Quotes about practice
page 8

“An anarchist society, far from being a remote ideal, has become a precondition for the practice of ecological principles.”

Murray Bookchin (1921–2006) American libertarian socialist author, orator, and philosopher

Ecology and Revolutionary Thought (1965).

“Consciousness is not wholly, nor even primarily a device for receiving sense-impressions. …there is another outlook than the scientific one, because in practice a more transcendental outlook is almost universally admitted. …who does not prize these moments that reveal to us the poetry of existence?”

Arthur Stanley Eddington (1882–1944) British astrophysicist

Science and the Unseen World (1929)

Sense, Universe

“One thing one can't help noticing is the efficacy of religion before the nineteenth century at dealing with these problems and answering some of these unanswerable questions. By the time of the Great War, religion is practically dead. By the time of the Second World War, it's no help at all.
The chaplains that were attached to the infantry that I was in practically never did spiritual work because they knew they'd be ridiculed. What they did was to apply bandages and surgical scissors, assisting the medics and calming people down psychologically. But everybody recognized that religion was no help whatever.”

Paul Fussell (1924–2012) Recipient of the Purple Heart medal

Humanities interview (1996)

War, People, World, Religion

“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

“Even Voltaire's father could not make a lawyer out of a genius. To be a good lawyer, one must have a mind and a disposition to venerate the past; a respect for precedents; a belief in the wisdom and the sanctity of the dead. Voltaire had genius, imagination, feeling, and poetry, and these gifts always have been, and always will be, incompatible with the practice of law.”

Clarence Darrow (1857–1938) American lawyer and leading member of the American Civil Liberties Union

Voltaire (1916)

Wisdom, Law, Feeling, Imagination

“[T]wo moments, of trance and struggle, mingle in the real life of societyː an undercurrent of conflict and disbelief always counteracts the routines of dependence and deference. Society, no matter how impregnable it seems to its inhabitants, always stands at the edge of the cliff. The petty practical quarrels and normative disputes, endlessly refought to reproduce a social world in the face of divergent interests and changing circumstance, can escalate at any moment into broader and more intense conflicts that put this world at risk.”

Roberto Mangabeira Unger (1947) Brazilian philosopher and politician

Source: Social Theoryː Its Situation and Its Task (1987), p. 205

Life, World, Change, Dependency

“This book can be read as an argument that social democracy is not enough and we can establish something better than social democracy. The explanatory ideas of False Necessity provide an understanding of society that presents the institutional arrangements on which the social democrat relies as the relatively contingent and revisable outcome of a particular sequence of practical and imaginative conflicts. More generally, these explanatory arguments support a view of social reality within which the rejection of social democracy seems reasonable. The programmatic ideas propose an alternative to social democracy that realizes more fully the ideals that the social democrat can only imperfectly achieve and radically redefines these ideals in the course of realizing them.”

Roberto Mangabeira Unger (1947) Brazilian philosopher and politician

Source: False Necessityː Anti-Necessitarian Social Theory in the Service of Radical Democracy (1987), p. 26

Books, Democracy, Imagination, Idea

“It is part of the established tradition in the use of juries as instruments of public justice that the jury be a body truly representative of the community. For racial discrimination to result in the exclusion from Jury service of otherwise qualified groups not only violates our Constitution and the laws enacted under it, but is at war with our basic concepts of a democratic society and a representative government. We must consider this record in the light of these important principles. The fact that the written words of a state's laws hold out a promise that no such discrimination will be practiced is not enough. The Fourteenth Amendment requires that equal protection to all must be given — not merely promised.”

Hugo Black (1886–1971) U.S. Supreme Court justice

Writing for the court, Smith v. Texas, 33 U.S. 129 (1940).

War, Justice, Law, Communication

“"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

“The Gutenberg galaxy was theoretically dissolved in 1905 with the discovery of curved space, but in practice it had been invaded by the telegraph two generations before that.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 286

“I have the same idea with all my books: an attempt to come close to the core of reality, the structure of reality, as opposed to the merely superficial. The realistic novel is remote from art. A novel should heighten life, should give one an illuminating experience; it shouldn't set out what you know already. I just muddle away at it. One gets flashes here and there, which help. I am not a philosopher or an intellectual. Practically anything I have done of any worth I feel I have done through my intuition, not my mind - which the intellectuals disapprove of. And that is why I am anathema to certain kinds of Australian intellectual.”

Patrick White (1912–1990) English-born Australian writer

In The Making (1970)

Life, Books, Art, Feeling

“Duration of selection. At this point a word should be said about how long a given act of selection may take, for when actual cases are examined, the time taken may, at first estimate, seem too long for any practical achievement. The question becomes specially important when the regulator is to be developed for regulation of a very large system. Approximate calculation of the amount of selection likely to be necessary may suggest that it will take a time far surpassing the cosmological; and one may jump to the conclusion that the time taken in actually achieving the selection would have to be equally long. This is far from being the case, however.”

W. Ross Ashby (1903–1972) British psychiatrist

Source: An Introduction to Cybernetics (1956), Part 3: Regulation and control, p. 260

Question, Time

“After being in legal practice for 67 years, I was at first reluctant to write about my professional life because of what C K Daphtary once told me when I pleaded with him to write his own memoirs. “What?” he said angrily, “shall I write one like Setalvad did?” He was referring to the autobiography of a great attorney general Motilal Setalvad — in part self eulogizing. But I was getting on in age and getting forgetful as well, exemplified in that Mathew Arnold quote at the very beginning of the book: “And we forget because we must, and not because we will.” So I compromised. I wrote out the story of my life at the Bar trying to keep the old ego strictly under control. If I have not wholly succeeded, it is only because a man’s ego just cannot be suppressed!”

Fali Sam Nariman (1929) Indian politician

On writing about his autobiography.
Fali Sam Nariman: An Interview

Life, Books, Age, Quotes

“This railway system practically administers the government of the United States, in all things that concern the system, and the governments of the several states of the Union as well. The majority of the United States senators recently elected have been its mere appointees and lobbyists, and agents at the same time for other corporate properties.
In all this corrupt exploitation of the nation by the most degrading sort of economic force, in this debauchery of every citizen of my commonwealth, I am obliged to participate, in order to travel anywhere upon the national highways, whether I go upon God's errands or go in quest of evil to do.”

George D. Herron (1862–1925) American clergyman, writer and activist

Source: Between Caesar and Jesus (1899), pp. 21-22

God, Travel, Evil, Time

“The strategic act by which Grosseteste and his thirteenth- and fourteenth-century successors created modern experimental science was to unite the experimental habit of the practical arts with the rationalism of twelfth-century philosophy.”

Alistair Cameron Crombie (1915–1996) Australian zoologist, historian of science

Robert Grosseteste and the Origins of Experimental Science 1100-1700 (1953)

Art, Science

“In the ranks of Labour there would be no faltering until victory was won and German and Japanese aggression had been utterly defeated. But they had reached a stage when they could look beyond war to peace. In all our parties there was a firm resolve to build up a world system of security that would prevent our fellow men and women again being subjected to the horror of war. The lesson of the war of 1914–18 was…only half learnt. The idea of the League of Nations was right, but it was not put into practice. This time we must see to it that an international order is established in the world with the power and the will, and not merely the desire, to prevent war breaking out again.”

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

Speech to the conference of representatives of the British and Dominion Labour parties, Westminster, London (12 September 1944), quoted in The Times (13 September 1944), p. 8.
War Cabinet

Women, Men, War, World

“There have been applied sciences throughout the ages. … However this so-called practice was not much more than paper in nearly all of these cases, and the various applied sciences were only lacking a bagatelle, namely proper scientific practice. The applied sciences show the application of theoretic doctrines in existing events; but that is precisely what it does, it merely shows. Whereas the scientific practice autonomously puts to use these theories.”

Christian Doppler (1803–1853) mathematician, physicist

in his review of Joseph Beskiba's textbook, published in the Österreichische Blätter für Literatur und Kunst (September 7, 1844), as quoted by [Peter Schuster, Moving the stars: Christian Doppler, his life, his works and principle, and the world after, Living edition, 2005, 3901585052, 78]

Age, Science

“Punitive-repressive attitudes toward extramarital sex are also linked with physical violence, personal crime, and the practice of slavery.”

James W. Prescott (1930) American psychologist

"Body Pleasure and the Origins of Violence" (1975)

Sex, Personality

“I know you've heard it a thousand times before. But it's true — hard work pays off. If you want to be good, you have to practice, practice, practice. If you don't love something, then don't do it.”

Ray Bradbury (1920–2012) American writer

As quoted in Ray Bradbury: The Uncensored Biography (2006) by Gene Beley, p. 284

Love, Time

“He represents a noble and courageous dedication to the service of freedom. He never sought for personal aggrandizement, but under heavy temptation remained loyal to the great Cause. He possessed a character that will abide with us through the generations. He loved his fellowmen, and believed in the ultimate triumph of self-government. But he did not consider France had reached a point where representative democracy would be a success. He was practical. Like Washington, he refused a crown. But while he believed Washington performed a great service in accepting the Presidency of America, he believed he had performed an equally great service in rejecting the Presidency of France. He approved the establishment of our republican institutions, and hoped they would one day be a model for the government of his own country. He recognized the value of native institutions. So, while he was loyal to freedom, he was likewise loyal to the Crown. In moderation, in the gradual evolution of government and society, he perceived the strongest defense against both reaction and revolution, and the greatest hope for permanent progress.”

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

1920s, Ordered Liberty and World Peace (1924)

Love, Hope, Democracy, Courage

“Prophets tend to be impatient with detailed analyses of particular choices made in the past—choices that determined how, month by month, we got to where we are from where we were. They tend to be equally impatient with how we can practically get from where we are today to some modest increments of improvement a month from now. To the prophet such preoccupation seems to be rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.”

James Gustafson (1925) American academic

Source: "Varieties of Moral Discourse: Prophetic, Narrative, Ethical and Policy", p. 50

Past

“Communism means barbarism, but Socialism means, or wishes to mean, cooperation and community of interests, sympathy, the giving to the hands not so large a share as to the brains, but a larger share than hitherto in the wealth they must combine to produce - means, in short, the practical application of Christianity to life, and has in it the secret of an orderly and benign reconstruction.”

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

On Democracy (6 October 1884)

Life, Secret, Communication, Wealth

“Now if plurality and difference belong only to the appearance-form; if there is but one and the same Entity manifested in all living things: it follows that, when we obliterate the distinction between the ego and the non-ego, we are not the sport of an illusion. Rather are we so, when we maintain the reality of individuation, — a thing the Hindus call Maya, that is, a deceptive vision, a phantasma. The former theory we have found to be the actual source of the phaenomenon of Compassion; indeed Compassion is nothing but its translation into definite expression. This, therefore, is what I should regard as the metaphysical foundation of Ethics, and should describe it as the sense which identifies the ego with the non-ego, so that the individual directly recognises in another his own self, his true and very being. From this standpoint the profoundest teaching of theory pushed to its furthest limits may be shown in the end to harmonise perfectly with the rules of justice and loving-kindness, as exercised; and conversely, it will be clear that practical philosophers, that is, the upright, the beneficent, the magnanimous, do but declare through their acts the same truth as the man of speculation wins by laborious research … He who is morally noble, however deficient in mental penetration, reveals by his conduct the deepest insight, the truest wisdom; and puts to shame the most accomplished and learned genius, if the latter's acts betray that his heart is yet a stranger to this great principle, — the metaphysical unity of life.”

Arthur Schopenhauer book On the Basis of Morality

Part IV, Ch. 2, pp. 273 https://archive.org/stream/basisofmorality00schoiala#page/273/mode/2up-274 <br class="br">On the Basis of Morality (1840)

Love, Life, Wisdom, Truth

“I am not a Zionist, nor am I am a practicing Jew, but I have a great deal of sympathy for my fellow Jews and a deep concern for the survival of Israel.”

George Soros (1930) Hungarian-American business magnate, investor, and philanthropist

On Israel, America and AIPAC (2007)

“Because of [my father Robert Thurman, a former Tibetan Buddhist monk], I often get asked if I'm a Buddhist. I always say no, because I have such respect for the rigor of being a practicing religious person. I'm an actress and a mom, and I probably don't have enough of an active spiritual life. And I don't know why people run around calling themselves by the names of religions when they don't actually practice them.”

Uma Thurman (1970) American actress and model

Interview with Laura Yorke. Reader's Digest. July 2006

Life, People, Religion, Moms

“Huebner observes that my use of laugher is my attempt to practice theology in a manner that refuses the attempt to manage the world. In short, my use of laughter is “an appropriate theological antidote to the Constantinian desire for control.””

Stanley Hauerwas (1940) American theologian

Source: The Work of Theology (2015), p. 217

World, Laughter

“I was brought up under a system in which discretion when given was practically absolute. It was the unbroken tradition of Westminster Hall. I believe that system worked justice and saved expense. I hope I may be forgiven if, with what energy remains to me, I strive after many years' experience and drawing near the close of my judicial career, to preserve this unfettered discretion which in my opinion, was given me by Parliament, and which I have never, at least intentionally abused.”

John Coleridge, 1st Baron Coleridge (1820–1894) British lawyer, judge and Liberal politician

Huxley v. West London Extension Railway Co. (1886), L. R. 17 Q. B. D. 383.

Justice, Hope, Drawing

“Good-breeding, or true politeness, is the art of showing men by external signs the internal regard we have for them. It arises from good sense, improved by good company. It must be acquired by practice and not by books.”

Thomas Jackson (1824–1863) Confederate general

Misattributed, Jackson's personal book of maxims

Men, Books, Art, Sense

“It is not of special importance to me what the law says about marriage. It is of overwhelming importance, however, who it is that rules me. Today's decree says that my Ruler, and the Ruler of 320 million Americans coast-to-coast, is a majority of the nine lawyers on the Supreme Court. The opinion in these cases is the furthest extension in fact—and the furthest extension one can even imagine—of the Court's claimed power to create “liberties” that the Constitution and its Amendments neglect to mention. This practice of constitutional revision by an unelected committee of nine, always accompanied (as it is today) by extravagant praise of liberty, robs the People of the most important liberty they asserted in the Declaration of Independence and won in the Revolution of 1776: the freedom to govern themselves.”

Antonin Scalia (1936–2016) former Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

Dissenting, Obergefell v. Hodges, 135 S. Ct. 2584, 192 L. Ed. 2d 609 (2015) ; decided June 26, 2015.
2010s

Marriage, People, Law, Imagination

“Indeed, once Kant had discovered the Humean problem of skepticism about the universality and necessity of first principles, he generalized it not only to the first principles of “speculative philosophy,” that is, theoretical cognition, but also to the first principle of practical philosophy, the fundamental principle of morality. Thus, from a methodological point of view, Kant’s project in philosophy became that of undermining both Humean and Pyrrhonian skepticism in both theoretical and practical philosophy, and, much more incidentally, along the way refuting Cartesian skepticism about external objects as a nagging but by no means central problem in theoretical philosophy.”

Paul Guyer (1948) American philosopher

Kant (2006; 2014), Introduction

Way, Problem, Universe

“But if man's affection be one of passion, then it is moved also in regard to other animals: for since the passion of pity is caused by the afflictions of others; and since it happens that even irrational animals are sensible to pain, it is possible for the affection of pity to arise in a man with regard to the sufferings of animals. Now it is evident that if a man practice a pitiful affection for animals, he is all the more disposed to take pity on his fellow-men: wherefore it is written (Prov. 12:10): "The just regardeth the lives of his beasts: but the bowels of the wicked are cruel." Consequently the Lord, in order to inculcate pity to the Jewish people, who were prone to cruelty, wished them to practice pity even with regard to dumb animals, and forbade them to do certain things savoring of cruelty to animals. Hence He prohibited them to "boil a kid in the milk of its dam"; and to "muzzle the ox that treadeth out the corn"; and to slay "the dam with her young."”

Thomas Aquinas book Summa Theologica

I-II, q. 102, art. 6 ad. 8
Summa Theologica (1265–1274)

Men, Pain, People, Affliction

“When the business man rebukes the idealism of his office-boy, it is commonly in some such speech as this: “Ah, yes, when one is young, one has these ideals in the abstract and these castles in the air; but in middle age they all break up like clouds, and one comes down to a belief in practical politics, to using the machinery one has and getting on with the world as it is.” Thus, at least, venerable and philanthropic old men now in their honoured graves used to talk to me when I was a boy. But since then I have grown up and have discovered that these philanthropic old men were telling lies. What has really happened is exactly the opposite of what they said would happen. They said that I should lose my ideals and begin to believe in the methods of practical politicians. Now, I have not lost my ideals in the least; my faith in fundamentals is exactly what it always was. What I have lost is my old childlike faith in practical politics.”

G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) English mystery novelist and Christian apologist

"The Ethics of Elfland" https://www.ccel.org/ccel/chesterton/orthodoxy.vii.html in Delphi Works of G. K. Chesterton

Men, Age, World, Faith

“Like a fish in the wind, jumps right out of its knowledge, and lands on the sand. Like when the wind comes ruffling at last, to sailors adrift, trying to manage the broken springs of their muscles, and lever and lift their well rubbed oars, making tiny dents, in the ocean. Like when they're cutting ash poles in the hills, the treetops fall as soft as cloth. Like oak trees swerving out of the hills, and setting their faces to the wind, day after day being practically lifted away, they are lashed to the earth, and never let go, gripping on darkness. All day in a trance of war, men murder each other, but at dusk, silence, only the fingers of fire lifting their questions to the mainland. Is there anybody there, please help. Help. help. Until he's full, and of his own iron will walks on.”

Alice Oswald (1966) British poet

Men, War, Spring, Question

“A proper measure of democracy should be put into effect in the army, chiefly by abolishing the feudal practice of bullying and beating and by having officers and men share weal and woe. Once this is done, unity will be achieved between officers and men, the combat effectiveness of the army will be greatly increased, and there will be no doubt of our ability to sustain the long, cruel war.”

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

On Protracted Warfare (1938)
Original: (zh-CN) 军队应实行一定限度的民主化，主要地是废除封建主义的打骂制度和官兵生活同甘苦。这样一来，官兵一致的目的就达到了，军队就增加了绝大的战斗力，长期的残酷的战争就不患不能支持。

Men, War, Democracy

“I have said this on many a previous occasion: that had the mix in Singapore been different, had it been 75% Indians, 15% Malays and the rest Chinese, it would not have worked. Because they believe in the politics of contention, of opposition. But because the culture was such that the populace sought a practical way out of their difficulties, therefore it has worked.”

Lee Kuan Yew (1923–2015) First Prime Minister of Singapore

[President's Address, Debate on President's Address, Parliament of Singapore, http://sprs.parl.gov.sg/search/topic.jsp?currentTopicID=00062986-ZZ&currentPubID=00069476-ZZ&topicKey=00069476-ZZ.00062986-ZZ_1%2Bid005_19850301_S0005_T00051-president-address%2B, March 01 1985, January 16 2015]
1980s

Way

“Homosexuality appears as one of the forms of sexuality when it was transposed from the practice of sodomy onto a kind of interior androgyny, a hermaphroditism of the soul. The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species.”

Michel Foucault (1926–1984) French philosopher

Vol I: La volonté de savoir
An Introduction. NY: Pantheon. Translated from French by Robert Hurley. Page 43
History of Sexuality (1976–1984)

Soul, Appearance

“Sheep are especially sensitive to the exact moment of the turn of the tide. In this game, nine tethered sheep react, pull on the stakes, jolt the chairs and rattle the tea-cups. Bets are taken on the combined sensitivity of any three lines of sheep -- read vertically, horizontally, or diagonally. Since there are normally three tide-turns every twenty-four hours, it is normal practice to take the best of three results. Reliable clocks, calendars, and time-tables are used to determine the accuracy of the sheep's forecast.”

Peter Greenaway (1942) British film director

Drowning By Numbers

Game, Time, Reading, Tea

“Frightened by the specter of “Islamic fundamentalism” we readily reject the “extremism” of “fundamentalists” and identify with “moderation” and “rationality,” the ostensible “values” of “western civilization.” We thus acquiesce in the practices of the global corporations and western political power.”

Richard A. Horsley (1939) Biblical scholar

Source: Religion and Empire: People, Power, and the Life of the Spirit (2003), p. 48

“We are living in 1937, and our universities, I suggest, are not half-way out of the fifteenth century. We have made hardly any changes in our conception of university organization, education, graduation, for a century - for several centuries. The three or four years' course of lectures, the bachelor who knows some, the master who knows most, the doctor who knows all, are ideas that have come down unimpaired from the Middle Ages. Nowadays no one should end his learning while he lives and these university degrees are preposterous. It is true that we have multiplied universities greatly in the past hundred years, but we seem to have multiplied them altogether too much upon the old pattern.. [A] new university is just another imitation of all the old universities that have ever been. Educationally we are still for all practical purposes in the coach and horse and galley stage.”

H. G. Wells book World Brain

World Brain (1938)

Age, Education, Way, Idea

“I hope that we all agree that the aim is to provide the right education for every child. For some children, that will be an education that is firmly based in learning practical and vocational skills. For others, it will be an education based on academic excellence.”

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)

Children, Education, Hope, Learning

“In sum: banking theory and practice, as immobilizing and fixating forces, fail to acknowledge men and women as historical beings; problem-posing theory and practice take the people's historicity as their starting point.”

Paulo Freire (1921–1997) educator and philosopher

Source: Pedagogia do oprimido (Pedagogy of the Oppressed) (1968, English trans. 1970), Chapter 2

Women, Men, People, Problem

“For any type of social management, It is of great practical importance that levels of quasi-stationary equilibria can be changed in either of two ways: by adding forces in the desired direction, or by diminishing opposing forces.”

Kurt Lewin (1890–1947) German-American psychologist

Source: 1940s, Quasi-Stationary Social Equilibria and the Problem of Permanent Change, 1947, p. 40.

Way, Change

“The invention of gunpowder and the constant improvement of firearms are enough in themselves to show that the advance of civilization has done nothing practical to alter or deflect the impulse to destroy the enemy, which is central to the very idea of war.”

Carl von Clausewitz book On War

On War (1832), Book 1

War, Idea

“Investigative practice therefore constitutes an area of considerable anxiety within the discipline of psychology. Concern with questions of methodological orthodoxy often takes the place of concern about theoretical orthodoxy when research or its results are discussed and evaluated. These preoccupations with the purity of method frequently deteriorate to a kind of method fetishism or "methodolatry." From this point of view there may be something distinctly subversive about the suggestion that the sphere of methodology is not a realm of pure reason but an area of human social activity governed by mundane circumstances like any other social activity. Nevertheless, the consequences of this suggestion should be explored, for not to do so exposes one to all the risks entailed by a naive and self-deluded style of scientific practice.”

Kurt Danziger (1926) German academic

Source: Constructing the subject: Historical origins of psychological research. 1994, p. 5-6

Question

“It makes a tremendous emotional and practical difference to one whether one accepts the universe in the drab discolored way of stoic resignation to necessity, or with the passionate happiness of Christian saints.”

William James (1842–1910) American philosopher, psychologist, and pragmatist

Lecture II, "Circumscription of the Topic"
1900s, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)

Happiness, Way, Universe, Passion

“One Western author who has become very popular among India’s history-writers is the American scholar Prof. Richard M. Eaton…. A selective reading of his work, focusing on his explanations but keeping most of his facts out of view, is made to serve the negationist position regarding temple destruction in the name of Islam. Yet, the numerically most important body of data presented by him concurs neatly with the classic (now dubbed “Hindutva”) account. In his oft-quoted paper “Temple desecration and Indo-Muslim states”, he gives a list of “eighty” cases of Islamic temple destruction. "Only eighty", is how the secularist history-rewriters render it, but Eaton makes no claim that his list is exhaustive. Moreover, eighty isn't always eighty. Thus, in his list, we find mentioned as one instance: "1994: Benares, Ghurid army. Did the Ghurid army work one instance of temple destruction? Eaton provides his source, and there we read that in Benares, the Ghurid royal army "destroyed nearly one thousand temples, and raised mosques on their foundations. (Note that unlike Sita Ram Goel, Richard Eaton is not chided by the likes of Sanjay Subramaniam for using Elliott and Dowson's "colonialist translation.") This way, practically every one of the instances cited by Eaton must be read as actually ten, or a hundred, or as in this case even a thousand temples destroyed. Even Eaton's non-exhaustive list, presented as part of "the kind of responsible and constructive discussion that this controversial topic so badly needs", yields the same thousands of temple destructions ascribed to the Islamic rulers in most relevant pre-1989 histories of Islam and in pro-Hindu publications…. If the “eighty” (meaning thousands of) cases of Islamic iconoclasm are only a trifle, the “abounding” instances of Hindu iconoclasm, “thoroughly integrated” in Hindu political culture, can reasonably be expected to number tens of thousands. Yet, Eaton’s list, given without reference to primary sources, contains, even in a maximalist reading (i. e., counting “two” when one king takes away two idols from one enemy’s royal temple), only 18 individual cases…. In this list, cases of actual destruction amount to exactly two…”

Koenraad Elst (1959) orientalist, writer

2000s, Ayodhya: The Case Against the Temple (2002)

Way, Quotes, History, Reading

“If an event really happened which was not a part of the uniformity of nature, it would have two properties: no evidence could give the right to believe it to any except those whose actual experience it was; and no inference worthy of belief could be founded upon it at all.
Are we then bound to believe that nature is absolutely and universally uniform? Certainly not; we have no right to believe anything of this kind. The rule only tells us that in forming beliefs which go beyond our experience, we may make the assumption that nature is practically uniform so far as we are concerned. Within the range of human action and verification, we may form, by help of this assumption, actual beliefs; beyond it, only those hypotheses which serve for the more accurate asking of questions.”

William Kingdon Clifford (1845–1879) English mathematician and philosopher

The Ethics of Belief (1877), The Limits Of Inference

Question, Nature, Universe, Help

“A Decalogue of Canons for Observation in Practical Life”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

1820s

Life

“Analysis of the supply of money, and in particular of changes in the supply of money, is simple in principle but extremely complex in practice, both in our hypothetical world and in the current real world. Simple in principle, because the supply of money is whatever the monetary authorities make if, complex in practice, because the decisions of the monetary authorities depend on numerous factors.”

Milton Friedman (1912–2006) American economist, statistician, and writer

Source: Money Mischief (1992), Ch. 2 The Mystery of Money

Money, World, Decision, Change

“Though "none by searching can find out God, or the Almighty to perfection," yet I am persuaded, that if mankind would dare to exercise their reason as freely on those divine topics as they do in the common concerns of life, they would, in a great measure, rid themselves of their blindness and superstition, gain more exalted ideas of God and their obligations to him and one another, and be proportionally delighted and blessed with the views of his moral government, make better members of society, and acquire, manly powerful incentives to the practice of morality, which is the last and greatest perfection that human nature is capable of.”

Ethan Allen (1738–1789) American general

Source: Reason: The Only Oracle Of Man (1784), Chapter I Section I - Of Reforming Mankind from Superstition and Error, and the Good Consequences of it"

Life, God, Exercises, Search

“Wherever we look the dreadful disintegration of the bridges of life, the capillaries and the bodies they have created, is evident, which has been caused by the mechanical and mindless work of man, who has torn away the soul from the Earth's blood - water. The more the engineer endeavors to channel water, of whose spirit and nature he is today still ignorant, by the shortest and straightest route to the sea, the more the flow of water weighs into the bends, the longer its path and the worse the water will become. The spreading of the most terrible disease of all, of cancer, is the necessary consequence of such unnatural regulatory works. These mistaken activities - our work - must legitimately lead to increasingly widespread unemployment, because our present methods of working, which have a purely mechanical basis, are already destroying not only all of wise Nature's formative processes, but first and foremost the growth of the vegetation itself, which is being destroyed even as it grows. The drying up of mountain springs, the change in the whole pattern of motion of the groundwater, and the disturbance in the blood circulation of the organism - Earth - is the direct result of modern forestry practices. The pulse-beat of the Earth was factually arrested by the modern timber production industry. Every economic death of a people is always preceded by the death of its forests. The forest is the habitat of water and as such the habitat of life processes too, whose quality declines as the organic development of the forest is disturbed. Ultimately, due to a law which functions with awesome constancy, it will slowly but surely come around to our turn. Our accustomed way of thinking in many ways, and perhaps even without exception, is opposed to the true workings of Nature. Our work is the embodiment of our will. The spiritual manifestation of this work is its effect. When such work is carried out correctly, it brings happiness, but when carried out incorrectly, it assuredly brings misery.”

Viktor Schauberger (1885–1958) austrian philosopher and inventor

Viktor Schauberger: Our Senseless Toil (1934)

Life, Death, Happiness, People

“It’s relevant that people whose polling places are schools are more likely to vote for sales taxes that will fund education. Or that judges become more likely to deny parole the longer they go without a break. Or that people serve themselves more food when using a large plate. Such effects, even when they’re small, can make a practical difference, especially when they influence votes and justice and health. But their existence doesn’t undermine the idea of a rational and deliberative self. To think otherwise would be like concluding that because salt adds flavor to food, nothing else does.”

Paul Bloom (1963) Canadian/American psychologist

“The War on Reason,” The Atlantic, March 2014, pp. 64–70

People, Health, Education, School

“According to a stagist conception of progressive history (which is usually blind to its implicit teleology), the work of figures like Foucault, Derrida and other cutting-edge French theorists is often intuitively affiliated with a form of profound and sophisticated critique that presumably far surpasses anything found in the socialist, Marxist or anarchist traditions. It is certainly true and merits emphasis that the Anglophone reception of French theory, as John McCumber has aptly pointed out, had important political implications as a pole of resistance to the false political neutrality, the safe technicalities of logic and language, or the direct ideological conformism operative in the McCarthy-supported traditions of Anglo-American philosophy. However, the theoretical practices of figures who turned their back on what Cornelius Castoriadis called the tradition of radical critique—meaning anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist resistance—surely contributed to the ideological drift away from transformative politics. According to the spy agency itself, post-Marxist French theory directly contributed to the CIA’s cultural program of coaxing the left toward the right, while discrediting anti-imperialism and anti-capitalism, thereby creating an intellectual environment in which their imperial projects could be pursued unhindered by serious critical scrutiny from the intelligentsia.”

Gabriel Rockhill (1972) philosopher

"The CIA reads French Theory: On the Intellectual Labor of Dismantling the Cultural Left" (2017)

History, Support, Falseness

“All moral doctrine, all practical suggestions about how we ought to live, depend on some belief about what human nature is like.”

Mary Midgley (1919–2018) British philosopher and ethicist

Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature (1979).

Nature, Dependency

“I'm surprised she's friends with the Tories, Helen Bonham-Carter, because she's an artist and I'm not saying it's right or wrong, artists do tend, historically, to be on the left. People on the right tend to be practical, level-headed, capable, unsentimental realists; people on the left tend to be people with dreams, hope, vision, imagination. You have to have imagination on the left, don't you? You have to be able to look at Ed Miliband and imagine that he represents anything other than the death of the post-war socialist dream. Ed Miliband, how did he manage that; how did he make the Labour party less popular than under Blair? That's like catching a baby that's been thrown out of an aeroplane and then tripping up and dropping it in a gutter.”

Stewart Lee (1968) English stand-up comedian, writer, director and musician

Series 3 Episode 3: "Satire"

Death, War, People, Dreams

“Train any population rationally, and they will be rational. Furnish honest and useful employments to those so trained, and such employments they will greatly prefer to dishonest or injurious occupations. It is beyond all calculation the interest of every government to provide that training and that employment; and to provide both is easily practicable.”

Robert Owen (1771–1858) Welsh social reformer

A New View of Society (1813-1816)

Training

“But a sculpture which sets out to achieve the same ends demands an almost unbelievable effort of concentration. Practically none of the episodes or moments of such a legend, [of Prometheus ] really lends itself to sculpture, and the sculptors of the nineteenth century were often quite careless or foolish in the choice of the moment which they set out to represent. Their works could thus become cluttered with all sorts of narrative details which detract from the monumental quality of the whole... That's why, in my 'Prometheus', I represent the fire as an integral part of the presence or appearance of the hero; he stands there before us in all his awe-inspiring grandeur, a human figure that seemed in the eyes of the men who first saw him to be actually consumed by the fire that he was bearing.”

Ossip Zadkine (1890–1967) French sculptor

c. 1960
Source: 1960 - 1968, Dialogues – conversations with.., quotes, c. 1960, p. 154

Men, Effort, Appearance, Parting

“I regard criticism as an art, and if in this country and in this age it is practiced with honesty, it is no more remunerative than the work of an avant-garde film artist. My dear anonymous letter writers, if you think it is so easy to be a critic, so difficult to be a poet or a painter or film experimenter, may I suggest you try both? You may discover why there are so few critics, so many poets.”

Pauline Kael (1919–2001) American film critic

"Replying to Listeners" http://www.paulrossen.com/paulinekael/replylisteners.html, broadcast on KPFA (January 1963).

Age, Art, Thinking, Country

“While working at Anna Freud's house, I found an unpublished letter in which he [Freud] told Fliess, less than two weeks after he gave the paper [The Aetiology of Hysteria], "I am as isolated as you could wish me to be: the word has been given out to abandon me, and a void is forming around me." Both the immediate response to the paper, and the subsequent response were ones that Freud had not anticipated: his colleagues thought he was crazy to believe his women patients. This was bound to have a disastrous impact on a young physician with a growing family, eager to open a neurological/psychiatric clinical practice. Where were his referrals to come from, if his colleagues thought he was completely daft? I made this point to Anna Freud.
"Do you believe", I said, "that this could have had anything to do with his later abandonment of the theory?"
"No." She was adamant.
"But tell me, Miss Freud, why did you omit this passage from your published edition of the letters?"”

Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson (1941) American writer and activist

"Because it makes my father sound so paranoid," was her response.
"But if it was the truth, then he was not paranoid, he was simply perceptive."
Source: Final Analysis (1990), pp. 175-176

Women, Truth, Family, Housing

“To be “reasonable” means to put oneself into a special, rarely happy relation to the sensuous. “Be reasonable” means, practically speaking, do not trust your impulses, do not listen to your body, learn control, starting with your own sensuousness. But intellect and sensuousness are inseparable. Torless’s outbreak of sweating after two pages of the Critique of Pure Reason contains as much truth as the whole of Kantianism. The understood mutual interaction of physis and logos is philosophy, not what is spoken.”

Peter Sloterdijk (1947) German philosopher

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

Happiness, Truth, Learning

“The majority of humans solve their issues by relying on dead methods because those majorities are dead. Attempts and errors, blindly imitations, putting into practice the first idea that comes to mind, reactions based on conditioning and dealing with problems in a linear pattern or by using fragile methods are some instances. Most of the people are not aware that these dead methods will end up to dead results.”

Elia M. Ramollah (1973) founder and leader of the El Yasin Community

The Great Master of Thought (Amen- Vol.3), Observing management

People, Error, Idea, Problem

“Our idealists must own that their velleity to abolish all suffering is most fully expressed in the Fifth Wisdom of Lamaism, the doctrine that teaches that "no durable happiness, nor yet security, for any sentient being can exist while others are a prey to suffering." That truth cannot be questioned and you may take it to heart: in practical terms it means we got ourselves born on the wrong planet -- in the wrong universe.”

Revilo P. Oliver (1908–1994) American philologist

"On the Roof of the World", Liberty Bell magazine (December 1987)
1970s, 1980s

Wisdom, Happiness, Truth, Question

“My body is a little bit sore from all of the practicing and playing and training, and your mind gets a little tired of it, too. It's nice to be able to recharge and come back fresh for the remainder of the year.”

Tiger Woods (1975) American professional golfer

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0971329/bio

Training

“The dominant, almost general, idea of revolution — particularly the Socialist idea — is that revolution is a violent change of social conditions through which one social class, the working class, becomes dominant over another class, the capitalist class. It is the conception of a purely physical change, and as such it involves only political scene shifting and institutional rearrangements. Bourgeois dictatorship is replaced by the "dictatorship of the proletariat" — or by that of its "advance guard," the Communist Party. Lenin takes the seat of the Romanovs, the Imperial Cabinet is rechristened Soviet of People's Commissars, Trotsky is appointed Minister of War, and a labourer becomes the Military Governor General of Moscow. That is, in essence, the Bolshevik conception of revolution, as translated into actual practice.”

Emma Goldman book My Disillusionment in Russia

My Disillusionment in Russia (1923)

War, People, Idea, Change

“Love can't flourish in a "society" based on money and meaningless work, but rather requires complete economic, as well as personal, freedom, leisure time and the opportunity to engage in intensely absorbing, emotionally satisfying activities which, when shared with those you respect, lead to deep friendship, but which our "society" provides practically no opportunity to engage in.”

Valerie Solanas (1936–1988) American radical feminist and writer. Attempted to assassinate Andy Warhol.

Source: SCUM MANIFESTO (1967), p. 11.

Love, Money, Friendship, Freedom

“I'm not a drummer anymore, on my gravestone, if there is one, if anyone writes anything about me besides hopefully being a dad, it would be that I sang in my band when I was in my 20s. So I was like, "Yeah, I should probably focus on this a little more," so I just practiced a lot.”

Patrick Stump (1984) American musician

When asked about his singing.
AbsolutePunk.net, Patrick Stump, Part 1 - 10.06.08

Singing

“Territory we do not want; having, it is probable, already more than we well know how to manage. Instead therefore of countenancing that vagrant and unsettled way of life which has become habitual to so many of our people; and that very general passion they have to be for ever running back in quest of fresh lands; a practice not more unpropitious to all agricultural improvements, than likely to keep us involved in Indian wars; let us enlarge our empire by the civilization of the Indians; who already have a better title to any of our un-located lands, than we can possibly give any new comers”

Jonathan Boucher (1738–1804) English minister

[He goes on to cite the example of Sir William Johnson's work with the Mohawks as Indian Superintendent, and to explain further what he means by "civilization"- in particular, encouraging the use of agriculture instead of hunting].
"A View of the Causes and Consequences of the American Revolution" (London, Robinson, 1797)

Life, War, People, Way

“The problem of the twenty-first century, then, is the problem of the color-blind. This problem is simple: it believes that to redress racism, we need to not consider race in social practice, notably in the sphere of governmental action. The state, we are told, must be above race. … We are led to believe that racism is prejudicial behavior of one party against another rather than the coagulation of socioeconomic injustice against groups. If the state acts without prejudice (this is, if it acts equally), then that is proof of the end of racism. Unequal socioeconomic conditions of today, based as they are on racisms of the past and of the present, are thereby rendered untouchable by the state. Color-blind justice privatizes inequality and racism, and it removes itself from the project of redistributive and anti-racist justice. This is the genteel racism of our new millennium.”

Vijay Prashad (1967) Indian historian and journalist

Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting: Afro-Asian Connections and the Myth of Cultural Purity (2002), p. 38

Justice, Color, Behavior, Problem

“The masses had already confused the meanings of Tasawwuf and it was believed that Sufis are those miserable failures in the world, who escape reality and pass their time as recluses in dark corners of oratories or mosques and that, they are incapable of self-sustenance and cannot courageously face the rigors of practical life. But this concept is not correct. The real Tasawwuf was taught by the Holy Prophet-SAW himself to his students, the Companions.”

Ameer Muhammad Akram Awan (1934–2017) Pakistani Sufi leader

Life, World, Failure, Courage

“To the extent that we are free we are like God, who has no need of an idea of a God over Godself or of an incentive other than the moral law itself. But to the extent that we are also natural beings, we desire our own happiness in everything else that we desire, and we need the practical postulate of God to bring that happiness together with morality.”

John E. Hare (1949) British philosopher

Source: “Ethics and Religion: Two Kantian Arguments” (2011), p. 165

God, Happiness, Law, Idea

“Men whose research is based on shared paradigms are committed to the same rules and standards for scientific practice. That commitment and the apparent consensus it produces are prerequisites for normal science, i. e., for the genesis and continuation of a particular research tradition.”

Thomas Kuhn book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

Source: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), II. The Route to Normal Science, p. 11 (2012 ed.)

Men, Science

“The people with the strong, brave exteriors are just as weak and vulnerable as the rest of us. And of course they never admit to their childish practices, their moments of weakness or absurdity, and then the rest of us think that’s how it should be.”

Alexander McCall Smith (1948) British writer

Love Over Scotland, chapter 17.
The 44 Scotland Street series

People, Thinking, Strong

“So many really divine individuals humanity has not already produced! Heros in the moral sense, who never got tired to practice renouncement and charity; bright intelligences who opened to the mind new ways and horizons; poets and wonderful artists, who created for him the image of an ideal world, the reflect of perfection. These are as many proofs of the presence of the absolu in the midst of humanity, for him that does not discover the immediate proof of that in himself.”

African Spir (1837–1890) Russian philosopher

Source: Words of a Sage : Selected thoughts of African Spir (1937), p. 44.

World, Way, Intelligence, Sense

“Though the principles of the banking trade may appear somewhat abstruse, the practice is capable of being reduced to strict rules. To depart upon any occasion from these rules, in consequence of some flattering speculation of extraordinary gain, is almost always extremely dangerous, and frequently fatal to the banking company which attempts it.”

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

Source: (1776), Book V, Chapter I, Part III, p. 820.

Appearance

“They (Native Americans) didn't have any rights to the land, and there was no reason for anyone to grant them rights which they had not conceived and were not using. What was it that they were fighting for, when they opposed white men on this continent? For their wish to continue a primitive existence, their 'right' to keep part of the earth untouched, unused and not even as property, but just keep everybody out so that you will live practically like an animal, or a few caves above it. Any white person who brings the element of civilization has the right to take over this continent.”

Ayn Rand (1905–1982) Russian-American novelist and philosopher

Q and A session following her address to the graduating class of The United States Military Academy at West Point, New York, March 6, 1974 - found in Endgame: Resistance, by Derrick Jensen, Seven Stories Press, 2006, pg 220

Men, Animals, Fight, Parting

“From a succession of historians we learn of a particularly gruesome component of Carthaginian daily life: the routine and ritualized sacrificing of not just animals—animal sacrifice was a common religious activity of all Mediterranean cultures—but of infants and children. …Greek and Roman historians were unanimous in their abhorrence of the Carthaginian practice…”

Jeffrey H. Schwartz (1948) American anthropologist

What the Bones Tell Us (1997)

Life, Children, Learning, Success

“The issues revolve around experiences of truth and fairness but also address the practice of having choices forced upon you as opposed to freely making your own based on true-to-the-moment information instead of calculated misinformation.”

Aberjhani (1957) author

(from 2012 essay Catching Up with Our Humanity).
From Articles, Essays, and Poems, On Guerrilla Decontextualization

Truth

“We can't use a double standard — there’s no room for double standards in American politics — for measuring our own and other people's policies. Our demands for democratic practices in other lands will be no more effective than the guarantee of those practices in our own country.”

Hubert H. Humphrey (1911–1978) Vice-President of the USA under Lyndon B. Johnson

Address to the Democratic National Convention http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/huberthumphey1948dnc.html (July 14, 1948), Convention Hall, Philadelphia.

People, Country

“Whether religion is a divisive or reconciling force depends on our certainty or our humility as we practice our faith in our politics.”

John Danforth (1936) American politician

Page 16
Faith and Politics (2006)
Context: Whether religion is a divisive or reconciling force depends on our certainty or our humility as we practice our faith in our politics. If we believe that we know God's truth and that we can embody that truth in a political agenda, we divide the realm of politics into those who are on God's side, which is our side, and those with whom we disagree, who oppose the side of God. This is neither good religion nor good politics. It is not consistent with following a Lord who reached out to a variety of people — prostitutes, tax collectors, lepers. If politics is the art of compromise, certainty is not really politics, for how can one compromise with God's own truth? Reconciliation depends on acknowledging that God's truth is greater than our own, that we cannot reduce it to any political platform we create, no matter how committed we are to that platform, and that God's truth is large enough to accommodate the opinions of all kinds of people, even those with whom we strongly disagree.

Faith, Religion, Dependency

“I was twenty-one when I first went to New York, and I was so fascinated by the architecture and glad that something like that existed and that I was able to have this visual experience that I thought to myself, this is where I want to live. To me, New York had a direct link with sculpture – that must have been it. Although at twenty-one I wasn't a sculptress yet, I was just starting my studies and I didn't even know what I wanted to do... New York is a city of incredible stability and solidity. And then the height of the buildings – that impressed me, like the people who always seemed a bit happier than the Germans in the street. When I came back to Germany it seemed to me that it wasn't particularly nice, my visual surroundings – it was all so dreary. And modernism hardly features at all in Germany. Okay, there was Bauhaus and there was this and that, but modernism is practically non-existent in architecture.”

Isa Genzken (1948) German sculptor

2001 - 2010, Isa Genzken in conversation with Wolfgang Tillmans' (2003)

People, Study

“Generally speaking, if we look at sports we find that their strong point is that because they are competitive they are interesting, and young people are likely to be attracted to them. No matter how valuable the method of physical education, if it is not put into practice, it will serve no purpose — therein lies the advantage of sports. But, in this regard there are matters to which we must also give a great deal of consideration. First, so-called sports were not created for the purpose of physical education; one competes for another purpose, namely, to win. Accordingly, the muscles are not necessarily developed in a balanced way, and in some cases the body is pushed too far or even injured. For that reason, while there is no doubt that sports are a good thing, serious consideration must be given to the selection of the sport and the training method. Sports must not be undertaken carelessly, over-zealously, or without restraint. However, it is safe to say that competitive sports are a form of physical education that should be promoted with this advice in mind. The reason I have worked to popularize sports for more than twenty years and that I have strived to bring the Olympic Games to Japan is entirely because I recognize these merits. However, in times like these, when many people are enthusiastic about sports, I would like to remind them of the adverse effects of sports as well. I also urge them to keep in mind the goals of physical education—to develop a sound body that is useful to you in your daily life — and be sure to consider whether or not the method of training is in keeping with the concept of”

Kanō Jigorō (1860–1938) Japanese educator and judoka

http://www.judoinfo.com/seiryoku2.htm seiryoku zenyo
"Judo and Physical Training" in Mind Over Muscle : Writings from the Founder of Judo (2006) edited by Naoki Murata, p. 57

Life, People, Education, Way

“We're all a bunch of badminton birdies who just got batted from the Republican side of the court to the Democrat side. We'll eventually get batted back again, of course, unless libertarians can manage to do something about it. If your principal concern, like mine, is freedom, there's absolutely no discernable difference between the two 'majors,' and for all practical purposes, they're one big party — the Boot On Your Neck party — pretending to be two.”

L. Neil Smith (1946) American writer

Interview, Ari Armstrong, "Catching Up with L. Neil Smith".

Freedom

“Shahjahan was even otherwise interested in making converts. Professor Sri Ram Sharma has collected facts and figures of Hindus converted to Islam from the works of Qazvini, Lahori, Salih, Mohsin Fani, Khafi Khan, etc. during Shajahan’s reign… The following is the summary of what he says. “Early in his reign Shahjahan had appointed a Superintendent of converts to Islam, thus setting up a department for the special purpose of making converts. The one common practice was to make terms with the criminals… The Hindus of the Punjab, Bhimbar, Bhadauri and Sirhind… were all offered remission of their sentences provided they accepted the ‘true faith’. When the war with the Portuguese started, of the 400 prisoners taken a few became Muslims. The rest were kept in prison with orders that whenever they expressed willingness to embrace Islam, they were to be converted, liberated and given daily allowances. An order was issued in the seventh year of his reign that if a Hindu wanted to be converted to Islam, his family should not place any obstacles in his way… Under Shahjahan, apostasy from Islam had again become a capital crime.””

Shah Jahan (1592–1666) 5th Mughal Emperor

Lal, K. S. (1990). Indian muslims: Who are they, citing Sharma, Sri Ram, The Religious Policy of the Mughal Emperors, Asia Publishing House (Bombay, 1962).

War, Family, Faith, Way

“In early times, say the Icelandic chronicles, men from the Western Islands came to live in this country, and when they departed, left behind them crosses, bells, and other objects used in the practice of sorcery... In those days there was great fertility of the soil in Iceland. But when the Norsemen came to settle here, the Western sorcerers were forced to flee the land, and old writings say that Kolumkilli, determined on revenge, laid a curse on the invaders, swearing that they would never prosper here, and more in the same spirit, much of what has since, to all appearances, been fulfilled.”

Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) Icelandic author

Sjálfstætt fólk (Independent People) (1935), Book One, Part I: Icelandic Pioneers

Men, Revenge, Appearance, Time

“An income tax intended to reduce inequality and promote the diffusion of wealth has in practice fostered reinvestment of corporate earnings, thereby favoring the growth of large corporations, inhibiting the operation of the capital market, and discouraging the establishment of new enterprises.”

Milton Friedman (1912–2006) American economist, statistician, and writer

Source: (1962), Ch. 13 Conclusion, 2002 edition, p. 198

Wealth

“I can deal with functionality on a practical level. And I still have this relationship with this imaginary snake. My imaginary pal. If I’m going to be dealing in totally imaginary territory, it struck me that it would be useful to have a native as a guide. So I can have my imaginary conversations with my imaginary snake, and maybe it gives me information I already knew in part of myself, and maybe I just needed to make up an imaginary snake to tell me it.”

Alan Moore (1953) English writer primarily known for his work in comic books

De Abaitua interview (1998)

Parting

“I think the greatest sin in the world is bringing children into the world that have disease from their parents, that have no chance to be a human being, practically. Delinquents, prisoners, all sorts of things just marked when they're born. That to me is the greatest sin — that people can — can commit.”

Margaret Sanger (1879–1966) American birth control activist, educator and nurse

The Mike Wallace Interview (ABC) http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/multimedia/video/2008/wallace/sanger_margaret_t.html, <br class="br">Posed question: "Do you believe in sin — When I say "believe" I don't mean believe in committing sin, do you believe there is such a thing as a sin

Children, People, World, Disease

“I'm as much satisfied as ever that we have followed a right course on the war question. It must be right for us, because we have followed our own conscientious convictions. But in proportion as we are devoted to our principles must be our regret to see so little prospect of their being adopted as the practical guide of our foreign policy. It is no use blinking the fact that there are not a score of men in the House, and but few out of the ranks of the Friends in the country, who are ready to take their stand upon the principle of non-intervention in the affairs of other countries. This is no reason why we should hold our peace; but it shows that we have to begin at the beginning, by converting to our views that public opinion which is at present all but unanimously against us.”

Richard Cobden (1804–1865) English manufacturer and Radical and Liberal statesman

Letter to John Bright (14 September 1854), quoted in John Morley, The Life of Richard Cobden (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1905), p. 626.
1850s

Men, War, Peace, Question

“Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.”

Richard Feynman (1918–1988) American theoretical physicist

Does not appear to be from any of his books or cited in a biography. A Google Books search shows that the oldest book citing "physics is like sex" is Scary Monsters and Bright Ideas (2000) by science broadcaster Robyn Williams. On p. 44, this book claims: "Einstein said, 'You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother'. Richard Feynman added, 'Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it'." Given that Einstein didn't really say the former, it's likely that Feynman didn't really say the latter.
Disputed and/or attributed
Variant: Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.

Sex

“Neil Cavuto: …your campaign has received a $500 campaign donation from a white supremacist in West Palm Beach. And your campaign had indicated you have no intention to return it. What are you going to do with that?
Ron Paul: It is probably already spent. Why give it back to him and use it for bad purposes?
Neil Cavuto: …this Don Black who made the donation, and who ran a site called "Stormfront, White Pride Worldwide," now that you know it, now that you're familiar after the fact, you still would not return it?
Ron Paul: Well, if I spent his money and I took the money that maybe you might have sent to me and donate it back to him, that does not make any sense to me. Why should I give him money to promote his cause?
Neil Cavuto: …Hillary Clinton has had to do this, a number of other candidates have had to do this. Do you think that just is a bad practice?
Ron Paul: I think it is pandering. I think it is playing the political correctness… What about the people who get donations, want to get special interests from the military industrial complex? They put in — they raise, bundle their money, and send millions of dollars in there. And they want to rob the taxpayers. That is the real evil … that buys influence in government. And this is, to me, the corruption that should be corrected… you are missing the whole boat — the whole boat, because it is the immorality of government, it's the special interests in government, it's fighting illegal wars…
Neil Cavuto: All right.
Ron Paul: …and financing, and taxing the people, destroying the people through inflation, and undermining this prosperity of the country.”

Ron Paul (1935) American politician and physician

Your World with Neil Cavuto, FOX News, December 19, 2007 http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,317536,00.html http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CrRtZaG63o8 <br class="br">2000s, 2006-2009

Money, War, People, Thinking

“Of course, violence is never justified. But seen in this context – amid a highly toxic environment, defined by mistrust and resentment, stoked by years of bad feelings, and spurred by illegal and misguided practices – it is not difficult to imagine how a single tragic incident set off the city of Ferguson like a powder keg. In a sense, members of the community may not have been responding only to a single isolated confrontation, but also to a pervasive, corrosive, and deeply unfortunate lack of trust – attributable to numerous constitutional violations by their law enforcement officials including First Amendment abuses, unreasonable searches and seizures, and excessive and dangerous use of force; exacerbated by severely disproportionate use of these tactics against African Americans; and driven by overriding pressure from the city to use law enforcement not as a public service, but as a tool for raising revenue.”

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

2010s, Update on Investigations in Ferguson (2015)

Law, Feeling, Imagination, Search

“One of the pupils of Artur Schnabel told me that he never heard his teacher practice a difficult passage slowly, but he was struck by the way Schnabel would play one chord of a slow movement over and over, measuring and remeasuring the different components of the harmony.”

Charles Rosen (1927–2012) American pianist and writer on music

Source: Piano Notes: The World of the Pianist (2002), Ch. 2 Listening to the Sound of the Piano

Way, Teachers

“She died with her telly on, 87 and confused,
With not enough hospital beds 'cos all the money’s been used,
On the end of the century party preparations,
And they reckon that the last thing she saw in her life,
Was Sting, singing on the roof of the Barbican.
A Country Practice, Four Lads Who Shook the Wirral”

Nigel Blackwell

1998
Lyrics

Life, Money, Singing, Country

“What can be called "consciousness of the process of abstraction." That is, consciousness of the fact that out of a virtually infinite universe of possible things to pay attention to, we abstract only certain portions, and those portions turn out to be the ones for which we have verbal labels and categories. What we abstract, i. e., "see," and how we abstract it, or see it, or see it or think about it, is for all practical purposes inseparable from how we talk about it.”

Neil Postman (1931–2003) American writer and academic

Teaching as a Subversive Activity (1969)

Thinking, Universe

“I am inclined to say that the personal attendance and intervention of women in election proceedings, even apart from any suspicion of the wider objects of many of the promoters of the present movement, would be a practical evil not only of the gravest, but even of an intolerable character.”

William Ewart Gladstone (1809–1898) British Liberal politician and prime minister of the United Kingdom

Speech https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1871/may/03/second-reading in the House of Commons (3 May 1871) on the Women's Disabilities Bill. <br class="br">1870s

Women, Evil, Personality

“The practical implication is that one's goal is to live each moment with freedom, honesty and responsibility.”

Rollo May (1909–1994) US psychiatrist

Source: Man’s Search for Himself (1953), p. 235

Freedom

“[T]he constitution controls any legislative act repugnant to it.... It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is.... So if a law be in opposition to the constitution; if both the law and the constitution apply to a particular case, so that the court must either decide that case conformably to the law, disregarding the constitution; or conformably to the constitution disregarding the law; the court must determine which of these conflicting rules governs the case. This is the very essence of judicial duty.... Those then who controvert the principle that the constitution is to be considered, in court, as a paramount law, are reduced to the necessity of maintaining that courts must close their eyes on the constitution, and see only the law. This doctrine would subvert the very foundation of all written constitutions... It would be giving the legislature a practical and real omnipotence... The judicial power of the United States is extended to all cases arising under the constitution.”

John Marshall (1755–1835) fourth Chief Justice of the United States

5. U.S. (1 Cranch) 137
Marbury v. Madison (1803)

Law

“The use of canon raised numerous questions concerning the paths of projectiles. …One might determine… what type of curve a projectile follows and…. prove some geometrical facts about this curve, but geometry could never answer such questions as how high the projectile would go or how far from the starting point it would land. The seventeenth century sought the quantitative or numerical information needed for practical applications, and such information is provided by algebra.”

Morris Kline (1908–1992) American mathematician

Source: Mathematics and the Physical World (1959), p. 148

Question

“The second observation is that poetry is a universal human art. Despite post-modern theories of cultural relativism that assert there are no human universals, there exists a massive and compelling body of empirical data, collected and documented by anthropologists, linguists, and archeologists that demonstrates there is no human society, however isolated, that has not developed and employed poetry as a cultural practice. Most of this poetry, of course, has been oral poetry. Many of these cultures never developed writing. But the fact remains—and it is a demonstrable fact, not mere opinion—that every society has developed a special class of speech, shaped by apprehensible patterns of sound, namely, poetry”

Dana Gioia (1950) American writer

9-10
Essays, Can Poetry Matter? (1991), Poetry as Enchantment (2015)

Art, Universe

“Churchman recognized in his critical systemic thinking that the human mind is not able to know the whole. … Yet the human mind, for Churchman, may appreciate the essential quality of the whole. For Churchman, appreciation of this essential quality begins … when first you see the world through the eyes of another. The systems approach, he says, then goes on to discover that every worldview is terribly restricted. Consequently, with Churchman, a rather different kind of question about practice surfaces. … That is, who is to judge that any one bounded appreciation is most relevant or acceptable? Each judgment is based on a rationality of its own that chooses where a boundary is to be drawn, which issues and dilemmas thus get on the agenda, and who will benefit from this. For each choice it is necessary to ask, What are the consequences to be expected insofar as we can evaluate them and, on reflection, how do we feel about that? As Churchman points out, each judgment of this sort is of an ethical nature since it cannot escape the choice of who is to be the client—the beneficiary—and thus which issues and dilemmas will be central to debate and future action. In this way, the spirit of C. West Churchman becomes our moral conscience. A key principle of systemic thinking, according to Churchman, is to remain ethically alert. Boundary judgments facilitate a debate in which we are sensitized to ethical issues and dilemmas.”

Robert L. Flood (1959) British organizational scientist

Robert L. Flood (1999, p. 252-253) as cited in: Michael H. G. Hoffmann (2007) Searching for Common Ground on Hamas Through Logical Argument Mapping. p. 5.

World, Way, Feeling, Question

Quotes about practice page 8

Quotes about practice
page 8