Quotes about proportion
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“The time it takes to feel better about a breakup is directly proportional to the time it takes to feel better about yourself.”

Greg Behrendt (1963) American comedian

Source: It's Called a Breakup Because It's Broken: The Smart Girl's Break-Up Buddy

Feeling, Time

“A culture fixated on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty, but an obsession about female obedience. Women's dieting has become what Yale psychologist Judith Rodin calls a 'normative obsession,' a never-ending passion play given international coverage out of all proportion to the health risks associated with obesity, and using emotive language that does not figure even in discussions of alcohol or tobacco abuse. […] Dieting is the most potent political sedative in women's history; a quietly mad population is a tractable one.”

Naomi Wolf book The Beauty Myth

Source: The Beauty Myth (1991), Chapter 6 : 'Hunger', p. 187

Women, Health, Alcohol, Beauty

“There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.”

Francis Bacon book Essays

Of Beauty
Essays (1625)

Beauty, Beauty

“Grief is depression in proportion to circumstance; depression is grief out of proportion to circumstance.”

Andrew Solomon book The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression

Source: The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression

Depressing

“Every impulse of feeling should be guided by reason; and, in my opinion, exertion should always be in proportion to what is required.”

Jane Austen book Pride and Prejudice

Source: Pride and Prejudice

Feeling

“Your ability to generate power is directly proportional to your ability to relax.”

David Allen (1945) American productivity consultant and author

Source: Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity

“Coach said. "the quality of a man's life is in direct proportion to his commitment to excellence, regardless of his chosen field of endeavor".”

Sherman Alexie book The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

Source: The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

Life, Wise

“If a man is alive, there is always danger that he may die, though the danger must be allowed to be less in proportion as he is dead-and-alive to begin with. A man sits as many risks as he runs.”

Henry David Thoreau book Walden ou la vie dans les bois

Source: Walden

Dead

“It is not very unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the public expense, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than in that proportion.”

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

Source: The Wealth of Nations (1776), Book V, Chapter II, Part II, Article I, p. 911.
Context: The necessaries of life occasion the great expense of the poor. They find it difficult to get food, and the greater part of their little revenue is spent in getting it. The luxuries and vanities of life occasion the principal expense of the rich, and a magnificent house embellishes and sets off to the best advantage all the other luxuries and vanities which they possess. A tax upon house-rents, therefore, would in general fall heaviest upon the rich; and in this sort of inequality there would not, perhaps, be anything very unreasonable. It is not very unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the public expense, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than in that proportion.

“Researchers from Britain's Keele University have found that swearing after an injury may help alleviate pain. Evidently, the pain that you feel is inversely proportional to the number of middle names you give Jesus.”

Stephen Colbert (1964) American political satirist, writer, comedian, television host, and actor

Pain, Feeling, Universe, Help

“The more you try to avoid suffering, the more you suffer, because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you, in proportion to your fear of being hurt. The one who does most to avoid suffering is, in the end, the one who suffers most.”

Thomas Merton book The Seven Storey Mountain

Source: The Seven Storey Mountain (1948)
Context: Indeed, the truth that many people never understand, until it is too late, is that the more you try to avoid suffering, the more you suffer, because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you, in proportion to your fear of being hurt. The one who does most to avoid suffering is, in the end, the one who suffers the most: and his suffering comes to him from things so little and so trivial that one can say that it is no longer objective at all. It is his own existence, his own being, that is at once the subject and the source of his pain, and his very existence and consciousness is his greatest torture.

Fear, Suffering, Hurt

“The degree of slowness is directionally proportional to the intensity of memory. The degree of speed is directionally proportional to the intensity of forgetting.”

Milan Kundera book Slowness

Source: Slowness

Memory, Speed, Forgetting

“But for the sake of some little mouthful of flesh we deprive a soul of the sun and light, and of that proportion of life and time it had been born into the world to enjoy.”

Plutarch book Moralia

I, 4
Moralia, Of Eating of Flesh
Context: For the sake of some little mouthful of flesh, we deprive a soul of the sun and light, and of that proportion of life and time it had been born into the world to enjoy. And then we fancy that the voices it utters and screams forth to us are nothing else but certain inarticulate sounds and noises, and not the several deprecations, entreaties, and pleadings of each of them.

Life, World, Soul, Light

“The ability to hurt someone is usually in direct proportion to how much that person cares about you.”

Susan Mallery (1950) American author

Source: Almost Perfect

Hurt, Personality

“Men become civilized, not in proportion to their willingness to believe, but in proportion to their readiness to doubt.”

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

" What I Believe http://www.unz.org/Pub/Forum-1930sep-00133" in The Forum 84 (September 1930), p. 136 1930s Context: Men become civilized, not in proportion to their willingness to believe, but in proportion to their readiness to doubt. The more stupid the man, the larger his stock of adamantine assurances, the heavier his load of faith.

Men

“Resistance is directly proportional to love. If you're feeling massive Resistance, the good news is that it means there's tremendous love there too.”

Steven Pressfield (1943) United States Marine

Source: The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks & Win Your Inner Creative Battles

Love, Feeling

“Men are wise in proportion, not to their experience, but to their capacity for experience. If we could learn from mere experience, the stones of London would be wiser than its wisest men.”

George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) Irish playwright

#127-128
1900s, Maxims for Revolutionists (1903)

Men, Learning

“I have long held the opinion that the amount of noise that anyone can bear undisturbed stands in inverse proportion to his mental capacity and therefore be regarded as a pretty fair measure of it.”

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) German philosopher

“We grow in direct proportion to the amount of chaos we can sustain and dissipate”

Ilya Prigogine (1917–2003) physical chemist

Source: Order Out of Chaos: Man's New Dialogue with Nature

“The colonized is elevated above his jungle status in proportion to his adoption of the mother country's cultural standards.”

Frantz Fanon book Black Skin, White Masks

Source: Black Skin, White Masks

Country

“He was my first boyfriend, and I made him my everything - he was my new life, my new love, my new compass point. I guess that's the danger with firsts - you lose all sense of proportion.”

David Levithan Boy Meets Boy

Source: Boy Meets Boy

Love, Life, Sense

“Heaven and hell seem out of proportion to me: the actions of men do not deserve so much.”

Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator, and a key figure in Spanish language literature

El infierno y el paraíso me parecen desproporcionados. Los actos de los hombres no merecen tanto.
As quoted in Borges Verbal (1999) edited by Pilar Bravo and Mario Paoletti, p. 156

Men, Hell

“Hope and reality lie in inverse proportions, inside the walls of a hospital… Doubt is like dye. Once is spreads into the fabric of excuses you've woven, you'll never get rid of the stain.”

Jodi Picoult book Lone Wolf

Source: Lone Wolf

Lie, Hope, Reality

“Resistance to change is proportional to how much the future might be altered by any given act.”

Stephen King book 11/22/63

Source: 11/22/63

Change, Future

“The happiness you feel is in direct proportion to the love you give.”

Oprah Winfrey (1954) American businesswoman, talk show host, actress, producer, and philanthropist

Love, Happiness, Feeling, Happy

“So the freshness lives on
in a lemon,
in the sweet-smelling house of the rind,
the proportions, arcane and acerb.”

Pablo Neruda (1904–1973) Chilean poet

Source: Odes to Common Things

Housing

“Love is a possible strength, in an actual weakness. Marriage transforms a distraction into a support, the power of which should be, and happily often is, in direct proportion to the degree of imbecility it supplants.”

Thomas Hardy book Far from the Madding Crowd

Source: Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), Ch. 4

Love, Marriage, Support

“There was one great tomb more lordly than all the rest; huge it was, and nobly proportioned. On it was but one word, DRACULA.”

Bram Stoker book Dracula

Source: Dracula

“My misery is reaching epidemic proportions.”

Libba Bray A Great and Terrible Beauty

Source: A Great and Terrible Beauty

“The most natural Beauty in the World is Honesty, and Moral Truth. For all Beauty is Truth. True Features make the Beauty of a Face; and true Proportions the Beauty of Architecture; as true Measures that of Harmony and Musick.”

Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury (1671–1713) English politician and Earl

Vol. 1, p. 77; "Sensus Communis".
Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1711)

Truth, World, Beauty, Nature

“Europeans are awakening more and more to a sense that beasts have rights, in proportion as the strange notion is being gradually overcome and outgrown, that the animal kingdom came into existence solely for the benefit and pleasure of man. This view, with the corollary that non-human living creatures are to be regarded merely as things, is at the root of the rough and altogether reckless treatment of them, which obtains in the West.”

Arthur Schopenhauer book On the Basis of Morality

Part III, Ch. VIII, 7, p. 225 https://archive.org/stream/basisofmorality00schoiala#page/225/mode/2up On the Basis of Morality (1840)

Pleasure, Sense, Animals

“The life of Jesus was a translation into humanity, of the life of God, as far as man is capable of discerning the latter. In the same way, the church is not something born on earth which grew to divine proportions and significance, but a translation into terms of space and time of the divine community eternally existent in heaven.”

Leslie Weatherhead (1893–1976) English theologian

Location unknown
The Christian Agnostic (1965)

Life, God, Way, Communication

“In proportion as a man's interests become humane and his efforts rational, he appropriates and expands a common life, which reappears in all individuals who reach the same impersonal level of ideas.”

George Santayana (1863–1952) 20th-century Spanish-American philosopher associated with Pragmatism

Source: The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress (1905-1906), Vol. II, Reason in Society, Ch. VIII: Ideal Society

Life, Idea, Effort

“[Tar water] is of a nature so mild and benign and proportioned to the human constitution, as to warm without heating, to cheer but not inebriate.”

George Berkeley book Siris

Paragraph 217. Compare: "Cups / That cheer but not inebriate", William Cowper, The Task, book iv, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).
Siris (1744)

Nature, Water

“If the expansion of the space of the universe is uniform in all directions, an observer located in anyone of the galaxies will see all other galaxies running away from him at velocities proportional to their distances from the observer.”

George Gamow (1904–1968) Russian-American physicist and science writer

Source: The Creation of the Universe (1952), p. 31

Universe

“Of all those expensive and uncertain projects, however, which bring bankruptcy upon the greater part of the people who engage in in them, there is none perhaps more perfectly ruinous than the search after new silver and gold mines. It is perhaps the most disadvantageous lottery in the world, or the one in which the gain of those who draw the prizes bears the least proportion to the loss of those who draw the blanks: for though the prizes are few and the blanks are many, the common price of a ticket is the whole fortune of a very rich man.”

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

Source: (1776), Book IV, Chapter VII, Part First, p. 610.

People, World, Search, Loss

“It would be different if there were some great widespread public indigonation and demand: "Away with the prescriptive upper house of Parliament". There is not. There was recently carried out by Mr. McKenzie and a colleague of his a survey of working-class political attitudes called Angels in Marble. They found that "only one-third of the entire working class sample, and only a slightly higher proportion of Labour voters, favoured abolishing the Lords or altering it in any way…About a third of the whole sample" of working-class voters in the country "see the Lords as an intrinsic part of the national tradition or of the government of the country." As so often, the ordinary rank and file of the electorate have seen a truth, an important fact, which has escaped so many more clever people—the underlying value of that which is traditional, of that which is prescriptive.”

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

Speech in the House of Commons http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1968/nov/19/house-of-lords-reform#S5CV0773P0_19681119_HOC_305 (19 November 1968) regarding proposals for reforming the House of Lords. 1960s

People, Truth, Angels, Way

“So, my brethren, let us do our work, that others entering on it may carry it forward through after generations. Thus shall the work of the fathers become the glory of fheir children; and in the end, when the mystery of God shall be finished, we shall see, in its completed beauty and proportion, the great fabric into which we put our little all; and we shall rejoice at once in the skill of the Architect and the diligence of the successive builders.”

William Mackergo Taylor (1829–1895) American theologian

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 126.

God, Children, Beauty, Success

“Had the acute-angled rabble been all, without exception, absolutely destitute of hope and of ambition, they might have found leaders in some of their many seditious outbreaks, so able as to render their superior numbers and strength too much even for the wisdom of the Circles. But a wise ordinance of Nature has decreed that, in proportion as the working-classes increase in intelligence, knowledge, and all virtue, in that same proportion their acute angle (which makes them physically terrible) shall increase also and approximate to the comparatively harmless angle of the Equilateral Triangle. Thus, in the most brutal and formidable of the soldier class — creatures almost on a level with women in their lack of intelligence — it is found that, as they wax in the mental ability necessary to employ their tremendous penetrating power to advantage, so do they wane in the power of penetration itself.

How admirable is this Law of Compensation! And how perfect a proof of the natural fitness and, I may almost say, the divine origin of the aristocratic constitution of the States in Flatland! By a judicious use of this Law of Nature, the Polygons and Circles are almost always able to stifle sedition in its very cradle, taking advantage of the irrepressible and boundless hopefulness of the human mind. Art also comes to the aid of Law and Order. It is generally found possible — by a little artificial compression or expansion on the part of the State physicians — to make some of the more intelligent leaders of a rebellion perfectly Regular, and to admit them at once into the privileged classes; a much larger number, who are still below the standard, allured by the prospect of being ultimately ennobled, are induced to enter the State Hospitals, where they are kept in honourable confinement for life; one or two alone of the more obstinate, foolish, and hopelessly irregular are led to execution.”

Edwin Abbott Abbott book Flatland

Source: Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (1884), PART I: THIS WORLD, Chapter 3. Concerning the Inhabitants of Flatland

Life, Wisdom, Women, Law

“John Philoponus (c. 490-570) of Alexandria… refuted Aristotle's theory that the velocities of falling bodies in a given medium are proportional to their weight, making the observation that "if one lets fall simultaneously from the same height two bodies differing greatly in weight, one will find that the ratio of the times of their motion does not correspond to the ratios of their weights, but the difference in time is a very small one." …He also criticized Aristotle's antiperistasis theory of projectile motion, which states that the air displaced by the object flows back to push it from behind. Instead Philoponus concluded that "some incorporeal kinetic power is imparted by the thrower to the object thrown" and that "if an arrow or a stone is projected by force in a void, the same will happen much more easily, nothing being necessary except the thrower."”

John Freely (1926–2017) American physicist

This is the famous "impetus theory," which was revived in medieval Islam and again in fourteenth century Europe, giving rise to the beginning of modern dynamics.
Source: Before Galileo, The Birth of Modern Science in Medieval Europe (2012), p. 8

Time

“Science, which is the logic of nature, demands proportion between the house and its foundation. Theology sometimes builds weighty structures on a doubtful base.”

John Tyndall (1820–1893) British scientist

p, 125
New Fragments (1892)

Nature, Science, Housing

“The pretended rights of these theorists are all extremes: and in proportion as they are metaphysically true, they are morally and politically false. The rights of men are in a sort of middle, incapable of definition, but not impossible to be discerned. The rights of men in government are their advantages; and these are often in balances between differences of good; in compromises between good and evil, and sometimes between evil and evil. Political reason is a computing principle: adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing, morally and not metaphysically or mathematically, true moral denominations.”

Edmund Burke book Reflections on the Revolution in France

Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)

Men, Mathematics, Evil, Falseness

“We all have that heritage, no matter what old land our fathers left. All colors and blends of Americans have somewhat the same tendencies. It's a breed — selected out by accident. And so we're overbrave and overfearful — we're kind and cruel as children. We're overfriendly and at the same time frightened of strangers. We boast and are impressed. We're oversentimental and realistic. We are mundane and materialistic — and do you know of any other nation that acts for ideals? We eat too much. We have no taste, no sense of proportion. We throw our energy about like waste. In the old lands they say of us that we go from barbarism to decadence without an intervening culture. Can it be that our critics have not the key or the language of our culture? That's what we are, Cal — all of us. You aren't very different.”

John Steinbeck book East of Eden

East of Eden (1952)

Children, Color, Sense, Time

“[T]he lectures… may be expected to remain tolerably commensurate to the state of the sciences for a much longer period; since, in investigations so intimately connected with mathematical principles, the essential improvements will always bear a very small proportion to the number of innovations. …the references, which it contains, are… sufficient to lead those, who may consult the passages quoted, to the works of every author of eminence that has treated of the respective subjects.”

Thomas Young (scientist) (1773–1829) English polymath

Preface
A Course of Lectures on Natural Philosophy and the Mechanical Arts (1807)

Quotes, Mathematics, Science

“The first impression and a natural one is, that the fine arts have risen or declined in proportion as patronage has been given to them or withdrawn, but it will be found that there has often been more money lavished on them in their worst periods than in their best, and that the highest honours have frequently been bestowed on artists whose names are scarcely now known.”

John Constable (1776–1837) English Romantic painter

Lecture, Literary and Scientific Institution, Hampstead, (25 July 1836), from notes taken by C.R. Leslie
1830s, his lectures History of Landscape Painting (1836)

Money, Art, Nature

“A superintendent of a road fifty miles in length can give its business his professional attention and may be constantly on the line engaged in the direction of its details; each person is personally known to him, and all questions in relation to its business are at once presented and acted upon; and any system however imperfect may under such circumstances prove comparatively successful.
In the government of a five hundred miles in length a very different state exists. Any system which might be applicable to the business and extent of a short road would be found entirely inadequate to the wants of a long one. and I am fully convinced that in the want of system perfect in its details, properly adapted and vigilantly enforced, lies the true secret of their [the large roads’] failure; and that this disparity of cost per mile in operating long and short roads, is not produced by a difference in length, but is in proportion to the perfection of the system adopted.”

Daniel McCallum (1815–1878) Canadian engineer and early organizational theorist

Source: Report of the Superintendent of the New York and Erie Railroad to the Stockholders (1856), p. 34: Third paragraph. Cited in: Alfred D. Chandler, Jr. (1962). Strategy and Structure: Chapters in the History of the Industrial Enterprise. p. 21-22

Secret, Failure, Question, Business

“I am searching for the proper harmony of rhythm and unchanging proportion, as I wrote in the article. And I cannot tell you how difficult it is. [Mondrian is reacting on Van Doesburg criticism of the strong domination of the regular grid in Mondrian's latest paintings]”

Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) Peintre Néerlandais

In Mondrian's letter to Theo van Doesburg, Paris, 16 September 1919; as quoted in Mondrian, - The Art of Destruction, Carel Blotkamp, Reaktion Books LTD. London 2001, p. 171
1910's

Search, Strong, Painting

“I was walking late one night along a tree-lined path; a chestnut fell at my feet. The noise it made as it burst, the resonance it provoked in me, and an upheaval out of all proportion to this insignificant event thrust me into miracle, into the rapture of the definitive, as if there were no more questions — only answers. I was drunk on a thousand unexpected discoveries, none of which I could make use of. This is how I nearly reached the Supreme. But instead I went on with my walk.”

Emil M. Cioran book The Trouble With Being Born

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

Question, Tree, Night

“Now, in order to claim some knowledge of painting, Vitruvius speaks of the consideration of the perfect human body and about how good sculptors and painters in order to make it give it a height of ten faces, and I say that according to them they have read and they say that this proportion is based on knowledge of measurement and that it happens that without it it is not possible to have proportion or consideration because those who are not cognizant of this do not count.”

El Greco (1541–1614) Greek painter, sculptor and architect

quoted by Liane Lefaivre and Alexander Tzonis, in The Emergence of Modern Architecture: A Documentary History from 1000 to 1810 https://books.google.com/books?id=4xB9k7-Neb8C&pg=PT184; Routledge, New York, 2004) p. 165

Knowledge, Reading, Painting, Perfection

“In every work of art the subject is primordial, whether the artist knows it or not. The measure of the formal qualities is only a sign of the measure of the artist's obsession with his subject; the form is always in proportion to the obsession.”

Alberto Giacometti (1901–1966) Swiss sculptor and painter (1901-1966)

Alberto Giacometti (1945), as cited in: Joel Shatzky, ‎Michael Taub (1999), Contemporary Jewish-American Dramatists and Poets. p. 302

Art

“But, good God, what is this when compared with that deep and true music of the wise, whereby the proportions of natural things are investigated, the harmonical concord and the qualities of the whole world are revealed, by which also connected things are bound together, peace established between conflicting elements, and whereby each star is perpetually suspended in its appointed place by its weight and strength, and by the harmony of its lucent spirit”

Robert Fludd (1574–1637) British mathematician and astrologer

Robert Fludd, cited in: Waite (1887, p. 291)

God, World, Peace, Music

“The Pelagians produce such Scriptures as these: 'The Lord is with you, while ye be with him; and if ye seek him, he will be found of you' (2 Chron. xv. 2). 'Turn ye, …and I will turn unto you' (Zech. i. 3) From which they would infer, that the grace of God is proportioned to the merits of men. But all this would be to no purpose, if they would but compare one Scripture with another; for example: 'Turn us, O God of our salvation' (Ps lxxxv. 4); and, 'after that I was turned, I repented' (Jer. xxxi. 19); and, 'turn us unto thee, O Lord, and we shall be turned”

Thomas Bradwardine (1300–1349) Theologian; Archbishop of Canterbury

Lam v. 21
De causa Dei contra Pelagium

Men, God

“The House is composed of very good men, not shining, but honest and reasonably well-informed, and in time they will be found to improve, and not to be much inferior in eloquence, science, and dignity, to the British Commons. They are patriotic enough, and I believe there are more stupid (as well as more shining) people in the latter, in proportion.”

Fisher Ames (1758–1808) American politician

Letter to George Richard Minot (May 27, 1789); reported in Works of Fisher Ames (1854), ed. Seth Ames, vol. 1, p. 45.

Men, People, Stupidity, Science

“The art and mystery of banks… is established on the principle that 'private debts are a public blessing.' That the evidences of those private debts, called bank notes, become active capital, and aliment the whole commerce, manufactures, and agriculture of the United States. Here are a set of people, for instance, who have bestowed on us the great blessing of running in our debt about two hundred millions of dollars, without our knowing who they are, where they are, or what property they have to pay this debt when called on; nay, who have made us so sensible of the blessings of letting them run in our debt, that we have exempted them by law from the repayment of these debts beyond a give proportion (generally estimated at one-third). And to fill up the measure of blessing, instead of paying, they receive an interest on what they owe from those to whom they owe; for all the notes, or evidences of what they owe, which we see in circulation, have been lent to somebody on an interest which is levied again on us through the medium of commerce. And they are so ready still to deal out their liberalities to us, that they are now willing to let themselves run in our debt ninety millions more, on our paying them the same premium of six or eight per cent interest, and on the same legal exemption from the repayment of more than thirty millions of the debt, when it shall be called for.”

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

ME 13:420
1810s, Letters to John Wayles Eppes (1813)

People, Law, Art

“Gordon Tullock, on the other hand, might be characterized as the somewhat cynical pragmatist, who set out to understand the world, not to change it. This side of Tullock is visible in his early paper on simple majority rule, and is perhaps most apparent in his work on rent seeking. These differences should not be pushed too far, however. Buchanan (1980) also contributed to the rent-seeking literature, and often has described public choice as “politics without romance.” One of the most dispiriting contributions to the public choice literature has to be Kenneth Arrow’s (1951) famous impossibility theorem. In a too little appreciated article, Tullock (1967b) demonstrated with the help of a somewhat torturous geometrical analysis, that the cycling that underlies the impossibility theorem is likely to be constrained to a rather small subset of Pareto-optimal outcomes, and thus Arrow’s theorem was “irrelevant,” a rather happy result, and one which anticipated work appearing more than a decade later on the uncovered set. In Chap. 10 of Toward a Mathematics of Politics, Tullock (1967a) engages in a bit of wishful thinking about constitutional design by describing how one could achieve an ideal form of proportional representation in a legislative body. He also was an early enthusiast of the potential for using a demand-revelation process to reveal individual preferences for public goods”

Dennis Mueller (1940) American economist

Tideman and Tullock 1976
James Buchanan, Gordon Tullock, and The Calculus (2012)

Happiness, World, Literature, Mathematics

“Remember this— that there is a proper dignity and proportion to be observed in the performance of every act of life.”

Marcus Aurelius book Meditations

IV, 32
Meditations (c. 121–180 AD), Book IV

Life

“I had used my sense of humor; I had called it proportion, perspective. But perspective is distance.”

Bel Kaufmanová book Up the Down Staircase

Part X, ch. 51 (Sylvia Barrett)
Up the Down Staircase (1965)

Sense

“They [the true instructors of the people] will accustom children to the vegetable régime. The peoples living on vegetable foods, are, of all men, the handsomest, the most vigorous, the least exposed to diseases and to passions, and they whose lives last longest. Such, in Europe, are a large proportion of the Swiss. The greater part of the peasantry who, in every country, form the most vigorous portion of the people, eat very little flesh-meat. The Russians have multiplied periods of fasting and days of abstinence, from which even the soldiers are not exempt; and yet they resist all kinds of fatigues. The negroes, who undergo so many hard blows in our colonies, live upon manioc, potatoes, and maize alone. The Brahmins of India, who frequently reach the age of one hundred years, eat only vegetable foods. It was from the Pythagorean sect that issued Epaminondas, so celebrated by for his virtues, Archytas, by his genius for mathematics and mechanics; Milo of Crotona, by his strength of body. Pythagoras himself was the finest man of his time, and, without dispute, the most enlightened, since he was the father of philosophy amongst the Greeks. Inasmuch as the non-flesh diet introduces with many virtues and excludes none, it will be well to bring up the young upon it, since it has so happy an influence upon the beauty of the body and upon the tranquillity of the mind. This regimen prolongs childhood, and, by consequence, human life.”

Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre (1737–1814) writer and botanist from France

Vœux d'un solitaire, pour servir de suite aux "Études de la nature", as quoted in The Ethics of Diet by Howard Williams (University of Illinois Press, 2003, p. 175 https://books.google.it/books?id=o9ugCcZ13BMC&pg=PA175)

Life, Men, Happiness, Children

“The "need to know" syndrome had reached epidemic proportions within the U. S. government, all the way to top including the Presidents of the United States”

Newton Lee American computer scientist

giving them the benefit of the doubt
Counterterrorism and Cybersecurity: Total Information Awareness (2nd Edition), 2015

Way

“The extraordinary stylistic changes of late eighteenth-century music may have provided much of the inspiration for the literature of the turn of the century, but the literary forms that resulted were deeply eccentric. It was these works—paradoxical, anticlassical, often with startlingly unbalanced proportions—which in turn influenced the music of the generation of composers that followed. The most clearly affected by literature and art were Schumann, Berlioz, and Liszt, but neither Mendelssohn nor Chopin remained untouched by literary developments, like the revival of Celtic and medieval poetry, as the overtures of Mendelssohn and the Ballades of Chopin explicitly demonstrate.”

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

Source: The Romantic Generation (1995), Ch. 2 : Fragments

Art, Music, Literature, Change

“…A column is not merely a round stick of stone: it is part of an entire symbolic system, which one cannot intuit simply by looking at it in isolation. The basic reason for studying such things is not merely technical or archivally historical but humanistic; it is to seek out the answer to what someone like Vitruvius meant by his (to us) mysterious comment that "a building should have the proportions of a man,"”

Robert Hughes (1938–2012) Australian critic, historian, writer

Things I Didn't Know (2006)

Study, Parting

“Freedom to create a mess is proportional to your ability to know what "no mess" is and how to get there.”

David Allen (1945) American productivity consultant and author

15 July 2009 https://twitter.com/gtdguy/status/2645749878 Official Twitter profile (@gtdguy) https://twitter.com/gtdguy

Freedom

“It was hard for Wilt to put his faith in many people. Being in his position, many people tried to exploit him. I say little in reference to character, not size. There were always those who enjoyed hanging around to pick up the crumbs that might fall off their 7' cake. No matter where we went to play ball, It seemed that he had a thousand cousins who needed tickets to the game-free tickets, that is. One of Wilt's weaknesses was being too big-hearted. He never turned down any of these requests, and very often he was holding the bag. You'd expect a 7' person to have an extra big heart, but his was even out of proportion to his size.”

Wilt Chamberlain (1936–1999) basketball player

Bob Billings in a college english paper that profiled his friend[citation needed]
Personality

People, Faith, Game, Heart

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

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

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

Men, War, Peace, Question

“Every man feels himself wounded, where he finds himself neglected, and that in proportion as he is conscious of endeavouring to merit attention. I shall be satisfied with any measure that the Congress shall take, that has not a direct tendency to degrade me in the public estimation. A measure of that sort would sink me in my own esteem, and render me spiritless and uneasy in my situation, and consequently unfit for the service.”

Nathanael Greene (1742–1786) American general in the American Revolutionary War

Letter to George Washington (May 1776)

Feeling

“In reality, an American siege and occupation of the city would take weeks, perhaps months, but capture of the airport would allow troop-carrying aircraft to land. Since the city is 27 miles wide, an all-out assault could be an operation of epic proportions.”

Robert Fisk (1946) English writer and journalist

Allies 'seize most of Baghdad airport' http://www.robert-fisk.com/articles210b.htm, April 4, 2003 2003

Reality

“Is not the training of an artist a training in the due relation of one thing with another, and in the faculty of expressing that relation clearly; and, even more, a training in the faculty of disengaging from self the very essence of self — and passing that essence into other selves by so delicate means that none shall see how it is done, yet be insensibly unified? Is not the artist, of all men, foe and nullifier of partisanship and parochialism, of distortions and extravagance, the discoverer of that jack-o'-lantern — Truth; for, if Truth be not Spiritual Proportion I know not what it is. Truth it seems to me — is no absolute thing, but always relative, the essential symmetry in the varying relationships of life; and the most perfect truth is but the concrete expression of the most penetrating vision. Life seen throughout as a countless show of the finest works of Art; Life shaped, and purged of the irrelevant, the gross, and the extravagant; Life, as it were, spiritually selected — that is Truth; a thing as multiple, and changing, as subtle, and strange, as Life itself, and as little to be bound by dogma. Truth admits but the one rule: No deficiency, and no excess! Disobedient to that rule — nothing attains full vitality. And secretly fettered by that rule is Art, whose business is the creation of vital things.”

John Galsworthy (1867–1933) English novelist and playwright

Vague Thoughts On Art (1911)

Life, Men, Truth, Art

“A man bringing himself, melody and mathematics into perfect and enviable proportions. / only more so, much more so.”

Peter Greenaway (1942) British film director

"The Eisenstein Song"
M is for Man, Music, and Mozart

Mathematics, Perfection

“[The goal of efficiency was] a system in which all relevant information would be available to each research worker in an amplitude proportional to its degree of relevance.”

John Desmond Bernal (1901–1971) British scientist

Source: The Social Function of Science (1939), p. 249

“.. No academy could have given me all I discovered by getting my teeth into the exhibitions, the shop windows, and the museums of Paris. Beginning with the market – where, for lack of money, I bought only a piece of a long cucumber – the workman in his blue overall, the most ardent followers of Cubism, everything showed a definite feeling for proportion, clarity, an accurate sense of form, of a more painterly kind of painting, even in the canvases of second-rate artists.”

Marc Chagall (1887–1985) French artist and painter

Quote in Marc Chagall - the Russian years 1906 – 1922, editor Christoph Vitali, exhibition catalogue, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, 1991, p. 29
1920's, My life (1922)

Money, Feeling, Sense, Painting

“A painting grows like a plant. Use all colours, all shapes. Everything that attracts and excites me is a part of me. Painting is about proportions, relationships which breathe life. "Painting is a harmony which runs parallel to nature."”

Stefan Szczesny (1951) German painter and sculptor

Mustique (2002)

Life, Nature, Parting, Painting

“It is probable a true history of human events would show that a far larger proportion of our acts are the results of sudden impulses and accident, than of that reason of which we so much boast.”

James Fenimore Cooper book The Pilot: A Tale of the Sea

The Pilot: A Tale of the Sea http://www.amazon.com/The-Pilot-A-Tale-Sea/dp/1490555811 (1829); Preface The Pilot: A Tale of the Sea (1823)

History

“The Freikorps movement was surprisingly heterogeneous… The 158 Jews members of Bavarian Freikorps amounted to about 0.5 percent of the members of the Bavarian Freikorps movement. This was a figure not out of proportion with the overall ratio of Jews among the Bavarian population,…”

Thomas Weber (historian) (1974) German historian

Source: Becoming Hitler: The Making of a Nazi (2017), pp. 61-62

“I suppose one reason why we are seldom able to comfort our neighbours with our words is that our goodwill gets adulterated, in spite of ourselves, before it can pass our lips. We can send black puddings and petticoes without giving them a flavour of our own egoism; but language is a stream that is almost sure to smack of a mingled soil. There was a fair proportion of kindness in Raveloe; but it was often of a beery and bungling sort, and took the shape least allied to the complimentary and hypocritical.”

George Eliot (1819–1880) English novelist, journalist and translator

Source: Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe (1861), Chapter 10 (at page 77-78)

“The language of the internet is English, and an overwhelming proportion of the global computer chatter also originates from America, influencing the content of global conversation.”

Zbigniew Brzeziński book The Grand Chessboard

Source: The Grand Chessboard (1997), Chapter 1, Hegemony Of A New Type, p. 25.

“Ideas which have been developed simultaneously or in immediate succession in the same mind mutually reproduce each other, and do this with greater ease in the direction of the original succession and with a certainty proportional to the frequency with which they were together.”

Hermann Ebbinghaus (1850–1909) German psychologist

Source: Memory: A contribution to experimental psychology, 1885, p. 90; Cited in: Granville Stanley Hall et al. The American Journal of Psychology, Vol. 35, 1924, p. 218.

Idea, Success

“It is clearly apparent that in building the best results should accrue in proportion as every element in the structure is fitted both to the function it has to perform and the materials of which it is made. It follows from this that disguise and complication are hindrances, both to good construction and good design, and as complication and disguise are expensive and wasteful, that the interests of good art and true economy run on parallel lines.”

Ernest Flagg (1857–1947) American architect

Introduction
Small Houses: Their Economic Design and Construction (1922)

Art

“The new architecture has suppressed monotonous repetition and destroyed the equality of two symmetrical halves. It does not allow for continuous repetition. A block of houses is as much a whole as an independent house. Balance and symmetry are two entirely different things. In place of symmetry the new architecture proposes a balanced relationship of unequal parts or parts which differ [in position, proportion, size and materials] in functional character.”

Theo van Doesburg (1883–1931) Dutch architect, painter, draughtsman and writer

Quote from his unpublished writing, 'Fundamental principles', 1930; as cited in Theo van Doesburg, Joost Baljeu, Studio Vista, London 1974, p. 203
1926 – 1931

Parting, Housing

“After making careful inquiry I can not find a half a dozen cases of a man or woman who has completed a full course of education in any of our reputable institutions like Hampton, Tuskegee, Fiske, or Atlanta, who are imprisoned. The records of the South show that 90 percent of the colored people imprisoned are without knowledge of trades and 61 percent are illiterate. But it has been said that the negro proves economically valueless in proportion as he is educated. Let us see. All will agree that the negro in Virginia, for example, began life forty years ago in complete poverty, scarcely owning clothing or a day's food. The reports of the State auditor show the negro today owns at least one twenty-sixth of the real estate in that Commonwealth exclusive of his holdings in towns and cities, and that in the counties east of the Blue Ridge Mountains he owns one-sixteenth. In Middlesex County he owns one-sixth: in Hanover, one-fourth. In Georgia the official records show that, largely through the influence of educated men and women from Atlanta schools and others, the negroes added last year $1,526,000 to their taxable property, making the total amount upon which they pay taxes in that State alone $16,700,000. Few people realize under the most difficult and trying circumstances, during the last forty years, it has been the educated negro who counseled patience, self-control, and thus averted a war of races. Every negro going out of our institutions properly educated becomes a link in the chain that shall forever bind the two races together in all essentials of life.”

Booker T. Washington (1856–1915) African-American educator, author, orator, and advisor

Speech in New York (12 February 1904), as quoted in speech by Edward de Veaux Morrell in the House of Representatives https://cdn.loc.gov/service/rbc/lcrbmrp/t2609/t2609.pdf (4 April 1904) 1900s

Life, Women, Men, War

“There is, however, no doubt that the various races, when carefully compared and measured, differ much from each other,—as in the texture of the hair, the relative proportions of all parts of the body,2 the capacity of the lungs, the form and capacity of the skull, and even in the convolutions of the brain.3 But it would be an endless task to specify the numerous points of structural difference. The races differ also in constitution, in acclimatisation, and in liability to certain diseases. Their mental characteristics are likewise very distinct; chiefly as it would appear in their emotional, but partly in their intellectual, faculties. Every one who has had the opportunity of comparison, must have been struck with the contrast between the taciturn, even morose, aborigines of S. America and the light-hearted, talkative negroes. There is a nearly similar contrast between the Malays and the Papuans,4 who live under the same physical conditions, and are separated from each other only by a narrow space of sea.”

Charles Darwin book The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex

volume I, chapter VII: "On the Races of Man", page 216 http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?pageseq=238&itemID=F937.1&viewtype=image The Descent of Man (1871)

Disease, Light, Appearance, Heart

“There’s a law,” Chuck said, “which I call Rittersdorf’s Third Law of Diminished Returns, which states that proportional to how long you hold a job you imagine that it has progressively less and less importance in the scheme of things.”

Philip K. Dick book Clans of the Alphane Moon

Source: Clans of the Alphane Moon (1964), Chapter 4 (p. 47)

Law, Imagination

“Europe is no longer Europe, it is Eurabia, a colony of Islam, where the Islamic invasion does not proceed only in a physical sense, but also in a mental and cultural sense… I am an atheist, and if an atheist and a pope think the same things, there must be something true. There must be some human truth that is beyond religion… I am disgusted by the anti-Semitism of many Italians, of many Europeans… Look at the school system of the West today. Students do not know history! They don't know who Churchill was! In Italy, they don't even know who Cavour was!… Servility to the invaders has poisoned democracy, with obvious consequences for the freedom of thought, and for the concept itself of liberty… State-run television stations contribute to the resurgent anti-Semitism, crying only over Palestinian deaths while playing down Israeli deaths, glossing over them in unwilling tones… The increased presence of Muslims in Italy and in Europe is directly proportional to our loss of freedom… The Muslims refuse our culture and try to impose their culture on us. I reject them, and this is not only my duty toward my culture-it is toward my values, my principles, my civilization… The struggle for freedom does not include the submission to a religion which, like the Muslim religion, wants to annihilate other religions… The West reveals a hatred of itself, which is strange and can only be considered pathological; it now sees only what is deplorable and destructive… These charlatans care about the Palestinians as much as I care about the charlatans. That is not at all… When I was given the news, I laughed. The trial is nothing else but a demonstration that everything I've written is true… President Bush has said, 'We refuse to live in fear.'…Beautiful sentence, very beautiful. I loved it! But inexact, Mr. President, because the West does live in fear. People are afraid to speak against the Islamic world. Afraid to offend, and to be punished for offending, the sons of Allah. You can insult the Christians, the Buddhists, the Hindus, the Jews. You can slander the Catholics, you can spit on the Madonna and Jesus Christ. But, woe betide the citizen who pronounces a word against the Islamic religion.”

Oriana Fallaci (1929–2006) Italian writer

A Sermon for the West">From "A Sermon for the West" By Oriana Fallaci - Oct. 22, 2002 Address to an audience at the American Enterprise Institute

Love, Death, People, Truth

“[During 'If This Is The Answer, What Is The Question' -- the answer is "24%"] Is it "What is the proportion of my penis that is medically safe for a woman to accommodate?"”

Ed Byrne (1972) Irish comedian

Mock the Week

Question

“The most probable view is that adopted by Nesselmann, that the works which we know under the three titles formed part of one arithmetical work, which was, according to the author's own words, to consist of thirteen Books. The proportion of the lost parts to the whole is probably less than it might be supposed to be. The Porisms form the part the loss of which is most to be regretted, for from the references to them it is clear that they contained propositions in the Theory of Numbers most wonderful for the time.”

Thomas Little Heath (1861–1940) British civil servant and academic

Source: Diophantos of Alexandria: A Study in the History of Greek Algebra (1885), Ch. II, p.37

Books, Loss, Time, Parting

“Art remains a sure refuge, the hope of a reason in life from now on, and the consoling thought that little beauty manifests itself in our lives, and that we are continuing the work of Creation... Therefore the work of art has merit, inscribed in the marvelous beauty of flowers, of light, in the proportion of trees and shape of waves, and the perfection of faces; to inscribe our poor and lamentable life of suffering, of hope and of thought.”

Maurice Denis (1870–1943) French painter

Quote, 24 March 1895, from Denis' Journal; as cited on Wikipedia: Maurice Denis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurice_Denis - reference [16] 1890 - 1920

Life, Beauty, Hope, Art

“To decrease geometrically is this, that in equal times, first the whole quantity then each of its successive remainders is diminished, always by a like proportional part.”

John Napier (1550–1617) Scottish mathematician

The Construction of the Wonderful Canon of Logarithms (1889)

Time, Success, Parting

“The operational sciences hoped to nourish business management, which however largely ignored them, and the latter continues to be undernourished by the business schools which are fairly broad but shallow everywhere. By over focus on short-range financial values, business management in the United States has lost a dozen major markets to the Japanese, added pollution in all its forms, and enriched itself out of all proportion to its value as just one factor of production.
Action science, developed by the social sciences over many years in relative isolation from the applied physical sciences, and which might otherwise have humanized them and made engineering more productive, was doomed to fail by being on one end of the two-culture problem wherein science and the humanities do not even speak the same language.
I could go on listing a few dozen paradigms: art, law, computer software design, medicine, politics, and architecture, each addressed to a certain context, level, or phase, each good in itself, but each limited to the fields of its origin and its purposes. The methodological problem is the same as if, in designing any large system, each subsystem designer were left to design each subsystem to the best requirements he knew. The overall requirement might not be met; overall harmony could not be achieved, and conflict could ensue to cause failure at the system level.
What is envisioned is a new synthesis, a unified, efficient, systems methodology (SM): a multiphase, multi-level, multi-paradigmatic creative problem-solving process for use by individuals, by small groups, by large multi-disciplinary teams, or by teams of teams. It satisfies human needs in seeking value truths by matching the properties of wanted systems, and their parts, to perform harmoniously with their full environments, over their entire life cycles”

Arthur D. Hall (1925–2006) American electrical engineer

Source: Metasystems Methodology, (1989), p.xi-xii, cited in Philip McShane (2004) Cantower VII http://www.philipmcshane.ca/cantower7.pdf

Life, Truth, School, Law

“Dissent is a legitimate and essential right in any democracy and modern politicians must accept this fact with tolerance. A sense of proportion — and a sense of humour — is a sign of strength, not a sign of weakness.”

Sting (1951) English musician

Joining with Amnesty International in condemning the Russian authorities’ treatment of Pussy Riot, a Russian punk rock protest band. "Sting condemns Russia's treatment of Pussy Riot musicians ahead of Moscow concert" Amnesty International (25 July 2012) http://www.amnesty.org/en/news/sting-condemns-russias-treatment-pussy-riot-musicians-ahead-moscow-concert-2012-07-25

Democracy, Sense

“Mathematics is merely a convenient tool by which the designer determines the physical proportions and details of a planned structure in order to transform his ideas… to the actuality of a finished structure.”

Eduardo Torroja (1899–1961) Spanish architect

p, 125
Philosophy of Structures (1958)

Mathematics, Idea

“In this country over the last five years pay has doubled, whereas output has slightly fallen. That is totally different from the position with many of our competitors. Pay in those countries has gone up hand in hand with productivity. Consequently, they have the jobs and we have a larger proportion of the unemployment.”

Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013) British stateswoman and politician

Prime Minister's Questions (2 June 1981) http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/104659 First term as Prime Minister

Country

“When in Italy [Klee stayed in Italy, in 1901], I learned to understand architectural monuments... Even the dullest will understand that the obvious commensurability of parts, to each other and to the whole, corresponds to the hidden numerical proportions that exist in other artificial and natural organisms. It is clear that these figures are not cold and dead, but full of the breath of life; and the importance of measurements as an aid to study and creation becomes evident.”

Paul Klee (1879–1940) German Swiss painter

Quote (December 1903), as cited in Artists on Art, from the 14th – 20th centuries, ed. Robert Goldwater and Marco Treves; Pantheon Books, 1972, London, p. 444
1903 - 1910

Life, Understanding, Nature, Study

“And for me Michelangelo's greatest work is one that was in his studio partly finished, partly unfinished when he died 'The Rondanini Pietà'. I don't know of any other single work of art by anyone that is more poignant, more moving. It isn't the most powerful of Michelangelo's works – it's a mixture, in fact, of two styles…. the changing became so drastic that I think he knocked the head off the sculpture… So the figure must originally have been a good deal taller. And if we see also the proportion of the length of the body of Christ compared with the length of the legs, there's no doubt that the whole top of the original sculpture has been cut away. Now this to me is a great question. Why should I and other sculptors I know, my contemporaries – I think that Giacometti feels this, I know Marino Marini feels it – find this work one of the most moving and greatest works we know of when it's a work which has such disunity in it?… But that's so moving, so touching: the position of the heads, the whole tenderness of the top part of the sculpture, is in my opinion more what it is by being in contrast with the rather finished, tough, leathery, typical Michelangelo legs. The top part is Gothic and the lower part is sort of Renaissance.”

Henry Moore (1898–1986) English artist

Quote of Henri Moore in his interview with David Silvester, in 'The Sunday Times Magazine', 16 Febr. 1964, pp. 18, 20-22
1955 - 1970

Art, Feeling, Question, Thinking

“[O]f that scientifically practical skill which produces the greatest effect with the least possible expenditure of material and work, the instances are comparatively rare. In too many cases we see the strength and the stability which ought to be given by the skilful arrangement of the parts of a structure supplied by means of clumsy massiveness, and of lavish expenditure of material, labour, and money; and the evil is increased by a perversion of the public taste, which causes works to be admired, not in proportion to their fitness for their purposes, or to the skill evinced in attaining that fitness, but in proportion to their size and cost.”

William John Macquorn Rankine (1820–1872) civil engineer

p, 125
"On the Harmony of Theory and Practice in Mechanics" (Jan. 3, 1856)

Money, Evil, Parting

“I accepted one branch of this philosophy, but eugenics without birth control seemed to me a house built upon sands. It could not stand against the furious winds of economic pressure which had buffeted into partial or total helplessness a tremendous proportion of the human race. The eugenists wanted to shift the birth control emphasis from less children for the poor to more children for the rich. We went back of that and sought first to stop the multiplication of the unfit. This appeared the most important and greatest step towards race betterment.”

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

Source: Margaret Sanger: An Autobiography (1938), Chapter 30, "Now Is the Time for Converse", pp. 374-375.

Children, Birth, Appearance, Housing

“Public officers, whose character and conduct remain open to debate and free discussion in the press, find their remedies for false accusations in actions under libel laws providing for redress and punishment, and not in proceedings to restrain the publication of newspapers and periodicals. The general principle that the constitutional guaranty of the liberty of the press gives immunity from previous restraints has been approved in many decisions under the provisions of state constitutions. The importance of this immunity has not lessened. While reckless assaults upon public men, and efforts to bring obloquy upon those who are endeavoring faithfully to discharge official duties, exert a baleful influence and deserve the severest condemnation in public opinion, it cannot be said that this abuse is greater, and it is believed to be less, than that which characterized the period in which our institutions took shape. Meanwhile, the administration of government has become more complex, the opportunities for malfeasance and corruption have multiplied, crime has grown to most serious proportions, and the danger of its protection by unfaithful officials and of the impairment of the fundamental security of life and property by criminal alliances and official neglect, emphasizes the primary need of a vigilant and courageous press, especially in great cities. The fact that the liberty of the press may be abused by miscreant purveyors of scandal does not make any the less necessary the immunity of the press from previous restraint in dealing with official misconduct. Subsequent punishment for such abuses as may exist is the appropriate remedy consistent with constitutional privilege.”

Charles Evans Hughes (1862–1948) American judge

Near v. Minnesota, 283 U.S. 697 (1931).
Judicial opinions

Life, Men, Unfaithfulness, Law

“As to the Income Tax, my opinion is that the needful revenue would be fairly and most fairly raised if paid by property, and by individuals in proportion to their property…A Property Tax should be an assessment upon all land and buildings, and canals and railroads, but not on property such as machinery, stock in trade, etc. The aristocracy have squeezed all they can out of the mass of the consumers, and now they lay their daring hands on those not wholly impoverished.”

John Bright (1811–1889) British Radical and Liberal statesman

Letter to his sister Margaret on Sir Robert Peel's budget (1842), quoted in G. M. Trevelyan, The Life of John Bright (London: Constable, 1913), pp. 72-73.
1840s