Quotes about prior (248 quotes, page 3)

“One of the best things about writing is how it redeems, not to mention recycles, all of one's prior experiences, including — or perhaps especially — the failures.”

Lois McMaster Bujold (1949) Science Fiction and fantasy author from the USA

"Putting It Together" p. 6
The Vorkosigan Companion (2008)

Failure

“Welcoming Hegel’s idea of reconciliation as akin to his own enterprise of public reason, Rawls drew the line at his vision of the international realm as a domain of violence and anarchy, in which contention between sovereign states was bound to be regulated by war. Habermas’s gesture enlisted Hegel, on the contrary, as a patron of cosmopolitan peace. The first could not square his Law of Peoples with the lawlessness of Hegel’s states, the second could only enrol Hegel for pacific progress by turning him philosophically inside out. Bobbio, by contrast, could take the measure of Hegel’s conception of world history, as a ruthless march of great powers in which successive might founds overarching right, and invoke it in all logic to justify his approval of American imperial violence. Law was born of force, and the maxim of the conqueror – prior in tempore, potior in jure”

Perry Anderson (1938) British historian

still held.
Spectrum: From Right to Left in the World of Ideas (2005), Ch. 7. "Arms and Rights, The Adjustable Centre" (1998)

War , People , World , Peace

“Nehamas invokes Nietzsche’s talk of the “eternal basic text of homo natura” (BGE 230, quoted above) as evidence of aestheticism--the view, recall, that “texts can be interpreted equally well in vastly different and deeply incompatible ways” (p. 3). But the talk of “text” in this passage is actually incompatible with aestheticism. For in this passage, as we have seen, Nietzsche asserts that prior claims to “knowledge” have been superficial precisely because they have ignored the “eternal basic text”— ewigen Grundtext—of man conceived as a natural organism. That this text is eternal and basic implies not that it “can be interpreted equally well in vastly different and deeply incompatible ways” but just the opposite: readings which do not treat man naturalistically misread the text—they “falsify” it. It is these misreadings, of course, that Nietzsche, ever the “good philologist,” aims to correct.”

Brian Leiter (1963) American philosopher and legal scholar

"The Hermeneutics of Suspicion: Recovering Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud"

Way , Quotes , Nature , Knowledge

“It is usually assumed that, in speaking, in the 1844 Manuscripts, of man’s “being reduced to the level of the animals,” and of man’s alienation from his “species-being” under the conditions of capitalist production, Marx is thinking in terms of an abstract conception of “man” as being alienated from his biological characteristics as a species. So, it is presumed, at this initial stage in the evolution of his thought, Marx believed that man is essentially a creative being whose “natural” propensities are denied by the restrictive character of capitalism. Actually, Marx holds, on the contrary, that the enormous productive power of capitalism generates possibilities for the future development of man which could not have been possible under prior forms of productive system. The organization of social relationships within which capitalist production is carried on in fact leads to the failure to realize these historically generated possibilities. The character of alienated labor does not express a tension between “man in nature” (non-alienated) and “man in society” (alienated), but between the potential generated by a specific form of society—capitalism—and the frustrated realization of that potential. What separates man from the animals is not the mere existence of biological differences between mankind and other species, but the cultural achievements of men, which are the outcome of a very long process of social development.”

Anthony Giddens (1938) British sociologist

Source: Capitalism and Modern Social Theory (1971), pp. 15-16.

Men , Failure , Nature , Thinking

“The cultural-revolutionary politics of personal relations may be far more firmly established in the domains of domesticity, leisure, and consumption than in the organization of practical life. It may still flourish more strongly among the educated professional classes than among ordinary working people. Its war against the tyranny of roles and hierarchies may be perverted by a lack of institutional imagination. Yet its achievements are real. We cannot understand them merely as a series of episides in the confined life of high culture. We can often trace the ideas of this cultural-revolutionary politics of role-jumbling to the work of small numbers of thinkers, artists, and professional outsiders. But the diffusion of these ideas through the medium of popular culture, and the sympathy with which they have been greeted by ever larger sectors of the population, would have been inconceivable without a prior transformation of social life. As always, people had to see enacted before their eyes a fragmentary example of the connection between the freedom to revise social arrangements and assumptions and freedom from dependence and depersonalization. Only then could they want more of the same and believe more possible.”

Roberto Mangabeira Unger (1947) Brazilian philosopher and politician

Source: False Necessityː Anti-Necessitarian Social Theory in the Service of Radical Democracy (1987), pp. 293-294

Life , War , People , Education

“One scarcely knows whether to laugh or cry. The spectacle presented, in Cynthia Russett's splendid book, of nineteenth-century white male scientists and thinkers earnestly trying to prove women inferior to men--thereby providing, along with "savages" and "idiots," an evolutionary buffer between men and animals--is by turns appalling, amusing, and saddening. Surveying the work of real scientists as well as the products of more dubious minds, Russett has produced a learned yet immensely enjoyable chapter in the annals of human folly.
At the turn of the century science was successfully challenging the social authority of religion; scientists wielded a power no other group commanded. Unfortunately, as Russett demonstrates, in Victorian sexual science, empiricism tangled with prior belief, and scientists' delineation of the mental and physical differences between men and women was directed to show how and why women were inferior to men. These men were not necessarily misogynists. This was an unsettling time, when the social order was threatened by wars, fierce economic competition, racial and industrial conflict, and the failure of society to ameliorate poverty, vice, crime, illnesses. Just when men needed the psychic lift an adoring dependent woman could give, she was demanding the vote, higher education, and the opportunity to become a wage earner!”

Cynthia Eagle Russett (1937–2013) American historian

Cynthia Eagle Russett. Sexual Science: The Victorian Construction of Womanhood. Harvard University Press, 2009. Abstract

Women , Men , War , Books

“The Bible presents a cataclysm at the beginning of time, which is the emergence of self-consciousness in human beings, which puts a rift in the structure of Being. That's the right way to think about it. That's given cosmic significance. You can dispense with that and say that nothing that happens to human beings is of cosmic significance, that we're these short lived, mold-like entities that are like cancers on this tiny little planet, rotating out in the middle of nowhere, on the edge of some unknown galaxy in the middle of infinite space, and nothing that happens to us matters. This is not a road that you can walk down and live well. For all intents and purposes, it's untrue. If fact, if you really walk down that road, and you take it really seriously, you end up not living at all. The kind of conclusions suicidal people draw about the utility of life prior to wishing for its cessation, are very much like the conclusions that you draw if you walk down that particular line of reasoning long enough.”

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

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ifi5KkXig3s "Biblical Series IV: Adam and Eve: Self-Consciousness, Evil, and Death"

Life , People , Way , Thinking

“Four more byes down the leg side, although Prior was pretty blameless there. However, it does take his byes conceded past the 1,000,000 mark in only his seventh Test, which is quite some achievement. Give that some [name of sponsor deleted] energy, you gobby git.”

Rob Smyth (1977) English/Irish rugby league player

Cricket England versus India; Third Test, day one; Over-by-over: afternoon session http://sport.guardian.co.uk/englandindia2007/story/0,,2145331,00.html

Past

“This opinion… appears to be ancient… that the one, excess and defect, are the principles of things… It is not… probable that there are more than three principles… [E]ssence is one certain genus of being: so that principles will differ from each other in prior and posterior alone, but not in genus, for in one genus there is always one contrariety, and all contrarieties appear to be referred to one. That there is neither one element, therefore, nor more than two or three, is evident.”

Aristotle book Physics

Book I, Ch. VII, pp. 62-63.
Physics

Appearance

“[T]he ancient philosophers… all of them assert that the elements, and those things which are called by them principles, are contraries, though they establish them without reason, as if they were compelled to assert this by truth itself. They differ, however… that some of them assume prior, and others posterior principles; and some of them things more known according to reason, but others such as are more known according to sense: for some establish the hot and the cold, others the moist and the dry, others the odd and the even, and others strife and friendship, as the causes of generation. …in a certain respect they assert the same things, and speak differently from each other. They assert different things… but the same things, so far as they speak analogously. For they assume principles from the same co-ordination; since, of contraries, some contain, and others are contained.”

Aristotle book Physics

Book I, Ch. VI, pp. 57-59.
Physics

Friendship , Truth , Sense

“The greatest problem is not how to continue but how to exalt our existence. The call for a life beyond the grave is presumptuous, if there is no cry for eternal life prior to our descending to the grave.”

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

Man Is Not Alone : A Philosophy Of Religion (1951), Ch. 26 : The Pious Man; Our Destiny is to Aid
Context: The greatest problem is not how to continue but how to exalt our existence. The call for a life beyond the grave is presumptuous, if there is no cry for eternal life prior to our descending to the grave. Eternity is not perpetual future but perpetual presence. He has planted in us the seed of eternal life. The world to come is not only a hereafter but also a here-now.

Life , Problem , Cry

“Quality is a direct experience independent of and prior to intellectual abstractions.”

Robert M. Pirsig book Lila: An Inquiry into Morals

Lila (1991), p. 73

“There is… something which is in energy only; and there is something which is both in energy and capacity. …of relatives, one is predicated as according to excess and defect: another according to the effective and passive, and, in short, the motive, and that which may be moved… Motion, however, has not a substance separate from things… But each of the categories subsists in a twofold manner in all things. Thus… one thing pertaining to it is form, and another privation. …So the species of motion and mutation are as many as those of being. But since in every genus of things, there is that which is in entelecheia, and that which is in capacity; motion is the entelecheia of that which is in capacity… That there is energy, therefore, and that a thing then happens to be moved, when this energy exists, and neither prior nor posterior to it, is manifest. … [N]either motion nor mutation can be placed in any other genus; nor have those who have advanced a different opinion concerning it spoken rightly. …for by some motion is said to be difference, inequality, and non-being; though it is not necessary that any of these should be moved… Neither is mutation into these, nor from these, rather than from their opposites. …The cause, however, why motion appears to be indefinite, is because it can neither be simply referred to the capacity, nor to the energy of beings. …[I]t is difficult to apprehend what motion is: for it is necessary to refer it either to privation, or to capacity, or to simple energy; but it does not appear that it can be any of these. The above-mentioned mode, therfore remains, viz. that it is a certain energy; but… difficult to be perceived, but which may have a subsistence.”

Aristotle book Physics

Book III, Ch. I, pp. 137-147.
Physics

Motivation , Appearance

“Prior to the advent of brain, there was no color and no sound in the universe, nor was there any flavor or aroma and probably rather little sense and no feeling or emotion.”

Roger Wolcott Sperry (1913–1994) American neuroscientist

"Evolution of the Human Brain" (1964), p. 2
Context: Prior to the advent of brain, there was no color and no sound in the universe, nor was there any flavor or aroma and probably rather little sense and no feeling or emotion. Before brains the universe was also free of pain and anxiety.

Color , Feeling , Sense , Universe

“I am saying that many of the problems between the sexes are coming from something prior to socialization, a turbulence that has to do with every boy’s origin in a woman’s body, and the way he is overwhelmed by this huge, matriarchal shadow of a goddess figure from his childhood.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Sex, Art and American Culture : New Essays (1992), Rape and Modern Sex War, p. 68
Context: I am saying that many of the problems between the sexes are coming from something prior to socialization, a turbulence that has to do with every boy’s origin in a woman’s body, and the way he is overwhelmed by this huge, matriarchal shadow of a goddess figure from his childhood. And I feel, after so many decades of studying this, that men are suffering from a sense of dependence on women, their sense that at any moment they could be returned to that slavery and servitude they experienced under a woman’s thumb, when they were a boy in the shadow of the mother. I got this from studying all world culture, and comparing and noticing how often there were these similar patterns in many different cultures. Many things that erupt in rape or violence, or battery and so on, are happening when a woman is pushing that button of fear and dependency.

Sex , Way , Boy , Problem

“I approach the presentation of Kierkegaard with some trepidation. Next to Nietzsche, or rather, prior to Nietzsche, I consider him to be the most important thinker of our post-Kantian age.”

Karl Jaspers The Great Philosophers

The Great Philosophers (1962)
Context: I approach the presentation of Kierkegaard with some trepidation. Next to Nietzsche, or rather, prior to Nietzsche, I consider him to be the most important thinker of our post-Kantian age. With Goethe and Hegel, an epoch had reached its conclusion, and our prevalent way of thinking — that is, the positivistic, natural-scientific one — cannot really be considered as philosophy.

Age

“Further, the state is by nature clearly prior to the family and to the individual, since the whole is of necessity prior to the part; for example, if the whole body be destroyed, there will be no foot or hand, except in an equivocal sense, as we might speak of a stone hand; for when destroyed the hand will be no better than that. But things are defined by their working and power; and we ought not to say that they are the same when they no longer have their proper quality, but only that they have the same name.”

Aristotle book Politics

Book I, Part II
Politics

Family , Nature , Sense , Parting

“The premisses of demonstrative knowledge must be true, primary, immediate, more knowable than and prior to the conclusion, which is further related to them as effect to cause… The premisses must be the cause of the conclusion, more knowable than it, and prior to it; its causes, since we posses scientific knowledge of a thing only when we know its cause; prior, in order to be causes; antecedently known, this antecedent knowledge being not our mere understanding of the meaning, but knowledge of the fact as well. Now 'prior' and 'more knowable' are ambiguous terms, for there is a difference between what is prior and more knowable in the order of being and what is prior and knowable to man. I mean that objects nearer to sense are prior and more knowable to man; objects without qualification prior and more knowable are those further from sense. Now the most universal causes are furthest from sense and particular causes are nearest to sense, and they are thus exactly opposed to each other.”

Aristotle book Posterior Analytics

I. 2, 71b.9 sqq
Posterior Analytics

Understanding , Knowledge , Sense , Universe

“For ten long weary years prior to 9/11, WBC warned you daily on the mean streets of this nation that your sodomite sins will be avenged by an angry God except you repent.”

Fred Phelps (1929–2014) American pastor and activist

2000s, 9/11: God's Wrath Revealed (2006)
Context: For ten long weary years prior to 9/11, WBC warned you daily on the mean streets of this nation that your sodomite sins will be avenged by an angry God except you repent. You persecuted us for our trouble, thereby aggravating your great transgression. On 9/11/01, God Almighty dealt backsliding America a staggering blow.

God

“Thus, the theists take their cue from manufacture, the pantheists from growth. For one man, the world is like a thought or a grammatical sentence in which a thought is expressed. For such a philosopher, the whole must logically be prior to the parts; for letters would never have been invented without syllables to spell, or syllables without words to utter.”

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

A Pluralistic Universe (1909) http://www.gutenberg.org/files/11984/11984-8.txt, Lecture I
1900s
Context: Reduced to their most pregnant difference, empiricism means the habit of explaining wholes by parts, and rationalism means the habit of explaining parts by wholes. Rationalism thus preserves affinities with monism, since wholeness goes with union, while empiricism inclines to pluralistic views. No philosophy can ever be anything but a summary sketch, a picture of the world in abridgment, a foreshortened bird's-eye view of the perspective of events. And the first thing to notice is this, that the only material we have at our disposal for making a picture of the whole world is supplied by the various portions of that world of which we have already had experience. We can invent no new forms of conception, applicable to the whole exclusively, and not suggested originally by the parts. All philosophers, accordingly, have conceived of the whole world after the analogy of some particular feature of it which has particularly captivated their attention. Thus, the theists take their cue from manufacture, the pantheists from growth. For one man, the world is like a thought or a grammatical sentence in which a thought is expressed. For such a philosopher, the whole must logically be prior to the parts; for letters would never have been invented without syllables to spell, or syllables without words to utter.
Another man, struck by the disconnectedness and mutual accidentality of so many of the world's details, takes the universe as a whole to have been such a disconnectedness originally, and supposes order to have been superinduced upon it in the second instance, possibly by attrition and the gradual wearing away by internal friction of portions that originally interfered.
Another will conceive the order as only a statistical appearance, and the universe will be for him like a vast grab-bag with black and white balls in it, of which we guess the quantities only probably, by the frequency with which we experience their egress.
For another, again, there is no really inherent order, but it is we who project order into the world by selecting objects and tracing relations so as to gratify our intellectual interests. We carve out order by leaving the disorderly parts out; and the world is conceived thus after the analogy of a forest or a block of marble from which parks or statues may be produced by eliminating irrelevant trees or chips of stone.
Some thinkers follow suggestions from human life, and treat the universe as if it were essentially a place in which ideals are realized. Others are more struck by its lower features, and for them, brute necessities express its character better.
All follow one analogy or another; and all the analogies are with some one or other of the universe's subdivisions. Every one is nevertheless prone to claim that his conclusions are the only logical ones, that they are necessities of universal reason, they being all the while, at bottom, accidents more or less of personal vision which had far better be avowed as such; for one man's vision may be much more valuable than another's, and our visions are usually not only our most interesting but our most respectable contributions to the world in which we play our part. What was reason given to men for, said some eighteenth century writer, except to enable them to find reasons for what they want to think and do?—and I think the history of philosophy largely bears him out, "The aim of knowledge," says Hegel, "is to divest the objective world of its strangeness, and to make us more at home in it." Different men find their minds more at home in very different fragments of the world.

World , Parting

“The proof that the state is a creation of nature and prior to the individual is that the individual, when isolated, is not self-sufficing; and therefore he is like a part in relation to the whole.”

Aristotle book Politics

Book I, Part II
Politics

Nature , Parting

“He must be warned prior to any questioning that he has the right to remain silent, that anything he says can be used against him in a court of law, that he has the right to the presence of an attorney, and that, if he cannot afford an attorney one will be appointed for him prior to any questioning if he so desires.”

Earl Warren (1891–1974) United States federal judge

Miranda v. Arizona, 384 U. S. 436, 478-79 (1965)
Context: To summarize, we hold that, when an individual is taken into custody or otherwise deprived of his freedom by the authorities in any significant way and is subjected to questioning, the privilege against self-incrimination is jeopardized. Procedural safeguards must be employed to protect the privilege, and unless other fully effective means are adopted to notify the person of his right of silence and to assure that the exercise of the right will be scrupulously honored, the following measures are required. He must be warned prior to any questioning that he has the right to remain silent, that anything he says can be used against him in a court of law, that he has the right to the presence of an attorney, and that, if he cannot afford an attorney one will be appointed for him prior to any questioning if he so desires.

Law , Question

“Prior to 1918 the word “communism” did not mean Left Social Democracy of the sort represented by the Russian Bolsheviks, a radical, revolutionary form of State socialism. Quite the contrary, it was used of those who wished in one way or another to abolish the State, who believed that socialism was not a matter of seizing power, but of doing away with power and returning society to an organic community of non-coercive human relations.”

Kenneth Rexroth (1905–1982) American poet, writer, anarchist, academic and conscientious objector

Introduction : The Libertarian Tradition http://www.bopsecrets.org/rexroth/communalism1.htm
Communalism (1974)
Context: Prior to 1918 the word “communism” did not mean Left Social Democracy of the sort represented by the Russian Bolsheviks, a radical, revolutionary form of State socialism. Quite the contrary, it was used of those who wished in one way or another to abolish the State, who believed that socialism was not a matter of seizing power, but of doing away with power and returning society to an organic community of non-coercive human relations. They believed that this was what society was naturally, and that the State was only a morbid growth on the normal body of oeconomia, the housekeeping of the human family, grouped in voluntary association. Even the word “socialism” itself was originally applied to the free communist communities which were so common in America in the nineteenth century.

Way , Democracy , Communication

“Discontinuity of its linguistic and logical terms is for the conscious analytical intellect psychologically and logically prior to notions of continuity.”

Lancelot Law Whyte (1896–1972) Scottish industrial engineer

Essay on Atomism: From Democritus to 1960 (1961)
Context: Discontinuity of its linguistic and logical terms is for the conscious analytical intellect psychologically and logically prior to notions of continuity.... This functional priority... may not have been reflected in the history of the development of reason in all human communities.... But it is relevant for the West that the Pythagoreans, with their discrete integers and point patterns, came before Euclid, with his continuous metrical geometry, and that physical atomism as a speculative philosophy preceded by some two thousand years the conception of a continuous physical medium with properties of its own.<!--pp.13-14

“I felt even somewhat resentful of my prior education, that I could have gone as far as I had—already a fairly well-recognized professor of educational psychology—and yet could have remained so unaware of the crucial importance of genetic factors for the study of individual differences.”

Arthur Jensen (1923–2012) professor of educational psychology

Source: Differential Psychology: Towards Consensus (1987), p. 424
Context: I had begun by trying, for the sake of scholarly thoroughness, merely to write a short chapter for my book on the ‘culturally disadvantaged’ that I expected would succinctly review the so-called nature-nurture issue only to easily dismiss it as being of little or no importance for the subsequent study of the causes of scholastic failure and success. I delved into practically all the available literature on the genetics of intelligence, beginning with the works of the most prominent investigator in this field, Sir Cyril Burt, whom I had previously heard give a brilliant lecture entitled The Inheritance of Mental Ability’ at University College, London in 1957. The more I read in this field, the less convinced I became of the prevailing belief in the all-importance of environment and learning as the mechanisms of individual and group differences in general ability and scholastic aptitude. I felt even somewhat resentful of my prior education, that I could have gone as far as I had—already a fairly well-recognized professor of educational psychology—and yet could have remained so unaware of the crucial importance of genetic factors for the study of individual differences.

Education , Study

“Faith is something that comes out of the soul. It is not an information that is absorbed but an attitude, existing prior to the formulation of any creed.”

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

"The Holy Dimension", p. 337
Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Essays (1997)

Faith , Soul

“Prior to any questioning, the person must be warned that he has a right to remain silent, that any statement he does make may be used as evidence against him, and that he has a right to the presence of an attorney, either retained or appointed.”

Earl Warren (1891–1974) United States federal judge

Miranda v. Arizona, 384 U. S. 436, 445 (1965) - Opinion of the Court
Context: Prior to any questioning, the person must be warned that he has a right to remain silent, that any statement he does make may be used as evidence against him, and that he has a right to the presence of an attorney, either retained or appointed. The defendant may waive effectuation of these rights, provided the waiver is made voluntarily, knowingly and intelligently. If, however, he indicates in any manner and at any stage of the process that he wishes to consult with an attorney before speaking there can be no questioning. Likewise, if the individual is alone and indicates in any manner that he does not wish to be interrogated, the police may not question him. The mere fact that he may have answered some questions or volunteered some statements on his own does not deprive him of the right of refrain from answering any further inquiries until he has consulted with an attorney and thereafter consents to be questioned.

Question , Personality

“The human mind in all countries having gone to the uttermost limit of its own capacity, flushed with its conquests, haughty after its self-assertion upon emerging from the prior dark age, is now nearing a new phase, a phase inherent in the nature and destiny of things.”

Louis Sullivan (1856–1924) American architect

Emotional Architecture as Compared to Intellectual (1894)
Context: The human mind in all countries having gone to the uttermost limit of its own capacity, flushed with its conquests, haughty after its self-assertion upon emerging from the prior dark age, is now nearing a new phase, a phase inherent in the nature and destiny of things.
The human mind, like the silk-worm oppressed with the fullness of its own accumulation, has spun about itself gradually and slowly a cocoon that at last has shut out the light of the world from which it drew the substance of its thread. But this darkness has produced the chrysalis, and we within the darkness feel the beginning of our throes. The inevitable change, after centuries upon centuries of preparation, is about to begin.

Age , Nature , Country

“It is true that my conclusions and views on certain issues are based on my knowledge existing prior to the submission of ASI’s report in court. I and Prof. Habib had given this statement that remains of old mosque or Eidgah had been found beneath the disputed site and not of any temple.If this propaganda that remains of temple were found at the disputed site, had not taken place, there would have been no occasion for me and Prof. Irfan Habib to give the above statement.”

Suraj Bhan (archaeologist) (1931–2010) Indian archaeologist

Justice Aggarwal, Para 3826
Quotes from the Judgment from Honorable Justice Agarwal, 2010

Knowledge

“I worked as a medical illustrator for about ten years. It was not my career ambition; it was a way to finance my addiction to art and support my family. Medical illustration gave me the opportunity to investigate and portray the bodily systems in dramatic ways. Prior to my work as a medical illustrator, I prepared bodies at a medical-school morgue, which provided important training for understanding the fleeting nature of life. It also provided unforgettable studies into the iridescent, fibrous architecture that forms our physical body.”

Alex Grey (1953) American artist

High Times interview (2002)

School , Family , Study , Understanding

“He has been doing a wonderful job in guiding India even prior to being the prime minister along the path of extraordinary economic growth. That is a marvel, I think, for all of the world.”

Manmohan Singh (1932) 13th Prime Minister of India

Barack Obama, as quoted in "Manmohan Singh is a wise, wonderful man: Obama" http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2009-04-04/india/28002745_1_obama-climate-change-wonderful-man, The Times of India (4 April 2009)

World , Thinking

“I used to sit on the stairs outside the courtroom and scratch out poems on legal pads while I was waiting for our cases to be called. There were juvenile hearings prior to the housing cases, and of course given their right to privacy we were not allowed inside the courtroom while that was going on. Everyone was in the hallway or on the stairs. I sat there. I didn’t have an office there, and I wrote poems. It was not as crazy as it might sound because whether I was working or am working as a lawyer or a poet, I am an advocate…”

Martín Espada (1957) Puerto Rican poet

On composing poems while practicing as an attorney in “The Writer’s Block Transcripts: A Q&A with Martin Espada” https://www.sampsoniaway.org/interviews/2015/12/11/the-writers-block-transcripts-a-qa-with-martin-espada/ in Sampsonia Way (2015 Dec 11)

Housing , Waiting

“It is absurd to excite reason against the primary postulates of pure time, as, for example, continuity, etc., since they follow from laws prior and superior to which nothing is found, and since reason herself in the use of the principle of contradiction cannot dispense with the support of this concept, so primitive and original is it.”

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) German philosopher

Kant's Inaugural Dissertation (1770), Section III On The Principles Of The Form Of The Sensible World

Support , Time , Law

“For the effect is in the cause, and Karma produces the manifestation of it in the body, brain, and mind furnished by reincarnation. And as a cause set up by one man has a distinct relation to him as a center from which it came, so each one experiences the results of his own acts. We may sometimes seem to receive effects solely from the acts of others, but this is the result of our own acts and thoughts in this or some prior life. We perform our acts in company with others always, and the acts with their underlying thoughts have relation always to other persons and to ourselves.”

William Quan Judge (1851–1896) American occult writer

The Ocean of Theosophy by William Q. Judge (1893), Chapter 11, Karma

Personality , Life , Relation ships

“We do not have even fragments of the teachings of former World Teachers given prior to certain knowledge of Their existence. We do not have the teachings of a Christ, or a Buddha, or a Krishna, except seen through the eyes of later followers. For the first time we are given the flavor of the thoughts and insights of a Being of immeasurable stature to enable us to understand the path of evolution stretching ahead of us which He has come to outline for us. The impression left in the mind by the Teacher is that the breadth and depth of His knowledge and awareness have no limits; that He is tolerant and wise beyond conception, and of amazing humility.”

Benjamin Creme (1922–2016) artist, author, esotericist

Maitreya's Teachings - The Laws of Life (2005)

Time , Understanding , Teachers , Knowledge

“Prior to World War II, most socialists and socialist parties of Europe held strong anti-Semitic opinions and railed against the capitalistic middle class and wealthy, especially money-lending Jews who engaged in usury. Their schemes called for wealth-confiscation and redistribution to create a truly equal society.”

L. K. Samuels (1951) American writer

Source: Killing History: The False Left-Right Political Spectrum and the Battle between the ‘Free Left’ and the ‘Statist Left', (2019), p. 369

Money , War , Wealth , Strong

“Repression invades the academic enterprise itself, even prior to all restrictions on academic freedom. The pre-empting of the mind vitiates impartiality and objectivity: unless the student learns to think in the opposite direction, he will be inclined to place the facts into the predominant framework of values. Scholarship, i. e., the acquisition and communication of knowledge, prohibits the purification and isolation of facts from the context of the whole truth. An essential part of the latter is recognition of the frightening extent to which history is made and recorded by and for the victors, that is, the extent to which history was the development of oppression. And this oppression is in the facts themselves which it establishes; thus they themselves carry a negative value as part and aspect of their facticity. To treat the great crusades against humanity (like that against the Albigensians) with the same impartiality as the desperate struggles for humanity means neutralizing their opposite historical function, reconciling the executioners with their victims, distorting the record. Such spurious neutrality serves to reproduce acceptance of the dominion of the victors in the consciousness of man.”

Herbert Marcuse Repressive Tolerance

Repressive Tolerance (1965)

History , Freedom , Learning , Communication

“To radicalize the question of phenomenology is not only to aim for a pure phenomenality but to seek out the mode according to which it originally becomes a phenomenon -- the substance, the stuff, the phenomenological matter of which it is made, its phenomenologically pure materiality. That is the task of material phenomenology. Prior to this being-toward-the-outside in which everything is properly speaking placed outside of itself and in which every reality is a priori emptied and dispossessed of itself and thus becomes its contrary, an irreality, and prior to the abandonment and undoing that is called death and that would be unable to exist on its own, material phenomenology is devoted to the discovery of the reign of a phenomenality that is constructed in such a surprising way that the thought that always thinks about the world never thinks about it. To the internal structure of this originary manifestation, there belongs no Outside, no Separation, no Ek-stasis. Its phenomenological substance is not visibility. None of the categories that have been used by philosophy since the Greeks at any rate, are appropriate for it.”

Michel Henry (1922–2002) French writer

Source: Michel Henry, Material Phenomenology, Fordham University Press, 2008, p. 2
Source: Books on Phenomenology and Life, Material Phenomenology (1990)

Question , Thinking , Way , Reality

“No citizen should be permitted to become a member of or contribute to any organization whose members are pledged, or have ever been pledged, to tender prior loyalty to any state other than the United States, or to defend any state other than the United States in case of war, except as in such a war the United States might formally be allied with another power.”

Dorothy Thompson (1893–1961) American journalist and radio broadcaster

Source: "Let the Record Speak" 1939, “The Truth about Communism” https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015051180423&view=1up&seq=5 (1948), p. 16

War , Loyalty

“I did not see who was assisting me. However, just prior to the assistance, I saw someone sitting yoga-fashion, with robes and headpiece... Of all the helpers from whom I have obtained some repeatable identification, only one have I been able to identify a second time.”

Robert Monroe (1915–1995) American founder of The Monroe Institute

Journeys Out of the Body (1971), Chapter 9. Angels and Archetypes

Fashion , Time

“Where the self is conceived as prior to its ends, independent of the roles it may occupy at any given time, reputation cannot be a matter of honor in the traditional sense. For the unencumbered self, not honor but dignity is the basis of respect―the dignity that consists in the capacity of persons as autonomous agents to choose their ends for themselves. Unlike honor, which ties respect for persons to the roles they inhabit, dignity resides in a self antecedent to social institutions, and so is invulnerable to injury by insult alone. For selves such as these, reputation matters, not intrinsically, as a matter of honor, but only instrumentally, as a business asset for example.”

Michael J. Sandel (1953) American political philosopher

Chap. 3. Religious Liberty and Freedom of Speech
Democracy's Discontent (1996)

Personality , Business , Sense , Time

“Writing is tiring and difficult, but I can sit at my desk for hours and hours, writing through the night to dawn. I never had any prior writing experience, but I learned that it’s not about using heavy vocabulary, and more about how I can express my sincerity.”

Brigitte Lin (1954) Taiwanese actress

As quoted in "Brigitte Lin, a timeless national treasure" in Taipei Times (15 May 2018) https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/feat/archives/2018/05/15/2003693091

Night , Learning , Sincerity

“Prior to studies of unusually intelligent people that showed them to be generally much better adapted and happier than others, the popular belief in the United States was that exceptional intelligence was often associated with exceptional ability to “drive yourself nuts.””

Robyn Dawes (1936–2010) American psychologist

Hence, people believed that genius and lunacy were intimately connected. Perhaps, nearly all of us “drive ourselves a little nuts” by virtue of creating stories that lead us to the illusion that we understand history, other people, causality, and life—when we don’t.
Source: Everyday Irrationality: How Pseudo-Scientists, Lunatics, and the Rest of Us Systematically Fail to Think Rationally (2001), Chapter 7, “Good Stories” (p. 125)

Study , Intelligence , People

“Without the prior pacification of Italy, it could happen that as soon as I leave to succer you, Venice, Florence, Ferrara and Francesco Sforza will ally together, pull all their resources and invite the French to support them… Since I will need to take with me to Germany the army besieging Florence, we need a swift decision by His Holiness in this matter.”

Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor (1500–1558) Holy Roman Emperor

Support , Decision

“[W]e’re skeptical that so-called "impeachment precedent" commands deference apart from its power to persuade future generations. Congress isn’t bound by its own prior decisions.”

Laurence Tribe (1941) American lawyer and law school professor

To End a Presidency (2018)

Future , Decision

“Because physical theories typically predict numerical values, an improvement in experimental precision reduces the tolerance range and hence increases corroborability. In most psychological research, improved power of a statistical design leads to a prior probability approaching ½ of finding a significant difference in the theoretically predicted direction. Hence the corroboration yielded by "success" is very weak, and becomes weaker with increased precision. "Statistical significance" plays a logical role in psychology precisely the reverse of its role in physics. This problem is worsened by certain unhealthy tendencies prevalent among psychologists, such as a premium placed on experimental "cuteness" and a free reliance upon ad hoc explanations to avoid refutation.”

Paul E. Meehl (1920–2003) American psychologist

Source: [Theory-testing in psychology and physics: A methodological paradox, Philosophy of Science, 34, 2, 1967, 103–115, https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/288135]

Problem , Success

“Churchill's 2,054 page book "Second World War" makes no mention of genocide or the murder of Jews. Coincidentally, Churchill was a strong proponent of eugenic legislation prior to the outbreak of WWII.”

A.E. Samaan

Source: From a "Race of Masters" to a "Master Race": 1948 to 1848

War , Strong , Books , World

“American newspapers frequently offered praise for eugenics just prior to WWII and The Holocaust …. that is, until Hitler revealed what eugenics really looked like. They avoided the subject for decades thereafter.”

A.E. Samaan

Source: H.H. LAUGHLIN: American Scientist. American Progressive. Nazi Collaborator.

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Quotes about prior
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