Quotes about preserves
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“No quality of human nature is more remarkable, both in itself and in its consequences, than that propensity we have to sympathize with others, and to receive by communication their inclinations and sentiments, however different from, or even contrary to our own. This is not only conspicuous in children, who implicitly embrace every opinion propos’d to them; but also in men of the greatest judgment and understanding, who find it very difficult to follow their own reason or inclination, in opposition to that of their friends and daily companions. To this principle we ought to ascribe the great uniformity we may observe in the humours and turn of thinking of those of the same nation; and ’tis much more probable, that this resemblance arises from sympathy, than from any influence of the soil and climate, which, tho’ they continue invariably the same, are not able to preserve the character of a nation the same for a century together. A good-natur’d man finds himself in an instant of the same humour with his company; and even the proudest and most surly take a tincture from their countrymen and acquaintance. A chearful countenance infuses a sensible complacency and serenity into my mind; as an angry or sorrowful one throws a sudden dump upon me. Hatred, resentment, esteem, love, courage, mirth and melancholy; all these passions I feel more from communication than from my own natural temper and disposition. So remarkable a phaenomenon merits our attention, and must be trac’d up to its first principles.”

David Hume book A Treatise of Human Nature

Part 1, Section 11
A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40), Book 2: Of the passions

Love, Men, Children, Feeling

“The imbecile bourgeoisie of this country make themselves the accomplices of the very people whose aim is to drive them out of their houses to starve in ditches. And they have the political power still, if they only had the sense to use it for their preservation.”

Joseph Conrad book The Secret Agent

Source: The Secret Agent (1907), Ch. 2

People, Sense, Housing, Country

“Adventurers swarmed out of the North, as much the enemies of one race as of the other, to cozen, beguile and use the negroes. The white men were aroused by a mere instinct of self-preservation — until at last there sprung into existence a great Kuklux Klan, a veritable empire of the South, to protect the Southern country.”

Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) American politician, 28th president of the United States (in office from 1913 to 1921)

A History of the American People (1902), describing the Klan as a brotherhood of politically disenfranchised white men; famously quoted in The Birth of a Nation (1915)
1900s

Men, Country

“Most merciful and gracious God, who hast preserved me unto this hour, I most humbly acknowledge Thee as the guide and companion of my youth. Thou hast protected me through the dangers of infancy and childhood, and in my youth Thou didst bless me with the full enjoyment, the happy intimacy, of the best of fathers. Be as gracious and merciful then as Thou hast hitherto been, now that I am about to enter a new stage of existence. Teach me, I beseech Thee, to strengthen in my soul the cultivation of Thy truth, the recollection of the uncertainty of life, the greatness of the objects for which I was created. Revive those delightful religious impressions which in early days I felt more strongly than now; and as Thou hast been pleased lately to permit me to look to a way of life to which formerly I dared not to do, let the leisure I shall enjoy enlarge my warmth of heart towards Thee. Make every branch of study which I may pursue strengthen my confidence in Thy ever-ruling providence, that, undeceived by views of false philosophy, I may ever in singleness of heart elevate my mind from Thy works unto Thy divine essence. Keep from me a vain and overbearing spirit; let me- ever have a thorough sense of my own ignorance and weakness; and keep me through all the trials and troubles of a transitory state in body and soul unto everlasting life, for Jesus Christ's sake. Amen.”

James David Forbes (1809–1868) Scottish physicist and glaciologist

"Completing my Twenty-first Year" (1839), a prayer written by Forbes on April 20th, 1830. Life and letters of James David Forbes p. 450.

Life, God, Truth, Youth

“Then, in no nation more than the English is there a diversified individuality. We are a people of individuals, and a people of character…The preservation of the individuality of the Englishman is essential to the preservation of the type of the race, and if our differences are smoothed out and we lose that gift, we shall lose at the same time our power. Uniformity of type is a bad thing. I regret very much myself the uniformity of speech. Time was, two centuries ago, when you could have told by his speech from what part of England every member of Parliament came. He spoke the speech of his fathers, and I regret that the dialects have gone, and I regret that by a process which for want of a better name we have agreed among ourselves to call education, we are drifting away from the language of the people and losing some of the best English words and phrases which have lasted in the country through centuries, to make us all talk one uniform and inexpressive language.”

Stanley Baldwin (1867–1947) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech at the annual dinner of The Royal Society of St. George (6 May 1924), quoted in On England, and Other Addresses (1926), pp. 5-6.
1924

People, Education, Time, Parting

“In Washington's day the task of the people was to create and weld together a nation. In Lincoln's day the task of the people was to preserve that Nation from disruption from within. In this day the task of the people is to save that Nation and its institutions from disruption from without.”

Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945) 32nd President of the United States

1940s, Third inaugural address (1941)

People

“No Mr Huckabee, history –and criminal statistics- have both shown that tragedies will only increase, the more religious any society becomes. The more influence religion has over law, the lower our quality of life, and the more human rights are violated. It is true that any population of hundreds of millions will produce a proportionate percentage of sociopaths. But what we need there is more efficient provisions of mental health care –so that those suffering dementia and other disorders will be identified, treated, or isolated as need be –BEFORE they go berserk. Religion doesn’t want that either –as a matter of self-preservation. Because a fair amount of divine revelation can be cured with the same medications that treats schizophrenia. Where would the churches be if that many of their clergymen were clothed in straight-jackets?”

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

Patheos, Fukkenuckabee http://www.patheos.com/blogs/reasonadvocates/2012/12/21/fukkenuckabee/ (December 21, 2012)

Life, Health, Religion, Law

“The United States State Department will tell you that American aid is given to preserve the things for which we stand, to promote the basic freedoms of mankind, not necessarily to promote individual governments. That is our justification for sending help to a Greek government that, for a time at least, could by no means be called democratic. In the case of Britain, the nation is marching on the road towards Socialism. But the ingrained liberty and freedom of the individual has been proved by men like Churchill who still speak out against the government and by the men like the transport workers and miners who tell the government which they voted for to go to blazes. And between these fires, the British government--no matter what its political shadings--has the job of getting the country back on its feet.”

Bill Downs (1914–1978) American journalist

The British Crisis (1948)

Men, Freedom, Time, Help

“Among the fundamental values linked to women's actual lives is what has been called a 'capacity for the other.' Although a certain type of feminist rhetoric makes demands 'for ourselves,' women preserve the deep intuition of the goodness in their lives of those actions which elicit life, and contribute to the growth and protection of the other…. But, in the final analysis, every human being, man or woman, is destined to be 'for the other.'… Therefore, the promotion of women within society must be understood and desired as a humanization accomplished through those values, rediscovered thanks to women. Every outlook which presents itself as a conflict between the sexes is only an illusion and a danger; it would end in segregation and competition between men and women, and would promote a solipsism nourished by a false conception of freedom.”

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

Doctrinal document On the Collaboration of Men and Women in the Church and in the World, July 31, 2004
2003

Life, Women, Men, Sex

“All of us, I am certain, are united by more important things than those which superficially divide us. We are united, for instance, by a common detestation of colonialism in whatever form it appears. We are united by a common detestation of racialism. And we are united by a common determination to preserve and stabilise peace in the world....”

Sukarno (1901–1970) first President of the Republic of Indonesia

Speech at the Opening of the Bandung Conference

World, Peace, Appearance

“Rosa Luxemburg is an outstanding example of a type of mind that is often met with in the history of Marxism and appears to be specially attracted by the Marxist outlook. It is characterized by slavish submission to authority, together with a belief that in that submission the values of scientific thought can be preserved. No doctrine was so well suited as Marxism to satisfy both these attitudes, or to provide a mystification combining extreme dogmatism with the cult of "scientific" thinking, in which the disciple could find mental and spiritual peace. Marxism thus played the part of a religion for the intelligentsia, which did not prevent some of them, like Rosa Luxemburg herself, from trying to improve the deposit of faith by reverting to first principles, thus strengthening their own belief that they were independent of dogma.”

Leszek Kolakowski (1927–2009) Philosopher, historian of ideas

Source: Main Currents Of Marxism (1978), Three Volume edition, Volume II, The Golden Age, pp. 94-5

Peace, Faith, Religion, History

“That very law which moulds a tear
And bids it trickle from its source,—
That law preserves the earth a sphere,
And guides the planets in their course.”

Samuel Rogers (1763–1855) British poet

On a Tear (c. 1813-5), l. 21-4.

Law, Tear

“The failure of idealistic thought lay partly in the fact that it did not recognize that every ideal is linked to its shadow. […] Whatever is incomplete is thus always complemented by its contrary; the penalty for any principle which fails to express the whole is the necessity to co-exist with its opposite. Partial love implies partial hate; spirit, sensuality; self-sacrificing compassion, sadism. The denial of any aspect sharpens and preserves it, while its acceptance transforms it by bringing it within the process of the whole.”

Lancelot Law Whyte (1896–1972) Scottish industrial engineer

Source: The Next Development in Man (1948), p. 254

Love, Hate, Penalty, Failure

“Peat preserves timber, animals, and such unexpected treasure-troves as hoards of acorns and firkins of beech butter from the forests which preceded the bogs. A whole archaeology may very well lie in peat, and the pollen record may reveal past history. At the base of Irish bogs the Fir Bolg (the little people), their axes, bridges, butter, and forest life are well preserved. They and their forests were banished, as if by magic, by the Tuatha de Danan (the Children of Diana) who now dig the peat. Diana was displaced in turn by Mary, mother of God. But all are mixed in the peat and the tongue of Ireland.”

Bill Mollison (1928–2016) Australian permaculturist

Source: Permaculture: A Designers' Manual (1988), chapter 9.9

Life, God, Children, People

“Thus by such victory, not by machines but in oppositions to the principle to the principles of machines, has the freedom of states been preserved by the cunning of architects.”

Vitruvius book De architectura

Source: De architectura (The Ten Books On Architecture) (~ 15BC), Book X, Chapter XVI, Sec. 12

Freedom, Victory

“After settling the affairs of Ajmir, the conqueror marched "towards Dehli (may God preserve its prosperity and perpetuate its splendour!) which is among the chief (mother) cities of Hind. When he arrived at Dehli, he saw " a fortress which in height and strength had not its equal nor second throughout the length and breadth of the seven climes." The army encamped around the fort. " A torrent of blood flowed on the field of battle, and it became evident to the chiefs that if they did not seek for safety from the sword of the king of the earth, and if they should deliver into the hands of Satan the time of option and the reins of good counsel, the condition of Dehli would be like that of Ajmir; so from the dread of kingly punishment, the Rai and mukaddams of that country placed their heads upon the line of slavery, and their feet within the circle of obedience, and made firm the conditions of tribute [mdlguzdrt) and the usages of service.”

Muhammad of Ghor (1160–1206) Ghurid Sultan

About the conquest of Delhi. Hasan Nizami. Elliot and Dowson, Vol. II : Elliot and Dowson, History of India as told by its own Historians, 8 Volumes, Allahabad Reprint, 1964. pp. 216. Also quoted in Jain, Meenakshi (2011). The India they saw: Foreign accounts.

God, Time, Country

“…some one has to speak in favor of the right when so speaking is unpopular. The more unpopular, the greater the necessity; … The Republican party has done much for this country. It has often created and preserved prosperity by fighting crazes. For the first time in its history, it is yielding to one. If it would only say "we have made this prosperity, it is our child, and shall have our protection," and stand to its guns, it will beat Bryanism to death as it always has. But with its leader caring more for popularity than principle, courageous, as he is uninformed, I, myself, am convinced that it will have to go out of power in order that it may return chastened and more trusted than ever.”

George Howard Earle, Jr. (1856–1928) American lawyer

Letter to Samuel W. Pennypacker by George H. Earle, Jr. (16 May 1906)

Death, History, Courage, Time

“We have come here today to honor the memory of Lafayette, because long ago he came to this country as a private citizen at his own expense and joined us in fighting for the maintenance and extension of our institutions. It was not so much to acquire new rights, as to maintain old rights, that the men of that day put their fortunes to the hazard of war. They were resisting usurpations; they were combating unlawful tyrannies. No doubt they wanted to be Americans, but they wanted most of all to be free. They believed in individual liberty, safeguarded by constitutional guarantees. This principle to them was dearer than life itself. What they fought to preserve and extend, we ought to be ready to fight to maintain.”

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)

Life, Men, War, Memory

“Jealousy is a virtue of democracies which preserves them from tyrants.”

Anatole France book Penguin Island

Book VII : Modern Times, Ch. IX : The Final Consequences
Penguin Island (1908)

Jealousy, Democracy

“In brief, for the United States, Eurasian geostrategy involves the purposeful management of geostrategically dynamic states and the careful handling of geopolitically catalytic states, in keeping with the twin interests of America in the short-term: preservation of its unique global power and in the long-run transformation of it into increasingly institutionalized global cooperation. To put it in a terminology that hearkens back to the more brutal age of ancient empires, the three grand imperatives of imperial geostrategy are to prevent collusion and maintain security dependence among the vassals, to keep tributaries pliant and protected, and to keep the barbarians from coming together.”

Zbigniew Brzeziński book The Grand Chessboard

Source: The Grand Chessboard (1997), Chapter 2, The Eurasian Chessboard, p. 40.

Age, Dependency

“The skein of human continuity must often become this tenuous across the centuries (hanging by a thread, in the old cliché), but the circle remains unbroken if I can touch the ink of Lavoisier's own name, written by his own hand. A candle of light, nurtured by the oxygen of his greatest discovery, never burns out if we cherish the intellectual heritage of such unfractured filiation across the ages. We may also wish to contemplate the genuine physical thread of nucleic acid that ties each of us to the common bacterial ancestor of all living creatures, born on Lavoisier's ancienne terre more than 3.5 billion years ago—and never since disrupted, not for one moment, not for one generation. Such a legacy must be worth preserving from all the guillotines of our folly.”

Stephen Jay Gould book The Lying Stones of Marrakech

"The Proof of Lavoisier's Plates", p. 114
The Lying Stones of Marrakech (2001)

Age, Light

“Firstly what does conservation mean? It is not merely the saving from extinction of such species as the Notornis, the Leadbetters Possum or the Leathery Turtle; this is important work but it is only part of the problem. You cannot begin to preserve any species of animal unless you preserve the habitat in which it dwells. Disturb or destroy that habitat and you will exterminate the species as surely as if you had shot it. So conservation means that you have to preserve forest and grassland, river and lake, even the sea itself. This is not only vital for the preservation of animal life generally, but for the future existence of man himself — a point that seems to escape many people.”

Gerald Durrell (1925–1995) naturalist, zookeeper, conservationist, author and television presenter

Two in the Bush (1966)

Life, People, Problem, Future

“A severe morality holds that intercourse (and may hold this of eating, too) has something wrong about it if it is ever done except explicitly as being required for that preservation of human life which is what makes intercourse a good kind of action. But this involves thoroughly faulty moral psychology. God gave us our physical appetite, and its arousal without our calculation is part of the working of our sort of life. Given moderation and right circumstances, acts prompted by inclination can be taken in a general way to accomplish what makes them good in kind and there's no need for them to be individually necessary or useful for the end that makes them good kinds of action. Intercourse is a normal part of married life through the whole life of the partners in a marriage and is normally engaged in without any distinct purpose other than to have it, just as such a part of married life.”

G. E. M. Anscombe (1919–2001) British analytic philosopher

Contraception and Chastity (1975)

Life, God, Marriage, Way

“But in adversity, intelligence alone cannot sustain hope. Ultimately, hope can be sustained only by finding purpose in adversity, by imposing a pattern on the fortuitous disasters of existence. Human beings, if force to it, will compromise their intelligence to preserve their hope.”

Edmund Cooper book Seed of Light

Seed of Light (1959)

Hope, Intelligence

“Governments have an obligation to preserve their populations’ cultures as world heritage in accordance with the aim of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization to promote diversity and oppose cultural imperialism.”

Alfred de Zayas (1947) American United Nations official

Report of the Independent Expert on the promotion and protection of all human rights, civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights, including the right to development https://documents-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/G16/151/19/PDF/G1615119.pdf?OpenElement. 2016, Report submitted to the UN Human Rights Council

World, Education

“It has been in accordance with these principles that we have made generous settlements of our foreign debts. The little sentiment of "live and let live" expresses a great truth. It has been thought wise to extend the payment of our debts over a long period of years, with a very low rate of interest, in order to relieve foreign peoples of the burden of economic pressure beyond their capacity to bear. An adjustment has now been made of all these major obligations, and they have all but one been mutually ratified. The moral principle of the payment of international debts has been preserved. Every dollar that we have advanced to these countries they have promised to repay with some interest. Our National Treasury is not in the banking business. We did not make these loans as a banking enterprise. We made them to a very large extent as an incident to the prosecution of the war. We have not sought to adjust them on a purely banking basis. We have taken into consideration all the circumstances and the elements that attended the original transaction and all the results that will probably flow from their settlement. They have been liquidated on this broad moral and humanitarian basis. We believe that the adjustments which have been made will be mutually beneficial to the trade relations of the countries involved and that out of these economic benefits there will be derived additional guaranties to the stability and peace of the world.”

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

1920s, Ways to Peace (1926)

War, People, Truth, World

“The Japanese spirit wavered from then on between the lure of the West and the need to preserve her territorial integrity. Slowly, inexorably, Western civilization covered up with its veneer this other civilization patiently built up in the course of centuries, long nurtured in suffering and in pride by generations of men and women. But this was only in semblance. The Japan of old still dwells deep in the soul of every inhabitant of her islands and manifests itself at every turn in some euphuistic subtlety or an exquisitely delicate courtesy.”

Louis Frédéric (1923–1996) French scholar

Frédéric, L. (1984). Daily life in Japan at the time of the samurai, 1185-1603. Tokyo: Tuttle.

Women, Men, Soul, Suffering

“God is not satisfied if we preserve the love we owe our neighbour; we must preserve our neighbour in the love he ought to have for us.”

Marguerite Bourgeoys (1620–1700) French colonist and foundress

The Writings of Marguerite Bourgeoys, p. 170

Love, God

“You and I, whole human beings, are, so Richard Dawkins insists, merely "survival machines, robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes." At its most fundamental level, he finds the living universe populated by John Wayne genetics and Clint Eastwood chemicals.”

Theodore Roszak (1933–2011) American social historian, social critic, writer

Source: The Gendered Atom: Reflections on the Sexual Psychology of Science (1999), Ch.9 Deep Community

Universe, Selfishness

“Comrades, it always affords me much gratification to meet my old comrades in arms of ten or fourteen years ago, and to live over again in memory the trials and hardships of those days. Hardships imposed for the preservation and perpetuation of our free institutions. We believed then, and believe now, that we had a good government, worth fighting for, and, if need be, dying for. How many of our comrades of those days paid the latter price for our preserved Union! Let their heroism and sacrifices be ever green and in our memory. Let not the results of their sacrifices be destroyed. The Union and the free institutions for which they fell, should be held more dear for their sacrifices.”

Ulysses S. Grant (1822–1885) 18th President of the United States

1870s, Speech to the Society of the Army of Tennessee (1875)

Memory, Fight

“It is above all over the question of the State that socialists are divided. Two main currents can be discerned in the factions that exist among us which correspond to differences in temperament as well as in ways of thinking, but above all to the extent that one believes in the coming revolution.
There are those, on the one hand, who hope to achieve the social revolution through the State by preserving and even extending most of its powers to be used for the revolution. And there are those like ourselves who see the State, both in its present form, in its very essence, and in whatever guise it might appear, an obstacle to the social revolution, the greatest hindrance to the birth of a society based on equality and liberty, as well as the historic means designed to prevent this blossoming. The latter work to abolish the State and not to reform it.”

Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921) Russian zoologist, evolutionary theorist, philosopher, scientist, revolutionary, economist, activist, geogr…

Source: The State — Its Historic Role (1897), I

Hope, Way, Birth, Question

“The reason I keep mentioning God is because I believe in God. A lot of people are surprised by that, what with it being 2014 and this being a technologically advanced secular culture. God is primarily regarded as the preserve of thick white people and angry brown people. Since Friedrich Nietzsche (deceased) declared, “God is dead,” we’ve been exploring the observation of British writer G. K. Chesterton, who said, “The death of God doesn’t mean man will believe in nothing but that he will believe in anything.” I’m a good example of that: at thirteen a believer in Lakeside, at eight a believer in biscuits, at seventeen a devoted wanker, at nineteen a fanatical drug user, before winding up in the monastery of celebrity.”

Russell Brand book Revolution

Revolution (2014)

Death, God, People, Dead

“There was an NPR story this morning, about the indigenous peoples of Australia, which might make a good column. Apparently they want to preserve their culture, language, and religion because they're slowly disappearing, which is certainly understandable. But, for some reason, they also want more stuff — better education, housing, etc. — from the Australian government. Isn't it odd that it never occurs to such groups that maybe, just maybe, the reason their cultures are evaporating is that they get too much of that stuff already? Indeed, I'm at a loss as to how mastering algebra and biology will make aboriginal kids more likely to believe — oh, I dunno — that hallucinogenic excretions from a frog have spiritual value. And I'm at a loss as to how better clinics and hospitals will do anything but make the shamans and medicine men look more useless. And now that I think about it, that's the point I was trying to get at a few paragraphs ago, when I was talking about the symbiotic relationship between freedom and the hurly-burly of life. Cultures grow on the vine of tradition. These traditions are based on habits necessary for survival, and day-to-day problem solving. Wealth, technology, and medicine have the power to shatter tradition because they solve problems.”

Jonah Goldberg (1969) American political writer and pundit

( August 15, 2001 http://web.archive.org/web/20010105/www.nationalreview.com/goldberg/goldberg081501.shtml) 2000s, 2001

Life, Men, People, Education

“The ideal Ireland that we would have, the Ireland that we dreamed of, would be the home of a people who valued material wealth only as a basis for right living, of a people who, satisfied with frugal comfort, devoted their leisure to the things of the spirit – a land whose countryside would be bright with cosy homesteads, whose fields and villages would be joyous with the sounds of industry, with the romping of sturdy children, the contest of athletic youths and the laughter of happy maidens, whose firesides would be forums for the wisdom of serene old age. The home, in short, of a people living the life that God desires that men should live. With the tidings that make such an Ireland possible, St. Patrick came to our ancestors fifteen hundred years ago promising happiness here no less than happiness hereafter. It was the pursuit of such an Ireland that later made our country worthy to be called the island of saints and scholars. It was the idea of such an Ireland - happy, vigorous, spiritual - that fired the imagination of our poets; that made successive generations of patriotic men give their lives to win religious and political liberty; and that will urge men in our own and future generations to die, if need be, so that these liberties may be preserved. One hundred years ago, the Young Irelanders, by holding up the vision of such an Ireland before the people, inspired and moved them spiritually as our people had hardly been moved since the Golden Age of Irish civilisation. Fifty years later, the founders of the Gaelic League similarly inspired and moved the people of their day. So, later, did the leaders of the Irish Volunteers. We of this time, if we have the will and active enthusiasm, have the opportunity to inspire and move our generation in like manner. We can do so by keeping this thought of a noble future for our country constantly before our eyes, ever seeking in action to bring that future into being, and ever remembering that it is for our nation as a whole that future must be sought.”

Éamon de Valera (1882–1975) 3rd President of Ireland

Radio broadcast http://www.rte.ie/archives/exhibitions/eamon-de-valera/719124-address-by-mr-de-valera/, "On Language & the Irish Nation" (17 March 1943), often called "The Ireland that we dreamed of" speech

Life, Wisdom, Men, God

“Gun Free Zones are hunting preserves for innocent people. Period.”

Larry Correia (1977) American fantasy writer

"An opinion on gun control", Monster Hunter Nation http://monsterhunternation.com/2012/12/20/an-opinion-on-gun-control/, 2012-12-20

People

“Aristotle’s enthusiasm for the preservation of social distinction and his emphasis on the social position of the “high-souled” man remind us that even in his favored politeia, with as many respectable and steady men of the middle class admitted to political participation as is possible, Aristotle hankered after the rule of true, that is, natural aristocrats. If that attitude is not unknown two and a half millennia later, his unconcern with those left out of this vision of the world—women, ordinary working people, foreigners, slaves—is happily rather less common. But we shall not see much sympathy for ordinary lives and ordinary happiness for many centuries yet, certainly not in the work of Cicero.”

Alan Ryan (1940) British philosopher

On Politics: A History of Political Thought: From Herodotus to the Present (2012), Ch. 3 : Aristotle: Politics Is Not Philosophy

Women, Men, People, World

“MAJOR URWICK and Dr. Metcalf have rendered a conspicuous service by editing this collection of Mary Follett’s lectures on business management. They contain teaching which was of importance when the lectures were delivered, and which many people felt should be preserved in a collated form and given a wider public. The circumstances of today have increased that importance. Many people are being called upon to fill new administrative posts, and these lectures teach the principles which should underly all administrative method.”

Seebohm Rowntree (1871–1954) British philanthropist industrialist and sociologist writer

Seebohm Rowntree, "Preface" to Mary Parker Follett with Henry C. Metcalf, and Lyndall Urwick (eds.). Dynamic administration: the collected papers of Mary Parker Follett. Harper & Brother Publishing, 1942

People, Business

“The United States is now a battlefield, not because of any invading army, foreign enemy, or civil insurrection, but by an act of Congress. In a shameful, disgraceful bipartisan vote on the 220th anniversary of the ratification of the Bill of Rights, Congress passed a bill that essentially eviscerates the rights guaranteed in that hallowed document and guts the rule of law in our nation. Why should we be surprised? James Madison warned, “No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.””

R. Lee Wrights (1958–2017) American gubernatorial candidate

2011, " America Is Not a Battlefield http://www.libertyforall.net/?p=7002"

Law, Freedom

“The Prussian diet has not an ideal composition…but has done useful work; in spite of this it will be necessary to preserve the [general] franchise for the Reichstag and to change the franchise for the diet. I most sincerely regret the announcement of such a change. It is merely a concession to the supposed popular will.”

Hans von Seeckt (1866–1936) German general

Letter (4 February 1916), quoted in F. L. Carsten, The Reichswehr and Politics 1918 to 1933 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), p. 105.

Change, Sincerity

“There was a time, and not so long ago, when one could score a success also here with a bit of irony, which compensated for all other deficiencies and helped one get through the world rather respectably, gave one the appearance of being cultured, of having a perspective on life, an understanding of the world, and to the initiated marked one as a member of an extensive intellectual freemasonry. Occasionally we still meet a representative of that vanished age who has preserved that subtle, sententious, equivocally divulging smile, that air of an intellectual courtier with which he has made his fortune in his youth and upon which he had built his whole future in the hope that he had overcome the world. Ah, but it was an illusion! His watchful eye looks in vain for a kindred soul, and if his days of glory were not still a fresh memory for a few, his facial expression would be a riddle to the contemporary age, in which he lives as a stranger and foreigner. Our age demands more; it demands, if not lofty pathos then at least loud pathos, if not speculation then at least conclusions, if not truth then at least persuasion, if not integrity then at least protestations of integrity, if not feeling then at least verbosity of feelings. Therefore it also coins a totally different kind of privileged faces. It will not allow the mouth to be defiantly compressed or the upper lip to quiver mischievously; it demands that the mouth be open, for how, indeed, could one imagine a true and genuine patriot who is not delivering speeches; how could one visualize a profound thinker’s dogmatic face without a mouth able to swallow the whole world; how could one picture a virtuoso on the cornucopia of the living world without a gaping mouth? It does not permit one to stand still and to concentrate; to walk slowly is already suspicious; and how could one even put up with anything like that in the stirring period in which we live, in this momentous age, which all agree is pregnant with the extraordinary? It hates isolation; indeed, how could it tolerate a person’s having the daft idea of going through life alone-this age that hand in hand and arm in arm (just like itinerant journeymen and soldiers) lives for the idea of community.”

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

Source: 1840s, On the Concept of Irony with Continual Reference to Socrates (1841), p. 246-247

Life, Hate, Truth, Youth

“The analytical equations, unknown to the ancient geometers, which Descartes was the first to introduce into the study of curves and surfaces, are not restricted to the properties of figures, and to those properties which are the object of rational mechanics; they extend to all general phenomena. There cannot be a language more universal and more simple, more free from errors and from obscurities, that is to say more worthy to express the invariable relations of natural things.
Considered from this point of view, mathematical analysis is as extensive as nature itself; it defines all perceptible relations, measures times, spaces, forces, temperatures; this difficult science is formed slowly, but it preserves every principle which it has once acquired; it grows and strengthens itself incessantly in the midst of the many variations and errors of the human mind.
Its chief attribute is clearness; it has no marks to express confused notions. It brings together phenomena the most diverse, and discovers the hidden analogies which unite them.”

Joseph Fourier book The Analytical Theory of Heat

Preliminary Discourse, p.7 Note: often quoted as Mathematics [or mathematical analysis] compares the most diverse phenomena and discovers the secret analogies that unite them.
The Analytical Theory of Heat (1878)

Error, Mathematics, Nature, Study

“To safeguard the KMT’s reins of government and majority in the legislature, as well as the future of the public and the Republic of China, I must apologize (for breaking my promise to serve as New Taipei City mayor in full term) to each New Taipei City resident who supports me. I want to tell every Taiwanese and resident of the city that I am doing this (going for the 2016 ROC presidential election) because I have to protect the ROC we love, the democratic politics we have fought to preserve and our healthy democracy of checks and balances.”

Eric Chu (1961) Taiwanese politician

Eric Chu (2015) cited in " Presidential Election: KMT’s Eric Chu takes over campaign http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/front/archives/2015/10/18/2003630321" on Taipei Times, 18 October 2015.

Love, Democracy, Support, Future

“The elucidation of the theory of centripetal and disturbing forces is necessarily less complete. Still… a general conception of the nature of the action of those forces… sufficient to preserve the student from the gross errors… may be obtained from explanations like those here offered. The methods of ascertaining the weight of the Earth and other bodies are… more difficult of explanation; yet… something may be done even in these.”

George Biddell Airy (1801–1892) English mathematician and astronomer

Introduction
Popular Astronomy: A Series of Lectures Delivered at Ipswich (1868)

Error, Nature

“They are in you and me; they created us, body and mind; and their preservation is the ultimate rationale for our existence. They have come a long way, those replicators. Now they go by the name of genes, and we are their survival machines.”

Richard Dawkins book The Selfish Gene

Source: The Selfish Gene (1976, 1989), Ch. 2. The replicators

Way

“Taking on the responsibility of portraying a real person in history, preserving his genius while demonstrating the vulnerable crumbling of his personality, I researched carefully, and gained great respect for the contributions Mr. Hughes shared with the world.”

Carson Grant (1950) American actor

VanSchalkwyk, Cindy, "Native Son's Heart is in the Arts", Warren Times Gazette, Jan 11, 2007, p 1.
About portraying Howard Hughes printed 2007 in the Warren Times Gazette

World, History, Personality

“The secession and the Confederacy's existence were predicated on slavery, on preserving and defending it against containment, as virtually all of its founders from Robert Barnwell Rhett to Jefferson Davis unashamedly declared in 1861.”

Jefferson Davis (1808–1889) President of the Confederate States of America

William Davis, Look Away!: A History of the Confederate States of America (2002), New York: The Free Press, p. 130

“A Chinaman can ride in the same passenger coach with white citizens of the United States, while citizens of the black race in Louisiana, many of whom, perhaps, risked their lives for the preservation of the Union, who are entitled, by law, to participate in the political control of the State and nation, who are not excluded, by law or by reason of their race, from public stations of any kind, and who have all the legal rights that belong to white citizens, are yet declared to be criminals, liable to imprisonment, if they ride in a public coach occupied by citizens of the white race. He does not object, nor, perhaps, would he object to separate coaches for his race if his rights under the law were recognized. But he objecting, and ought never to cease objecting, to the proposition that citizens of the white and black race can be adjudged criminals because they sit, or claim the right to sit, in the same public coach on a public highway.”

John Marshall Harlan (1833–1911) United States Union Army officer and Supreme Court Associate Justice

1890s, Plessy v. Ferguson (1896)

Law

“If the institutions of parliamentary democracy are worth preserving, the duty to explain them to the people they are meant to serve becomes vitally important.”

John Allen Fraser (1931) Canadian politician

Afterword, p. 174
The House Of Commons At Work (1993)

People, Democracy

“Portrait likenesses cooked and preserved in memory, likenesses burst in the memory of Mr. Jean Dubuffet, painter.”

Jean Dubuffet (1901–1985) sculptor from France

Two quotes, Jean Dubuffet placed on the poster announcing his painting-show 'Les gens sont plus beaux qu'ils croient, in Galerie René Drouin, Paris (October 7–31, 1947)
1940's

Memory, Cooking

“Those of us who love the country and country things feel in our bones the urbanisation of our land and the need that something should be done to preserve our birds and our flowers.”

Stanley Baldwin (1867–1947) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech at the unveiling of the Hudson Memorial in Hyde Park (19 May 1925), quoted in On England, and Other Addresses (1926), p. 129.
1925

Love, Feeling, Flowers, Bird

“Bills of rights give assurance to the individual of the preservation of his liberty. They do not define the liberty they promise.”

Benjamin N. Cardozo (1870–1938) United States federal judge

Other writings, The Paradoxes of Legal Science (1928)

“By a law that was divine, most admirable, and bestowed by grace upon all, it was made known to men that community was greatly in their interest, and that they are therefore preserved by an order in which laws are established by the common consent of all, or at least of the wise and heroic, with the others’ support”

Nicholas of Cusa book De concordantia catholica

De concordantia catholica (The Catholic Concordance) (1434)

Men, Law, Communication, Support

“At the big Georgia paper mill the saboteur was obviously a chemist. Some kind of catalyst was substituted for a drum of regular sizing solution and vast billowing waves of corrosive fumes ruined the plant. Anonymous calls to a local TV station claimed it had been done to preserve trees.
The same day, in northern California, signs were posted on a stand of redwoods that the governor had authorized for lumbering: about two hundred of the last six hundred in the state. The signs said: FOR EVERY TREE YOU KILL ONE OF YOU WILL DIE TOO.
The promise was carried out with Schmiesser machine-pistols. The actual score was eighteen people for seventeen trees.
Close enough.”

John Brunner book The Sheep Look Up

July “BLOWBACK”
The Sheep Look Up (1972)

People, Tree

“We have reconfirmed the unity and firmness of our position, the position expressed in the Joint Communique of the four powers at Paris on December 14th. We do not accept any substitution of East Germans for the Soviet Union in its responsibilities toward Berlin and its obligations to us. We are resolved that our position in, and access to, West Berlin shall be preserved.”

John Foster Dulles (1888–1959) United States Secretary of State

Quoted in "1959 Year In Review: Death of John Foster Dulles," http://www.upi.com/Audio/Year_in_Review/Events-of-1959/Death-of-John-Foster-Dulles/12295509433704-3/ UPI.com (1959).

“Commerce is naturally adverse to all the violent passions; it loves to temporize, takes delight in compromise, and studiously avoids irritation. It is patient, insinuating, flexible, and never has recourse to extreme measures until obliged by the most absolute necessity. Commerce renders men independent of each other, gives them a lofty notion of their personal importance, leads them to seek to conduct their own affairs, and teaches how to conduct them well; it therefore prepares men for freedom, but preserves them from revolutions.”

Alexis De Tocqueville book Democracy in America

Variant translation: Trade is the natural enemy of all violent passions. Trade loves moderation, delights in compromise, and is most careful to avoid anger. It is patient, supple, and insinuating, only resorting to extreme measures in cases of absolute necessity. Trade makes men independent of one another and gives them a high idea of their personal importance: it leads them to want to manage their own affairs and teaches them to succeed therein. Hence it makes them inclined to liberty but disinclined to revolution.
Book Three, Chapter XXI.
Democracy in America, Volume II (1840), Book Three

Love, Men, Nature, Freedom

“Thus, to depict Rama as a virile warrior was a sin against Hinduism, an imitation of colonialist virility myths, a betrayal of the feminine passivity of genuine Hinduism. Or, to organize the Hindu religious personnel on a common platform (the Dharma Sansad, more or less 'religious parliament') is an un-Hindu imitation of the Bishops' Synod in the Catholic Church. Or, to alert the Hindus against Muslim or Christian conversion campaigns is an abandonment of the cheerful Hindu indifference to sectarian name-tags, the only thing which really changes upon conversion. Indeed, anything that could play a role in upholding and preserving Hinduism was found to be un-Hindu, while anything that could make or keep Hinduism defenceless and moribund, was glorified as true Hinduism. Anything that smacked of vitality and the will to survive was dubbed 'Semitic.”

Koenraad Elst (1959) orientalist, writer

2000s, Who is a Hindu, (2001)

Change, Betrayal, Indifference

“Trust is the core of human relationships, of gregariousness among men. Friendship, a puzzle to the syllogistic and critical mentality, is not based on experiments or tests of another person's qualities but on trust. It is not critical knowledge but a risk of the heart which initiates affection and preserves loyalty in our fellow men.”

Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907–1972) Polish-American Conservative Judaism Rabbi

"The Holy Dimension", p. 339
Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Essays (1997)

Men, Friendship, Knowledge, Heart

“Man today can do more than the culture heros and half-gods; he has solved many insoluble problems. But he has also betrayed the hope and destroyed the truth which were preserved in the sublimations of higher culture. To be sure, the higher culture was always in contradiction with social reality, and only a privileged minority enjoyed its blessings and represented its ideals. The two antagonistic spheres of society have always coexisted; the higher culture has always been accommodating, while the reality was rarely disturbed by its ideals and its truth. Today's novel feature is the flattening out of the antagonism between culture and social reality through the obliteration of the oppositional, alien, and transcendent elements in the higher culture by virtue of which it constituted another dimension of reality. This liquidation of two-dimensional culture takes place not through the denial and rejection of the “cultural values,” but through their wholesale incorporation into the established order, through their reproduction and display on a massive scale.”

Herbert Marcuse book One-Dimensional Man

Source: One-Dimensional Man (1964), pp. 56-57

God, Truth, Hope, Problem

“A liberal is fundamentally fearful of concentrated power. His objective is to preserve the maximum degree of freedom for each individual separately that is compatible with one man's freedom not interfering with other men's freedom. He believes that this objective requires that power be dispersed. He is suspicious of assigning to government any functions that can be performed through the market, both because this substitutes coercion for voluntary co-operation in the area in question and because, by giving government an increased role, it threatens freedom in other areas.”

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

Source: (1962), Ch. 3 The Control of Money, p. 39

Men, Fear, Question, Freedom

“Your Excellency, I am in receipt of His Majesty's royal order, which your excellency communicated to me on the 6th inst., accepting the offer of my work, the 'Caprichos' on eighty copper plate engraved with aqua-fortis by my hand, which I will hand to the Royal Calografia with the lot of prints which I had printed by way of precaution, amounting to two hundred and forty copies of eighty prints, in order not to defraud His Majesty in the least, and for my own satisfaction as to my mode of procedure. I am very grateful for the pension of twelve thousand reals which His Majesty has been pleased to grant to my son [Xavier Goya], for which I offer my best thanks to His Majesty, and to your excellency.... I only desire your excellency's orders, and that you may keep well. May God preserve your excellency's valuable life for many years... Your excellency's obedient and grateful servant, Franco de Goya.”

Francisco De Goya (1746–1828) Spanish painter and printmaker (1746–1828)

letter to the Minister, Don Miguel Cayetano Soler, Madrid, October 9, 1803; as quoted in the 'Gazette des Beaux-Arts', 1860, p. 241, and reproduced in facsimile in Mr. Calvert's monograph, p. 88; also by Valerian von Loga: Francisco de Goya, Berlin, 1903, p. 77
1800s

Life, God, Way, Communication

“Our civilization depends on peace among Western nations, and therefore on united strength, for Peace is a virgin who dare not show her face without Strength, her father, for protection. We can have peace and security only so long as we band together to preserve that most priceless possession, our inheritance of European blood, only so long as we guard ourselves against attack by foreign armies and dilution by foreign races.
We need peace to let our best men live to work out those more subtle, but equally dangerous, problems brought by this new environment in which we dwell, to give us time to turn this materialistic trend, to stop prostrating ourselves before this modern idol of mechanical efficiency, to find means of combining freedom, spirit, and beauty with industrial life — a peace which will bring character, strength, and security back to Western peoples.”

Charles Lindbergh (1902–1974) American aviator, author, inventor, explorer, and social activist

Aviation, Geography, and Race (1939)

Life, Men, People, Peace

“As soon as I think that I am a little body, I want to preserve it, to protect it, to keep it nice, at the expense of other bodies; then you and I become separate.”

Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902) Indian Hindu monk and phylosopher

Pearls of Wisdom

Thinking

“Allowing, therefore, the great usefulness of the Government Schools, the Exhibitions, and the Museums both public and private, the question now arises as to what are the impediments to our future progress. The principal ones appear to me to be three.
# A want of a distinctive architecture, which is fatal to art generally.
# The want of a good costume, which is fatal to colour; and
# The want of a sufficient teaching of the figure, which is fatal to art in detail.
It will perhaps be as well to take these one by one.
The most fatal impediment of the three is undeniably the want of a distinctive architecture in the nineteenth century. Architecture is commonly called the mother of all the other arts, and these latter are all more or less affected by it in their details. In almost every age of the world except our own only one style of architecture has been in use, and consequently only one set of details. The designer had accordingly to master, 1. the figure, and the great principles of ornament; 2. those details of the architecture then practised which were necessary to his trade; and 3. the technical processes. Now what is the case in the present day? If we take a walk in the streets of London we may see at least half-a-dozen sorts of architecture, all with different details; and if we go to a museum we shall find specimens of the furniture, jewellery, &c., of these said different styles all beautifully classed and labelled. The student, instead of confining himself to one style as in former times, is expected to be master of all these said half-dozen, which is just as reasonable as asking him to write half-a-dozen poems in half-a-dozen languages, carefully preserving the idiomatic peculiarities of each. This we all know to be an impossibility, and the end is that our student, instead of thoroughly applying the principles of ornament to one style, is so bewildered by having the half-dozen on his hands, that he ends by knowing none of them as he ought to do. This is the case in almost every trade; and until the question of style gets gets settled, it is utterly hopeless to think about any great improvement in modern art.”

William Burges (1827–1881) English architect

Source: Art applied to industry: a series of lectures, 1865, p. 8-9; Partly cited in: Journal of the Royal Society of Arts. Vol. 99. 1951. p. 520

Age, World, School, Art

“One respectful question will be addressed to Jews who plan to continue to eat meat: In view of strong Jewish mandates to be compassionate to animals, preserve our health, help feed the hungry, preserve and protect the environment, conserve resources, and seek and pursue peace, and the very negative effects animal-centered diets have in each of these areas, will you now become a vegetarian, or at least sharply reduce your consumption of animal products?”

Richard H. Schwartz (1934) American mathematician and writer

Judaism and Vegetarianism (revised edition, New York: Lantern Books, 2001), pp. 181 https://archive.org/stream/JudaismAndVegetarianism#page/n205/mode/2up-182.

Health, Peace, Question, Strong

“I know a little of why there is blood in my body, pumping life into my limbs and thought into my brain. I am wanted by God. He is wanting to preserve me, to guide me through the darkness of the shadow of death, up into the highlands of His presence and afterlife. I understand that I am temporary, in this shell of a thing on this dirt of an earth. I am being tempted by Satan, we are all being tempted by Satan, but I am preserved to tell those who do not know about our Savior and Redeemer. This is why Paul had no questions. This is why he could be beaten one day, imprisoned the next, and released only to be beaten again and never ask God why. He understood the earth was fallen. He understood the rules of Rome could not save mankind, that mankind could not save itself; rather, it must be rescued, and he knew he was not in the promised land, but still in the desert, and like Joshua and Caleb he was shouting, "Follow me and trust God!"”

Donald Miller book Blue Like Jazz: nonreligious thoughts on Christian spirituality

Blue Like Jazz (2003, Nelson Books)

Life, Death, God, Understanding

“We should fight to preserve a country where people such as Michael Moore get to miss the point as badly as he misses it. Michael Moore represents everything I detest in a human being.”

Dennis Miller (1953) American stand-up comedian, television host, and actor

Associated Press interview (26 January 2004) http://www.cnn.com/2004/SHOWBIZ/TV/01/26/tv.dennismiller.ap/, The Toronto Star (13 June 2004) http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagenamethestar/Layout/Article_PrintFriendly&cArticle&cid1086991811111&call_pageid968867495754

People, Fight, Country

“While conditions in the United States because of the World War are serious, they are so much better than in the years following the close of the Civil War, that we who have had the double experience can be greatly encouraged. Then one-half of our country was devastated, its industries destroyed or paralyzed; now we are united and stronger in every way. Then we had a paper currency and a dangerous inflation, now we are on a gold standard and with an excellent banking and credit system. The development of our resources and wonderful inventions and discoveries since the Civil War place us in the foremost position to enter upon world commerce when all other nations have come as they must to co-operation and co-ordination upon lines for the preservation of peace and the promotion of international prosperity.”

Chauncey Depew (1834–1928) American politician

My Memories of Eighty Years (1922), p. 352

War, World, Peace, Way

“Youth is the leaven that keeps all these questioning, testing attitudes fermenting in the world. If it were not for this troublesome activity of youth, with its hatred of sophisms and glosses, its insistence on things as they are, society would die from sheer decay. It is the policy of the older generation as it gets adjusted to the world to hide away the unpleasant things where it can, or preserve a conspiracy of silence and an elaborate pretense that they do not exist. But meanwhile the sores go on festering just the same. Youth is the drastic antiseptic. It will not let the elders cry peace, where there is no peace. By its fierce sarcasms it keeps issues alive in the world until they are settled right. It drags skeletons from closets and insists that they be explained. No wonder the older generation fears and distrusts the younger. Youth is the avenging Nemesis on its trail.”

Randolph Bourne (1886–1918) American writer

Page 438 https://books.google.com/books?id=-F8wAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA438. Quote republished in " Left and Right: The Prospects for Liberty http://alexpeak.com/twr/lar/1/1/2/," Left and Right: A Journal of Libertarian Thought 1, no. 1 (Spring, 1965), p. 22 http://alexpeak.com/twr/lar/1/1/2/#p22. "Youth" (1912), II

Youth, World, Fear, Peace

“In our online descriptions and program literature we describe the cloisters as a public sphere for networked interaction, the gathering place for students, professors, and librarians engaged in planning, evaluating, or reviewing the efforts of research and study utilizing the whole range of technologies of literacy. We go further and describe the task of the cloisters as to "channel flows of research, learning and teaching between the increasingly networked world of the library and the intimacy and engagement of our classrooms and other campus spaces". There we continue to explore the "collectible object", which I tentatively described in Othermindedness in terms of maintaining an archive of "the successive choices, the errors and losses, of our own human community" and suggesting that what constitutes the collectible object is the value which suffuses our choices. It seemed to me then that electronic media are especially suited to tracking such "changing change".
I think it still seems so to me now but I do fear we have lost track of the beauty and nimbleness of new media in representing and preserving the meaning-making quotidian, the ordinary mindfulness which makes human life possible and valuable.
It is interesting, I think, that recounting and rehearsing this notion leaves this interview layered and speckled with (self) quotations, documentations, implicit genealogies, images, and traditions of continuity, change, and difference. Perhaps the most quoted line of afternoon over the years has been the sentence "There is no simple way to say this."”

Michael Joyce (1945) American academic and writer

The same is true of any attempt to describe the way in which the collectible object participates in (I use this word as a felicitous shorthand for the complex of ideas involved in what I called "representing and preserving the meaning-making quotidian" above) the library as living archive. An interview with Michael Joyce and review of Liam’s Going at Trace Online Writing Centre Archive (2 December 2002) http://tracearchive.ntu.ac.uk/review/index.cfm?article=33

Life, World, Fear, Beauty

“The Church, sensing that the middle class was slipping out of its grasp, certainly tried to create patterns of living which would enable the bourgeois to remain a bourgeois as well as a Christian; that is, to carry out his economic and social functions while preserving the features of a son of the Church. But it never succeeded in hallowing the aspirations of the new middle class by giving them a religious basis.”

Bernard Groethuysen (1880–1946) French literary historian, translator and writer

Source: The Bourgeois: Catholicism vs. Capitalism in Eighteenth-Century France (1927), p. 48

Sense

“Yesterday we fought a great battle and gained a great victory, for which all the glory is due to God alone. Although under a heavy fire for several continuous hours I received only one wound, the breaking of the longest finger of my left hand; but the doctor says the finger may be saved. It was broken about midway between the hand and knuckle, the ball passing on the side next to the forefinger. Had it struck the centre, I should have lost the finger. My horse was wounded, but not killed. Your coat got an ugly wound near the hip, but my servant, who is very handy, has so far repaired it that it doesn't show very much. My preservation was entirely due, as was the glorious victory, to our God, to whom be all the honor, praise, and glory. The battle was the hardest that I have ever been in, but not near so hot in its fire.”

Thomas Jackson (1824–1863) Confederate general

Letter to his wife after the First Battle of Bull Run (22 July 1861); as quoted in Memoirs of Stonewall Jackson by His Widow Mary Anna Jackson (1895) http://books.google.com/books?id=bG2vg5cH004C, Ch. XI : The First Battle of Manassas, p. 178

God, Victory, Horse

“Among complex systems, stability is typically meta-stability, which is preserved through cycling, whilst growth and shrinkage are often components of a larger-scale, cyclic wave.”

Nick Land (1962) British philosopher

"Eternal Return, and After" https://web.archive.org/web/20110718030428/http://www.thatsmags.com/shanghai/index.php/article/detail/269/eternal-return-and-after (2011)

“The idea that a culture can preserve its originality by barricading itself against foreign influences is an old illusion that has always produced the opposite of the desired result. Isolation breeds sterility. It is the free circulation of cultural products and talents that allows each society to perpetuate and renew itself.”

Jean-François Revel (1924–2006) French writer and philosopher

Source: 2000s, Anti-Americanism (2003), p. 105

Idea

“I set out as a steeplejack in my youth to preserve chimneys. I've finished by knocking most of them down.”

Fred Dibnah (1938–2004) English steeplejack and television personality, with a keen interest in mechanical engineering

Unsourced

Youth

“Man's chief purpose…is the creation and preservation of values: that is what gives meaning to our civilization, and the participation in this is what gives significance, ultimately, to the individual human life.”

Lewis Mumford (1895–1990) American historian, sociologist, philosopher of technology, and literary critic

Faith for Living (1940)

Life

“In all the human societies we have ever reviewed, in every age and every state, there has seldom if ever been a shortage of eager young males prepared to kill and die to preserve the security, comfort and prejudices of their elders, and what you call heroism is just an expression of this fact; there is never a scarcity of idiots.”

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, Use of Weapons (1990), Chapter Thirteen (p. 434).

Age

“As nations are among the largest and the most complete divisions into which society is formed, the grandest aggregations of organized human power; as they raise to observation and distinction the world’s greatest men, and call into requisition the highest order of talent and ability for their guidance, preservation and success, they are ever among the most attractive, instructive and useful subjects of thought, to those just entering upon the duties and activities of life.”

Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman

1860s, Our Composite Nationality (1869)

Life, Men, World, Success

“To preserve liberty, it is essential that the whole body of people always possess arms, and be taught alike, especially when young, how to use them…”

Richard Henry Lee (1732–1794) American statesman

Additional Letters From The Federal Farmer, 53 (1788); although generally attributed to Lee, his authorship of these letters is disputed in "The Authorship of the Letters from the Federal Farmer" by Gordon S. Wood, in The William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, Vol. 31, No. 2 (April 1974) http://www.jstor.org/stable/1920914

People

“For this country is moving and it must not stop. It cannot stop. For this is a time for courage and a time for challenge. Neither conformity nor complacency will do. Neither the fanatics nor the faint-hearted are needed. And our duty as a Party is not to our Party alone, but to the nation, and, indeed, to all mankind. Our duty is not merely the preservation of political power but the preservation of peace and freedom.”

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

1963, Remarks Intended for Delivery to the Texas Democratic State Committee in the Municipal Auditorium in Austin

Peace, Courage, Freedom, Time

“[T]he Confederacy was so entwined with the idea of preserving slavery that the flag, even today, can evoke racial polarization…”

Victor Davis Hanson (1953) American military historian, essayist, university professor

2010s, America: One Nation, Indivisible (2015)

Idea

“No government is ever really in favor of so-called civil rights. It always tries to whittle them down. They are preserved under all governments, insofar as they survive at all, by special classes of fanatics, often highly dubious.”

H.L. Mencken (1880–1956) American journalist and writer

33
1940s–present, Minority Report : H.L. Mencken's Notebooks (1956)

“Valour’s the best reward; ‘tis valour that surpasses all things else : our liberty, our safety, life, estate, our parents, children, country, are by this preserved, protected : valour everything comprises in itself; and every good awaits the man who is possess’d of valour. (translator Thornton)”
[V]irtus praemium est optimum ; virtus omnibus remus anteit profecto : libertas salus vita res et parentes, patria et prognati tutantur, servantur : virtus omnia in sese habet, omnia adsunt bona quem penest virtus.

Plautus Amphitryon

Amphitryon, Act II, scene 2, line 16.
Variant translation: Courage is the very best gift of all; courage stands before everything, it does, it does! It is what maintains and preserves our liberty, safety, life, and our homes and parents, our country and children. Courage comprises all things: a man with courage has every blessing.
Amphitryon

Life, Children, Parent, Country

“Between things sacred and profane there is this difference among others. In profane matters the instrument derives its worth from the end, and is valued for the most part only in so far as it is a means to that end; and consequently we change the instruments as the end demands, and finally, when the end is no longer pursued, the instruments automatically fall into disuse. But in sacred matters the end invests the instrument with a sanctity of its own. Consequently, there is no changing or varying of the instrument; and when the end has ceased to be pursued, the instrument does not fall out of use, but is directed towards another end. In other words: in the one case we preserve the shell for the sake of the kernel, and discard the shell when we have eaten the kernel; in the other case we raise the shell to the dignity of the kernel, and do not rob it of that dignity even if the kernel withers, but make a new kernel for it.”

Ahad Ha'am (1856–1927) Hebrew essayist and thinker

Source: Selected Essays (1904), "Sacred and Profane" (1891), p. 41

Change, Parting

“There can be no question but that Christianity was originally a Jewish promotion, and it is noteworthy that the Christians who try to make their cult respectable in the Third Century claim that they repudiate the Jews. One of the earliest to do this was Tertullian, a Carthaginian shyster, whose Apologeticum, a defense of Christianity, was written at the very beginning of the Third Century. He asserts that Christianity is not a conspiracy of revolutionaries and degenerates, as was commonly believed, and claims that it is an association of loving brothers who have preserved the faith that the Jews forsook – which has been the common story ever since. Our holy men salvage Tertullian by claiming that he was "orthodox" in his early writings, but then, alas! became a Montanist heretic, poor fellow. Tertullian is the author of the famous dictum that he believes the impossible because it is absurd (credo quia absurdum), so he is naturally dear to the heart of the pious. How much Jerome and other saints have tampered with the facts to make Tertullian seem "orthodox" in his early works has been most fully shown by Timothy Barnes in his Tertullian (Oxford, 1971), but even he spends a hundred pages pawing over chronological difficulties that can be reconciled by what seems to me the simple and obvious solution: Tertullian, who was evidently a pettifogging lawyer before he got into the Gospel-business, had sense enough to eliminate from his brief for the Christians facts that would have displeased the pagans whom he was trying to convince that Christians represented no threat to civilized society; he accordingly concealed in his apologetic works the peculiar doctrines of the Christian sect to which he had been originally "converted," but he naturally expounded those doctrines in writings intended, not for the eyes of wicked pagans, but for other brands of Christians, whom he wished to convert to his own sect, which was that of Montanus, a very Holy Prophet (divinely inspired, of course) who was a Phrygian, not a Jew, and who had learned from chats with God that since the Jews had muffed their big opportunity at the time of the Crucifixion, Jesus, when he returned next year or the year after that, was going to set up his New Jerusalem in Phrygia after he had raised hell with the pagans and tormented and butchered them in all of the delightful ways so lovingly described in the Apocalypse, the Hymn of Hate that still soothes the souls of "fundamentalist" Christians today. If, in his Apologeticum and similar works, Tertullian had told the stupid pagans that they were going to be tortured and exterminated in a year or two, they might have doubted that Christians were the innocent little lambs that Tertullian claimed they were.”

Revilo P. Oliver (1908–1994) American philologist

The Jewish Strategy, Chapter 12 "Christianity"
1990s, The Jewish Strategy (2001)

Love, Men, God, Hate

“Language always preserves a play or figure/ground relation between experience, and perception and its replay in expression.”

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

Source: 1980s, Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988), p. 121

“In the middle ages of Christianity opposition to the State opinions was hushed. The consequence was, Christianity became loaded with all the Romish follies. Nothing but free argument, raillery & even ridicule will preserve the purity of religion.”

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

Notes on Religion (October 1776), published in The Works of Thomas Jefferson in Twelve Volumes http://oll.libertyfund.org/ToC/0054.php, Federal Edition, Paul Leicester Ford, ed., New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1904, Vol. 2 http://oll.libertyfund.org/Texts/Jefferson0136/Works/0054-02_Bk.pdf, p. 256 1770s

Age, Religion

“Mankind cannot, I submit, save itself from destruction through mere cleverness of scientific technology selfishly applied, nor through wishful thinking. But through a deep sense of brotherhood of all life, and a willingness and eagerness on the part of each and every person to work constructively for the preservation and enhancement of life, mankind may yet be preserved and go forward into the next millennium with confidence, competence and compassion.”

H. Jay Dinshah (1933–2000) American proponent of veganism and Jain ethics

The Vegetarian Way, Proceedings of the 24th World Vegetarian Conference (India, 1977); as quoted in Jon Wynne-Tyson, The Extended Circle (1985), and in the International Vegetarian Union website https://ivu.org/congress/wvc77/extracts.html.

Life, Confidence, Thinking, Sense

“What is the light of a poet's name,
If it is not his country that hallows his fame?
Where may he look for guerdon so fair
As the honour and praise that await him there?
His name will be lost and his grave forgot,
If the tears of his country preserve them not!...”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

The Improvisatrice (1824)

Tear, Light, Country

“Every influence, every motive, that provokes the spirit of murder among men, impels these mountaineers to deeds of treachery and violence. The strong aboriginal propensity to kill, inherent in all human beings, has in these valleys been preserved in unexampled strength and vigour. That religion, which above all others was founded and propagated by the sword — the tenets and principles of which are instinct with incentives to slaughter and which in three continents has produced fighting breeds of men — stimulates a wild and merciless fanaticism. The love of plunder, always a characteristic of hill tribes, is fostered by the spectacle of opulence and luxury which, to their eyes, the cities and plains of the south display. A code of honour not less punctilious than that of old Spain, is supported by vendettas as implacable as those of Corsica.”

Winston S. Churchill book The Story of the Malakand Field Force

The Story of the Malakand Field Force: An Episode of Frontier War (1898), Chapter I Description of the tribal areas of what is now Pakistan, commonly referred to as Waziristan Downloadable eText version(s) of this book can be found online http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/gutbook/lookup?num=9404 at Project Gutenberg Early career years (1898–1929)

Love, Men, Religion, Mountain

“Art, it seems to me, should simplify. That, indeed, is very nearly the whole of the higher artistic process; finding what conventions of form and what detail one can do without and yet preserve the spirit of the whole — so that all that one has suppressed and cut away is there to the reader's consciousness as much as if it were in type on the page.”

Willa Cather (1873–1947) American writer and novelist

On the Art of Fiction"; originally published in The Borzoi 1920 (1920)
Willa Cather on Writing (1949)

Art

“The example we would do well to keep in front of us is that of the Dalai Lama. He was giving a discourse on a Tibetan text about meditation. He read out a sentence, laughed and remarked, ‘Buddhist theories of creation, a disgrace! Must throw them out!’ He advises that we should keep a wastepaper basket nearby – whatever doesn’t accord with what we know now, we should cast into that basket. ‘Buddhism must face facts,’ that is what he teaches. Accordingly, he has opened Buddhist texts to minute examination. (…) That reflects confidence in one’s tradition. That is true service to the tradition. That is the way to preserve for the future ‘the pearl of great price’ in it.”

Arun Shourie (1941) Indian journalist and politician

Eminent Historians: Their Technology, Their Line, Their Fraud

Way, Confidence, Reading, Future

“Child! Do not throw this book about;
Refrain from the unholy pleasure
Of cutting all the pictures out!
Preserve it as your chiefest treasure.”

Hilaire Belloc (1870–1953) writer

"Dedication on the Gift of a Book to a Child"
Verses (1910)

Pleasure, Books

“Autumn! Autumn! The Alexandrine epoch of the year, gathering into its enormous libraries all the sterile wisdom of the three hundred and sixty-five days of the solar cycle! Oh, those aged mornings, as yellow as parchment, sweet with wisdom, like late evenings. Oh, those cunningly smiling mornings, like shrewd palimpsests, many-layered like old, yellowed books. Oh, the autumnal day, that old jester-librarian clambering up ladders in his slipped-down dressing gown, sampling the preserves of all ages and cultures!”

Bruno Schulz (1892–1942) Polish novelist and painter

“The Second Autumn” http://www.schulzian.net/translation/sanatorium/second_autumn.htm His father, The seasons

Wisdom, Books, Age, Smile

“I’ve never wanted to fit in Abbaji’s shoes and am happy to walk in my own. My father made it categorically clear even when my brothers or me performed with him. “I don’t expect my sons to be me because what I’m doing is already done. They’ve to be better than me,” he’d say. “Photocopies are eventually consigned to the dust bin and only originals preserved.”

Zakir Hussain (musician) (1951) Indian tabla player, musical producer, film actor and composer

Quote, I've never wanted to fit in Abbaji's shoes: Ustad Zakir Hussain

Shoe, Happiness

“There is a philosophical, or metaphysical position that can be taken–maybe its a scientific hypothesis–that the past cannot in fact exist. Everything that can possibly exist exists now. Things now may be expressive of some conceivable or describable past state of affairs, yes:but that's different from saying this this former state actually somehow exists in the form of "the past". Even in our memory[…]there is no past:no scenes preserved with all their sights and sounds. Merely fleeting states of mind, myriad points assembled for a moment to make a new picture (but "picture" is wrong too, too full, too fixed) of what we think are former states of things: things that once were, or may have been the case.”

John Crowley book Four Freedoms

Prelude
Four Freedoms (2009)

Thinking, Memory, Past

“With what moral authority can they speak of human rights — the rulers of a nation in which the millionaire and beggar coexist; the Indian is exterminated; the black man is discriminated against; the woman is prostituted; and the great masses of Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, and Latin Americans are scorned, exploited, and humiliated? How can they do this — the bosses of an empire where the mafia, gambling, and child prostitution are imposed; where the CIA organizes plans of global subversion and espionage, and the Pentagon creates neutron bombs capable of preserving material assets and wiping out human beings; an empire that supports reaction and counter-revolution all over the world; that protects and promotes the exploitation by monopolies of the wealth and the human resources of whole continents, unequal exchange, a protectionist policy, an incredible waste of natural resources, and a system of hunger for the world?”

Fidel Castro (1926–2016) former First Secretary of the Communist Party and President of Cuba

Speech on the 25th anniversary of the Moncada Barracks attack (26 July 1978) http://www.cuba.cu/gobierno/discursos/1978/esp/f260778e.html

Hunger, World, Support, Nature

“What was needed was a literary theory which, while preserving the formalist bent of New Criticism, its dogged attention to literature as aesthetic object rather than social practice, would make something a good deal more systematic and 'scientific' out of all this. The answer arrived in 1957, in the shape of the Canadian Northrop Fryes mighty 'totalization' of all literary genres, Anatomy of Criticism.”

Terry Eagleton (1943) British writer, academic and educator

Source: 1980s, Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983), Chapter 3, 79

Dogs, Literature

“At this moment the most stable Government in the world is our own, and it is solely because, in its real essence, it is the most free, in the only sense in which Freedom really exists; where men can act at their own free discretion, restrained only by the necessities of Justice. If the spirit of the Constitution is to be observed, that great instrument is always self-preserving. It needs only to be followed to be safeguarded.”

George Howard Earle, Jr. (1856–1928) American lawyer

From Does Price Fixing Destroy Liberty? (1920) by George H. Earle, Jr.

Men, World, Justice, Sense

“I make known unto thee how He hath provided for the bodily health of us all, by having produced Æsculapius, the Preserver of the universe; and how he hath communicated to us virtue of every kind, by sending down Aphrodite in company with Athene for our guardian; having made it all but a law that no one should use copulation except for the end of generating his like. For this reason truly, according to his revolutions and seasons, do the various vegetable and animal races feel themselves stirred towards the generation of their kind. What need is there to magnify the glory of his rays, and of his light? A night without moon, and without stars, how terrible is it! Let anyone reflect on this, in order that he may estimate how great a blessing is the light we derive from the Sun!”

Julian (emperor) (331–363) Roman Emperor, philosopher and writer

Upon the Sovereign Sun (362)

Health, Law, Feeling, Star

“The wisdom of the wise, and the experience of ages, may be preserved by quotation.”

Isaac D'Israeli (1766–1848) British writer

Quotation; since at least 1986 a paraphrased form misattributed to his son Benjamin Disraeli has often been quoted: "The wisdom of the wise and the experience of the ages are perpetuated by quotations."
Curiosities of Literature (1791–1834)

Wisdom, Age

Quotes about preserves page 7

Quotes about preserves
page 7