Quotes about process
page 13

Alan Gura photo

“We’d like to think that the Bill of Rights was ratified in 1791, but in reality, in the practical and for your daily life, the Bill of Rights means what judges tell you it means and judges in our country are a byproduct of the electoral process. Forget about 1791, the Second Amendment is on the ballot, this time, next time, every time.”

Alan Gura (1971) American lawyer

On the need for Second Amendment supporters to remain vigilant about gun rights in the United States, from his recorded speech http://www.guns.com/2012/11/10/attorney-alan-gura-gun-rights-policy-conference/ to attendees of the 2012 Gun Rights Policy Conference.

Damian Pettigrew photo
Ellen Willis photo

“The excursus upon the origin of Odysseus’ scar is not basically different from the many passages in which a newly introduced character, or even a newly appearing object or implement, though it be in the thick of a battle, is described as to its nature and origin; or in which, upon the appearance of a god, we are told where he last was, what he was doing there, and by what road he reached the scene; indeed, even the Homeric epithets seem to me in the final analysis to be traceable to the same need for an externalization of phenomena in terms perceptible to the senses. Here is the scar, which comes up in the course of the narrative; and Homer’s feeling simply will not permit him to see it appear out of the darkness of an unilluminated past; it must be set in full light, and with it a portion of the hero’s boyhood. … To be sure, the aesthetic effect thus produced was soon noticed and thereafter consciously sought; but the more original cause must have lain in the basic impulse of the Homeric style: to represent phenomena in a fully externalized form, visible and palpable in all their parts, and completely fixed in their spatial and temporal relations. Nor do psychological processes receive any other treatment: here too nothing must remain hidden and unexpressed. With the utmost fullness, with an orderliness which even passion does not disturb, Homer’s personages vent their inmost hearts in speech; what they do not say to others, they speak in their own minds, so that the reader is informed of it. Much that is terrible takes place in the Homeric poems, but it seldom takes place wordlessly: Polyphemus talks to Odysseus; Odysseus talks to the suitors when he begins to kill them; Hector and Achilles talk at length, before battle and after; and no speech is so filled with anger or scorn that the particles which express logical and grammatical connections are lacking or out of place.”

Source: Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1946), p. 5

Bernhard Riemann photo
John Allen Fraser photo

“Question Period is not part of the legislative process, and has nothing to do with it. It is a means of monitoring the Executive that the Government cannot evade.”

John Allen Fraser (1931) Canadian politician

Source: The House Of Commons At Work (1993), Chapter 9, The House of Commons Functions, p. 122

Charles Darwin photo
Paulo Freire photo

“Problem-posing education affirms men and women as beings in the process of becoming.”

Paulo Freire (1921–1997) educator and philosopher

Pedagogia do oprimido (Pedagogy of the Oppressed) (1968, English trans. 1970)

Lynn Margulis photo

“Identity is not an object; it is a process with addresses for all the different directions and dimensions in which it moves, and so it cannot so easily be fixed with a single number.”

Lynn Margulis (1938–2011) American evolutionary biologist

with Richard Guerrero, "Two Plus Two Equals One: Individuals Emerge from Bacterial Communities" in Gaia 2: Emergence : the New Science of Becoming ed. William Irwin Thompson (1991).

Ivar Jacobson photo
Henry Adams photo
Daniel Kahneman photo
George Boole photo
Don Soderquist photo

“Too many leaders are afraid of letting their minds wander too far; they put fences around their dreams. If you want to accomplish great things, you must dare to venture beyond today’s realities. The thinking behind ‘Imagine the Possible’ was that we needed to push even further, beyond the self-imposed limits of our current thought processes and previous experiences.”

Don Soderquist (1934–2016)

Don Soderquist “ The Wal-Mart Way: The Inside Story of the Success of the World's Largest Company https://books.google.com/books?id=mIxwVLXdyjQC&lpg=PR9&dq=Don%20Soderquist&pg=PR9#v=onepage&q=Don%20Soderquist&f=false, Thomas Nelson, April 2005, p. 107.
On Leading Well

“p>One translucent day I leave the city
to visit my home, the land of Champa.Here are stupas gaunt with yearning,
ancient temples ruined by time,
streams that creep alone through the dark
past peeling statues that moan of Champa.Here are dense and drooping forests
where long processions, lost souls of Champa,
march; and evening spills through thick,
fragrant leaves, mingling with the cries of moorhens.Here is the field where two great armies
were reduced to a horde of clamoring souls.
Champa blood still cascades in streams of hatred
to grinding oceans filled with Champa bones.Here too are placid images: hamlets at rest
in evening sun, Champa girls gliding homeward,
their light chatter floating
with the pink and saffron of their dresses.Here are magnificent sunbaked palaces,
temples that blaze in cerulean skies.
Here battleships dream on the glossy river, while the thunder
of sacred elephants shakes the walls.Here, in opaque light sinking through lapis lazuli,
the Champa king and his men are lost in a maze of flesh
as dancers weave, wreathe, entranced,
their bodies harmonizing with the flutes.All this I saw on my way home years ago
and still I am obsessed,
my mind stunned, sagged with sorrow
for the race of Champa.”

Chế Lan Viên (1920–1989) Vietnamese writer

"On the Way Home", in A Thousand Years of Vietnamese Poetry, ed. Nguyễn Ngọc Bích (Alfred A. Knopf, 1975), p. 167; quoted in full in Buddhism & Zen in Vietnam by Thich Thien-an (Tuttle Publishing, 1992)

George W. Bush photo
Marvin Bower photo

“Fourteen basic and well-known managing processes make up the components from which a management system for any business can be fashioned.”

Marvin Bower (1903–2003) American business theorist

Source: The Will to Manage (1966), p. 26

Ernst von Glasersfeld photo
Neil Peart photo
Edmund Husserl photo
Herbert Marcuse photo
Frances Willard photo

“Here, India will be a global player of considerable political and economic impact. As a result, the need to explicate what it means to be an Indian (and what the ‘Indianness’ of the Indian culture consists of) will soon become the task of the entire intelligentsia in India. In this process, they will confront the challenge of responding to what the West has so far thought and written about India. A response is required because the theoretical and textual study of the Indian culture has been undertaken mostly by the West in the last three hundred years. What is more, it will also be a challenge because the study of India has largely occurred within the cultural framework of America and Europe. In fulfilling this task, the Indian intelligentsia of tomorrow willhave to solve a puzzle: what were the earlier generations of Indian thinkers busy with, in the course of the last two to three thousand years? The standard textbook story, which has schooled multiple generations including mine, goes as follows: caste system dominates India, strange and grotesque deities are worshipped in strange andgrotesque ways, women are discriminated against, the practice of widow-burning exists and corruption is rampant. If these properties characterize India of today and yesterday, the puzzle about what the earlier generation of Indian thinkers were doing turns into a very painful realization: while the intellectuals of Europeanculture were busy challenging and changing the world, most thinkersin Indian culture were apparently busy sustaining and defendingundesirable and immoral practices. Of course there is our Buddha andour Gandhi but that is apparently all we have: exactly one Buddha and exactly one Gandhi. If this portrayal is true, the Indians have butone task, to modernize India, and the Indian culture but one goal: to become like the West as quickly as possible.”

S. N. Balagangadhara (1952) Indian philosopher

Foreword by S. N. Balagangadhara in "Invading the Sacred" (2007)
Source: Balagangadhara, S.N. (2007), "Foreword." In Ramaswamy, de Nicolas & Banerjee (Eds.), Invading the Sacred: An Analysis of Hinduism Studies in America . Delhi: Rupa & Co., pp. vii–xi.

Geddy Lee photo
Charles Stross photo
Naomi Klein photo
Charles A. Beard photo
Dwight D. Eisenhower photo

“It is unwise to make education too cheap. If everything is provided freely, there is a tendency to put no value on anything. Education must always have a certain price on it; even as the very process of learning itself must always require individual effort and initiative.”

Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890–1969) American general and politician, 34th president of the United States (in office from 1953 to 1961)

Address at the Centennial Celebration Banquet of the National Education Association http://www.eisenhower.archives.gov/all_about_ike/quotes.html (4 April 1957)
1950s

Bear Bryant photo

“Recruiting is the one thing I hate. I won't do it unless my coaches tell me I've just got to. The whole process is kind of undignified for me and the young man.”

Bear Bryant (1913–1983) American college football coach

Source: Football's Supercoach, B.J., Phillips, Sep. 29, 1980, Time, 6, 2008-12-11 http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,952802-6,00.html,

Steve Reich photo

“…in serial music, the series itself is seldom audible… What I'm interested in is a compositional process and a sounding music that are one in the same thing.”

Steve Reich (1936) American composer

Source: Steve Reich, ‎Paul Hillier (2002) Writings on Music, 1965-2000, p. 35

Francis Galton photo
Kamisese Mara photo
Ray Harryhausen photo
Eric Hargan photo
Serzh Sargsyan photo
Stanislav Grof photo

“LSD is a catalyst or amplifier of mental processes. If properly used it could become something like the microscope or telescope of psychiatry.”

Stanislav Grof (1931) Czech pychiatrist

LSD psychotherapy (1980), MAPS 2001 edition, Epilogue, p. 299.

Daniel Abraham photo
Rex Stout photo
Rajiv Malhotra photo
Francis Escudero photo

“We need to participate in the very process of electing into office people we believe are deserving. And this long process – sometimes viewed as tedious – starts with having yourself registered properly.”

Francis Escudero (1969) Filipino politician

Philippine Star http://www.philstar.com/cebu-news/2015/07/20/1478960/comelec-cebu-requests-six-more-registration-machines
2015

John Gray photo
John Ralston Saul photo
Marshall McLuhan photo

“Blast Sputnik for closing terrestrial nature in a man-made environment that transfers the evolutionary process from biology to technology.”

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

Source: 1960s, Counterblast (1969), p. 85

Yoji Shinkawa photo
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner photo

“The technical procedures doubtless release energies in the artist that remain unused in the much more lightweight processes of drawing or painting”

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880–1938) German painter, sculptor, engraver and printmaker

referring to his printmaking
Quote from Uber Kirchners Graphik, (under his pseudonym de:Louis de Marsalle) E. L. Kirchner, Genius 3, Book 2, 1922, 251-63, reprinted by National Gallery, Washington D.C. 2003, p. 226
1920's

“The point of an analysis of capitalism, or of nihilism, is to do more of it. The process is not to be critiqued. The process is the critique, feeding back into itself, as it escalates. The only way forward is through, which means further in.”

Nick Land (1962) British philosopher

"A Quick-and-Dirty Introduction to Accelerationism" https://jacobitemag.com/2017/05/25/a-quick-and-dirty-introduction-to-accelerationism/ (2017) (original emphasis)

Ernesto Che Guevara photo
James Clerk Maxwell photo
Marshall Goldsmith photo

“Lasting goal achievement requires lots of time, hard work, personal sacrifice, ongoing effort, and dedication to a process that is maintained over years.”

Marshall Goldsmith (1949) American author of leadership and management literature

Source: What Got You Here Won't Get You There, 2008, p. 189 (in 2010 edition}

Seneca the Younger photo

“Withdraw into yourself, as far as you can. Associate with those who will make a better man of you. Welcome those whom you yourself can improve. The process is mutual; for men learn while they teach.”
Recede in te ipse quantum potes; cum his versare qui te meliorem facturi sunt, illos admitte quos tu potes facere meliores. Mutuo ista fiunt, et homines dum docent discunt.

Seneca the Younger (-4–65 BC) Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman, and dramatist

Source: Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium (Moral Letters to Lucilius), Letter VII: On crowds, Line 8.

James Jeans photo
David Bohm photo
Jesús Huerta de Soto photo
Gloria Estefan photo
John D. Carmack photo
Michael E. Porter photo
John H. Manley photo

“Some bodies of knowledge emerge over time in a process of coevolution with the location in which they are embedded.”

Jonas Ridderstråle (1966) Swedish business theorist

Julian Birkinshaw, Robert Nobel, and Jonas Ridderstråle. "Knowledge as a contingency variable: do the characteristics of knowledge predict organization structure?." Organization science 13.3 (2002): 274-289.

Pratibha Patil photo

“Our combined endeavour should be to ensure that the rate of economic growth is sustained and it is socially inclusive; We must also ensure that every region of the country participates in and benefits from the process of economic growth.”

Pratibha Patil (1934) 12th President of India

Quoted in The Times of India, "Pratibha Patil sworn in as President" http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Pratibha-Patil-sworn-in-as-President/articleshow/2232871.cms, July 25, 2007.

Nicholas Ovcharov photo
Theodor Mommsen photo

“.. whatever may have been the style and title, the sovereign ruler was there, and accordingly the court established itself at once with all its due accompaniments of pomp, insipidity, and emptiness. Caesar appeared in public not in the robe of the consuls which was bordered with purple stripes, but in the robe wholly of purple which was reckoned in antiquity as the proper regal attire, and received, sitting on his golden chair and without rising from it, the solemn procession of the senate. The festivals in his honour commemorative of birthday, of victories, and of vows, filled the calendar. When Caesar came to the capital, his principal servants marched forth in trips to great distances so as to meet and escort him. To be near to him began to be of such importance, that the rents rose in the quarter of the city where he lived. Personal interviews with him were rendered so difficult by the multitude of individuals soliciting audience, that Caesar found himself compelled in many cases to communicate even with his intimate friends in writing, and that persons even of the highest rank had to wait for hours in the ante-chamber. People felt, more clearly than was agreeable to Caesar himself, that they no longer approached a fellow-citizen. There arose a monarchical aristocracy, which was a remarkable manner at once new and old, and which had sprung out of the idea of casting into the shade the aristocracy of the oligarchy by that of the royalty, the nobility of the patriciate. The patrician body still subsisted, although without essential privileges as an order, in the character of a close aristocratic guild; but as it could receive no new gentes it had dwindled away more and more in the course of centuries, and in Caesar's time there were not more than fifteen or sixteen patrician gentes still in existence. Caesar, himself sprung from one of them, got the right of creating new patrician gentes conferred on the Imperator by decree of the people, and so established, in contrast to the republican nobility, the new aristocracy of the patriciate, which most happily combined all the requisites of a monarchichal aristocracy - the charm of antiquity, entire dependence on the government, and total insignificance. On all sides the new sovereignty revealed itself.”

Theodor Mommsen (1817–1903) German classical scholar, historian, jurist, journalist, politician, archaeologist and writer

Vol. 4, Part 2. Translated by W.P. Dickson.
The New Court.
The History of Rome - Volume 4: Part 2

Colin Wilson photo
Humberto Maturana photo

“By autopoietic organization, Maturana and Varela meant the] processes interlaced in the specific form of a network of productions of components which realizing the network that produced them constitutes it as a unity.”

Humberto Maturana (1928) Chilean biologist and philosopher

Source: Autopoiesis and cognition: The realization of the living (1980), p. 80 as cited in: Lee O. Thayer, George A. Barnett (1997) * Organization-Communication: Emerging Perspectives, Volume 5:. p. 193.

Shashi Tharoor photo

“A philosopher is a lover of wisdom, not of knowledge, which for all its great uses ultimately suffers from the crippling effect of ephemerality. All knowledge is transient linked to the world around it and subject to change as the world changes, whereas wisdom, true wisdom is eternal immutable. To be philosophical one must love wisdom for its own sake, accept its permanent validity and yet its perpetual irrelevance. It is the fate of the wise to understand the process of history and yet never to shape it.”

The Great Indian Novel
Variant: A philosopher is a lover of wisdom, not of knowledge, which for all its great uses ultimately suffers from the crippling effect of ephemerality. All knowledge is transient linked to the world around it and subject to change as the world changes, whereas wisdom, true wisdom is eternal immutable. To be philosophical one must love wisdom for its own sake, accept its permanent validity and yet its perpetual irrelevance. It is the fate of the wise to understand the process of history and yet never to shape it.

Joseph Alois Schumpeter photo

“Masculine process has at its foundation externalization. The young boy is focused away from his inner and personal self and into achievement, performance, competition, success, emotional control (being "cool"), autonomy (not being dependent or needy), fearlessness, action, and an ethic that only values time spent in doing. Anything else is suspect and viewed as lazy, worthless, time-wasting, or meaningless.Externalization, or the process of being pushed outside of oneself, amplifies and eventually becomes disconnection. Personal relationships are then objectified and founded on the role another can play in his life. Relationships are based on doing and are therefore fairly readily interchangeable with anyone else who can do.Disconnection leads men to the experience of being loners, where it's "lonely at the top," and freedom, space, and "doing one's thing," are the rationalized values. Disconnection transforms a man into someone who has everything he wanted externally, but has nothing that is bonded or connected on a personal level. He is "out of touch," so he doesn't know why he's unhappy, and may conclude that the cause of his malaise is that he needs "more." He sets out to get it, but when he gets it he feels deader and more isolated than ever.The end stage of this journey of masculine process is personal oblivion, which can occur early in his life or may not appear full blown until he's an older man, depending on how extreme his externalized process is. At this point, personal connection becomes impossible. He doesn't know he rationalizes his personal emptiness with cynical philosophies and escapes painful awareness through non-relationships he can control by buying. In the end state of oblivion, he is beyond personal reach and can only relate in abstract, depersonalized, intellectualized ways. The only way he is "loved" is in return for providing or taking care of others.”

Herb Goldberg (1937–2019) American psychologist

The Personal Journey of Masculinity: From Externalization to Disconnection to Oblivion, pp. 10–11
What Men Still Don't Know About Women, Relationships, and Love (2007)

G. I. Gurdjieff photo
Marvin Minsky photo

“The free electoral process is one of the things that outsiders envy most about this country. The distinctly American two-party system is perpetuated through that process.”

Scribd:Robert Agresta Inauguration speech Quoted in Mayor & Council Meeting of January 2009 http://www.scribd.com/full/54569111?access_key=key-11gd71r31loly41co5n5

Walter A. Shewhart photo
Cecilia Malmström photo
Robert Pinsky photo

“I am very interested in memorization which is the process of incorporating a poem, so, I would say the kind of poetry I write is the kind that emphasises the physical qualities of the words.”

Robert Pinsky (1940) American poet, editor, literary critic, academic.

WPFW-FM inteview with Grace Cavalieri 1995/96 season

Samuel Butler photo
Rein Vihalemm photo
Roger Ebert photo