Quotes about process
page 27

“And another thing I think we need to be aware of is that not every instance of design we see in nature needs to be directly attributed to God. Certainly as Christians we believe there is an angelic hierarchy - it's not just that there's this physical material world and there's God. There can be various hierarchies of intelligent beings operating, God can work through what can be called derived intelligences - processes which carry out the Divine will, but maybe not perfectly because of the fall.”

William A. Dembski (1960) American intelligent design advocate

address given at Fellowship Baptist Church, Waco, Texas, 2004-03-07, quoted in * The case against intelligent design: the faith that dare not speak its name
The New Republic
2005-08-11
Jerry
Coyne
2000s

God, World, Angels, Intelligence

“A second principle of Americanization is identity of economic interest. At this time, after all America has united to win the war, one hesitates to turn a page so shameful in American history. And yet, if America reverts to its former industrial brutality and indifference, Americanization will fail. Identity of economic interest, generally speaking, has meant to the American getting the immigrant to work for him at as low a wage as possible, for as long hours as possible, and scrapping him at the end of the game, with as little compunction as he did an old machine. And the immigrant's successful fellow-countryman, elevated to be a private banker, a padrone, or a notary public, has shared the practices of the native American. Always the immigrant has been in positions of the greatest danger, and with less safeguards for his care. He has been called by number and nicknamed and ridiculed. Frequently trades-unions have excluded him from their benefits, compensation laws have discriminated against him, trades have been closed to him, until he has wondered in the bitterness of his spirit what American opportunity was and how he could pursue life, liberty, and happiness at his work. Whenever he has been discontented, the popular remedy has been higher wages or shorter hours, and rarely the expansion of personal relationships. Very little self-determination has been given to him; on the contrary he has been made a cog in a highly organized industrial machine. His spirit has been imprisoned in the hum of machinery. His special gifts have been lost, even as his lack of skill in mechanical work has injured delicate processes and priceless materials. His pride has been humiliated and his initiative stifled because he has been given little of the artisan's pleasure in seeing his finished product.”

Frances Kellor (1873–1952) American sociologist

What is Americanization? (1919)

Life, War, Happiness, Pleasure

“Sometimes I look at the battered exteriors of apartment buildings in New York and think how these sorry shells have housed such a long procession of styles. The money! The effort! One tenant mirrors everything, the next panels the walls, the third lines them with mylar, the fourth turns to toile de Jouy, the fifth to pegboard or handblocked rice paper. The expensive if often shoddy interiors installed only to be dismantled, the exterior left untouched as it turns yet another shade sootier — this transience seems a fitting emblem for the way we stay up-to-date without ever changing.”

Edmund White (1940) American novelist and LGBT essayist

New York City (p. 260).
States of Desire: Travels in Gay America (1980)

Money, Way, Thinking, Effort

“Harold Kelley’s long-term relationship with John Thibaut, from 1953 until Thibaut’s demise in 1986, is considered an exemplary model of scientific collaboration. It began with their being invited to write a major chapter on group problem-solving and process for the Handbook of Social Psychology (1954). That chapter, updated in 1968, not only became a major resource in that field, but it led them to a separate volume, The Social Psychology of Groups (1959), which became one of the most influential works in social psychology.”

Bertram Raven (1926) American psychologist

Bertram H. Raven, In Memoriam : Harold H. Kelley Professor of Psychology, Emeritus Los Angeles 1921–2003 http://senate.universityofcalifornia.edu/inmemoriam/HaroldH.Kelley.htm at senate.universityofcalifornia.edu, 2003.

Problem

“It is traditional in the theory of the firm to define the production opportunity set available to the firm in terms of its boundary -- the maximum attainable set of output quantities for various input quantities, given the state of technology and knowledge. This boundary is the production function of the firm. One of our purposes here is to point out the dependence of such production functions on the structure of property rights and contracting rights within which the firm exists. We redefine the production function in order to recognize the dependence of output on the structure of property and contracting rights. That expanded framework is then used to discuss a concrete set of problems surrounding the role of labor in the firm ranging from the 'labor-managed firm' system (in which tradable capital value residual claims [common stock] are legally prohibited), and the codetermination and industrial democracy movements (in which management participation by labor is required by law), to cooperatives and professional partnerships (i. e., quasi-labor-managed firms which arise out of the voluntary contracting process), and the capitalist corporation.”

Michael Jensen (1939) American economist

Michael C. Jensen and William H. Meckling. "Rights and production functions: An application to labor-managed firms and codetermination." Journal of business (1979): 469-506.

Law, Democracy, Knowledge, Problem

“In parts of Europe, disbelief in the Armenian genocide allegation is a crime on par with Holocaust denial. But the Holocaust was proven before the Nuremburg Tribunal with the trappings of due process. Armenians, in contrast, have forgone bringing their genocide allegation before the International Court of Justice because it is unsupported by historical facts.”

Bruce Fein (1947) American lawyer

Armenian crime amnesia? (2007)

Justice, Parting

“When loops are present, the network is no longer singly connected and local propagation schemes will invariably run into trouble.. If we ignore the existence of loops and permit the nodes to continue communicating with each other as if the network were singly connected, messages may circulate indefinitely around the loops and process may not converges to a stable equilibrium… Such oscillations do not normally occur in probabilistic networks… which tend to bring all messages to some stable equilibrium as time goes on. However, this asymptotic equilibrium is not coherent, in the sense that it does not represent the posterior probabilities of all nodes of the network.”

Judea Pearl (1936) Computer scientist

Source: Probabilistic Reasoning in Intelligent Systems: Networks of Plausible Inference, 1988, p. 195

Communication, Sense, Time

“Here we have seen that their early history is still largely an open question. They may have had Greek origins: Whatever process produced the Greek-speakers (of that is how one defines "Greek") who lived south of Olympus may have also produced the Makedones who wandered out of the western mountains to establish a home and a kingdom in Pieria.”

Eugene N. Borza (1935) American historian

Source: In the Shadow of Olympus: The Emergence of Macedon (1990), pp. 277-278

Home, History, Mountain, Question

“The 19th and first half of the 20th century conceived of the world as chaos. Chaos was the oft-quoted blind play of atoms, which, in mechanistic and positivistic philosophy, appeared to represent ultimate reality, with life as an accidental product of physical processes, and mind as an epi-phenomenon. It was chaos when, in the current theory of evolution, the living world appeared as a product of chance, the outcome of random mutations and survival in the mill of natural selection. In the same sense, human personality, in the theories of behaviorism as well as of psychoanalysis, was considered a chance product of nature and nurture, of a mixture of genes and an accidental sequence of events from early childhood to maturity.
Now we are looking for another basic outlook on the world -- the world as organization. Such a conception -- if it can be substantiated -- would indeed change the basic categories upon which scientific thought rests, and profoundly influence practical attitudes.
This trend is marked by the emergence of a bundle of new disciplines such as cybernetics, information theory, general system theory, theories of games, of decisions, of queuing and others; in practical applications, systems analysis, systems engineering, operations research, etc. They are different in basic assumptions, mathematical techniques and aims, and they are often unsatisfactory and sometimes contradictory. They agree, however, in being concerned, in one way or another, with "systems," "wholes" or "organizations"; and in their totality, they herald a new approach.”

Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1901–1972) austrian biologist and philosopher

Source: General System Theory (1968), 7. Some Aspects of System Theory in Biology, p. 166-167 as quoted in Lilienfeld (1978, pp. 7-8) and Alexander Laszlo and Stanley Krippner (1992) " Systems Theories: Their Origins, Foundations, and Development http://archive.syntonyquest.org/elcTree/resourcesPDFs/SystemsTheory.pdf" In: J.S. Jordan (Ed.), Systems Theories and A Priori Aspects of Perception. Amsterdam: Elsevier Science, 1998. Ch. 3, pp. 47-74.

Life, World, Way, Behavior

“Chance as a theme and as method. A method of allowing something objective to come into being; a theme for creating a simile (picture) of our survival strategy:
(1) The living method, which not only processes conditions, qualities and events as they chance to happen, but exists solely as that non-static 'process', and in no other way.
(2) Ideological: denial of the planning, the opinion and the world-view whereby social projects, and subsequently 'big pictures', are created. So what I have often seen as a deficiency on my part – the fact that I've never been in a position to 'form a picture' of something – is not incapacity at all but an instinctive effort to get at a more modern truth: one that we are already living out in our lives”

Gerhard Richter (1932) German visual artist, born 1932

life is not what is said but the saying of it, not the picture but the picturing Quotes from Notes, 1989; as cited on collected quotes on the website of Gerhard Richter: 'on Techniques' https://www.gerhard-richter.com/en/quotes/techniques-5 1980's

Life, Truth, World, Way

“the internationalization of economic activity and its major vehicle, the TNC, can be regarded simply as being part of the normal expansive process of capitalist development.”

Peter Dicken (1938) British geographer

Source: Global Shift (2003) (Fourth Edition), Chapter 7, Transnational Corporations, p. 200

Parting

“Administration is not unlike play-acting. The task of the good actor is to know and play his role, although different roles may differ greatly in content. The effectiveness of the performance will depend on the effectiveness of the play and the effectiveness with which it is played. The effectiveness of the administrative process will vary with the effectiveness of the organization and the effectiveness with which its members play their parts.”

Herbert A. Simon book Administrative Behavior

Source: 1940s-1950s, Administrative Behavior, 1947, p. 252; As cited in: Herbert Simon (1996) The Sciences of the Artificial. page xii.

Parting, Dependency

“I can't tell you how many terrorists we let go, we let get away, because we were worried about a woman or a child dying in the process.”

Brett Velicovich (1983)

An elite soldier on using drones to hunt terrorists — and giving the kill order http://www.vox.com/world/2017/7/17/15961420/drone-terrorist-iraq-afghanistan-interview-warrior-brett-velicovich, Vox, 17 July 2017

“The dilemma of a socialized system is that the information flow overwhelms a centralized system if it is open to new ideas and data, that closing the system and forcing the plan to work forecloses alternatives and risks unhedged mistakes, and that decentralizing without real markets poses the problems discussed by Hayek. These information problems permeate virtually all economic processes.”

Sidney G. Winter book An Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change

Richard Nelson and Sidney Winter, An Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change (1982), p. 365

Idea, Problem

“Economists tell us that the 'price' of an object and its 'value' have very little or nothing to do with one another. 'Value' is entirely subjective — economic value, anyway — while 'price' reflects whatever a buyer is willing to give up to get the object in question, and whatever the seller is willing to accept to give it up. Both are governed by the Law of Marginal Utility, which is actually a law of psychology, rather than economics. For government to attempt to dictate a 'fair price' betrays complete misunderstanding of the entire process.”

L. Neil Smith (1946) American writer

Ceres, Chapter Eighteen http://www.bigheadpress.com/lneilsmith/?page_id=235, 2009.

Law, Question

“If the Hindus sang Vande Mãtaram in a public meeting, it was a ‘conspiracy’ to convert Muslims into kãfirs. If the Hindus blew a conch, or broke a coconut, or garlanded the portrait of a revered patriot, it was an attempt to ‘force’ Muslims into ‘idolatry’. If the Hindus spoke in any of their native languages, it was an ‘affront’ to the culture of Islam. If the Hindus took pride in their pre-Islamic heroes, it was a ‘devaluation’ of Islamic history. And so on, there were many more objections, major and minor, to every national self-expression. In short, it was a demand that Hindus should cease to be Hindus and become instead a faceless conglomeration of rootless individuals. On the other hand, the ‘minority community’ was not prepared to make the slightest concession in what they regarded as their religious and cultural rights. If the Hindus requested that cow-killing should stop, it was a demand for renouncing an ‘established Islamic practice’. If the Hindus objected to an open sale of beef in the bazars, it was an ‘encroachment’ on the ‘civil rights’ of the Muslims. If the Hindus demanded that cows meant for ritual slaughter should not be decorated and marched through Hindu localities, it was ‘trampling upon time-honoured Islamic traditions’. If the Hindus appealed that Hindu religious processions passing through a public thoroughfare should not be obstructed, it was an attempt to ‘disturb the peace of Muslim prayers’. If the Hindus wanted their native languages to attain an equal status with Urdu in the courts and the administration, it was an ‘assault on Muslim culture’. If the Hindus taught to their children the true history of Muslim tyrants, it was a ‘hate campaign against Islamic heroes’. And the ‘minority community’ was always ready to ‘defend’ its ‘religion and culture’ by taking recourse to street riots.”

Sita Ram Goel (1921–2003) Indian activist

Muslim Separatism – Causes and Consequences (1987)

Hate, Children, Peace, Religion

“I think my position on the same-sex marriage thing probably sums up the kind of conservative that I am. I’m a small c conservative as well as a big C Conservative, and that means that I prefer my change to be evolutionary rather than revolutionary, and you know I got myself quite comfortable with the institution of civil partnership, but I was then quite shocked by the urge to move on so quickly to the next stage, but I dare say in time I will become quite comfortable with the institution of same-sex marriage, and I suspect I speak for a large number of Conservatives when I say it isn’t so much the substance of the change as the process and things being evolutionary and gradually taking root rather than through tumultuous change which is disturbing to the settled instinct.”

Philip Hammond (1955) British Conservative politician

Conservative Home interview (2013)

Marriage, Sex, Thinking, Change

“[Roger B. Smith] identified the following skills and mental processes required of today’s managers as those acquired and sharpened in the study of the liberal arts.”

Roger Smith (executive) (1925–2007) CEO

Art, Study

“Although control principles are not customarily associated with international relations, there may be some significant advantages in seeing how international relations may benefit by suitable use of control concepts and methods. Over the years, control engineers and scientists have learned how to use information processing and equipment, along with energy and materials to improve the performance of various systems.”

Harold Chestnut (1917–2001) American engineer

Harold Chestnut (1986) " Applications of Control Principles to International Relations http://www.ieeecss.org/CSM/library/1986/dec1986/w13-14.pdf" In: IEEE Control Systems Magazine, Vol.6, No. 6, Dec. 1986. pp. 13-14

Learning

“Indeed, our society, which has seemed so freedom-giving and passive in its attitudes toward the artist really makes extraordinary demands upon him: on the one side, to be free in some vague spiritual sense, free to act only as an artist, and yet on the other side to be rigorously tested as to whether the freedom he has achieved is great enough to be more solidly dependable than a government's financial structure... No wonder that modern painters, in view of these curious relations to society, have taken art matters into their own hands, decides for themselves what art is, what its subjects are to be, and how they are to be treated. Art like love is an active process of growth and development.”

Robert Motherwell (1915–1991) American artist

Source: 1950s, The painter and the audience' (1954), p. 108

Love, Art, Sense, Freedom

“Administration is generic. It is a social science concept which applies to all organized group activity. Administration arises whenever organization occurs. There are common problems and processes in the household, the school, the church, the business corporation, and the vast modern state. After deciding upon objectives, means must be devised for carrying out the program. This latter process is administration. Anyone who is responsible for directing the work of others thereby becomes an administrator”

Marshall E. Dimock (1903–1991) American writer

Source: "The Study of Administration." 1937, p. 29

School, Business, Problem, Science

“Book-to-screen adaptations must always strive for two things: First, you must find a way to tell the broad story of the original plot; second, you must somehow reflect the spirit and texture of the novel—that is, you must transform a lot of words into a few pictures. All those digressions, inner monologues, thought processes, turns of phrase, all those word pictures, and especially all that un-photographable stuff that made the novel so delicious, must somehow be represented onscreen by use of the filmmaker's tools: moving pictures, dialogue and performance, sets, costumes, music and all the other tricks of the trade. That's the process a writer must go through to create a successful blueprint for a film.”

Tommy Lee Wallace (1949) American film director

Tommy Lee Wallace on Crafting His Miniseries Masterpiece, IT https://dailydead.com/stephen-king-week-tommy-lee-wallace-on-crafting-his-miniseries-masterpiece-it/ (October 27, 2015)

Books, Music, Way, Success

“The origins and travels of our purchases remain matters of indifference, although—to the more imaginative at least—a slight dampness at the bottom of a carton, or an obscure code printed along a computer cable, may hint at processes of manufacture and transport nobler and more mysterious, more worthy of wonder and study, than the very goods themselves.”

Alain de Botton (1969) Swiss writer

Source: The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work (2009), pp. 15-16.

Travel, Imagination, Study, Indifference

“It will not benefit the world if we succeed in banishing the old-fashioned wars of nations only to clear the board for social and doctrinal wars of even greater ferocity and destructiveness. This, indeed, is a growing danger. We were told that the old wars of religion had ended, but that is not much comfort if the wars of various kinds of secular religions or non-God religions are to begin and are to make Europe the arena of their hideous conflict, and if all that makes life worth living to the mass of the people is to be destroyed in the process.”

Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

I Ask You—What Price Freedom? Answers, 24 October 1936.
Reproduced in The Collected Essays of Sir Winston Churchill, Vol I, Churchill at War, Centenary Edition (1976), Library of Imperial History, p. 364. ISBN 0903988429
The 1930s

Life, God, War, People

“The scientific process of peer-review seeks out and exposes fraud by design. But antievolutionist arguments are withheld from peer-review because they are driven entirely by frauds including misstatements, out-of-context quote-mining, and contrived or distorted falsehoods, and terms erroneously redefined into instigative reactionary nonsense unintelligible as anything other than propaganda. In short, if creationists knew how to expose a fraud, they wouldn’t be creationists anymore.”

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

"13th Foundational Falsehood of Creationism" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=myfifz3C0mI Youtube (September 3, 2008) Youtube, Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism

Quotes, Fraud

“What kind of God can one infer from the sort of phenomena epitomized by the species on Darwin's Galapagos Islands? The evolutionary process is rife with happenstance, contingency, incredible waste, death, pain and horror.… The God of the Galapagos is careless, wasteful, indifferent, almost diabolical. He is certainly not the sort of God to whom anyone would be inclined to pray.”

David Hull (1935–2010) American philosopher

Reviewing Phillip Johnson's Darwin on Trial for Nature in 1992, as quoted in Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith Vol. 45, p. 47 (1993) by American Scientific Affiliation

Death, God, Pain, Indifference

“The problem is not the math itself, but the blind acceptance and even idolatry we have applied to the quantitative models. These predictive models leave citizens befuddled and unable to defend or criticize model-based decisions. We argue that we should accept the fact that we live in a qualitative world when it comes to natural processes. We must rely on qualitative models that predict only direction, trends, or magnitudes of natural phenomena, and accept the possibility of being imprecise or wrong to some degree. We should demand that when models are used, the assumptions and model simplifications are clearly stated. A better method in many cases will be adaptive management, where a flexible approach is used, where we admit there are uncertainties down the road and we watch and adapt as nature rolls on.”

Orrin H. Pilkey (1934) American ecologist

Interview with Orrin Pilkey & Linda Jarvis-Pilkey https://web.archive.org/web/20080105132439/http://www.columbia.edu/cu/cup/publicity/pilkeyinterview.html. Useless Arithmetic: Why Environmental Scientists Can’t Predict the Future (2007)

World, Nature, Problem, Decision

“If domination is always a process of armed robbery, the peculiarity of capitalism is that the person with the arms stands apart from the person doing the robbery, merely supervising that the robbery conforms with the law.”

John Holloway book Change the World Without Taking Power

Change the World Without Taking Power (2002)

Law, Personality

““Nature has its own logic, or so brother Peter tells us.”
“The logic of chance—amoral and sometimes inaccurate.”
“Well, Foutlif, we Earthmen are products of the ‘natural’ process; consequently, you shouldn’t be surprised to find us both of those things at times—amoral and inaccurate.””

Michael Bishop (1945) American writer

Source: A Funeral for the Eyes of Fire (1975), Chapter 4, “Enlightenment: Down on the Edgegleam Plains” (p. 83)

Nature, Chance, Time

“"Another situation generally exposed to ressentiment danger is the older generation's relation with the younger. The process of aging can only be fruitful and satisfactory if the important transitions are accompanied by free resignation, by the renunciation of the values proper to the preceding stage of life. Those spiritual and intellectual values which remain untouched by the process of aging, together with the values of the next stage of life, must compensate for what has been lost. Only if this happens can we cheerfully relive the values of our past in memory, without envy for the young to whom they are still accessible. If we cannot compensate, we avoid and flee the “tormenting” recollection of youth, thus blocking our possibilities of understanding younger people. At the same time we tend to negate the specific values of earlier stages. No wonder that youth always has a hard fight to sustain against the ressentiment of the older generation. Yet this source of ressentiment is also subject to an important historical variation. In the earliest stages of civilization, old age as such is so highly honored and respected for its experience that ressentiment has hardly any chance to develop. But education spreads through printing and other modern media and increasingly replaces the advantage of experience. Younger people displace the old from their positions and professions and push them into the defensive. As the pace of “progress” increases in all fields, and as the changes of fashion tend to affect even the higher domains (such as art and science), the old can no longer keep up with their juniors. “Novelty‟ becomes an ever greater value. This is doubly true when the generation as such is seized by an intense lust for life, and when the generations compete with each other instead of cooperating for the creation of works which outlast them. “Every cathedral,” Werner Sombart writes, “every monastery, every town hall, every castle of the Middle Ages bears testimony to the transcendence of the individual's span of life: its completion spans generations which thought that they lived for ever. Only when the individual cut himself loose from the community which outlasted him, did the duration of his personal life become his standard of happiness.” Therefore buildings are constructed ever more hastily—Sombart cites a number of examples. A corresponding phenomenon is the ever more rapid alternation of political regimes which goes hand in hand with the progression of the democratic movement. But every change of government, every parliamentary change of party domination leaves a remnant of absolute opposition against the values of the new ruling group. This opposition is spent in ressentiment the more the losing group feels unable to return to power. The “retired official” with his followers is a typical ressentiment figure. Even a man like Bismarck did not entirely escape from this danger."”

Max Scheler (1874–1928) German philosopher

Das Ressentiment im Aufbau der Moralen (1912)

Life, Happiness, People, Youth

“The economy is not in our [i. e. black] hands, we are not in control of economic power. We have identified the weaknesses in [land reform]. Willing buyer, willing seller did not work. It made the state’s price tag an unfair process. In addition there are many laws dealing with land which cause confusion and delays. … Land hunger is real.”

Jacob Zuma (1942) 4th President of South Africa

On 3 March 2017 during his annual address to the National House of Traditional Leaders, Zuma wants ‘black parties’ to unite on land issue https://citizen.co.za/news/south-africa/1446107/zuma-wants-black-parties-unite-land-issue/, Citizen reporter (3 March 2017)

Hunger, Law

“If philosophy aims at being a theoretical mode of thought and speech, can it have a rhetorical character and be expressed in rhetorical forms? The answer seems obvious. Theoretical thinking, as a rational process, excludes every rhetorical element because pathetic influences—the influences of feeling—disturb the clarity of rational thought. …
To prove means to show something to be something, on the basis of something. To have something through which something is shown and explained definitively is the foundation of our knowledge. Apodictic, demonstrative speech is the kind of speech which establishes the definition of a phenomenon by tracing it back to ultimate principles, or archai. It is clear that the first archai of any proof and hence of knowledge cannot be proved themselves because they cannot be the object of apodictic, demonstrative, logical speech; otherwise they would not be the first assertions. Their nonderivable, primary character is evident from the fact that we neither can speak nor comport ourselves without them, for both speech and human activity simply presuppose them. But if the original assertions are not demonstrable, what is the character of the speech in which we express them? Obviously this type of speech cannot have a rational-theoretical character….
Basic premises cannot have an apodictic, demonstrative character and structure but are thoroughly indicative….
Arche … cannot have a rational but only a rhetorical character. Thus the term "rhetoric" assumes a fundamentally new significance; "rhetoric" is not, nor can it be the art, the technique of an exterior persuasion; it is rather the speech which is the basis of the rational thought.”

Ernesto Grassi (1902–1991) Italian philosopher

Source: Rhetoric as Philosophy (1980), pp. 18-19

Art, Feeling, Knowledge, Thinking

“… non-Christian scientists are really barring from the Christian worldview any way to carry out their experimental or observational science. Think about it: when they're doing observational science using the scientific method, they have to assume the laws of logic, they have to assume the laws of nature, they have to assume the uniformity of nature. I mean, think about it, if the universe came about through natural processes, where did the laws of logic come from? Did they just pop into existence? Are we in a stage now where we only have half of logic? So, you see, I have a question for Bill Nye: How do you account for the laws of logic and laws of nature from a naturalistic worldview that excludes the existence of God?”

Ken Ham (1951) Australian young Earth creationist

"Bill Nye Debates Ken Ham" (February 4, 2014)

God, Law, Way, Question

“Behold, the atheists' nightmare. Now if you study a well-made banana, you'll find, on the far side, there are three ridges. On the close side, two ridges. If you get your hand ready to grip a banana, you'll find on the far side there are three grooves, on the close side, two grooves. The banana and the hand are perfectly made, one for the other. You'll find the maker of the banana, Almighty God, has made it with a non-slip surface. It has outward indicators of inward contents — green: too early; yellow: just right; black: too late. Now if you go to the top of the banana, you'll find, as with the soda can makers have placed a tab at the top, so God has placed a tab at the top. When you pull the tab, the contents don't squirt in your face. You'll find a wrapper which is biodegradable, has perforations. Notice how gracefully it sits over the human hand. Notice it has a point at the top for ease of entry. It's just the right shape for the human mouth. It's chewy, easy to digest and its even curved toward the face to make the whole process so much easier. Seriously, Kirk, the whole of creation testifies to the genius of God's creation.”

Ray Comfort (1949) New Zealand-born Christian minister and evangelist

God, Study

“Leslie White spoke of culture as an "organism" with life and death cycles of its own. But the cultural effect, by which we are conditioned, blinds us to a primary process that is our true source of communion and social being. Each of us is born with a "life scheme" that is masked, inhibited, and finally dominated by the process of acculturation. For all intents and purposes, this primary program, which is our birthright, becomes nonexistent through acculturation. Once our primary program is masked into noncognizance, culture emerges as the dominant meta program in our organism. Once this meta program of culture becomes dominant, it shapes our experience into an arbitrary and parallel counterfeit of that which is real. Once this meta program takes over our perceptual apparatus, it is the only mode we have for interacting with reality. Once that happens we can't question our culturally conditioned state, since that is our only reality experience.”

Joseph Chilton Pearce (1926–2016) American writer

Source: Exploring the Crack In the Cosmic Egg (1974), p. 9-10

Life, Death, Question, Reality

“System' is the concept that refers both to a complex of interdependencies between parts, components, and processes, that involves discernible regularities of relationships, and to a similar type of interdependency between such a complex and its surrounding environment.”

Talcott Parsons (1902–1979) American sociologist

Talcott Parsons (1968) "Systems Analysis: Social Systems" in: David L. Sills ed. International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. p. 458; Cited in: Ida R. Hoos (1972) Systems Analysis in Public Policy: A Critique.

Parting

“I shall endeavor to show that induction is really the inverse process of deduction.”

William Stanley Jevons (1835–1882) English economist and logician

Source: The Principles of Science: A Treatise on Logic and Scientific Method (1874) Vol. 1, p. 14

“Whenever logical processes of thought are employed — that is, whenever thought for a time runs along an accepted groove — there is an opportunity for the machine. Formal logic used to be a keen instrument in the hands of the teacher in his trying of students' souls. It is readily possible to construct a machine which will manipulate premises in accordance with formal logic, simply by the clever use of relay circuits. Put a set of premises into such a device and turn the crank, and it will readily pass out conclusion after conclusion, all in accordance with logical law, and with no more slips than would be expected of a keyboard adding machine.”

Vannevar Bush book As We May Think

As We May Think (1945)

Law, Soul, Teachers, Time

“The Smokies seem to be in the process of losing most of their mussels. The National Park Service actually has something of a tradition of making things extinct. Bryce Canyon National Park is perhaps the most interesting—certainly the most striking—example. It was founded in 1923 and in less than half a century under the Park Service’s stewardship lost seven species of mammal—the white-tailed jackrabbit, prairie dog, pronghorn antelope, flying squirrel, beaver, red fox, and spotted skunk. Quite an achievement when you consider that these animals had survived in Bryce Canyon for tens of millions of years before the Park Service took an interest in them. Altogether, forty-two species of mammal have disappeared from America’s national parks this century.”

Bill Bryson A Walk in the Woods

Source: A Walk in the Woods (1997), Chapter 7 (p. 92)

Dogs, Animals, Flying

“The procession from Newgate to Tyburn used to pass along Broad Street, and halt at the great gate of the hospital, in order that the condemned man might take his last draught of ale on earth.”

Walter Besant (1836–1901) English novelist and historian

The Fascination of London: Holborn and Bloomsbury (with Geraldine Mitton), 1903 http://books.google.com/books?id=SqAKAAAAYAAJ&pg=PR18, p. 18

“Budgeting is a math exercise, number crunching. Planning is a logical, linear process. Strategizing requires a great deal of information about customers and competitors, along with conceptual skills. Visioning uses a very different part of the brain than budgeting. As the name implies, it involves trying to see possible futures. It inevitably has both a creative and emotional component (e. g., “How do we feel about the options?”). When you use “orthodox planning” to create a vision, frustration and failure are inevitable.”

John P. Kotter (1947) author of The heart of Change

Step 3, p. 68
The Heart of Change, (2002)

Feeling, Exercises, Failure, Future

“The Buddhists maintain that there is no Creator but an infinitude of creative powers, which collectively form the one eternal substance, the essence of which is inscrutable — hence not a subject for speculation for any true philosopher. Socrates invariably refused to argue upon the mystery of universal being, yet no one would ever have thought of charging him with atheism, except those who were bent upon his destruction. Upon inaugurating an active period, says the Secret Doctrine, an expansion of this Divine essence, from within outwardly, occurs in obedience to eternal and immutable law, and the phenomenal or visible universe is the ultimate result of the long chain of cosmical forces thus progressively set in motion. In like manner, when the passive condition is resumed, a contraction of the Divine essence takes place, and the previous work of creation is gradually and progressively undone. The visible universe becomes disintegrated, its material dispersed; and "darkness," solitary and alone, broods once more over the face of the "deep." To use a metaphor which will convey the idea still more clearly, an outbreathing of the "unknown essence" produces the world; and an inhalation causes it to disappear. This process has been going on from all eternity, and our present universe is but one of an infinite series which had no beginning and will have no end.”

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky book Isis Unveiled

Source: Isis Unveiled (1877), Volume II, Chapter VI

Secret, World, Law, Idea

“(The processes are) doubly ruinous: they impoverish the earth by hastily removing, for the benefit of a few generations, the common resources which, once expended and dissipated, can never be restored; and second, in its technique, its habits, its processes, the paleotechnic period is equally inimical to the earth considered as a human habitat, by its destruction of the beauty of the landscape, its ruining of streams, its pollution of drinking water, its filling the air with a finely divided carboniferous deposit, which chokes both life and vegetation.”

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

"The Theory and Practice of Regionalism" in The Sociological Review, vol. 20, nos. 1 and 2, 1928.

Life, Beauty, Drink, Water

“When today Muslim goondas create a riot in Bhagalpur or in Gonda, the secularist press will obscure this beginning (in both cases bombs thrown from Muslim establishments at Hindu processions) and highlight the ensuing Hindu part of the violence. Some M. J. Akbar will poignantly describe the suffering of some Muslim villagers, and then blame the atmosphere created by the Rathyatra in some distant town, without even mentioning that the riot started with a pre-planned armed attack on a Hindu procession. (…) Not only do you gain on the propaganda front, the press may even come out in support of your demands. For some time, Muslim communalists have demanded a ban on processions. More than 95% of religious processions are Hindu processions anyway, for processions are a thoroughly Pagan practice which in Islam can only be a heterodox oddity. (…) A very good illustration is the next and very important demand of the Muslim communalists : a larger than proportionate reservation for Muslims in the army and the police…”

Koenraad Elst (1959) orientalist, writer

1990s, Ayodhya and After: Issues Before Hindu Society (1991)

Support, Suffering, Distant, Time

“Cooptation is the process of absorbing new elements into the leadership or policy- determining structure of an organization as a means of averting threats to its stability or existence.”

Philip Selznick (1919–2010) American sociologist

Source: TVA and the grass roots : a study in the sociology of formal organization, 1949, p. 13

“But as far as our own world is concerned, its gradual leveling-down — or, we might say, its death — appears to be proved. And how will this process affect the fate of our spirit? Will it wane with the degradation of the energy of our world and return to unconsciousness, or will it grow according as the utilizable energy diminishes and by virtue of the very efforts that it makes to retard this degradation and to dominate Nature? — for this it is that constitutes the life of the spirit. May it be that consciousness and its extended support are two powers in contraposition, the one growing at the expense of the other?”

Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936) 19th-20th century Spanish writer and philosopher

The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), X : Religion, the Mythology of the Beyond and the Apocatastasis

Life, Death, Fate, World

“I think a lot of directors, they come out of film school, they don't know anything about acting. Or they're writers that don't know anything about the process. And I think they're afraid sometimes to talk to actors and be honest with actors.”

Matt Dillon (1964) American actor

Betsy Pickle (June 1, 1997) "Redefining Himself, On and Off-Camera", The Knoxville News-Sentinel, p. T4.

School, Thinking

“It's not what you've been taught - in the conservative sectors - that you have a poverty of materials. You're all healthy, you're all strong enough to make sounds until the end of time. The only problem you have is deciding whether your sound is any good. What I'm encouraging you to do is not to think about that too much, not to reevaluate the sounds, but just to examine them, and see what the structure is. See what's actually there, before you start this process of trying to ask yourself whether Nancy Reagan would like it, or Mrs. Bush. Just take the whole big first chunk, and then break it down. Follow what you know about it to where it goes… The music's there. I'm not trying to be weird, but it's there.”

Robert Ashley (1930–2014) American composer

I was taught that I didn't have anything, and it was my job to work hard and get something, and that's just not true.
from talks at Mills College, 1989. Published with libretto of Perfect Lives, pages 151-2, Burning Books Press

Music, Problem, Thinking, Strong

“We at Answers in Genesis have been saddened by recent news of a devastating earthquake that rocked Nepal on April 25. This earthquake and its aftershocks have killed thousands, levelled buildings, and left countless thousands homeless and hungry. It even triggered an avalanche on Mount Everest that resulted in fatalities. Now, the headline of an article in the New York Times declares, “Ancient Collision Made Nepal Earthquake Inevitable.” The author writes, “More than 25 million years ago, India, once a separate island on a quickly sliding piece of the Earth’s crust, crashed into Asia. The two land masses are still colliding, pushed together at a speed of 1.5 to 2 inches a year. The forces have pushed up the highest mountains in the world, in the Himalayas, and have set off devastating earthquakes.” But starting from the history recorded in God’s Word we know that this earthquake is not the result of a crash 25 million years ago and slow and gradual processes ever since. Instead, when we start with the history recorded in God’s Word, we know that this earthquake is one of the tragic consequences of the Fall and the global Flood of Noah’s day… Please be in prayer for Nepal and especially for our brothers and sisters in that country who are reaching out to victims with the love of Christ. Also, as they watch the news, many people will be asking how God could allow such a tragedy. I encourage you to equip yourself with the biblical answer to why there is death and suffering—because of Adam and Eve’s rebellion—so that you can answer their questions and point them toward the hope that we can have even in the midst of tragedy because of the sacrifice of Jesus and the salvation that He offers. It’s important to know that such tragedy is not God’s fault—it’s our fault because of our sin in Adam. God stepped into history in the person of His Son to rescue us from the problem we caused and the resulting separation from our God.”

Ken Ham (1951) Australian young Earth creationist

"Nepal Suffering After Major Earthquake" https://answersingenesis.org/blogs/ken-ham/2015/04/30/nepal-suffering-after-major-earthquake/, Around the World with Ken Ham (April 30, 2015) Around the World with Ken Ham (May 2005 - Ongoing)

Love, Death, God, People

“[On Looking 31 at 41] I still have plenty of vices, but alcohol isn't one of them. It's probably just down to sleep and diet. If you travel long haul a lot or don't sleep much, it's not going to last very long, that's for sure. I'm pretty healthy so I think that helps a lot. I've been that way for a long time - 20 solid years of eating vegetarian/vegan and taking care of myself. That probably helps the preservation process.”

Jared Leto (1971) American actor and musician

Interview http://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/article/jared-leto-hugo-boss-red-fragrance-interview for British GQ, 5 March 2013.

Alcohol, Way, Travel, Thinking

“I present, for what it is worth, and may prove to be worth, the following bill of axioms or aphorisms on public administration, as fitting this important occasion.
# The continuous and fairly efficient discharge of certain functions by government, central and local, is a necessary condition for the existence of any great society.
# As a society becomes more complicated, as its division of labor ramifies more widely, as its commerce extends, as technology takes the place of handicrafts and local self-sufficiency, the functions of government increase in number and in their vital relationships to the fortunes of society and individuals.
# Any government in such a complicated society, consequently any such society itself, is strong in proportion to its capacity to administer the functions that are brought into being.
# Legislation respecting these functions, difficult as it is, is relatively easy as compared with the enforcement of legislation, that is, the effective discharge of these functions in their most minute ramifications and for the public welfare.
# When a form of government, such as ours, provides for legal changes, by the process of discussion and open decision, to fit social changes, then effective and wise administration becomes the central prerequisite for the perdurance of government and society — to use a metaphor, becomes a foundation of government as a going concern.
# Unless the members of an administrative system are drawn from various classes and regions, unless careers are open in it to talents, unless the way is prepared by an appropriate scheme of general education, unless public officials are subjected to internal and external criticism of a constructive nature, then the public personnel will become a bureaucracy dangerous to society and to popular government.
# Unless, as David Lilienthal has recently pointed out in an address on the Tennessee Valley Authority, an administrative system is so constructed and operated as to keep alive local and individual responsibilities, it is likely to destroy the basic well-springs of activity, hope, and enthusiasm necessary to popular government and to the following of a democratic civilization.”

Charles A. Beard (1874–1948) American historian

Administration, A Foundation of Government (1940)

Education, Hope, Way, Spring

“Business process reengineering encompasses the envisioning of new work strategies, the actual process design activity, and the implementation of the change in all its complex technological, human, and organizational dimensions”

Thomas H. Davenport (1954) American academic

Thomas H. Davenport, "Need radical innovation and continuous improvement? Integrate process reengineering and TQM." Planning Review 21.3 (1993): 6-12.

Business, Change

“We know only what we do, what we make, what we construct; and all that we make, all that we construct, are realities. I call them images, not in Plato's sense (namely that they are only reflections of reality), but I hold that these images are the reality itself and that there is no reality beyond this reality except when in our creative process we change the images: then we have created new realities.”

Naum Gabo (1890–1977) Russian sculptor

Quote of Naum Gabo, 1950; as cited in: Eidos: a journal of painting, sculpture and design. Nr.1, p. 31
1936 - 1977

Reality, Sense, Change

“I graciously accept defeat. We lost by a very small margin. Democracy is a process. It is up to us to make it work. The MDP has always asked for a government elected by the people. Today is a happy day for the Maldives - we now have an elected government.”

Mohamed Nasheed (1967) Maldivian politician, 4th president of the Maldives

Quoted on BBC News, "Maldives election: Abdulla Yameen wins run-off vote" http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-24974019, November 16, 2013.

Happiness, People, Democracy

“In the federal confirmation process, a standard question from the judiciary committee is, "Well, if you're confirmed will you legislate?" And, with a look of horror, the nominee says, "Oh, I won't legislate." Well, what about the law of contract and tort; where do they think it came from, the stork?”

Anthony Kennedy (1936) Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

Roth Lecture, USC Law School (20 November 1998).

Law, Question, Thinking

“Suppose then I want to give myself a little training in the art of reasoning; suppose I want to get out of the region of conjecture and probability, free myself from the difficult task of weighing evidence, and putting instances together to arrive at general propositions, and simply desire to know how to deal with my general propositions when I get them, and how to deduce right inferences from them; it is clear that I shall obtain this sort of discipline best in those departments of thought in which the first principles are unquestionably true. For in all 59 our thinking, if we come to erroneous conclusions, we come to them either by accepting false premises to start with—in which case our reasoning, however good, will not save us from error; or by reasoning badly, in which case the data we start from may be perfectly sound, and yet our conclusions may be false. But in the mathematical or pure sciences,—geometry, arithmetic, algebra, trigonometry, the calculus of variations or of curves,—we know at least that there is not, and cannot be, error in our first principles, and we may therefore fasten our whole attention upon the processes. As mere exercises in logic, therefore, these sciences, based as they all are on primary truths relating to space and number, have always been supposed to furnish the most exact discipline. When Plato wrote over the portal of his school. “Let no one ignorant of geometry enter here,” he did not mean that questions relating to lines and surfaces would be discussed by his disciples. On the contrary, the topics to which he directed their attention were some of the deepest problems,—social, political, moral,—on which the mind could exercise itself. Plato and his followers tried to think out together conclusions respecting the being, the duty, and the destiny of man, and the relation in which he stood to the gods and to the unseen world. What had geometry to do with these things? Simply this: That a man whose mind has not undergone a rigorous training in systematic thinking, and in the art of drawing legitimate inferences from premises, was unfitted to enter on the discussion of these high topics; and that the sort of logical discipline which he needed was most likely to be obtained from geometry—the only mathematical science which in Plato’s time had been formulated and reduced to a system. And we in this country [England] have long acted on the same principle. Our future lawyers, clergy, and statesmen are expected at the University to learn a good deal about curves, and angles, and numbers and proportions; not because these subjects have the smallest relation to the needs of their lives, but because in the very act of learning them they are likely to acquire that habit of steadfast and accurate thinking, which is indispensable to success in all the pursuits of life.”

Joshua Girling Fitch (1824–1903) British educationalist

Source: Lectures on Teaching, (1906), pp. 291-292

Life, God, Truth, World

“One should become so familiar with the structure as to have the feeling of being, in full vitality and sentiment, part of it and of all its elements. …it is necessary to achieve a sincere Einfühlung [empathy] of the process of resistence… through the deformation that is always essentially united with the process of stressing. …[T]he comprehension of a structure requires intuitive knowledge of the ethology of its resistance and of its constituent materials.”

Eduardo Torroja (1899–1961) Spanish architect

Philosophy of Structures (1958)

Feeling, Knowledge, Parting, Sincerity

“For aspiring law students I would like to say in your career, never try to show off. There is a tremendous amount of knowledge to be learnt, there is a tremendous amount of experience to be had in the field of law and no one can say “I’m on top and I know everything”. No, you don’t. The moment you say, you know everything, I’m afraid that’s the beginning of your downfall. It’s a never-ending process of learning and humility is essential because you can never learn the law. At the age of 92 my senior Jamsetjee Kanga used to say “I’m still learning” and he really meant it. If an odd chap walked into his chamber, he would just pick up a case and tell us about it, he was like a wizard. He could spot the most important point in the case, unlike us.”

Fali Sam Nariman (1929) Indian politician

Conversation with the living legend of law - Fali Sam Nariman

Age, Law, Knowledge, Learning

“A physical theory, like an abstract science, consists of definitions and axioms as first principles, and of propositions, their consequences; but with these differences:—first, That in an abstract science, a definition assigns a name to a class of notions derived originally from observation, but not necessarily corresponding to any existing objects of real phenomena, and an axiom states a mutual relation amongst such notions, or the names denoting them; while in a physical science, a definition states properties common to a class of existing objects, or real phenomena, and a physical axiom states a general law as to the relations of phenomena; and, secondly,—That in an abstract science, the propositions first discovered are the most simple; whilst in a physical theory, the propositions first discovered are in general numerous and complex, being formal laws, the immediate results of observation and experiment, from which the definitions and axioms are subsequently arrived at by a process of reasoning differing from that whereby one proposition is deduced from another in an abstract science, partly in being more complex and difficult, and partly in being to a certain extent tentative, that is to say, involving the trial of conjectural principles, and their acceptance or rejection according as their consequences are found to agree or disagree with the formal laws deduced immediately from observation and experiment.”

William John Macquorn Rankine (1820–1872) civil engineer

Source: "Outlines of the Science of Energetics," (1855), p. 121; Second paragraph

Law, Science

“Deficit financing proper is rather the process whereby a Government spends more money that it withdraws from the economy by taxation, borrowing, running down reserves, etc.; thereby causing in most circumstances, and very acutely in ours, monetary inflation and severe pressure on the balance of payments.”

John James Cowperthwaite (1915–2006) British colonial administrator

March 29, 1967, page 249.
Official Report of Proceedings of the Hong Kong Legislative Council

Money

“The problem solver needs to stand back and examine problem contexts in the light of different “Ws” (weltanschauungen). Perhaps he can then decide which “W” seems to capture the essence of the particular problem context he is faced with. This whole process needs formalizing if it is to be carried out successfully. The problem solver needs to be aware of different paradigms in the social sciences, and he must be prepared to view the problem context through each of these paradigms.”

Mike Jackson (1951) systems scientist

Source: Towards a System of Systems Methodologies (1984), p. 473

Problem, Light, Science

“The darkness
is the deepening shadow
of your presence; the silence a
process in the metabolism
of the being of love.”

R.S. Thomas (1913–2000) Welsh poet

"Alive", p. 51
Laboratories of the Spirit (1975)

Love, Silence

“While there have been many criticisms of the research in corporate social responsibility, perhaps the most troubling issue is the very nature of 'corporate social responsibility' as if the concept were needed to augment the study of business policy. Corporate social responsibility was often looked at as an “add on” to “business as usual” and the phrase often heard from executives is “corporate social responsibility is fine, if you can afford it.
We need to understand the complex interconnections between economic and social forces. Isolating "social issues" as separate from the economic impact which they have, and conversely isolating economic issues as if they had no social effect, misses the mark both managerially and intellectually. Actions aimed at one side will not address the concerns of the other. Processes, techniques and theories that do not consider all of these forces will fail to describe and predict the business world as it really is.”

R. Edward Freeman (1951) American academic

Source: A stakeholder approach to strategic management, 1984, p. 40

World, Understanding, Business, Nature

“There are as many Scottish roads to Socialism as there are predictions of Britain's economic doom - but most of them demand three things: a coherent plan for an extension of democracy and control in society and industry which sees every reform as a means to creating a socialist society; a harnessing of the forces for industrial and community self-management within a political movement; and a massive programme of education by the Labour Movement as a whole.

Gramsci's relevance to Scotland today is in his emphasis that in a society which is both mature and complex, where the total social and economic processes are geared to maintaining the production of goods and services (and the reproduction of the conditions of production), then the transition to socialism must be made by the majority of the people themselves and a socialist society must be created within the womb of existing society and prefigured in the movements for democracy at the grass roots. Socialists must neither place their faith in an Armageddon or of capitalist collapse nor in nationalisation alone. For the Jacobin notion of a vanguard making revolution on behalf of working people relates to a backward society (and prefigures an authoritarian and bureaucratic state), then the complexity of modern society requires a far reaching movement of people and existing conditions and as a co-ordinator for the assertion of social priorities by people at a community level and control by producers at an industrial level. In such a way political power will become a synthesis of – not a substitute for – community and industrial life.

This requires from the Labour Movement in Scotland today a postive commitment to creating a socialist society, a coherant strategy with rhythm and modality to each reform to cancel the logic of capitalism and a programme of immediate aims which leads out of one social order into another. Such a social reorganisation - a phased extension of public control under workers' sustained and enlarged, would in EP Thompson's words lead to "a crisis not of despair and disintegration but a crisis in which the necessity for a peaceful revolutionary transition to an alternative socialist logic became daily more evident."”

Gordon Brown (1951) British Labour Party politician

Introduction to "The Red Paper On Scotland", 1975.

Life, People, Education, Peace

“Relational processing entails treating whole relationships as operands. Its primary purpose is loop-avoidance, an absolute requirement for end users to be productive at all, and a clear productivity booster for application programmers.”

E. F. Codd (1923–2003) computer scientist

Relational Database: A Practical Foundation for Productivity (1982)

“Let us summarize these three points more concisely:
(a) The rejection of art as a mere emotional, individualistic, and romantic affair.
(b) 'Objective' work, undertaken with the silent hope that the end product will nevertheless eventually be regarded as a work of art.
(c) Consciously goal-directed work in architecture, which will have a concise artistic effect on the basis of well-preparated objective-scientific criteria.
Such an architecture will actively raise the general standard of living. This represents the dialectic of our development process, which purports to arrive at the affirmative by negation — a process similar to melting down old iron and forging it into new steel.”

El Lissitsky (1890–1941) Soviet artist, designer, photographer, teacher, typographer and architect

Quotes from: 'Ideological Superstructure'
1926 - 1941, Rußland: Die Rekonstruktion der Architektur in der Sowjetunion' (1929)

Hope, Art

“Kunti returned to Hastinapura with the five children, the two half-charred bodies and a retinue of Brahmins and servants. The citizens of Hastinapura watched the sad procession and talked among themselves.”

Kunti character from Indian epic Mahabharata

Source: The End Of An Epoch, p. 32.

Children, Sadness

“The higher processes are all processes of simplification. The novelist must learn to write, and then he must unlearn it; just as the modern painter learns to draw, and then learns when utterly to disregard his accomplishment, when to subordinate it to a higher and truer effect.”

Willa Cather (1873–1947) American writer and novelist

"The Novel Démeublé"
Not Under Forty (1936)

Learning, Drawing

“You must look at the processes of motion in the macrocosmos and microcosmos accurately, and copy them!”

Viktor Schauberger (1885–1958) austrian philosopher and inventor

Implosion Magazine, No. 14, p. 19 (Callum Coats: Energy Evolution (2000))
Implosion Magazine

“An intrinsic problem, similar to the one we discussed in connexion with tradition in general, presents itself with the process of transmission of the symbolic universe from one generation to another. Socialization is never completely successful. Some individuals 'inhabit' the transmitted universe more definitely than others.”

Peter L. Berger book The Social Construction of Reality

1991; 124
The Social Construction of Reality, 1966

Problem, Universe, Success

“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

“David Galin, among other researchers, has pointed out that teachers have three main tasks: first, to train both hemispheres — not only the verbal, symbolic, logical left hemisphere, which has always been trained in the traditional education, but also the relational, holistic right hemisphere, which is largely neglected in today's schools; second, to train students to use the cognitive style suited to the tasks at hand; and third, to train students to be able to bring both styles — both hemispheres — to bear on a problem in an integrated manner.
When teachers can pair the complementary modes or fit one mode to the appropriate task, teaching and learning will become a much more precise process. Ultimately, the goal will be to develop both halves of the brain. Both modes are necessary for full human functioning and both are necessary for creative work of all kinds, whether writing or painting, developing a new theory in physics, or dealing with environmental problems.”

Betty Edwards (1926) American artist

Source: The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain (1979), p.196

Education, School, Problem, Learning

“Whoever exploits retrograde oxidising processes must inevitably inaugurate a scarcity and shortage of food, raw materials and fuels”

Viktor Schauberger (1885–1958) austrian philosopher and inventor

Callum Coats: The Fertile Earth

Food

“In quantum physics, however, each observation implies an intervention in the observed. Because of the quantum physical laws of nature, a change of state of the observed is inevitably coupled to the observation process. So it's not a situation independent from the experiment that is observed, but we ourselves call forth the facts (or compel them to go in a certain direction to a disambiguation), that then become an observation.”

Pascual Jordan (1902–1980) German physicist and politician

In der Quantenphysik dagegen bedeutet jede Beobachtung einen Eingriff in das Beobachtete; eine Zustandsveränderung am Beobachteten ist auf Grund der quantenphysikalischen Naturgesetze mit dem Beobachtungsprozess zwangslaüfig verknüpft. Also nicht ein sowieso, unabhängig von diesem Experiment vorhandener Tatbestand wird wahrgenommen, sondern wir selber rufen die Tatbestände hervor (oder: nötigen sie in bestimmter Richtung zu einer Klärung), die dann zur Wahrnehmung gelangen.
Quantenmechanische Bemerkungen zur Biologie und Psychologie, Erkenntnis, Vol. 4 (1934). p. 228.

Law, Nature, Change

“Our present knowledge of human perception leaves no doubt as to the general form of any theory which is to do justice to such knowledge: a theory of perception must be a field theory. By this we mean that the neural functions and processes with which the perceptual facts are associated in each case are located in a continuous medium.”

Wolfgang Köhler (1887–1967) German-American psychologist and phenomenologist

Source: Dynamics in Psychology, 1940, p. 55

Justice, Knowledge

“The fact is that Soviet Leninism, through a process of gradual involution, has taken on more and more of the attributes of paradigmatic Fascism.”

A. James Gregor (1929–2019) American political scientist

Source: The Ideology of Fascism: The Rationale of Totalitarianism, (1969), p. 359

“I believe that freedom is not a constant attribute that "we have" or "we don’t have"; perhaps there is only one reality: the act of liberating ourselves in the process of using choices. Every step in life that heightens the maturity of man heightens his ability to choose the freeing alternative.
I believe that "freedom of choice" is not always equal for all men at every moment. The man with an exclusively necrophilic orientation; who is narcissistic; or who is symbiotic-incestuous, can only make a regressive choice. The free man, freed from irrational ties, can no longer make a regressive choice.”

Erich Fromm (1900–1980) German social psychologist and psychoanalyst

Credo (1965)

Life, Men, Reality, Freedom

“We are by no means opposed to the globalization of relationships as such—in fact, as we said, the strongest forces of Leftist internationalism have effectively led this process. The enemy, rather, is a specific regime of global relations that we call Empire.”

Antonio Negri book Empire

45–46
Empire

“The notion that one can discover large patterns or regularities in the procession of historical events is naturally attractive to those who are impressed by the success of the natural sciences in classifying, correlating, and above all predicting.”

Isaiah Berlin (1909–1997) Russo-British Jewish social and political theorist, philosopher and historian of ideas

Five Essays on Liberty (2002), Historical Inevitability (1954)

Nature, Science, Success

“I have grown accustomed to the disrespect expressed by some of the participants for their colleagues in the other disciplines. "Why, Dan," ask the people in artificial intelligence, "do you waste your time conferring with those neuroscientists? They wave their hands about 'information processing' and worry about where it happens, and which neurotransmitters are involved, but they haven't a clue about the computational requirements of higher cognitive functions." "Why," ask the neuroscientists, "do you waste your time on the fantasies of artificial intelligence? They just invent whatever machinery they want, and say unpardonably ignorant things about the brain." The cognitive psychologists, meanwhile, are accused of concocting models with neither biological plausibility nor proven computational powers; the anthropologists wouldn't know a model if they saw one, and the philosophers, as we all know, just take in each other's laundry, warning about confusions they themselves have created, in an arena bereft of both data and empirically testable theories. With so many idiots working on the problem, no wonder consciousness is still a mystery. All these charges are true, and more besides, but I have yet to encounter any idiots. Mostly the theorists I have drawn from strike me as very smart people – even brilliant people, with the arrogance and impatience that often comes with brilliance – but with limited perspectives and agendas, trying to make progress on the hard problems by taking whatever shortcuts they can see, while deploring other people's shortcuts. No one can keep all the problems and details clear, including me, and everyone has to mumble, guess and handwave about large parts of the problem.”

Daniel Dennett book Consciousness Explained

Consciousness Explained (1991)

People, Intelligence, Problem, Time

“The course of decision in this Court has thus far jealously enforced the principle of a free society secured by the prohibition of unreasonable searches and seizures. Its safeguards are not to be worn away by a process of devitalizing interpretation.”

Felix Frankfurter (1882–1965) American judge

Davis v. United States, 328 U.S. 582, 597 (1946).
Judicial opinions

Search, Decision

“Israel should really reflect on what's going on in Egypt. It does not want to be the Hosni Mubarak of the peace process.”

Thomas Friedman (1953) American journalist and author

Meet The Press, January 30, 2011. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/41317645/ns/meet_the_press-transcripts/

Peace

“I shall here present the view that numbers, even whole numbers, are words, parts of speech, and that mathematics is their grammar. Numbers were therefore invented by people in the same sense that language, both written and spoken, was invented. Grammar is also an invention. Words and numbers have no existence separate from the people who use them. Knowledge of mathematics is transmitted from one generation to another, and it changes in the same slow way that language changes. Continuity is provided by the process of oral or written transmission.”

Carl Eckart (1902–1973) American physicist

Source: Our Modern Idol: Mathematical Science (1984), p. 95.

People, Way, Mathematics, Knowledge

“Models of human reasoning are clearly relevant to a wide variety of subject areas such as sociology, economics, psychology, artificial intelligence and man-machine systems. Broadly there are two types: psychological models of what people actually do; and formal models of what logicians and philosophers feel a rational individual would, or should, do. The main problem with the former is that it is extremely difficult to monitor thought processes - the behaviourist approach is perhaps reasonable with rats but a ridiculously inadequate source of data on man - the introspectionist approach is far more successful [e. g. in analysing human chess strategy… but the data obtained is still incomplete and may not reflect the actual thought processes involved.”

Brian R. Gaines (1938) British computer scientist

Source: Foundations of fuzzy reasoning (1976), p. 623.

People, Feeling, Intelligence, Problem

“An element is a substance which cannot be further reduced to a simpler substance by ordinary processes, and is made up of particles of one kind only.”

C. N. R. Rao (1934) Indian chemist

Source: Understanding Chemistry (1999), p. 8

“Playing the lottery is gambling, and I'm not a gambler. I assessed my life, knew I wanted to become a successful writer, and believed that I had a winner for a story. All I imagined was getting a huge publishing deal and attending the premier of my movie. In fact, every time my wife and I went to the movies, I'd tell her that, one day, we'll be in a theater in Hollywood watching MEG. Does that mean that I wasn't scared? Of course not. The process is similar to crawling out on a limb of a very high tree. You know you're out there and that it's a huge drop if you fall. Out along the weakest branches grows the fruit. If you really intend on making it all the way out to the fruit, you can't hold onto the trunk, you have to let go. At the same time, you have to be smart enough not to look down (negatives), which, of course, everyone you know is screaming at you to do. If you don't want to fall, then keep looking at the fruit. This all may sound hooky, but it works and it's how I've chosen to live my life, ever since I was 13 years old.”

Steve Alten (1959) American writer

Interview with Steve Alten http://www.screenwritersutopia.com/article/d14867f2 (March 11th, 2004)

Life, Way, Imagination, Tree

“Their record has been matched only recently by Communism, considered a Christian heresy by thinkers like Bertrand Russell. In China, the communist regime destroyed half a million Buddhist shrines. (Were the Buddhists there also in the habit of hoarding their gold in their shrines, thus attracting communist expropriatory justice and getting them destroyed in the process? Or was it a rare example of an act purely motivated by an ideology? Probably Stalinist historians of the JNU would like to explain.)”

Ram Swarup (1920–1998) Indian historian

Hindu View of Christianity and Islam (1992)

Justice, Communication, Motivation

“Logically, humanity itself will also become a domesticate of this order as the world of production processes us as much as it degrades and deforms every other natural system.”

John Zerzan (1943) American anarchist and primitivist philosopher and author

Elements of Refusal (1988)

World, Nature

“Abductees," Eva said, "are souls that have, for their individual purposes and reasons, chosen the probability of physical form." But through their experiences they are "regaining their memory of source... The process of abduction is one form of such, of regaining memory." The abduction "experience itself," Eva said, "is a mechanism to remove" the "structures that impede the reconnection with source," and to purify the physical vehicle in such a way to serve to regain better memory and to bring knowledge to others.”

John E. Mack (1929–2004) American psychiatrist

p 258-259
Abduction: Human Encounters With Aliens (1994)

Way, Soul, Knowledge, Memory

“Of all things to be learned, in school or out, languaging, as I prefer to call the process, is least like a mechanical skill. It is, in fact, the most intimate, integrated, emotion-laden learning we do. At no point can we separate what we know and what we are from how our linguistic powers develop…”

Neil Postman (1931–2003) American writer and academic

Language Education in a Knowledge Context (1980)

School, Learning

“Participant. A participant is active, a part of the process, and a necessary component of the magical experience. This is how it should be. No magic happens unless the participant perceives it as magical, so she can never be a mere spectator.”

Derren Brown (1971) British illusionist

Books, Confessions of a Conjuror (2010)

Parting

“I have met a lot and they’ve been varied. The experiences are extremely varied. Some emotional and with great depth and other ones just genuine gratitude, you know, and thanks. It’s all very humbling to me and I take it very seriously and I feel it quite to my core so but as I said they’re very different and they all combine that overall same feeling of we’re all connected on way or another, you know. The fan base is responsible for my reprisal and that’s something that I just cherish. There’s a connection because it’s something that I artistically … I look at this as an actor and I have to use the word artistic because it’s a creative process. It sounds a little fishy but still, they reacted to my creative concept and we’re bonded because of it. It was one of those wonderful things in life. You click and I certainly feel that with people that feel an affection for Prime.”

Peter Cullen

Exclusive Interview with Peter Cullen http://collider.com/exclusive-interview-with-peter-cullen/ (June 9, 2007)

Life, People, Way, Feeling

“Nothing in life is certain except death, taxes and the second law of thermodynamics. All three are processes in which useful or accessible forms of some quantity, such as energy or money, are transformed into useless, inaccessible forms of the same quantity. That is not to say that these three processes don't have fringe benefits: taxes pay for roads and schools; the second law of thermodynamics drives cars, computers and metabolism; and death, at the very least, opens up tenured faculty positions.”

Seth Lloyd (1960) American engineer

Nature 430, 971 (26 August 2004); doi:10.1038/430971a

Life, Death, Money, School

“Whether computers are used for engineering design, medical data processing, composing music, or other purposes, the structure of computing is much the same. We are extremely short of talented people in this field, and so we need departments, curricula, and research and degree programs in computer science… I think of the Computer Science Department as eventually including experts in Programming, Numerical Analysis, Automata Theory, Data Processing, Business Games, Adaptive Systems, Information Theory, Information Retrieval, Recursive Function Theory, Computer Linguistics, etc., as these fields emerge in structure… Universities must respond [to the computer revolution] with far reaching changes in the educational structure.”

George Forsythe (1917–1972) Stanford University computer scientist

As cited in Donald Knuth (1972). "George Forsythe and the Development of Computer Science" http://www.stanford.edu/dept/ICME/docs/history/forsythe_knuth.pdf. Comms. ACM. "Educational implications of the computer revolution," 1963

People, Education, Music, Game

“In some respects, cities are bottom-up processes, but they are also top-down initiatives – and elites soon develop. Religion is older than the city, but the elites quickly build temples and turn themselves into priests. As they become more powerful the temples they build also have huge storehouses. What you see is that the man who has a surplus of material is the powerful man. This is because everyone is living hand-to-mouth, and if you have a bad harvest one year, well, you're stuffed.”

Richard Miles (historian) (1969) British historian and archaeologist

My bright idea: Civilisation is still worth striving for

Religion

“I am often inclined to put the implementation questions first, ie, "Can anything be changed?" Should the implementation question not accompany the whole process from its very beginning to its very end?”

C. West Churchman (1913–2004) American philosopher and systems scientist

C. West Churchman (1979, p. 21) as cited in: Interfaces (1982) Vol 12, p. 12
1980s and later

Question, Change

“The question really arises is it a republic if you can keep it, question have we kept it? And the answer is no! No we have not kept it. Since 2001 we have in effect an elected monarchy. And ah, meaning a country which Nixon's view 'when a president does it, it is legal'. The president says it's not illegal. That is the attitude long after Nixon of John Yoo, who was the advisor to George W. Bush, of David Addington, Bush Cheney's legal advisor. Essentially there are no limits on presidential power except those which he chooses to put on himself. Obama following on, has in effect decriminalized torture which is as illegal and criminal as anything can be under international law and domestic law, a number of domestic laws and international laws, which we have ratified to investigate, and follow-up if there is any credible charge. Obama has chosen not to investigate or indict any higher up for that process of torture.”

Daniel Ellsberg (1931) American economist and whistleblower

WHISTLEBLOWER TOUR! Daniel Ellsberg, Jesselyn Radack & Thomas Drake, April 8, 2014, found at 1:48:08 - 1:49:31 https://www.c-span.org/video/?318762-1/challenges-facing-whistleblowers,THE

Law, Question, Country

“In any organization, the man at the top must bear the responsibility. That responsibility, therefore, belongs here, in this office. I accept it. And I pledge to you tonight, from this office, that I will do everything in my power to ensure that the guilty are brought to justice and that such abuses are purged from our political processes in the years to come, long after I have left this office.”

Richard Nixon (1913–1994) 37th President of the United States of America

1970s, First Watergate Speech (1973)

Justice

“The different thought-processes seem to differ chiefly in respect to their temporal rhythm. If plants have souls, then hours and days must be for them what seconds are for us. The corresponding period for the earth-soul, at least for its outward activity, possibly embraces many thousands of years.”

Bernhard Riemann (1826–1866) German mathematician

Gesammelte Mathematische Werke (1876)

Soul

“I do not intend to argue the essence of these processes, all the more so because it has been proved that both types of memory function in the brain.”

Yevgeniy Chazov (1929) Russian physician

Tragedy and Triumph of Reason (1985)
Context: In medical science arguments are going on between behaviorists who perceive the function of brain as a multitude of simple and unconscious conditioned reflexes, and cognitivists who insist that humans sensing the surrounding world create its mental image which can be considered as memory of facts.
I do not intend to argue the essence of these processes, all the more so because it has been proved that both types of memory function in the brain. However, I am convinced that those who once saw a nuclear explosion or imagined the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki will forever maintain the mental picture of horror-stricken and dust-covered Earth, burned bodies of the dead and wounded and people slowly dying of radiation disease. Prompted by the sense of responsibility for the fortunes of the human race, Einstein addressed the following warning to his colleagues: "Since we, scientists, face the tragic lot of further increasing the murderous effectiveness of the means of destruction, it is our most solemn and noble duty to prevent the use of these weapons for the cruel ends they were designed to achieve".

Memory

Quotes about process page 27

Quotes about process
page 27