like dice to us.”
Einstein’s Parable of Quantum Insanity (2015)

God, Way, Game, Reality

“There is nothing about which a young Christian should be more anxious than maintaining the spirit, the love, the practice of private prayer j and nothing which should more seriously alarm him than any disposition to neglect it.”

John Angell James (1785–1859) British abolitionist

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 470.

Love

“The idea that this world is a playground instead of a battleground has now been accepted in practice by the vast majority of Christians. They are facing Christ and the world. …The ‘worship’ growing out of such a view of life is as far off center as the view itself—a sort of sanctified nightclub without the champagne and the dressed-up drunks.”

Aiden Wilson Tozer (1897–1963) American missionary

This World: Playground or Battleground? pp. 5-6

Life, World, Idea, Christ

““It’s no use!” it was the custom of his grandfather to say. “There’s not a bit o’ use in having brains! All they do is get you into trouble! A lucky idiot’s ten times better off than a brainy man with a jinx on him! A smart man starts thinkin’, and he thinks himself into a jail cell if his luck is bad, and good luck’s wasted on him because it ain’t reasonable and he don’t believe in it when it happens! It’s taken me a lifetime to keep my brains from ruinin’ me! No, sir! I hope none o’ my descendants inherit my brains! I pity ‘em if they do!”
Hoddan had been on Darth not more than four hours. In that time he’d found himself robbed, had resented it, had been the object of two spirited attempts at assassination, had ridden an excruciating number of miles on an unfamiliar animal, and now found himself in a stone dungeon and deprived of food lest feeding him obligate his host not to cut his throat. And he’d gotten into this by himself! He’d chosen it! He’d practically asked for it!
He began strongly to share his grandfather’s disillusioned view of brains.”

Murray Leinster book The Pirates of Zan

Source: The Pirates of Zan (1959), Chapter 4

Food, Hope, Thinking, Time

“An engineering science aims to organize the design principles used in engineering practice into a discipline and thus to exhibit the similarities between different areas of engineering practice and to emphasize the power of fundamental concepts. In short, an engineering science is predominated by theoretical analysis and very often uses the tool of advanced mathematics.”

Qian Xuesen (1911–2009) Chinese rocket scientist

Source: Engineering cybernetics, (1954), p. vii

Mathematics, Science

“Dr. Misra cities Firishta as follows: “In the year A. H. 435 (A. D. 1043) the Raja of Delhy, in conjunction with other Rajas took Hansy, Thanesur, and other dependencies from the governors to whom Modood (the successor of Masud) had entrusted them. The Hindus from thence marched towards the fort of Nagarkota [Kangra] which they besieged for four months and the garrison being distressed for provisions and no succour coming from Lahore was under the necessity of capitulating. The Hindus according to their practice erected new idols… The successor of the Raja of Delhy gave such confidence to the Indian chiefs of Punjab and other places that… they put on the aspect of lions.”

Firishta (1560–1620) Indian historian

Cited in S.R. Goel, (1994) Heroic Hindu resistance to Muslim invaders, 636 AD to 1206 AD. ISBN 9788185990187 , quoting Ram Gopal Misra, Indian Resistance to Early Muslim Invaders Upto 1206 A.D. (1983).
Tãrîkh-i-Firishta

Confidence, Dependency

“[At age 7] In eight hours of concentrated practice between my twice-weekly lessons, I memorized the A major and played it for Persinger.”

Yehudi Menuhin (1916–1999) American violinist and conductor

Violinist Yehudi Menuhin

Age

“This deeply alarming statistic points to one of the most pernicious aspects of the conduct our investigation uncovered: that these policing practices disproportionately harm African American residents. In fact, our review of the evidence found no alternative explanation for the disproportionate impact on African American residents other than implicit and explicit racial bias.”

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

2010s, Update on Investigations in Ferguson (2015)

“The principle that the majority have a right to rule the minority, practically resolves all government into a mere contest between two bodies of men, as to which of them shall be masters, and which of them slaves; a contest, that—however bloody—can, in the nature of things, never be finally closed, so long as man refuses to be a slave.”

Lysander Spooner book No Treason

Source: No Treason (1867–1870), No. I, p. 9

Men, Nature

“Hindus do not believe in conversion. If anyone fears that Hindus are resorting to conversion, let there be a legislation in Parliament to stop this practice. Hindus do not want to change anybody. If you do not want anybody to convert, then do not convert Hindus too.”

Mohan Bhagwat (1950) Indian activist

On the Ghar Wapsi issue, " RSS leader Mohan Bhagwat justifies ‘ghar wapsi’, says will bring back our brothers who have lost their way http://indianexpress.com/article/india/politics/bhagwat-dares-oppn-says-if-dont-like-conversion-bring-law-against-it/", The Indian Express (21 December 2014) 2011-2014

Fear, Change

“A burning at the stake, an afternoon in the rack, headscrews, a douche with boiling water, nails into hands, induced vomiting, ripped tongues, dead babes, human target practice, possession by devils, rape, transvestism, nude orgies in the nunnery. Put them all together and they spell Committed Art, because these are modern times and I certainly hope none of us is opposed to truth.”

Roger Ebert (1942–2013) American film critic, author, journalist, and TV presenter

Review http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-devils of The Devils (1 January 1971) Reviews, Zero star reviews

Truth, Hope, Art, Water

“Who is going to educate the human race in the principles and practice of conservation?”

Aldous Huxley book Brave New World Revisited

Source: Brave New World Revisited (1958), Chapter 12 (p. 112)

Education

“And the imperialists? Will they sit with their arms crossed? No! The system they practice is the cause of the evils from which we are suffering, but they will try to obscure the facts with spurious allegations, of which they are masters.”

Ernesto Che Guevara (1928–1967) Argentine Marxist revolutionary

On Development (1964)

Suffering, Evil

“For the habit of arguing in support of atheism, whether it be done from conviction or in pretence, is a wicked and impious practice.”
Mala enim et impia consuetudo est contra deos disputandi, sive ex animo id fit sive simulate.

Marcus Tullius Cicero (-106–-43 BC) Roman philosopher and statesman

Book II, section 67
De Natura Deorum – On the Nature of the Gods (45 BC)

Support

“If we would gain light either on the theory or the practice of religion: i. We must sincerely desire the light. 2. We must use the light we already have. 3. We must patiently seek light in the double way of prayer and rational inquiry. Never, as long as the world stands, will any religiously benighted soul thus patiently desire and pray and labor for the break of day, without at last seeing the eyelids of the morn unsealed, and the painfully dusky east gradually redden into the sun.”

Enoch Fitch Burr (1818–1907) American astronomer

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 389.

World, Religion, Way, Soul

“As far back as 1624… Louis Savot invented the first heat-circulating fireplace. His unit was installed in the Louvre, Paris, and became the prototype for Ben Franklin's 1742 Pennsylvania stove. The 1624 French fireplace achieved 30 to 45 percent more efficiency than do most American tract home fireplaces of today! Savot surrounded the grate of his creation with a metal chamber, which had warm air outlets above the fire opening. He also supplied the fire with air from under the floor. Thus, room drafts were reduced and combustion efficiency was further improved. Few people are aware that practically all of the technical features of Franklin's Pennsylvania stove were copied from earlier inventors.”

Ken Kern American writer

The Owner Built Home: A How-to-do-it Book (1972)

People, Home

“Technological progress — and it is a pity more do not appreciate it — is the one sound approach to increased employment and higher wages. There is no other way. Irrespective of what is being said to the contrary, new industries can be created, present industries can be expanded, unemployment can be eliminated in a practical way”

Alfred P. Sloan (1875–1966) American businessman

Source: Adventures of a White-Collar Man. 1941, p. 10; Published earlier in: Drugs, Oils & Paints, (1939). Vol. 54-55, p. 335

Way

“"Work out your own salvation." Work, as well as believe; and in the daily practice of faithful obedience, in the daily subjugation of your own spirits to His Divine power, in the daily crucifixion of your flesh with its affections and lusts, in the daily straining after loftier heights of godliness and purer atmospheres of devotion and love, — make more thoroughly your own what you possess. Work into the substance of your souls that which you hare. "Apprehend that for which you are apprehended of Christ;" and remember that not a past act of faith, but a present and continuous life of loving, faithful work in Christ, which is His and yet yours, is the holding fast the beginning of your confidence firm unto the end.”

Alexander Maclaren (1826–1910) British minister

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 127.

Love, Life, Faith, Soul

“Lysenkoism is held up by bourgeois commentators as the supreme demonstration that conscious ideology cannot inform scientific practice and that "ideology has no place in science." On the other hand, some writers are even now maintaining a Lysenkoist position because they believe that the principles of dialectical materialism contradict the claims of genetics. Both of these claims stem from a vulgarisation of Marxist philosophy through deliberate hostility, in the first case, or ignorance, in the second. Nothing in Marx, Lenin or Mao contradicts the particular physical facts and processes of a particular set of natural phenomena in the objective world, because what they wrote about nature was at a high level of abstraction. The error of the Lysenkoist claim arises from attempting to apply a dialectical analysis of physical problems from the wrong end. Dialectical materialism is not, and has never been, a programmatic method for solving particular physical problems. Rather, dialectical analysis provides an overview and a set of warning signs against particular forms of dogmatism and narrowness of thought. It tells us, "Remember that history may leave an important trace. Remember that being and becoming are dual aspects of nature. Remember that conditions change and that the conditions necessary to the initiation of some process may be destroyed by the process itself. Remember to pay attention to real objects in space and time and not lose them utterly in idealized abstractions. Remember that qualitative effects of context and interaction may be lost when phenomena are isolated."”

Richard C. Lewontin (1929) American evolutionary biologist

And above all else, "Remember that all the other caveats are only reminders and warning signs whose application to different circumstances of the real world is contingent."
"The Problem of Lysenkoism" by Richard Lewontin and Richard Levins, in Hilary and Steven Rose (eds.), The Radicalisation of Science, Macmillan, 1976, p. 58.

Hostility, World, Error, History

“Roger: Let's see.. Chris and Vinnie knew each other in high school and were in bands and then moved to Gainesville, Florida for college. I moved to Gainesville, Florida for college. And then Chris had a party and I told him I played guitar. Which I played guitar at that time. And he said you should come and play guitar then I went to practice with a guitar and then they're like, "Oh, by the way, we're going to be kicking out our bass player - would you mind playing bass?" I said OK. So I went out and bought a bass and that was in '92. And that's how it started. Then we started getting into the horn player thing. Shuffled a few horn players over the years but it's been the same main four guys the whole time.”

Roger Manganelli (1973) American musician

School, Way, Guy, Time

“There is, I venture to think, no ground for the ordinarily accepted statement of the relation of philosophy to theology and religion. It is usually said that while^hilosophy is the creation of an individual mind, theology or religion is, like folk-lore and language, the product of the collective mind of a people or a race. This is to confuse philosophy with philosophies, a conmion and, it must be admitted, a not unnatural confusion. But while a philosophy is the creation of a Plato, an Aristotle, a Spinoza, a Kant, or a Hegel, ^hilosophy itself is, like religion, folk-lore and language, a product of the collective mind of humanity. It is advanced, as these are, by individual additions, interpretations and syntheses, but it is none the less quite istinct from such individual contributions. philosophy is humanity's hold on Totality, and it becomes richer and more helpful as man's intellectual horizon widens, as his intellectual vision grows clearer, and as his insights become more numerous and more sure. Theology is philosophy of a particular type. It is an interpretation of Totality in terms of God and His activities. In the impressive words of Principal Caird, that philosophy which is theology seeks "to bind together objects and events in the links of necessary thought, and to find their last ground and reason in that which comprehends and transcends all— the nature of God Himself." Religion is the apprehension and the adoration of the Grod Whom theology postulates.
If the whole history of philosophy be searched for material with which to instruct the beginner in what philosophy really is and in its relation to theology and religion, the two periods or epochs that stand out above all others as useful for this purpose are Greek thought from Thales to Socrates, and that interpretation of the teachings of Christ by philosophy which gave rise, at the hands of the Church Fathers, to Christian theology. In the first period we see the simple, clear-cut steps by which the mind of Europe was led from explanations that were fairy-tales to a natural, well-analyzed, and increasingly profound interpretation of the observed phenomena of Nature. The process is so orderly and so easily grasped that it is an invaluable introduction to the study of philosophic thinking. In the second period we see philosophy, now enriched by the literally huge contributions of Plato, Aristotle and the Stoics, intertwining itself about the simple Christian tenets and building the great system of creeds and thought which has immortalized the names of Athanasius and Hilary, Basil and Gregory, Jerome and Augustine, and which has given color and form to the intellectual life of Europe for nearly two thousand years. For the student of today both these developments have great practical value, and the astonishing neglect and ignorance of them both are most discreditable.”

Nicholas Murray Butler (1862–1947) American philosopher, diplomat, and educator

" Philosophy" (a lecture delivered at Columbia University in the series on science, philosophy and art, March 4, 1908) https://archive.org/details/philosophyalect00butlgoog"

Life, God, People, Religion

“No known human group... simply throw[s] out its dead without any ritual or ceremony. In stark contrast, no animal practices burial of dead individuals of its own species.”

Theodosius Dobzhansky (1900–1975) geneticist and evolutionary biologist

Mourning and Funerals—For Whom (1977)

Animals, Dead

“For applied psychology, whether American or German, it never had the slightest appeal, as is shown by the figures for the relevant journals, Zeitschrift fiir angewandte Psychologie, Journal of Applied Psychology, and Journal of Educational Psychology. Applied psychology had committed itself to knowledge goals that were unlikely to be advanced by the kind of investigative practice associated with Wundt's laboratory. What it was after was knowledge that could be quickly utilized by agencies of social control so as to make their work more efficient and more rationally defensible.”

Kurt Danziger (1926) German academic

66
Constructing the subject: Historical origins of psychological research. 1994

Education, Knowledge

“Parson Amen's speculations on this interesting subject, although this may happen to be the first occasion on which he has ever heard the practice of taking scalps justified by Scripture. Viewed in a proper spirit, they ought merely to convey a lesson of humility, by rendering apparent the wisdom, nay the necessity, of men's keeping them-selves within the limits of the sphere of knowledge they were designed to fill, and convey, when rightly considered, as much of a lesson to the Puseyite, with abstractions that are quite as unintelligible to himself as they are to others; to the high-wrought and dogmatical Calvinist, who in the midst of his fiery zeal, forgets that love is the very essence of the relation between God and man; to the Quaker, who seems to think the cut of a coat essential to salvation; to the descendant of the Puritan, who whether he be Socinian, Calvinist, Universalist, or any other "1st," appears to believe that the "rock" on which Christ declared he would found his church was the "Rock of Plymouth"; and to the unbeliever, who, in deriding all creeds, does not know where to turn to find one to substitute in their stead. Humility, in matters of this sort, is the great lesson that all should teach and learn; for it opens the way to charity, and eventually to faith, and through both of these to hope; finally, through all of these, to heaven.”

James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851) American author

Source: Oak Openings or The bee-hunter (1848), Ch. XI

Love, Wisdom, Men, God

“The message is clear and loud. The fortunes of the persons who rule the country and the contents of the textbooks run in tandem. When Ayub Khan was in power in 1969 and the Urdu book was published it was right and proper that the bulk of it should be in praise of him. When, in 1970, he was no longer on the scene and this English translation was published it was meet that the book should ignore him. All the books published during Zia's years of power followed this practice. The conclusion is inescapable: the students arc not taught contemporary history but an anthology of tributes to current rulers. The authors are not scholars or writers but courtiers.”

Khursheed Kamal Aziz (1927–2009) historian

The Murder of History, critique of history textbooks used in Pakistan, 1993

Books, History, Personality, Country

“The German landscape is something unique that we cannot disturb and have no right to destroy. The more densely populated our 'living space' becomes with settlements, the greater our hunger will grow for unspoilt nature. The ever increasing spiritual damage caused by life within the big city will make this hunger practically uncontrollable… when we build here on this the landscape of our homeland we must be clear that we will protect its beauty; and in places where this beauty has already disappeared, we will reconstruct it.”

Fritz Todt (1891–1942) German engineer and senior Nazi figure

Quoted in "Fritz Todt: Baumeister des Dritten Reiches" (München: F.A. Herbig, 1986), by Franz W. Seidler, p. 113.

Life, Hunger, Beauty, Nature

“So little time we live in Time,
And we learn all so painfully,
That we may spare this hour's term
To practice for Eternity.”

Robert Penn Warren (1905–1989) American poet, novelist, and literary critic

"Bearded Oaks", Eleven Poems on the Same Theme (1942)

Learning, Time

“Bourguiba on people who patronized the Zéro de Conduite (Zero for Conduct), nightclub- "practice a shameful exhibitionism in morbid and degrading dances."”

Habib Bourguiba (1903–2000) Tunisian politician

[Tunisia: Shudder at the Knees, TIME, Friday, Aug. 26, 1966, http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,842668,00.html, September 6, 2011]

People, Dance

“I just feel that there's a little bit of lack of respect and class just to kind of leave a tournament like that and then come out and practice here, especially being the hostess. You know, I don't know the situation, if it's injury or whatever it is. It's just -- it just seemed really weird.”

Annika Sörenstam (1970) Swedish golfer

Annika Sorenstam comments re Michelle Wie - Press Conference 2007 LPGA Championships http://www.asapsports.com/show_interview.php?id=43436

Feeling

“The knowledge of feudal practices is the reason why I was perhaps the most formidable scourge of feudalism.”

François-Noël Babeuf (1760–1797) French political agitator and journalist of the French Revolutionary period

La connaissance des pratiques féodales « est la raison pour laquelle je fus peut-être le plus redoutable fléau de la féodalité. »
[in Gracchus Babeuf avec les Egaux, Jean-Marc Shiappa, Les éditions ouvrières, 1991, 13, 27082 2892-7]
On feudalism

Knowledge

“I began graduate work in the philosophy of sciences at the University of Pennsylvania in 1941 where I came under the influence of the “grand old man” of the department, the eminent philosopher E. A. Singer, Jr. Because of the informality of the department he created I began to collaborate with two younger members of the faculty, both of whom were former students of Singer, Thomas A. Cown and C. West Churchman.
Three aspects of Singer's philosophy had a particularly strong influence on me. First, that the practice of philosophy, its application, was necessary for the development of philosophy itself. Second, that effective work on “real” problems required an interdisciplinary approach. Third, that the social area needed more work than any of the other domains of science and that this was the most difficult.
We developed a concept of a research group that would enable us to practice philosophy in the social domain by dealing with real problems. The organization we designed was called “The Institute of Experimental Method.””

Russell L. Ackoff (1919–2009) Scientist

With the participation of a number of other graduate students in philosophy and a few other members of the faculty we started this institute on a completely informal basis. Preface, cited in Gharajedaghi, Jamshid. Systems thinking: Managing chaos and complexity: A platform for designing business architecture http://booksite.elsevier.com/samplechapters/9780123859150/Front_Matter.pdf. Elsevier, 2011. p. xii Towards a Systems Theory of Organization, 1985

Problem, Strong, Universe, Science