Quotes about proposal
page 2

“Lamarck, after having first studied botany with success, had then turned his attention to conchology, and soon became aware that in the newer (or tertiary) strata of the earth's crust there were a multitude of fossil species of shells… He also observed that other shells were so nearly allied to living forms, that it was difficult not to suspect that they had been connected by a common bond of descent. He therefore proposed that the element of time should enter into the definition of a species, and that it should run thus: 'A species consists of individuals all resembling each other, and reproducing their like by generation, so long as the surrounding conditions do not undergo changes sufficient to cause their habits, characters, and forms to vary. He came at last to the conclusion, that none of the animals and plants now existing were primordial creations, but were all derived from pre-existing forms, which, after they may have gone on for indefinite ages reproducing their like, had, at length, by the influence of alterations in climate and in the animate world, been made to vary gradually, and adapt themselves to new circumstances, some of them deviating, in the course of ages, so far from their original type as to have claims to be regarded as new species.”

Charles Lyell (1797–1875) British lawyer and geologist

Source: The Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man (1863), Ch.20, p. 389-390

Age, World, Study, Change

“This book can be read as an argument that social democracy is not enough and we can establish something better than social democracy. The explanatory ideas of False Necessity provide an understanding of society that presents the institutional arrangements on which the social democrat relies as the relatively contingent and revisable outcome of a particular sequence of practical and imaginative conflicts. More generally, these explanatory arguments support a view of social reality within which the rejection of social democracy seems reasonable. The programmatic ideas propose an alternative to social democracy that realizes more fully the ideals that the social democrat can only imperfectly achieve and radically redefines these ideals in the course of realizing them.”

Roberto Mangabeira Unger (1947) Brazilian philosopher and politician

Source: False Necessityː Anti-Necessitarian Social Theory in the Service of Radical Democracy (1987), p. 26

Books, Democracy, Imagination, Idea

“I propose to tell you a very brief tale about a love which…ran a smooth course to its happy conclusion.”

Giovanni Boccaccio book The Decameron

Uno amore...a lieto fin pervenuto, in una novelletta assai piccola intendo di raccontarvi.
Fifth Day, Fourth Story
The Decameron (c. 1350)

Love, Happiness

“Evidently, there is a political element in the attack on The Satanic Verses which has killed and injured good if obstreperous Muslims in Islamabad, though it may be dangerously blasphemous to suggest it. The Ayatollah Khomeini is probably within his self-elected rights in calling for the assassination of Salman Rushdie, or of anyone else for that matter, on his own holy ground. To order outraged sons of the Prophet to kill him, and the directors of Penguin Books, on British soil is tantamount to a jihad. It is a declaration of war on citizens of a free country, and as such it is a political act. It has to be countered by an equally forthright, if less murderous, declaration of defiance…. I do not think that even our British Muslims will be eager to read that great vindication of free speech, which is John Milton’s Areopagitica. Oliver Cromwell’s Republic proposed muzzling the press, and Milton replied by saying, in effect, that the truth must declare itself by battling with falsehood in the dust and heat…. I gain the impression that few of the protesting Muslims in Britain know directly what they are protesting against. Their Imams have told them that Mr Rushdie has published a blasphemous book and must be punished. They respond with sheeplike docility and wolflike aggression. They forgot what Nazis did to books … they shame a free country by denying free expression through the vindictive agency of bonfires…. If they do not like secular society, they must fly to the arms of the Ayatollah or some other self-righteous guardian of strict Islamic morality.”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

'Islam's Gangster Tactics', in the London Independent newspaper , 1989
Writing

War, Truth, Books, Thinking

“Forcible marriages, euphemistically called matrimonial alliances, were common throughout the medieval period. Only some of them find mention in Muslim chronicles with their bitter details. Here is one example given by Shams Siraj Afif (fourteenth century). The translation from the original in Persian may be summarised as follows. Firoz Shah was born in the year 709 H. (1309 C. E.). His father was named Sipahsalar Rajjab, who was a brother of Sultan Ghiyasuddin Tughlaq Ghazi. The three brothers, Tughlaq, Rajjab, and Abu Bakr, came from Khurasan to Delhi in the reign of Alauddin (Khalji), and that monarch took all the three in the service of the Court. The Sultan conferred upon Tughlaq the country of Dipalpur. Tughlaq was desirous that his brother Sipahsalar Rajjab should obtain in marriage the daughter of one of the Rais of Dipalpur. He was informed that the daughters of Ranamall Bhatti were very beautiful and accomplished. Tughlaq sent to Ranamall a proposal of marriage. Ranamall refused. Upon this Tughlaq proceeded to the villages (talwandi) belonging to Ranamall and demanded payment of the whole year’s revenue in a lump sum. The Muqaddams and Chaudharis were subjected to coercion. Ranamall’s people were helpless and could do nothing, for those were the days of Alauddin, and no one dared to make an outcry. One damsel was brought to Dipalpur. Before her marriage she was called Bibi Naila. On entering the house of Sipahsalar Rajjab she was styled Sultan Bibi Kadbanu. After the lapse of a few years she gave birth to Firoz shah. If this could be accomplished by force by a regional officer, there was nothing to stop the king.”

Firuz Shah Tughlaq (1309–1388) Tughluq sultan

Shams Siraj Afif cited in Lal, K. S. (1994). Muslim slave system in medieval India. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan. Chapter 12

Marriage, People, Beauty, Birth

“Most of the time, organizations generate actions unreflectively and non-adaptively. To justify their actions, organizations create problems, successes, threats and opportunities. These are ideological molecules that mix values, goals, expectations, perceptions, theories, plans, and symbols. The molecules form while people are result watching, guided by the beliefs that they should judge results good or bad, look for the causes of results, and propose needs for action. Because organizations modify their behavior programs mainly in small increments that make sense to top managers, they change too little and inappropriately, and nearly all organizations disappear within a few years.”

William H. Starbuck (1934) American academic

Abstract
"Organizations as action generators," 1983

People, Behavior, Problem, Sense

“A liberal is someone who feels a great debt to his fellow man, which debt he proposes to pay off with your money.”

G. Gordon Liddy (1930) American lawyer in Watergate scandal

As quoted in "The Best Of The Rest: 20 More Quotes About Liberals" at Right Wing News (24 November 2010) http://rightwingnews.com/quotes/the-best-of-the-rest-20-more-quotes-about-liberals/

Money, Feeling

“In examining each local authority's performance, instead of penalising those which attempt to provide for the needs of the elderly and single people and the housing problems in inner city areas, the Government should look at the high unmet need in any inner city area…We would like more home helps working for the council, more day centres for the elderly and better facilities for the physically and mentally handicapped, because in all those areas there are waiting lists, not at the wish of the council but simply because the Government treat our local authority in the same way as every other…The Secretary of State has created a monster in his rate support grant proposals and his rate-capping proposals. He has created the most enormous opposition to himself and the Government. The Government may well squeeze this nasty little measure through the House tonight, but the opposition that they have created will live for a long time. The unity of that opposition will live for even longer. It will destroy him, his Government and this kind of attack on democracy, and it will lead to the election of a Labour Government committed to the restoration of genuine local democracy that has been so shamelessly destroyed by the Government.”

Jeremy Corbyn (1949) British Labour Party politician

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1985/jan/16/rate-support-grant-england in the House of Commons (16 January 1985). 1980s

People, Way, Democracy, Home

“Without proposing an evolutionary scheme for such types, it is safe to say that mythology represents the most archaic form of universe-maintenance, as indeed it represents the most archaic form of legitimation generally.”

Peter L. Berger book The Social Construction of Reality

1991; 127-8
The Social Construction of Reality, 1966

Universe

“There are red lines that I as a democrat, say you cannot cross. I see it as defiance against Israel and Jerusalem as its capital as well as another protest against the historical narrative, a matter already pending before the High Court. (Responding to a MK Tibi-proposed bill recognising Jerusalem as the capital of a Palestinian state)”

Reuven Rivlin (1939) Israeli politician, 10th President of Israel

Israel national news http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/Flash.aspx/229567#.U5gRtvldXs9, 16 January 2012

“If there were only some mechanism (like Seurat's proposed system of painting, or the projected Universal Algebra that Gödel believes Leibnitz to have perfected and mislaid) for reasonably and systematically converting into poetry what we see and feel and are! When one reads the verse of people who cannot write poems — people who sometimes have more intelligence, sensibility, and moral discrimination than most of the poets — it is hard not to regard the Muse as a sort of fairy godmother who says to the poet, after her colleagues have showered on him the most disconcerting and ambiguous gifts, "Well, never mind. You're still the only one that can write poetry."”

Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) poet, critic, novelist, essayist

"Verse Chronicle," The Nation (23 February 1946); reprinted as "Bad Poets" in Poetry and the Age (1953)
General sources

People, Feeling, Intelligence, Universe

“If this is nothing more than a stipulation about how we ought to use the term ‘ideological’, then perhaps it will do no harm. But if it is a proposal about how historians ought to set about the business of explaining beliefs, then it seems to me fatal for just the reasons I have sought to give. It refuses to recognise that one of the reasons why someone may hold a certain belief is that there is good evidence in favour of it, that it fits well with their other beliefs, and so on – in a word, that it is rational for them to hold it. If we refuse to speak in these terms, we deprive ourselves of an indispensable means of identifying the most appropriate lines of enquiry to follow in any given case.”

Quentin Skinner (1940) British historian

Visions of Politics (2002), "Interpretation, rationality and truth"

Business

“Prism: But how would society react to such a proposal?”

James D. Watson (1928) American molecular biologist, geneticist, and zoologist.

Children from the Laboratory (May 1973), An Interview in Prism Magazine

“Man proposes, God disposes. (translated by Thornton)”
Sperat quidem animus : quo eveniat, diis in manu est

Plautus Bacchides

Bacchides Act I, scene 2, line 36.
Variant translation: The mind is hopeful : success is in God’s hands. (translator unknown)
Bacchides (The Bacchises)

God

“Lety5 - ay4 + by3 - cy2 + dy - e = 0be the general equation of the fifth degree and suppose that it can be solved algebraically,—i. e., that y can be expressed as a function of the quantities a, b, c, d, and e, composed of radicals. In this case, it is clear that y can be written in the formy = p + p1R1/m + p2R2/m +…+ pm-1R(m-1)/m,m being a prime number, and R, p, p1, p2, etc. being functions of the same form as y. We can continue in this way until we reach rational functions of a, b, c, d, and e. [Note: main body of proof is excluded]
…we can find y expressed as a rational function of Z, a, b, c, d, and e. Now such a function can always be reduced to the formy = P + R1/5 + P2R2/5 + P3R3/5 + P4R4/5, where P, R, P2, P3, and P4 are functions or the form p + p1S1/2, where p, p1 and S are rational functions of a, b, c, d, and e. From this value of y we obtainR1/5 = 1/5(y1 + α4y2 + α3y3 + α2y4 + α y5) = (p + p1S1/2)1/5,whereα4 + α3 + α2 + α + 1 = 0.Now the first member has 120 different values, while the second member has only 10; hence y can not have the form that we have found: but we have proved that y must necessarily have this form, if the proposed equation can be solved: hence we conclude that
It is impossible to solve the general equation of the fifth degree in terms of radicals.
It follows immediately from this theorem, that it is also impossible to solve the general equations of degrees higher than the fifth, in terms of radicals.”

Niels Henrik Abel (1802–1829) Norwegian mathematician

A Memoir on Algebraic Equations, Proving the Impossibility of a Solution of the General Equation of the Fifth Degree (1824) Tr. W. H. Langdon, as quote in A Source Book in Mathematics (1929) ed. David Eugene Smith

Way

“Third, this allowed us to propose what we called the cosmological interpretation of quantum mechanics. Here we interpret the wavefunction for an object as describing not some funky imaginary ensemble of possibilities for what the object might be doing, but rather the actual spatial collection of identical copies of the object that exist in our infinite space. Moreover, quantum uncertainty that you experience simply reflects your inability to self-locate in the Level I multiverse, i. e., to know which of your infinitely many copies throughout space is the one having your subjective perceptions.”

Max Tegmark book Our Mathematical Universe

Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality (2014)

“John asked what he could do to help my campaign for governor.
"Write a campaign song," I replied.
"Okay," said John, "what's the theme?"
"Our campaign slogan is 'Come together, join the party.'"
"Great title," said John. He grabbed his guitar and started improvising.
: Come together right now.
Don't come tomorrow, don't come alone,
Come together right now,
Over me.
:* On first proposing that John Lennon write a song for his California gubernatorial campaign; this eventually developed into the Beatles song, "Come Together", p. 281 ”

Timothy Leary book Flashbacks

Flashbacks, An Autobiography (1983)

Help

“We are left with a budget of paradoxes. Given the seeming logic of the proposed classification of right-wing polities—with nationalism, hierarchical political structures, and charismatic leadership as defining properties— both fascism and Marxism-Leninism would seem to be political products of right-wing extremism. Should that be the case, the revolutions undertaken by Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, and Mao Zedong were all right-wing endeavors.”

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

Source: The Faces of Janus: Marxism and Fascism in the Twentieth Century, (2000), p. 5

“I… propose that time and its passage are fundamental and real and the hopes and beliefs about timeless truths and timeless realms are mythology.”

Lee Smolin (1955) American cosmologist

Time Reborn: From the Crisis in Physics to the Future of the Universe (2013)

Truth, Hope, Time

“In recent years there has been increased interest in the effects of internal communication on decision processes. A number of hypotheses relating the bias in information to the final decision have been proposed. In this paper we discuss two laboratory experiments which were designed to test two such hypotheses. The first experiment tests the hypothesis that cost and sales estimations are made with the implicit assumption that a biased pay-off structure exists. The second experiment tests explicitly the effects of biased and unbiased pay-off structures on estimation within an organization. An analysis of the data for the two experiments is made and some implications for further research are drawn from the results.”

Richard Cyert (1921–1998) American economist

Richard Cyert, James G. March, William H. Starbuck. (1961) "Two experiments on bias and conflict in organisational estimation," Management Science, 254–64; Abstract

Communication, Decision

William H. Starbuck (1934) American academic

Richard Cyert, James G. March, William H. Starbuck. (1961) "Two experiments on bias and conflict in organisational estimation," Management Science, 254–64; Abstract

Communication, Decision

“As to the site of the bilateral discussions I propose, there are several possibilities. We could, for example, have our representatives meet in Moscow where contacts have already occurred. They could meet in some other country such as Burma. You may have other arrangements or sites in mind, and I would try to meet your suggestions.”

Lyndon B. Johnson (1908–1973) American politician, 36th president of the United States (in office from 1963 to 1969)

1960s, Letter to Ho Chi Minh (1967)

Country

“Indeed, a full understanding of Sraffa’s contributions can be difficult, since these must be viewed as a complex whole, as part of an extremely ambitious cultural project: ‘to shunt the car of economic science’ in a direction opposite to that –the subjective theory of value –chosen by Jevons, one of the leading early exponents of the marginalist approach. Thus, with his writings Sraffa contributes to exposing the weak points in the theories of the leading exponents of the marginalist approach, from Alfred Marshall and Arthur Cecil Pigou to Friedrich von Hayek, and of their present-day followers, and at the same time re-proposes the classical approach of Adam Smith and David Ricardo (and also, in certain respects, of Karl Marx). The work of reconstructing the classical approach is also coherent with elements of the Keynesian contribution. This connection is possibly the most important issue in the current debate concerning the road to be followed in going on with the work started by Sraffa.”

Alessandro Roncaglia (1947) Italian economist

Introduction
Piero Sraffa: His life, thought and cultural heritage (2000)

Cars, Understanding, Science, Time

“If free market prices don't give people what they morally deserve, should we try to regulate factor prices so that they do track producers' moral deserts? Hayek offered two compelling arguments against this proposal. First, if you fix prices on a backward-looking standard, they will no longer be able to perform their informational function. Producers will produce for what was demanded last quarter, even if it isn't demanded today. This creates enormous waste and generates huge opportunity costs. We'd be much poorer in an economy that worked like this. […] Hayek was right. It might sound like a compelling idea, to make sure that people receive the income they morally deserve. But orienting the economy around this goal, assuming it is achievable at all (and there are principled doubts about that), would doom us to poverty and serfdom. It would abolish capitalism, along with its chief virtues. It isn't worth the draconian costs.”

Elizabeth S. Anderson (1959) professor of philosophy and womens' studies

How Not to Complain About Taxes (III): "I deserve my pretax income" http://left2right.typepad.com/main/2005/01/how_not_to_comp_1.html (January 26, 2005)

People, Idea

“The church has stood, a rock colossus of bigotry, in the path of ten thousand proposed reforms. Sane efforts to legalize birth control information, the manufacture of proper birth control appliances, appliances for the inhibition of the spread of venereal disease, public instruction in sex hygiene, free clinics for the treatment of venereal disease, the inspection and treatment of prostitutes, controlled prostitution itself, the publication of psychological and physical sex information, aid for unwed mothers—myriad attempts by sane men acting sanely on real problems — have been fought down by church-frightened legislatures and church-dominated courts.”

Philip Wylie (1902–1971) American writer

Source: Generation of Vipers (1942), p. 74

Men, Disease, Sex, Birth

“I have read somewhere of a sermon preached by one of these in the Cathedral of Notre Dame. This old priest, among other things, said that the soul of a beggar was as dear to God as the soul of the richest of his people, and that Jesus Christ died as much for a beggar as for a prince. One French peasant, rough with labor, cried out: “I propose three cheers for Jesus Christ.””

Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–1899) Union United States Army officer

I like such things. I like to hear of them. I like to repeat them.
My Reviewers Reviewed (lecture from June 27, 1877, San Francisco, CA)

God, People, Soul, Reading

“Diophantus shows great Adroitness in selecting the unkown, especially with a view to avoiding an adfected quadratic…. The most common and characteristic of Diophantus' methods is his use of tentative assumptions which is applied in nearly every problem of the later books. It consists in assigning to the unknown a preliminary value which satisfies one or two only of the necessary conditions, in order that, from its failure to satisfy the remaining conditions, the operator may perceive what exactly is required for that purpose…. a third characteristic of Diophantus [is]… the use of the symbol for the unknown in different senses…. The use of tentative assumptions leads again to another device which may be called… the method of limits. This may best be illustrated by a particular example. If Diophantus wishes to find a square lying between 10 and 11, he multiplies these numbers by successive squares till a square lies between the products. Thus between 40 and 44, 90 and 99 no square lies, but between 160 and 176 there lies the square 169. Hence x^2 = \tfrac{169}{16} will lie between the proposed limits.”

James Gow (scholar) (1854–1923) scholar

p, 125
A Short History of Greek Mathematics (1884)

Lie, Books, Lying, Failure

“It is now more than twenty years since I somewhat rashly undertook to write the Life of Dr. Young. For many years, however, after making this engagement, I found myself so much occupied by the duties of a very laborious college office, that I had no leisure to commence the work; and when the possession of leisure would have enabled me to have done so, my health became so seriously deranged that I felt myself unequal to any continued and severe literary labour. The undertaking was consequently abandoned, and it was proposed to transfer it to other hands; but it was not found easy to secure the services of a person who possessed sufficient scientific knowledge to enable him to write the life of an author whose works were so various in their character and not unfrequently so difficult to understand and analyse, as those of Dr. Young.”

George Peacock (1791–1858) Scottish mathematician

Life of Thomas Young (1855)

Life, Health, Understanding, Knowledge

“I well knew that to propose something which would be called extreme, was the true way not to impede but to facilitate a more moderate experiment.”

John Stuart Mill book Autobiography

Source: Autobiography (1873), Ch. 7: General View of the Remainder of My Life (p. 206)

Way

“We are divided not only about political facts and social values, but also about what the Constitution itself means. The crusaders on this issue choose to ignore these problems and are proposing to deny the will of 64 million voters by appealing to five Supreme Court Justices (since no one is delusional enough to think that the four liberal justices are going to take the presidency away from Obama). What kind of conservatism is this?”

David Horowitz (1939) Neoconservative activist, writer

Horowitz speaks about Obama birth certificate doubters. [David, Horowitz, http://www.nationalreview.com/article/226474/obama-derangement-syndrome-david-horowitz, "Shut up about the birth certificate.", nationalreview.com, December 8, 2008, 2016-30-03]
2008

Justice, Problem, Thinking

“In the past two weeks, I have noted public statements by representatives of your government suggesting that you would be prepared to enter into direct bilateral talks with representatives of the U. S. Government, provided that we ceased "unconditionally" and permanently our bombing operations against your country and all military actions against it. In the last day, serious and responsible parties have assured us indirectly that this is in fact your proposal.”

Lyndon B. Johnson (1908–1973) American politician, 36th president of the United States (in office from 1963 to 1969)

1960s, Letter to Ho Chi Minh (1967)

Past, Country

“This title is unacceptably misleading, @CTVNews. I did not criticize “diversity” but rather “more diversity,” and “ever more diversity” as Trudeau is proposing with his radical multiculturalism. Canada has always been a diverse country and this is part of who we are. I love this Canada. But there is a difference between recognizing diversity and pushing for ever more of it. Something infinitely diverse has no core identity and ceases to exist.”

Maxime Bernier (1963) Canadian politician

7:10am 13 August 2018 https://twitter.com/MaximeBernier/status/1029007345005879296 reply to CTV News misquotation "Diversity will 'destroy' what makes Canada great" https://twitter.com/CTVNews/status/1029000159856914434 at 6:42am, leading CTV to re-issue the report under a different title by 9:40am https://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/tory-mp-bernier-criticized-for-saying-more-diversity-will-destroy-what-makes-canada-great-1.4050494 2018

Love, Parting, Country

“We are incredibly heedless in the formation of our beliefs, but find ourselves filled with an illicit passion for them when anyone proposes to rob us of their companionship. It is obviously not the ideas themselves that are dear to us, but our self-esteem, which is threatened.”

James Harvey Robinson (1863–1936) American historian

The Mind in the Making : The Relation of Intelligence to Social Reform (1921)

Idea, Passion

“The cultural treasures of the past, believed to be dead, are being made to speak, in the course of which it turns out that they propose things altogether different than what had been thought.”

Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) Jewish-American political theorist

"Martin Heidegger at Eighty," in Heidegger and Modern Philosophy: Critical Essays (1978) by Michael Murray, p. 294.

Past, Dead

“The proposed Bush regulations put politics above the health care needs of Americans.”

Nancy Pelosi (1940) American politician, first female Speaker of the House of Representatives, born 1940

[Gajewski, Karen Ann, Worth Noting, Humanist, 68, 5, September/October 2008, http://web.ebscohost.com/ehost/detail?vid=19&hid=114&sid=fc488ea1-3734-4774-a772-f0aafb4b9077%40sessionmgr103&bdata=JmxvZ2lucGFnZT1sb2dpbi5hc3Amc2l0ZT1laG9zdC1saXZl#db=afh&AN=34312851, 2008-11-22]
2000s

Health

“We are trying to establish a process beginning with problems arising from 2000. In the second part of the Bill we propose to establish a permanent national council for promotion of reconciliation, unity and tolerance and that to me is most important part of this Bill.”

Laisenia Qarase (1941) Prime Minister of Fiji

Additional remarks about the proposed Reconciliation and Unity Commission, Response to continuing opposition to the Reconciliation, Tolerance, and Unity Bill, 30 July 2005

Problem, Parting

“The aim of the process chart is to present information regarding existing and proposed processes in such simple form that such information can become available to and usable by the greatest possible number of people in an organization before any changes whatever are actually made, so that the special knowledge and suggestions of those in positions of minor importance can be fully utilized.”

Frank Bunker Gilbreth, Sr. (1868–1924) American industrial engineer

Source: Process charts (1921), p. 5.

People, Knowledge, Change

“I have been a Member of Parliament for 18 years. I have been a member of the Government for 14 years, of the Cabinet for ten years and Prime Minister since 1990. When the curtain falls it is time to get off the stage and that is what I propose to do. I shall, therefore, advise my parliamentary colleagues that it would be appropriate for them to consider the selection of a new leader of the Conservative Party to lead the party through Opposition through the years that lie immediately ahead.”

John Major (1943) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

"Major's Speech", The Times, 3 May 1997, p. 2.
Statement in Downing Street on 2 May 1997 following the general election in which the Conservative Party was heavily defeated. Major was just about to resign as Prime Minister and announced his decision to stand down as party leader simultaneously.
1990s, 1997

Lie, Time

“WEINER: Y'know, You gotta love these Republicans. I mean, you guys have chutzpah. The Republican Party is the wholly owned subsidiary of the insurance industry. They say this isn’t going to do enough, but when we propose an alternative to provide competition, they’re against it. They say we want to strengthen state insurance commissioners and they'll do the job. But when we did that in our national health care bill, they said we're against it. They said we want to have competition but when we proposed requiring competition they're against it. They’re a wholly owned subsidiary of the insurance industry. That’s the fact!”

Anthony Weiner (1964) American politician

Love, Health, Guy

“Socialists do not propose to substitute the domination of society by one privileged class for that of another. They seek to abolish class distinctions altogether. The abolition of classes is fundamental to the Socialist conception of society.”

Clement Attlee (1883–1967) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

The Labour Party in Perspective (Left Book Club, 1937), p. 145.
1930s

“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

“As both technologies and organizations undergo dramatic changes in form and function, organizational researchers are increasingly turning to concepts of innovation, emergence, and improvisation to help explain the new ways of organizing and using technology evident in practice. With a similar intent, I propose an extension to the structurational perspective on technology that develops a practice lens to examine how people, as they interact with a technology in their ongoing practices, enact structures which shape their emergent and situated use of that technology. Viewing the use of technology as a process of enactment enables a deeper understanding of the constitutive role of social practices in the ongoing use and change of technologies in the workplace. After developing this lens, I offer an example of its use in research, and then suggest some implications for the study of technology in organizations.”

Wanda Orlikowski American computer scientist

Source: "Using technology and constituting structures", 2000, p. 404; Abstract

People, Way, Understanding, Study

“I have spared no effort to establish upon a solid and enduring basis those sentiments of union and concord which are so indispensible for the progress and advancement of all those who dwell in my native land, and, so long as I live, I propose to use all the means at my command to see to it that both races cast a stigma upon the disagreeable events that took place on the Sonoma frontier in 1846. If before I pass on to render an account of my acts to the Supreme Creator, I succeed in being a witness to a reconciliation between victor and vanquished, conquerors and conquered, I shall die with the conviction of not having striven in vain. In bringing this chapter to a close, I will remark that, if the men who hoisted the “Bear Flag” had raised the flag that Washington sanctified by his abnegation and patriotism, there would have been no war on the Sonoma frontier, for all our minds were prepared to give a brotherly embrace to the sons of the Great Republic, whose enterprising spirit had filled us with admiration. Ill-advisedly, however, as some say, or dominated by a desire to rule without let or hindrance, as others say, they placed themselves under the shelter of a flag that pictured a bear, an animal that we took as the emblem of rapine and force. This mistake was the cause of all the trouble, for when the Californians saw parties of men running over their plains and forests under the “Bear Flag,” they thought that they were dealing with robbers and took the steps they thought most effective for the protection of their lives and property.”

Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo (1807–1890) Californian military commander, politician, and rancher

As quoted by George Mason University's History Matters: “More Like A Pig Than a Bear”: Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo Is Taken Prisoner During the Bear Flag Revolt, 1846
Historical and Personal Memoirs Relating to Alta California (1875)

Men, War, Effort, Animals

“Religion’s preferred punishment is almost always death, regardless of the crime. But the death penalty is a statistical failure just like all their proposed solutions to other problems always are. Here in the US, the states that still have the death penalty also have the highest murder rates; its a negative correlation. The problem there is one of society, the conditions imposed and the types of responses that are culturally coaxed. When murder happens, and that person is caught and tried, we should remove them as a threat, and whether they are imprisoned, institutionalized, or what have you should be determined by the particulars in each case.”

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

Patheos, How is secular humanist governance better than theocracy? http://www.patheos.com/blogs/reasonadvocates/2013/09/07/how-is-secular-humanist-governance-better-than-theocracy/ (September 7, 2013)

Death, Religion, Penalty, Failure

“It is with considerable reluctance that I criticize the monetarists, because, though I consider their proposed monetary policy unfeasible, they are after all much more nearly right in their assumptions and prescriptions than the majority of present academic economists. The simplistic form of the quantity theory of money that they hold is not tenable; but they are overwhelmingly right in insisting on how much "money matters," and they are right in insisting that in most circumstances, and over the long run, it is the quantity of money that is most influential in determining the purchasing power of the monetary unit. Other things being equal, the more dollars that are issued, the smaller becomes the value of each individual dollar. So at the moment the monetarists are more effective opponents of further inflation than the great bulk of politicians and even putative economists who still fail to recognize this basic truth.”

Henry Hazlitt (1894–1993) American journalist

Where the Monetarists Go Wrong (1976)

Money, Truth

“As for 'taste' as a criterion of painting I find that it is most frequently applied to work that is essentially insensitive, brutal or vulgar beyond question. Could it now be a term with political undertones to seduce, or cover profounder motives of exploitation? I propose it be kept to the wine cellar. There it deceives no one but him who over-indulges.”

Clyfford Still (1904–1980) American artist

Clyfford Still, in an interview with Ti Grace Sharpless, 1963; as quoted in Abstract Expressionism Creators and Critics, edited by Clifford Ross, Abrams Publishers New York 1990, p. 201
1960s

Motivation, Question, Wine, Painting

“A number of proposals have been advanced in recent years for the development of ‘general systems theory’ which, abstracting from properties peculiar to physical, biological, or social systems, would be applicable to all of them. We might well feel that, while the goal is laudable, systems of such diverse kinds could hardly be expected to have any nontrivial properties in common. Metaphor and analogy can be helpful, or they can be misleading. All depends on whether the similarities the metaphor captures are significant or superficial.
It may not be entirely vain, however, to search for common properties among diverse kinds of complex systems… The ideas of feedback and information provide a frame of reference for viewing a wide range of situations, just as do the ideas of evolution, of relativism, of axiomatic method, and of operationalism… hierarchic systems have some common properties that are independent of their specific content…”

Herbert A. Simon (1916–2001) American political scientist, economist, sociologist, and psychologist

H.A. Simon (1962) "The Architecture of complexity." in: Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society. Vol 106, pp. 467-468. as cited in: "James Grier Miller (1916-)" at isss.org retrieved Nov 16, 2012.
1960s-1970s

Feeling, Search, Idea, Help

“If the next time our governments propose to make war on a helpless civilian population we were to uncover our grief and guilt instead of our anger, how much difference might we make?”

Germaine Greer (1939) Australian feminist author

Sorrow (pg. 189)
The Whole Woman (1999)

War, Time, Anger

“Confronted with such a variety most philosophers try to establish one approach to the exclusion of all others. As far as they are concerned there can only be one true way- and they want to find it. Thus normative philosophers argue that knowledge is a result of the application of certain rules, they propose rules which in their opinion constitute knowledge and reject what clashes with them.”

Paul Karl Feyerabend (1924–1994) Austrian-born philosopher of science

Pg 84.
Conquest of Abundance (2001 [posthumous])

Way, Knowledge

“The Treaty of Guarantee came out of a proposal by Lloyd George, the British Prime Minister, at the allied conference of Paris as a compromise to Marshal Ferdinand Foch's insistence that the Franco-German border be pushed back to the Rhine. Foch felt that this new border would prevent another German invasion into France. The Germans had invaded France from across the Rhine five times within a century in 1814, 1815, 1870, 1914, and 1918. Its terms called for solemn guarantees by Britain and America of the French frontier against future German aggression.”

William L. Shirer book The Collapse of the Third Republic

The Collapse of the Third Republic (1969)

Time, Future

“What will it take to rally all peoples and nations to unite in the name of humanity? An all-out alien invasion or imminent mass extinction? Perhaps a gentler proposal like a Human Heritage Month would help to raise awareness that we are all human beings living together on the same beautiful planet marred by undue human conflicts and selfishness.”

Newton Lee American computer scientist

Google It: Total Information Awareness, 2016

People, Beauty, Help, Selfishness

“The various segments of the system of profound knowledge proposed here cannot be separated. They interact with each other. Thus, knowledge of psychology is incomplete without knowledge of variation.”

W. Edwards Deming (1900–1993) American professor, author, and consultant

The New Economics for Industry, Government, Education (1993)

Knowledge

“The Principle of Uncertainty is a bad name. In science, or outside of it, we are not uncertain; our knowledge is merely confined, within a certain tolerance. We should call it the Principle of Tolerance. And I propose that name in two senses. First, in the engineering sense: Science has progressed, step by step, the most successful enterprise in the ascent of man, because it has understood that the exchange of information between man and nature, and man and man, can only take place with a certain tolerance. But second, I also use the word, passionately, about the real world. All knowledge – all information between human beings – can only be exchanged within a play of tolerance. And that is true whether the exchange is in science, or in literature, or in religion, or in politics, or in any form of thought that aspires to dogma. It's a major tragedy of my lifetime and yours that scientists were refining, to the most exquisite precision, the Principle of Tolerance – and turning their backs on the fact that all around them, tolerance was crashing to the ground beyond repair. The Principle of Uncertainty or, in my phrase, the Principle of Tolerance, fixed once for all the realization that all knowledge is limited. It is an irony of history that at the very time when this was being worked out, there should rise, under Hitler in Germany and other tyrants elsewhere, a counter-conception: a principle of monstrous certainty. When the future looks back on the 1930's, it will think of them as a crucial confrontation of culture as I have been expounding it – the ascent of man against the throwback to the despots' belief that they have absolute certainty.”

Jacob Bronowski The Ascent of Man

Episode 11: "Knowledge or Certainty"
The Ascent of Man (1973)

World, Religion, History, Literature

“In India also, for century, education imparted through the medium of a foreign language has unduly dominated its academic life and it has now produced a class of men who are unconsciously so denationalised that any far reaching proposal for the recognition of the Indian languages as the vehicle of teaching and examination up to the highest University stage is either ridiculed as impossible or branded as reactionary. But I plead earnestly for the acceptance of this fundamental principle not on account of any blind adherence to things that I claim as my own but out of a firm conviction that the fullest development of the mind of a learner is possible only by this natural approach and also that by this process alone can there be a great revival of the glory and richness of the Indian languages.”

Syama Prasad Mookerjee (1901–1953) Indian politician

Speech delivered at Agra University Convocation on 23rd November 1940.

Life, Men, Education, Nature

“Our country has definitely relinquished the old standard of dealing with other countries by terror and force, and is definitely committed to the new standard of dealing with them through friendship and understanding. This new policy should be constantly kept in mind by the guiding forces of the Army and Navy, by the. Congress and by the country at large. I believe it holds a promise of great benefit to humanity. I shall resist any attempt to resort to the old methods and the old standards. I am especially solicitous that foreign nations should comprehend the candor and sincerity with which we have adopted this position. While we propose to maintain defensive and supplementary police forces by land and sea, and to train them through inspections and maneuvers upon appropriate occasions in order to maintain their efficiency, I wish every other nation to understand that this does not express any unfriendliness or convey any hostile intent. I want the armed forces of America to be considered by all peoples not as enemies but as friends as the contribution which is made by this country for the maintenance of the peace and security of the world.”

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

1920s, Second State of the Union Address (1924)

Friendship, Hostility, People, World

“So it was better to think of formulations which could explain the creation of matter without violating the law of conservation of matter…For that we used what is called as negative energy, which at that time was considered unrealistic. There was a good example of negative energy, mainly Newtonian gravity. Newtonian gravity is a negative energy system because gravitational potential energy is negative and we i. e, Fred Hoyle and me, worked out a fairly consistent method of describing this whole thing. Today what people call phantom fields, an idea which is catching up with people trying to explain some problems of the big-bang, these phantom fields are what we had proposed way back in the 1960’s.”

Jayant Narlikar (1938) Indian physicist

An Exclusive Interview with Prof. Jayant Vishnu Narlikar

People, Law, Way, Idea

“The principle of this art [as Mondrian proposes his view on modern art] is not a negation of matter, but a great love of matter, whereby it is seen in the highest, most intense manner possible, and depicted in the artistic creation.”

Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) Peintre Néerlandais

quote from Mondrian's sketchbook II, 1912/13; as cited in Mondrian, - The Art of Destruction, Carel Blotkamp, Reaktion Books LTD. London 2001, p. 78
1910's

Love, Art

“Between 1937 and 1941, Dobzhansky went from being able to allow for the possibility of evolutionary mechanisms other than those he favored to a position in which everything that did not fit his definition of evolution was rejected.
In the midst of his outpouring of anger at and dismissal of Goldschmidt, Dobzhansky neglected to consider the fact that while Goldschmidt's systemic mutations may not have been observed, neither had the mechanisms of speculation that he, or anyone else, for that matter, had proposed. …it was and still is the case that, with the exception of Dobzhansky's claim about a new species of fruit fly, the formation of a new species, by any mechanism, has never been observed.”

Theodosius Dobzhansky (1900–1975) geneticist and evolutionary biologist

Jeffrey H. Schwartz, Sudden Origins: Fossils, Genes, and the Emergence of Species (1999)
About

Flying, Anger

“Sedov (Trotsky's son) spoke a lot about the necessity of the maximum, the closest possible connections with Tukhachevsky, inasmuch as, in Trotsky's opinion, Tukhachevsky and the military group were to be the decisive force of the counter-revolutionary action. During the conversation it was also revealed that Trotsky entertained fears regarding Tukhachevsky 's Bonapartist tendencies. In the course of one conversation Sedov said that Trotsky in this respect even expressed the fear that if Tukhachevsky successfully accomplished a military coup, it was possible that he would not allow Trotsky into Moscow.... Trotsky therefore proposed that during the coup d'etat we should everywhere place our own people, people who would be faithful to Trotskyism and who could be relied upon as regards vigilance.”

Arkady Rosengolts (1889–1938) Belarusian politician

Trial of Anti-Soviet Bloc of Rights and Trotskyites, p. 245-6. Quote from Harpal Brar's Trotskyism or Leninism?, p. 281.

People, Fear, Faith, Decision

“Those portions of the present law contemplating consolidations ore not, sufficiently effective in producing expeditious action and need amplification of the authority of the Interstate Commerce Commission, particularly in affording a period for voluntary proposals to the commission and in supplying Government pressure to secure action after the expiration of such a period.”

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

1920s, Second State of the Union Address (1924)

Law

“That this House is appalled, but barely surprised, at the revelations in M15 files regarding the bizarre and inhumane proposals to use pigeons as flying bombs; recognises the important and live-saving role of carrier pigeons in two world wars and wonders at the lack of gratitude towards these gentle creatures; and believes that humans represent the most obscene, perverted, cruel, uncivilised and lethal species ever to inhabit the planet and looks forward to the day when the inevitable asteroid slams into the earth and wipes them out thus giving nature the opportunity to start again.”

Tony Banks (1942–2006) British politician

EDM http://edmi.parliament.uk/EDMi/EDMDetails.aspx?EDMID=24837&SESSION=682 (Early Day Motion) 1255 proposed by Tony Banks in the House of Commons, 21 May 2004; quoted by Parliamentary Information Management Service.

War, World, Nature, Housing

“Courage is not a quality one normally associates with mathematicians. Yet it should apply to people who work in their attics in secret for seven years without cease on a problem that has eluded the greatest mathematical minds since first proposed in 1637.”

Charles Krauthammer (1950–2018) American journalist

1990s, 1993, Eureka! A Modest Genius (1993)

People, Secret, Mathematics, Courage

“The way would be open for the soldiers, that is, if Chamberlain didn't pull another Munich. "I am only afraid that some Schweinehund (dirty dog) will make a proposal for mediation."”

William L. Shirer book The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1960)

Dogs, Way

“I wasn't aware of Chargaff's rules when he said them, but the effect on me was quite electric because I realized immediately that if you had this sort of scheme that John Griffith was proposing, of adenine being paired with thymine, and guanine being paired with cytosine, then you should get Chargaff's rules. I was very excited, but I didn't actually tell Chargaff because it was something I was doing with John Griffith…. This was very exciting, and we thought "ah ha!" and we realized - I mean what anyone who is familiar with the history of science ought to realize - that when you have one-to-one ratios, it means things go to together. And how on Earth no one pointed out this simple fact in those years, I don't know.”

Francis Crick (1916–2004) British molecular biologist, biophysicist, neuroscientist; co-discoverer of the structure of DNA

The DNA Story (1973, film, VSM Productions)

History, Science

“Vegetarianism is not only the most powerful political response we can make to industrialized food. It's a necessary prerequisite to reforming it. To quit eating meat is to dismantle the global food apparatus at its foundation. … Until we make that leap, until we create a culinary culture in which the meat-eaters must do the apologizing, the current proposals will be nothing more than gestures that turn the fork into an empty symbol rather than a real tool for environmental change.”

James E. McWilliams (1968) American historian

"Vegetarianism Is a Major Step for Environmental Change", in The Washington Post (16 November 2009) http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/15/AR2009111502210.html.

Food, Change

“Is a virus a living organism? What is a gene, and how does the original genetic constitution of a living organism express itself in the developed characteristics of the adult? Do complex protein molecules "know how" to reduplicate their pattern, and is this an essential clue to the problem of reproduction of living creatures? All these are certainly complex problems, but they are not problems of disorganized complexity, to which statistical methods hold the key. They are all problems which involve dealing simultaneously with a sizable number of factors which are interrelated into an organic whole. They are all, in the language here proposed, problems of organized complexity.”

Warren Weaver (1894–1978) American mathematician

Source: Science and Complexity, 1948, p. 537

Problem

“All, then, are agreed on the pressing nature of this problem, all are bent on its solution, and though it would doubtless be quite Utopian to expect a similar agreement as to the value of any remedy that may be proposed, it is at least of immense importance that, on a subject thus universally regarded as of supreme importance, we have such a consensus of opinion at the outset. This will be the more remarkable and the more hopeful sign when it is shown, as I believe will be conclusively shown in this work, that the answer to this, one of the most pressing questions of the day, makes of comparatively easy solution many other problems which have hitherto taxed the ingenuity of the greatest thinkers and reformers of our time. Yes, the key to the problem how to restore the people to the land — that beautiful land of ours, with its canopy of sky, the air that blows upon it, the sun that warms it, the rain and dew that moisten it — the very embodiment of Divine love for man — is indeed a Master-Key, for it is the key to a portal through which, even when scarce ajar, will be seen to pour a flood of light on the problems of intemperance, of excessive toil, of restless anxiety, of grinding poverty — the true limits of Governmental interference, ay, and even the relations of man to the Supreme Power.”

Ebenezer Howard (1850–1928) British writer, founder of the garden city movement

Introduction.
Garden Cities of To-morrow (1898)

Love, People, Beauty, Hope

“Vieta (c. 1590) rejected the name "algebra" as having no significance in the European languages, and proposed to use the word "analysis," and it is probably to his influence that the popularity of this term in connection with higher algebra is due.”

David Eugene Smith (1860–1944) American mathematician

Source: History of Mathematics (1925) Vol.2, p. 392

“One cannot, at once, claim to be superhuman and then plead mortal error. I propose to take our countrymen's claims of American exceptionalism seriously, which is to say I propose subjecting our country to an exceptional moral standard.”

Ta-Nehisi Coates book Between the World and Me

Source: Between the World and Me (2015), p. 8.

Error, Country

“Were an energetic and judicious system to be proposed with your signature it would be a circumstance highly honorable to your fame... and doubly entitle you to the glorious republican epithet, The Father of your Country.”

Henry Knox (1750–1806) Continental Army and US Army general, US Secretary of War

Letter to George Washington http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/04-05-02-0095, urging Washington to attend the Philadelphia Convention. (March 19, 1787)

Country

“Purpose of counter-intelligence action is to disrupt [Black Panther Party] and it is immaterial whether facts exist to substantiate the charge. If facts are present it aids in the success of the proposal but the Bureau feels … that disruption can be accomplished without facts to back it up.”

J. Edgar Hoover (1895–1972) American law enforcement officer and first director of the FBI

Memo (16 Sept. 1970).

Feeling, Intelligence, Success

“And fully in keeping with the demagogic prejudices of the party, no A. R. F leader would seriously propose participating cooperatively in the struggle of the people of w:Turkey against the fascist regime there… While the A. R. F. reprints maps showing the borders of a supposed "Armenia" proposed in the unratified w:Treaty of Sèvres, the party's literature ignores the native population within the borders of this "Armenia." It should be pointed out that this population, consisting of w:Kurds, Turks, Lazes and others, exceeds six million. One wonders what kind of Armenia the A. R. F. envisions in which Armenians will be an absolute—if not minuscule—minority…”

Monte Melkonian (1957–1993) National Hero of Armenia

Source: The Right to Struggle (1993), P. 57.

People, Literature

“Industry suffers from the managerial dogma that for the sake of stability and continuity, the company should be independent of the competence of individual employees. Hence industry rejects any methodological proposal that can be viewed as making intellectual demands on its work force. Since in the US the influence of industry is more pervasive than elsewhere, the above dogma hurts American computing science most. The moral of this sad part of the story is that as long as computing science is not allowed to save the computer industry, we had better see to it that the computer industry does not kill computing science.”

Edsger W. Dijkstra Computing Science

Dijkstra (1999) "Computing Science: Achievements and Challenges" https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD12xx/EWD1284.html (EWD 1284). 1990s

Sadness, Suffering, Science, Parting

“Futurism, as it has developed over six years, has solidified and surpassed Impressionism, has proposed plastic dynamism, atmospheric modeling, and the interpenetration of planes and states of mind.”

Giacomo Balla (1871–1958) Italian artist

The Futurist Reconstruction of the Universe (1915)

Future

“In common with my colleagues, I recognise that no single remedy can be a complete cure, but while I am ready to examine every proposal…I must frankly say that I believe a tariff levied on imported foreign goods will be found to be indispensable…The ultimate destiny of this country is bound up with the Empire…I hope to take my part in forwarding a policy which was the main subject of my father's last great political campaign…I hope that we may presently develop into a National Party, and get rid of that odious title of Conservative, which has kept so many from joining us in the past.”

Neville Chamberlain (1869–1940) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Election address in Birmingham (October 1931), quoted in Keith Feiling, Neville Chamberlain (London: Macmillan, 1946), pp. 196-197.
Minster of Health

Hope, Past, Parting, Country

“Americans combine to give fêtes, found seminaries, build churches, distribute books, and send missionaries to the antipodes. Hospitals, prisons, and schools take shape in that way. Finally, if they want to proclaim a truth or propagate some feeling by the encouragement of a great example, they form an association. In every case, at the head of any new undertaking, where in France you would find the government or in England some territorial magnate, in the United States you are sure to find an association. I have come across several types of association in America of which, I confess, I had not previously the slightest conception, and I have often admired the extreme skill they show in proposing a common object for the exertions of very many and in inducing them voluntarily to pursue it.”

Alexis De Tocqueville book Democracy in America

Book Two, Chapter V.
Democracy in America, Volume II (1840), Book Two

Truth, Books, School, Way

“Look at the budget that was just proposed in Washington. It is an attack of unimaginable cruelty on the most vulnerable among us, the youngest, the oldest, the poorest, and hard-working people who need a little help to gain or hang on to a decent middle-class life. It grossly underfunds public education, mental health, and efforts even to combat the opioid epidemic. And in reversing our commitment to fight climate change, it puts the future of our nation and our world at risk. And to top it off, it is shrouded in a trillion-dollar mathematical lie. Let's call it what it is. It's a con. They don't even try to hide it.”

Hillary Clinton (1947) American politician, senator, Secretary of State, First Lady

Post Presidential Election, Wellesley Commencement Speech (2017)

Life, People, Health, Lie

“If modern pedagogy means an effort towards the realisation of a new and more just form of society; if it means that we propose to instruct the rising generation in the causes which have brought about and maintain the lack of social equilibrium; if it means that we are anxious to prepare the race for better days, freeing it from religious fiction and from all idea of submission to an inevitable socio-economic inequality; we cannot entrust it to the State or to other official organisms which necessarily maintain existing privileges and support the laws which at present consecrate the exploitation of one man by another, the pernicious source of the worst abuses.”

Francesc Ferrer i Guàrdia (1859–1909) Spanish anarchist

The Origin and Ideals of the Modern School (1908)

Law, Idea, Support, Effort

“We Socialists are not reformers; we are revolutionaries. We Socialists do not propose change forms. We care nothing for forms. We want a change of the inside of the mechanism of society, let the form take care of itself.”

Daniel De Leon (1852–1914) American newspaper editor

Revolution
Reform or Revolution (1896)

Change

“I will defend my title as heavyweight champion of the world against all comers, none barred. By this I mean black, Mexican, Indian or any other nationality without regard to color, size or nativity. I propose to be the champion of the world, not the white or the Canadian or the American or any other limited degree of champion.”

Tommy Burns (boxer)

Statement of (3 February 1906) after his win against Marvin Hart, as quoted in a profile of Jack Johnson, at Unforgivable Blackness at PBS (2005) http://www.pbs.org/unforgivableblackness/sparring/rise.html.

World, Color

“Courage will be forthcoming if tile leaders of opinion in all parties will summon out of tile fatigue and confusion of war enough lucidity of mind to understand for themselves and to explain to tile public what is required; and then propose a plan conceived in a spirit of social justice, a plan which uses a time of general sacrifice, not as an excuse for postponing desirable reforms, but as an opportunity for moving further than we have moved hitherto towards reducing in equalities.”

John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) British economist

Source: How to Pay for the War (1940), Ch. 1 : The Character of the Problem

War, Justice, Courage, Understanding

“I must get off for a bit or I'll bonnet Joggleberry or get up and propose a national monument to Guy Fawkes or something silly.”

John Buchan book The Power-House

Source: The Power-House (1916), Ch. 1 "Beginning of the Wild-Goose Chase"

Guy

“A basic change in political ethics is required for the realization of the proposal [The dialog among civilizations].”

Mohammad Khatami (1943) Iranian prominent reformist politician, scholar and shiite faqih.

UNESCO 1999
Attributed

Change

“When all this is eliminated, what really remains? In place of the representative bodies created by general, popular elections, Lenin and Trotsky have laid down the soviets as the only true representation of political life in the land as a whole, life in the soviets must also become more and more crippled. Without general elections, without unrestricted freedom of press and assembly, without a free struggle of opinion, life dies out in every public institution, becomes a mere semblance of life, in which only the bureaucracy remains as the active element. Public life gradually falls asleep, a few dozen party leaders of inexhaustible energy and boundless experience direct and rule. Among them, in reality only a dozen outstanding heads do the leading and an elite of the working class is invited from time to time to meetings where they are to applaud the speeches of the leaders, and to approve proposed resolutions unanimously – at bottom, then, a clique affair – a dictatorship, to be sure, not the dictatorship of the proletariat but only the dictatorship of a handful of politicians, that is a dictatorship in the bourgeois sense, in the sense of the rule of the Jacobins”

Rosa Luxemburg (1871–1919) Polish Marxist theorist, socialist philosopher, and revolutionary

the postponement of the Soviet Congress from three-month periods to six-month periods!

Chapter Six, "The Problem of Dictatorship"
The Russian Revolution (1918)

Life, Reality, Sense, Freedom

“I am now Painter to the King with fifteen thousand reales [a year].... the King sent out an order to Bayeu and Maella to search out the best two painters that could be found, to paint the cartoons for tapestries. Bayeu proposed his brother, and Maella proposed me. Their advice was put before the king, and the favor was done, and I had no idea of what was happening to me.”

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

letter to his friend Don Martín Zapater https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q3915977, June 1786; as quoted by Robert Hughes, in: Goya. Borzoi Book - Alfred Knopf, New York, 2003, p. 81 Goya was already forty then; the four painters should paint the designs of all the new tapestries for the royal palace; their designs were then woven in the Royal Tapestry Factory 1780s

Search, Idea, Painting

“The terms for the Phocians were mild by Greek Standards (one Greek state proposed the execution of all the men) disarmament, division into village-settlements, payment of all indemnity to Apollo and expulsion from the Amphictiony. In their place the Macedonians were elected members. The two votes of Phocis on the council were transferred to the Macedonian state.”

N. G. L. Hammond (1907–2001) British classical scholar

"The Genius of Alexander the Great", p.18, Gerald Duckworth & Co Ltd (November 26, 2004)

Men

“First, we established incentives for those who were uninsured to buy insurance. Using tax penalties, as we did, or tax credits, as others have proposed, encourages "free riders" to take responsibility for themselves rather than pass their medical costs on to others. This doesn't cost the government a single dollar.”

Mitt Romney (1947) American businessman and politician

[2009-07-30, Mr. President, what's the rush?, USA Today, 7A, http://www.usatoday.com/printedition/news/20090730/column30_st.art.htm]
2009

Penalty

“His picture to me seems always to have the enthusiasm and freshness of youth, moved with the high-minded and patriotic purpose of maturity. He displayed the same ambition for faithful service, whether he was leading his soldiers in the last charge for American liberty at Yorktown or rebuking the mob at Paris for its proposal to make him king. His part in the French Revolution is well known. He served the cause of ordered liberty in America; he was unwilling to serve any other cause in France. His admirers might say of him on the first anniversary of Bastile Day, 'He is galloping through the ages' But he refused to be a man on horseback. He knew that the welfare of his country lay in moderation. The people trusted him, but the extremists, whether Jacobin or Royalist, feared him. He urged the National Assembly to establish by constitutional guarantees what the Revolution had gained.”

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

1920s, Ordered Liberty and World Peace (1924)

People, Youth, Age, Fear

“In contrast to earlier gay law reform and equality-oriented movements, the 1970s LGBT liberation movement did not seek to ape heterosexual values or secure the acceptance of sexual orientation and gender identity minorities within the existing sexual conventions. Indeed, it repudiated the prevailing sexual morality and institutions - rejecting not only heterosexism (heterosexual supremacism) but also male machismo, with its oppressive predisposition to rivalry, toughness and aggression; the extreme expressions of which are the rapist, queer-basher, racist murderer and war criminal.
The "radical drag" and "gender-bender" politics of the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) in the early 1970s glorified and promoted male gentleness. A conscious, if sometimes exaggerated, attempt to renounce the oppressiveness of masculinity and male privilege, it rejected straight macho values; identifying them with the subordination of women and LGBT people. The GLF was truly revolutionary because it attempted to subvert male-female gender roles and straight patriarchy. It denounced the ethos of masculine competitiveness, domination and violence; instead affirming the worthwhileness of male sensitivity and affection between men and, in the case of lesbians, the intrinsic value of an eroticism and love independent of maleness.
These ideas led me to propose that without the construction of a cult of machismo and a mass of aggressive male egos, neither sexual, gender, class, racial, speciesist nor imperialist oppression are possible.”

Peter Tatchell (1952) British gay rights activist

Machismo Underpins War and Tranny http://www.petertatchell.net/masculinity/machismo-underpins-war-and-tyranny.htm, Official Website

Love, Women, Men, War

“Propose to an Englishman any principle, or any instrument, however admirable, and you will observe that the whole effort of the English mind is directed to find a difficulty, a defect, or an impossibility in it. If you speak to him of a machine for peeling a potato, he will pronounce it impossible: if you peel a potato with it before his eyes, he will declare it useless, because it will not slice a pineapple. Impart the same principle or show the same machine to an American or to one of our Colonists, and you will observe that the whole effort of his mind is to find some new application of the principle, some new use for the instrument.”

Charles Babbage (1791–1871) mathematician, philosopher, inventor and mechanical engineer who originated the concept of a programmable c…

Quoted in Richard H. Babbage (1948), "The Work of Charles Babbage", 'Annals of the Computation Laboratory of Harvard University, vol. 16
Excerpt listed online, here: http://www.ed-thelen.org/bab/bab_philosopher.html
Attributed

Effort

“The multitude of formulas (for living the Christian life with success) proposed by Christian writers, preacher, conference speakers, and televangelists simply confuse me. They have different ideas about how it is done, offering promises of fulfillment and joy based on three easy steps, four points of action, or the five smooth stones that David threw.”

Donald Miller (1971) American writer

Prayer and the Art of Volkswagen Maintenance (2000, Harvest House Publishers)

Life, Idea, Success, Joy

“Sher Shah Sur’s name is associated in our textbooks with the Grand Trunk Road from Peshawar to Dacca, with caravanserais, and several other schemes of public welfare. It is true that he was not a habitual persecutor of Hindus before he became the emperor at Delhi. But he did not betray Islam when he became the supreme ruler. The test came at Raisen in 1543 AD. Shaykh Nurul Haq records in Zubdat-ul-Tawarikh as follows: “In the year 950 H., Puranmal held occupation of the fort of Raisen… He had 1000 women in his harem… and amongst them several Musulmanis whom he made to dance before him. Sher Khan with Musulman indignation resolved to conquer the fort. After he had been some time engaged in investing it, an accommodation was proposed and it was finally agreed that Puranmal with his family and children and 4000 Rajputs of note should be allowed to leave the fort unmolested. Several men learned in the law (of Islam) gave it as their opinion that they should all be slain, notwithstanding the solemn engagement which had been entered into. Consequently, the whole army, with the elephants, surrounded Puranmal’s encampment. The Rajputs fought with desperate bravery and after killing their women and children and burning them, they rushed to battle and were annihilated to a man.””

Sher Shah Suri (1486–1545) founder of Sur Empire in Northern India

Zubdat-ul-Tawarikh quoted in Goel, Sita Ram (2001). The story of Islamic imperialism in India. Chapter 7 ISBN 9788185990231

Women, Men, Children, Family

“We lunched in Fregene: grilled sardines sprinkled with parsley and lemon. Federico ate daintily, like someone with no appetite. The beach was deserted, the wind brisk. In the distance stood the abandoned lighthouse he filmed for 8 1/2. Like someone about to propose a toast, he stood up and "recited" from King Lear :
Hark! Have you heard the news? The king fell off a cliff.
O horrible! Were you very close to him?
Indeed, sir. Close enough to push.
We laughed until he brusquely sat down again, scraping the fish scales off his fingers, staring at the age spots that covered his hands. The beautiful adolescent waitress asked for his autograph. He drew himself as a man-lion in a hat and scarf with huge paws chasing her, and signed it "Féfé." We spent the afternoon visiting Ostia and returned to Rome in a sweltering twilight. He asked to be driven home for a change of clothes. We invited Giulietta, who wore a green velvet turban, to join us for dinner. (Had she already lost her hair from chemotherapy?) Graciously, she declined while smoking cigarette after cigarette. At Cesarina's, Federico drew hilarious, pornographic sketches on the table napkin saying, "If you have not made love today then you have lost a day!"”

Damian Pettigrew Canadian filmmaker

The entire restaurant was at his feet. He was twenty years old now and as thin as Kafka. He was Rome. He had adopted us the way Rome adopts everyone, and we loved him.
On Fellini's final years
Federico Fellini: Sou um Grande Mentiroso (2008)

Love, Age, Beauty, Way