Quotes about provider (2523 quotes, page 14)

“It seems that we are revisiting the whole argument about a European central bank. Many of us have the deepest misgivings about the establishment of such a bank, with no accountability to member states and an office life of eight years, in which it can do what it likes, provided that it supports the market economy throughout Europe, despite the social consequences. There is no time limit on the period of office of the political directors, and there is nothing about who they would be or where they would come from. But I ask the quite serious question: what on earth are these political directors to do, where do they come from, to whom are they answerable and how do we get rid of them if we do not like what they do?”

Jeremy Corbyn (1949) British Labour Party politician

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1993/mar/30/treaty-on-european-union in the House of Commons (30 March 1993).
1990s

Life , Question , Support , Time

“If you want to do evil, science provides the most powerful weapons to do evil; but equally, if you want to do good, science puts into your hands the most powerful tools to do so. The trick is to want the right things, then science will provide you with the most effective methods of achieving them.”

Richard Dawkins (1941) English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author

The Richard Dimbleby Lecture: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder (1996)

Science , Evil

“Present party designations have become empty of all contents…Vastly extended State expenditure, vastly increased demands from the taxpayer who has to provide the money, social reform regardless of expense, cash exacted from the taxpayer already at his wits' end—when were the problems of plus and minus more desperate? How are we to measure the use and abuse of industrial organization? Powerful orators find "Liberty" the true keyword, but the I remember hearing from a learned student that of "liberty" he knew well over two hundred definitions. Can we be sure that the "haves" and the "have-nots" will agree in their selection of the right one? We can only trust to the growth of responsibility; we may look to circumstances and events to teach their lesson.”

John Morley, 1st Viscount Morley of Blackburn (1838–1923) British Liberal statesman, writer and newspaper editor

Letter to Sir Francis Webster, president of the Montrose Burghs Liberal Association, quoted in 'Lord Morley On Modern Politics', The Times (11 May 1923), p. 12.

Money , Problem , Learning

“It's a public library. If you don't like the book, magazine, CD-ROM or film, put it down and pick up something else. Libraries provide choice. Our responsibility is to have in our collection a broad range of ideas and information.”

Judith Krug (1940–2009) librarian and freedom of speech proponent

" Oak Lawn Library Vows to Keep Playboy on Shelf http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2005-06-23/news/0506230234_1_library-board-president-library-officials-magazine" by Jo Napolitano, Chicago Tribune (June 23, 2005)

Books , Idea

“People, even poor people, were in general more contented before the 1914-18 war than they are now, although not nearly so well provided with comforts and luxuries. Incidentally they were also more often people of strong individuality, "characters" or "personalities" as we might say; not of course always either virtuous or agreeable, but qualitatively distinctive, not mere drops in an ocean of mediocrity. And they were more content with their lot than we are. What then is the true criterion of contentment? Can it be anything but the acceptance of one's lot, whatever it may be? Or in other words, knowing one's place and fulfilling faithfully whatever function may be associated with it, with a pride in the quality of the product as the principal incentive rather than any tangible reward; knowing, perhaps, that not to want is better than to have; and above all being intelligent enough not to place one's best hopes in nothing but the satisfactions which a short sojourn in this world can bring. All these things are criteria of contentment, and at the same time they are universal ethical constituents of every religion and tradition.”

Walter James, 4th Baron Northbourne (1896–1982) British rower, agriculturalist and translater

Intellectual Freedom (1971)

War , People , World , Religion

“The moral issues with which Marcus struggles would be, as he points out, unchanged whether the universe were mechanical and devoid of meaning or value or ruled by deity or Providence; whether the will were in fact free or determined; whether there were or were not a future life, or any even fugitive rewards and punishments at all.”

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

Marcus Aurelius: The Meditations (p. 82)
Classics Revisited (1968)

Life , Universe , Future

“I hold that two principles are important; first that there should be a steady expansion of public services, not an irregular one related to revenue accruing in any particular year; the second that taxes should be constant over long periods (provided, that is, that they are neither burdensome nor inequitable).”

John James Cowperthwaite (1915–2006) British colonial administrator

March 24, 1971, page 531.
Official Report of Proceedings of the Hong Kong Legislative Council

“The tool user, provided the tool is made well, need not, and indeed should not, know anything about the tool.”

Peter F. Drucker (1909–2005) American business consultant

Source: 1960s - 1980s, MANAGEMENT: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices (1973), Part 2, p. 513

“T is Providence alone secures
In every change both mine and yours.”

William Cowper (1731–1800) (1731–1800) English poet and hymnodist

A Fable, Moral.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Change

“The extreme ignorance and gullibility of the foreign press provides the negationists with a strategic cover. Most English-knowing Indians believe that the Western intelligentsia is more objective and competent, and they keep on believing this even in domains where the West is completely ignorant and incompetent. So the negationists feel supported in the back by an outside world which they can manipulate but which many in India still consider as a standard of truth. If the Hindu leadership had taken the trouble of studying the mental determinants of India's political configuration, it would have blown this cover away by spreading first-hand information to the foreign media, and educating them about the Stalinist-Islamic grip on the Indian establishment.”

Koenraad Elst (1959) orientalist, writer

1990s, Negationism in India, (1992)

Truth , World , Education , Feeling

“Work is not a constraint. Man's activity provides his true fulfilment. True fulfilment however, can only be achieved if one man is not another man's slave.”

Elfriede Jelinek book Wonderful, Wonderful Times

73
Wonderful, Wonderful Times (1990)

“[Descriptive research provides] an accurate description or picture of the status or characteristics of a situation or phenomenon.”

Clayton M. Christensen (1952–2020) Mormon academic

Johnson & Christensen (2004) Seeing What's Next. p. 302 as cited in: L.M. DeBruhl (2006) Leave No Parent Behind. p. 9
2000s

“Basically, price fluctuations have only one significant meaning for the true investor. They provide him with an opportunity to buy wisely when prices fall sharply and to sell wisely when they advance a great deal. At other times he will do better if he forgets about the stock market and pays attention to his dividend returns and to the operating results of his companies.”

Benjamin Graham (1894–1976) American investor

Source: The Intelligent Investor: The Classic Text on Value Investing (1949), Chapter II, The Investor and Stock-Market Fluctuations, p. 42

Time , Forgetting

“Nearly every city is making large appropriations for laying out spacious parks and playgrounds. These are providing recreation fields for the playing of outdoor games by both old and young. Golf courses and tennis courts abound. Too much emphasis can not be placed on the effort to get the children out of the alleys and off the streets into spacious open places where there is good sunlight and plenty of fresh air. Such an opportunity has both a physical and mental effect. It restores the natural balance of life and nourishes the moral fiber of youth.”

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

1920s, The Democracy of Sports (1924)

Life , Children , Youth , Game

“Modern ideas have had a home in Afghanistan since the 19th century. Several Islamist reformist movements started in Afghanistan before spreading to Central Asia and beyond. Afghanistan’s social- democratic, liberal, nationalist, Marxist, Maoist and Islamist parties provided a rich tapestry of ideologies until the ’70s.”

Amir Taheri (1942) Iranian journalist

"Myths of our Afghanistan debate" http://nypost.com/2009/10/15/myths-of-our-afghanistan-debate/, New York Post (October 15, 2009).
New York Post

Home , Idea

“Such is the real distribution of duties, responsibilities, and expenses. Yet people are given to thinking and speaking of the National Government as 'the Government'. They demand more from it than it was ever intended to provide; and yet in the same breath they complain that Federal authority is stretching itself over areas which do not concern it. On one side, there are demands for more amendments to the Constitution. On the other, there is too much opposition to those that already exist.”

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

1920s, The Reign of Law (1925)

People , Thinking

“Traditional measures of relatedness provide an incomplete and potentially inaccurate picture of the scope of exploit interrelationships between its SBUs. This is because traditional measures look at relatedness only at the industry or market level. But as we explain below, the relatedness that really matters is that between 'strategic assets' (i. e., those that cannot be accessed quickly and cheaply by nondiversified competitors.) Therefore, to accurately measure whether two businesses are related, we need to go beyond broad definitions of relatedness that focus on market similarity; we need to look at the similarities between the underlying strategic assets of the various businesses that a company is operating in.”

Constantinos C. Markides (1960) Cypriot business theorist

Source: "Related diversification, core competences and corporate performance", 1994, p. 150

Business

“Oh, do the Overlords of Life and Death always provide some obstacle to prevent what all of us have known in youth was possible from ever coming true?”

James Branch Cabell (1879–1958) American author

"Auctorial Induction"
The Certain Hour (1916)

Life , Death , Youth

“So long as you do not achieve social liberty, whatever freedom is provided by the law is of no avail to you.”

Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (1891–1956) Father of republic India, champion of human rights, father of India's Constitution, polymath, revolutionary…

Speech delivered to the Bombay Presidency Mahar Conference (31 May 1936)

Law , Freedom

“All the European democracies have far higher election turnouts than ours, and all of them provide their candidates with extensive free airtime. In fact, of all the major nations worldwide that profess to have democracies, only seven — just seven — do not offer free time. These are Ecuador, Honduras, Malaysia, Taiwan, Tanzania, Trinidad and Tobago, and the United States of America. Does it make us proud to be on such a list?”

Walter Cronkite (1916–2009) American broadcast journalist

Free the Airwaves! (2002)

Democracy , Time

“In 1946, a Macy Foundation interdisciplinary conference was organized to use the model provided by "feedback systems," honorifically referred to in earlier conferences as "teleological mechanisms," and later as "cybernetics," with the expectation that this model would provide a group of sciences with useful mathematical tools and, simultaneously, would serve as a form of cross-disciplinary communication. Out of the deliberations of this group came a whole series of fruitful developments of a very high order. Kurt Lewin (who died in 1947) took away from the first meeting the term "feedback". He suggested ways in which group processes, which he and his students were studying in a highly disciplined, rigorous way, could be improved by a "feedback process," as when, for example, a group was periodically given a report on the success or failure of its particular operations.”

Margaret Mead (1901–1978) American anthropologist

Source: 1960s, Continuities in Cultural Evolution (1964), p. 272-273

Way , Communication , Mathematics , Failure

“Outward, thanks to the knowledge of physical laws, man could subdue (or subjugate…) nature, but inwardly, he remained a slave to it. For, when all is said and done, at what is aiming all this display (or deployment) of activity, if not to realized outward profits, to provide material pleasure (or enjoyment). It is not the first time that men sell their birth right for a dish of lentils, and thus disown (or repudiate or deny) the best of thmeselves.”

African Spir (1837–1890) Russian philosopher

Source: Words of a Sage : Selected thoughts of African Spir (1937), p. 36 - second thought of the book, - the translator.

Men , Pleasure , Law , Birth

“People sometimes ask me what I think of the world today – as if 10,000 published Thoughts do not provide sufficient enlightenment on that subject. But let me not shrink from an honest answer. In world affairs. I am an optimist. Despite attention-grabbing headlines about the latest shocking incidents, and worrisome developments resulting from the fact that nationalism is still trumping internationalism, I believe that overall the people being born today, in whatever countries and circumstances, have a better chance than ever before of living worthwhile lives. At nearly 84, I'm sorry science hasn't yet invalidated the concept of mortality – but that, I'm sure, is coming. And, in the meantime, as inhabitants of this small planet, perhaps with most of our worst times behind us, I'm confident that we can, in general, find much to be thankful for.”

Ashleigh Brilliant (1933) American author and cartoonist

From his Brilliant News email messages to subscribers, Tuesday, November 21 20017

People , World , Confidence , Thinking

“In February 1917, it was found that a static solution with a positive curvature—the solution A—was not possible without the λ. In fact the curvature is proportional to λ (in solution A, λ is equal to the curvature; in B… it is three times the curvature). Thus, at the time when we had only the two static solutions A and B, and thought that these were the only possible ones, here was a plausible physical interpretation of the meaning of λ: it was the curvature of the world, and the square root of its reciprocal, the radius of curvature, could be conceived as providing a natural unit of length.”

Willem de Sitter (1872–1934) Dutch cosmologist

Kosmos (1932), Above is Beginning Quote of the Last Chapter: Relativity and Modern Theories of the Universe -->

World , Nature , Time

“Psychoanalysis provides truth in an infantile, that is, a schoolboy fashion: we learn from it, roughly and hurriedly, things that scandalize us and thereby command our attention. It sometimes happens, and such is the case here, that a simplification touching upon the truth, but cheaply, is of no more value than a lie. Once again we are shown the demon and the angel, the beast and the god locked in Manichean embrace, and once again man has been pronounced, by himself, not culpable.”

Stanisław Lem book His Master's Voice

Preface
His Master's Voice (1968)

God , Truth , Lie , Angels

“We receive data through five portals, five windows; the house of human consciousness has but five windows. Do you imagine that we will ever perceive all through these five windows? Do you imagine that that which is most important can ever be seen? How do you describe the most important things that have ever happened to you? The moment you knew you loved her: Can you reassemble that magnetic pull with the Lego of light and language? The moment you heard he’d died—can you define it, calcify it, crystallize it, make it live again, or is it at best a kind of taxidermy that language can provide? A stuffed dead effigy with cold unseeing eyes. And Jupiter revolves. And the moon watches, the moon you saw as a child, the moon that hung in the sky when Christ was crucified, the crescent moon, like a tear in heaven as the Prophet heard Allah.”

Russell Brand book Revolution

Revolution (2014)

Love , Imagination , Tear , Light

“• Realignment of P2.915 billion in the budget of the Department of Social Welfare and Development, specifically from the Pantawid Pamilya Pilipino Program and the KALAHI-CIDSS projects to Social Pension for Indigent Senior Citizens which will benefit 460,647 senior citizens at a total cost of P2.770 billion in line with R. A. No. 9994 or the Expanded Senior Citizens Act of 2010. Additional funding of P20 million will also be provided for the Comprehensive Project for Street Children, Street Families and Indigent Peoples-especially Badjaos, as well as an additional P95 million for Protective Services for Individuals and Families in Difficult Circumstances.”

Francis Escudero (1969) Filipino politician

2014, Speech: Sponsorship Speech for the FY 2015 National Budget

Children , People , Family

“Foremost is the principle that the purpose of consumer research is to understand the customer's needs and wishes, and thus design product and service that will provide better living for him in the future. A second principle is that no one can guess the future loss of business from a dissatisfied customer…”

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

Source: Out Of The Crisis (1982), p. 175

Understanding , Business , Loss , Future

“About the twenty-third year of my age, I had many fresh and heavenly openings, in respect to the care and providence of the Almighty over his creatures in general, and over man as the most noble amongst those which are visible”

John Woolman (1720–1772) American Quaker preacher

Source: The Journal of John Woolman (1774), p. 10

Age

“They attacked the astronomers as though they were criminals—the geologists as though they were assassins. They regarded physicians as the enemies of God—as men who were trying to defeat the decrees of Providence. The biologists, the anthropologists, the archaeologists, the readers of ancient inscriptions, the delvers in buried cities, were all hated by the theologians. They were afraid that these men might find something inconsistent with the Bible.”

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

The Truth (1896)

Men , God , Hate

“Psychiatrist R. D. Laing, among others, has said that the growing incidence of mental illness these days may be explained in part by the fact that the world we call real and which we ask people to live within and understand is itself open to question. The environment we live in is no longer connected to the mix of planetary processes which brought us all into being. It is solely the product of human mental processes. It is real, but only in the way that a theatrical play or a fun house is real. Our artificial environment is there and we can experience it, yet it has been created on purpose by other humans. It is an interpretation of reality; it no longer reveals how nature works and it cannot provide much useful information to human beings who seek to see their own lives as part of some wider natural process. We are left with no frame of reference untouched by human interpretation.”

Jerry Mander (1936) American activist

Source: Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television (1978), p. 87

People , World , Way , Understanding

“In fact, the whole idea of illusion seems to make sense only if we accept the reality of the illusory experience as an experience and question only what it seems to be telling us about the outside world. Optical illusions do really hapen. What they can’t do is provide accurate measurements of the outside world. The idea of having, so to speak, two successive layers of illusion here is unworkable.”

Mary Midgley (1919–2018) British philosopher and ethicist

Are You an Illusion (2014). 27.

World , Idea , Question , Reality

“Like, there's these new fundamentalist religious fanatics, some name like Meek Militant Action. Their aim's to inherit the Earth, provided nobody objects.”

Tom Holt book Paint Your Dragon

c. 12
Paint Your Dragon (1996)

“Tracking the individual learning curves of the major technologies that comprise the infrastructure of information technology provides a more detailed account of the present and future state-of-the art of the technologies underlying convergence. The base technologies of digital electronics, general-purpose computer architectures, software and interaction are mature and provide solid foundations for computer science. The upper technologies of knowledge representation and acquisition, autonomy and sociality, support product innovation and provide the beginnings of foundations for knowledge science. Well's dream of a world brain making available all of human knowledge is well on its way to realization and it is in the representation, acquisition, and access and effective application of that knowledge that the commercial potential and socio-economic impact of convergence lies.”

Brian R. Gaines (1938) British computer scientist

Last paragraph
Convergence to the Information Highway (1996)

World , Dreams , Art , Way

“When his companions wished to return to their country, and asked him what message he wished them to carry home, he bade them say this: that children ought to be provided with property and resources of a kind that could swim with them even out of a shipwreck.”

Vitruvius book De architectura

Introduction, Sec. 1
De architectura (The Ten Books On Architecture) (~ 15BC), Book VI

Children , Home , Country

“If (Mainland) China's dream is a dream of democracy, Taiwan will provide all needed assistance in the process of realizing that dream.”

Tsai Ing-wen (1956) President of the Republic of China

Liu Xiaobo's dream should be China's dream: Taiwan's Tsai, Focus Taiwan, 1, July 13, 2017, 14 July 2017 http://focustaiwan.tw/news/acs/201707130028.aspx,

Dreams , Democracy

“The explanation of this book is that the 1929 depression was so wide, so deep, and so long because the international economic system was rendered unstable by British inability and U. S. unwillingness to assume responsibility for stabilizing it by discharging five functions:(1) maintaining a relatively open market for distress goods;
(2) providing countercyclical, or at least stable, long term lending;
(3) policing a relatively stable system of exchange rates;
(4) ensuring the coordination of macroeconomic policies;
(5) acting as a lender of last resort by discounting or otherwise providing liquidity in financial crisis.”

Charles P. Kindleberger (1910–2003) American economic historian

The World in Depression, 1929-1939 (2nd ed., 1986), Ch. 14 : An Explanation of the 1929 Depression

Books

“Devolutionary reform will not provide a factory, a machine or jobs, build a school, train a doctor or put a pound on pensions.”

Neil Kinnock (1942) British politician

South Wales Echo (November 1, 1975).

School , Training

“…Jung even asserted that he would have no objection to regarding the psyche as a quality of matter and matter as a concrete aspect of the psyche, provided that the psyche was understood to be the collective unconscious.”

Marie-Louise von Franz (1915–1998) Swiss psychologist and scholar

Source: Psyche and Matter (1992), p. 40

“The current cosmological paradigm, the cold dark matter model with a cosmological constant, requires that the mass-energy of the Universe be dominated by invisible components: dark matter and dark energy. An alternative to these dark components is that the law of gravity be modified on the relevant scales. A test of these ideas is provided by the baryonic Tully-Fisher relation (BTFR), an empirical relation between the observed mass of a galaxy and its rotation velocity. Here, I report a test using gas rich galaxies for which both axes of the BTFR can be measured independently of the theories being tested and without the systematic uncertainty in stellar mass that affects the same test with star dominated spirals. The data fall precisely where predicted a priori by the modified Newtonian dynamics.”

Stacy McGaugh Novel Test of Modified Newtonian Dynamics with Gas Rich Galaxies

[21 March 2011, Novel test of modified Newtonian dynamics with gas rich galaxies, Physical Review Letters, 106, 12, 121303, 10.1103/PhysRevLett.106.121303]

Law , Star , Idea , Universe

“From the representation of both the Commissary-General and the Foragemaster-General, I find your Excellency will be obliged to quarter the troops in New Jersey. The great consumption of forage, that has taken place in this State for five months past, will render it very difficult to provide for this garrison, and the different posts of communication.”

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

Letter to George Washington (November 1779)

Communication , Past

“The term “information science” first appeared in the guise of “information scientist”. Particularly in industry during recent decades, some qualified scientists moved out of research, development of production into a new occupational role, that of providing an active information service to their colleagues. They regarded themselves as “information” scientists rather than “research” scientists. As this kind of work expanded and became formalized the need was seen to provide training for those who would enter the occupation. In time, the content of this training came to be called 'information science'.”

Brian Campbell Vickery (1918–2009) British information theorist

Source: Information Science in Theory and Practice (1987), p. 9-11.

Appearance , Science , Time , Training

“To my delight, Federico had seen Dans la ville blanche (1983) by Swiss director Alain Tanner. Enthusiastic about Bruno Ganz’s performance, he also was impressed by the film’s startling visual poetry of Lisbon achieved by transferring inferior film stock onto 35mm. It was exactly this kind of uncomplicated technical innovation that inspired Federico during the writing of Attore. Conceived in 1992, Attore focused on the craft and the psychology of actors. Having completed a film treatment with roles for Mastroianni, Giulietta Masina, and Paolo Villagio, Fellini was now wondering if he should provide Marcello with a home movie camera to be used in a loosely Shakespearian sense that all the world’s a film set. The 8mm footage of intimate memories of the theatre from his Rimini childhood would then be transferred to 35mm – a most intriguing idea that would have been a new departure for the Maestro had he lived to bring it to the screen.”

Damian Pettigrew Canadian filmmaker

On Fellini’s last film project, Attore
Federico Fellini: Sou um Grande Mentiroso (2008)

World , Home , Idea , Departure

“The saints are like the stars, who, in His providence, Christ hides under a seal, lest they appear whenever they wish. Instead, they are always ready to disembark from the quiet of contemplation into the works of mercy at the time decided upon by God, whenever their heart should hear the word of command.”
Stellae sunt sancti, quos Christus sub signaculo suae providentiae claudit, ne appareant quando velint, semper parati ad tempus a Deo statutum, ut, cum audierint aure cordis vocem iubentis, a secreto contemplationis egrediantur ad opera necessitatis.

Anthony of Padua (1195–1231) Franciscan

Sermon for the Fifth Sunday after Easter (Part III: De Christi omnium scientia, par. 10)
Sermons

God , Star , Appearance , Time

“Those who want the country to have a strong and sure defence can't rely on the Labour Party, the SDP or the Liberals. They can rely on us. By the end of this century it is predicted that several more countries will have acquired nuclear weapons. Labour wants Britain to give them up. At the very time when any sensible person would be renewing his insurance cover, Labour wants to cancel Britain's policy altogether. Moreover, they want to get rid of American bases from Britain and all nuclear weapons from British soil. Does anyone who has witnessed Mr. Gorbachev's performance thinks that he respects weakness? No. Mr. President, it is recognition of the West's strength and cohesion that has brought the Soviet Union back to the negotiating table. Our wish is to see substantial reductions in nuclear weapons, provided they are balanced and verifiable. I know that will be President Reagan's objective at his meeting with Mr Gorbachev, and he has our full support and good wishes as he goes to Geneva. The West could not have a better or a braver champion.”

Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013) British stateswoman and politician

Speech to Conservative Party Conference (11 October 1985) http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/106145
Second term as Prime Minister

Support , Thinking , Strong , Time

“When we are about to set forth on a path hitherto untried and likely to lead our lives in a new direction, it appears eminently desirable and proper that we should, in the first place, briefly review the public and private life of the day, in order to determine whether the essential elements that make up the happiness of states and individuals are all duly provided, and if not, where the need lies and how it can best be supplied.”

Felix Adler (1851–1933) German American professor of political and social ethics, rationalist, and lecturer

Founding Address (1876)

Life , Appearance , Happiness

“Black men, Indian men, and gay men have all have something in common: They do not provide an economic security blanket for women.”

Warren Farrell book The Myth of Male Power

Source: The Myth of Male Power (1993), Part II: The Glass Cellars of the disposable sex, p. 206.

Women , Men

“The fact that nobody asks you to sing is not an indication that you should sing louder. This sounds obvious until it's applied to matters like mass transportation. There are virtually no private mass transit companies. This does not represent the failure of the market to provide a needed service, it represents the failure of an unneeded service to go away!”

L. Neil Smith (1946) American writer

"Some New Tactical Reflections".

Failure , Singing

“The goal of providing basic literacy and education to all the world’s people is still the most basic development challenge.”

Talal Abu-Ghazaleh (1938) Jordanian businesspeople

October 14, 2003, at the World Congress –Engineering and Digital Divide, Tunisia.

People , World , Education

“Our civilization has essentially globalized only the surfaces of our lives. But our inner self continues to have a life of its own. And the fewer answers the era of rational knowledge provides to the basic questions of human Being, the more deeply it would seem that people, behind its back as it were, cling to the ancient certainties of their tribe. Because of this, individual cultures, increasingly lumped together by contemporary civilization, are realizing with new urgency their own inner autonomy and the inner differences of others.”

Václav Havel (1936–2011) playwright, essayist, poet, dissident and 1st President of the Czech Republic

The Need for Transcendence in the Postmodern World (1994)

Life , People , Question , Knowledge

“How is it possible for me to thank God in my heart for the food he gives me and for life, while every morsel I eat I earn with my toil and even suffering? There may be a Providence for the rich man, but every poor man must be his own Providence. As for the value of life, we poor folks don’t live for ourselves at all; we live for other people. I often wonder if the rich man who owns great blocks of stock in the road and reckons his wealth in the millions does not sometimes think, as he sits at his well-filled table and looks at the happy faces of his children, of the poor car driver who toils for his benefit for a dollar and ninety cents a day, and is lucky if he tastes meat twice a week and can give the little ones at home warm clothes and blankets for the winter.”

Jack Finney book Time and Again

Source: Time and Again (1970), Chapter 17 (p. 252)

Life , God , Children , People

“Encapsulation is the key to increasing the value of such software metrics as reusability, refinability, testability, maintainability, and extensibility. Object-oriented languages provide a number of mechanisms for improving encapsulation, but it is during the design phase that the greatest leverage can be realized.
The data-driven approach to object-oriented design focuses on the structure of the data in a system. This results in the incorporation of structural information in the definitions of classes. Doing so violates encapsulation.
The responsibility-driven approach emphasizes the encapsulation of both the structure and behavior of objects. By focusing on the contractual responsibilities of a class, the designer is able to postpone implementation considerations until the implementation phase.
While responsibility-driven design is not the only technique addressing this problem, most other techniques attempt to enforce encapsulation during the implementation phase. This is too late in the software life-cycle to achieve maximum benefits.”

Rebecca Wirfs-Brock (1953) American software engineer

Source: Object-oriented design: a responsibility-driven approach (1989), p. 75: Conclusion

Life , Behavior , Problem

“It is impossible to over-emphasize the importance of al-Jazari's work in the history of engineering. Until modern times there is no other document from any cultural area that provides a comparable wealth of instructions for the design, manufacture and assembly of machines… Al-Jazari did not only assimilate the techniques of his non-Arab and Arab predecessors, he was also creative. He added several mechanical and hydraulic devices. The impact of these inventions can be seen in the later designing of steam engines and internal combustion engines, paving the way for automatic control and other modern machinery. The impact of al-Jazari's inventions is still felt in modern contemporary mechanical engineering [2].”

Donald Hill (1922–1994) British historian and engineer

Donald Hill, Studies in Medieval Islamic Technology,; as cited in: Salim Al-Hassani. " 800 Years Later: In Memory of Al-Jazari, A Genius Mechanical Engineer http://muslimheritage.com/article/800-years-later-memory-al-jazari-genius-mechanical-engineer," at muslimheritage.com, 2015.

Way , History , Time , Wealth

“A framework as it applies to enterprises is simply a logical structure for classifying and organising the descriptive representations of an enterprise that are significant to the management of the enterprise as well as to the development of the enterprise's system [with the aim of] rationalising the carious concepts and specifications in order to provide for clarity of professional communication, to allow for improving and integrating development methodologies and tools, and to establish credibility and confidence in the investment of systems resources.”

John Zachman (1934) American computer scientist

Zachman cited in: Egon Berghout and Dan Remenyi, Egon Berghout (2003) Proceedings of the 10th European Conference on Information Technology Evaluation - 2003. p. 503
In this quote the "framework" refers to the Zachman Framework

Confidence , Communication

“We will make yogurt with all kinds of nutritious elements. We want to provide nutrition to the poor and children.”

Muhammad Yunus (1940) Bangladeshi banker, economist and Nobel Peace Prize recipient

The Daily Star (14 October 2006)

Children

“I then went on to suggest that we make a serious effort to gauge the demand over the next five to ten years, and make plans to meet that demand. In building new facilities, I suggested that we "use corporation funds for such new plants needed for armament if that gives us better control over same from the long term position in relation to the master plan." Accelerated depreciation made the use of corporate funds all the more feasible, and relieved the government of the necessity of providing capital for the plants.”

Alfred P. Sloan (1875–1966) American businessman

Source: My Years with General Motors, 1963, p. 387 (1964 edition)

Gauge , Effort

“Schumann’s Kreisleriana: No other cycle among Schumann’s great works so perfectly expresses the sensation of dark nocturnal things, of chaos, lurking in the background. The last piece of this collection shows this particularly well. Like skeletons on horseback, shadowy figures flit before us in a soft, sustained rhythm; in the middle section horn-calls enliven the scene with visions of knightly strength and nobility, but at the end the figures vanish ghost - like into night and mystery. Looking into the first volume of Schumann’s diaries we find ‘Midnight Piece,’ a prose passage which provides moving, indeed alarming evidence of his perilously depressive mental state. It contains elements of a highly personal kind which memorably convey the particular quality of his imagination, mortally cold and never far from visions of death. It could have served perfectly as a model for the final, disturbing piece in the Kreisleriana set.”

Burkard Schliessmann classical pianist

Talkings about Chopin and Schumann

Death , Imagination , Personality , Night

“Theologians who drink too deeply of the cup of social disenchantment risk constructing a paper church of their own imagination. Theory, in other words, is not enough to provide an escape from the unfettered and corrosive relativism of the market. Submission to Rome is the only ecclesial reality with enough authority.”

Stephen H. Webb (1961–2016) American theologian

"Who has the Authority to Write Theology?"

Imagination , Drink , Reality

“Management is the activity which plans, organizes, and controls the operations of the basic elements of men, materials, machines, methods, money, and markets, providing direction and coordination, and giving leadership to human efforts, so as to achieve the thought objectives of the enterprise.”

George R. Terry (1909–1979)

As cited in Wren & Bedeian (1972;411)
Principles of Management, 1960

Men , Money , Effort

“In the European Union of today, the obligation to provide international leadership rests on all nations - large and small.”

Alex Salmond (1954) Scottish National Party politician and former First Minister of Scotland

Scottish Government's relationship with Europe (July 11, 2007)

“As we go further into humanity's past and study its great spiritual cultures, the need for Vedanta becomes still greater. There is no other way of understanding them except through a living culture which is also as ancient as they. Take Egypt, for example. We have happily found plenty of texts bearing on its religion, but the oral traditions through which its spiritual knowledge was transmitted was lost. Therefore, bare texts do not make a meaning as literalists have found. To understand them, "it is necessary that we tum to the Vedanta … because the Upanishads provide the purest metaphysics available to us from the primordial past," as Arthur Versluis, the author of The Egyptian Mysteries, says. He himself followed this method and he found that the study of Vedanta "in-fills" Egyptian studies. His labour resulted in an illuminating study of Egypt's ancient religious tradition.”

Ram Swarup (1920–1998) Indian historian

Hindu View of Christianity and Islam (1992)

Religion , Way , Understanding , Knowledge

“In the fall, acorns, filberts, and hickory nuts are gathered by wildlife as winter stores. Field and pack rats bring in smaller seed such as wild rice from the marshes. If storages are provided, these foragers will fill hollow pipes or logs, or smaller pipes, old vehicle engine manifolds, and nest boxes or wall cavities. Seed so collected is sound, clean, and neatly stored. Providing some 15% is left, and given over to winter food for these workers, 85% can be collected for human use. A few people regularly collect their hickory nuts or wild rice in this way, by providing dens for squirrels or pack rats. It is a question of cooperation and provision for others, instead of attempting to kill off the experts and do the job yourself.”

Bill Mollison (1928–2016) Australian permaculturist

Source: Permaculture: A Designers' Manual (1988), chapter 12.15

People , Food , Way , Question

“Second, I use inference from technical studies and theories in order to provide practical information for therapists. Those thoughts are several steps removed from scientific validity.”

Virgil Miller Newton (1938) American priest

Miller Newton (1995). Adolescence: Guiding Youth Through the Perilous Ordeal. W.W. Norton and Company, NY, NY, pg 7.
Treatment Approach

Study

“While our country remains untainted with the principles and manners which are now producing desolation in so many parts of the world; while she continues sincere, and incapable of insidious and impious policy, we shall have the strongest reason to rejoice in the local destination assigned us by Providence. But should the people of America once become capable of that deep simulation towards one another, and towards foreign nations, which assumes the language of justice and moderation, while it is practising iniquity and extravagance, and displays in the most captivating manner the charming pictures of candour, frankness, and sincerity, while it is rioting in rapine and insolence, this country will be the most miserable habitation in the world. Because we have no government, armed with power, capable of contending with human passions, unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge and licentiousness would break the strongest cords of our Constitution, as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other. Oaths in this country are as yet universally considered as sacred obligations. That which you have taken, and so solemnly repeated on that venerable ground, is an ample pledge of your sincerity and devotion to your country and its government.”

John Adams (1735–1826) 2nd President of the United States

Letter to the Officers of the First Brigade of the Third Division of the Militia of Massachusetts, 11 October 1798, in Revolutionary Services and Civil Life of General William Hull http://books.google.com/books?id=E2kFAAAAQAAJ&dq=editions%3AVsZcW99fWPgC&pg=PA265#v=onepage&q&f=false (New York, 1848), pp 265-6. There are some differences in the version that appeared in The Works of John Adams (Boston, 1854), vol. 9, pp. 228-9 http://books.google.com/books?id=PZYKAQAAIAAJ&pg=PA228#v=onepage&q&f=false, most notably the words "or gallantry" instead of "and licentiousness".
1790s

People , World , Religion , Justice

“The wicked do not fear God from any unwillingness to offend him, provided they could do so with impunity. … But believers, as has been said, dread the offense even more than the punishment.”

John Calvin book Institutes of the Christian Religion

Book 3, Chapter 2, Section 27, p. 480
Institutes of the Christian Religion (1536; 1559)

God , Fear

“Formulating consists of determining the system inputs, outputs, requirements, objectives, constraints. Structuring the system provides one or more methods of organizing the solution, the method of operation, the selection of parts, and the nature of their performance requirements. It is evident that the processes of formulating a system and structuring it are strongly related.”

Harold Chestnut (1917–2001) American engineer

Source: Systems Engineering Tools, (1965), Systems Engineering Methods (1967), p. 70

Nature , Parting

“In all this, I have made no mention of punched cards and all the other hardware. The CRG would have been hard put to it to ignore this, even if it had wanted to, which it does not. We believe, however, that there will, in the foreseeable future, remain a need for classification to provide research workers with the opportunity for browsing and for imposing some discipline on a literature that tends always towards greater disorder. We believe that, since hundreds of millions of dollars and rubles are being spent on hardware, and fat volumes roll off the presses almost day and night, that ten shillings a year that the CRG collects from its members will not be missed.”

Douglas John Foskett (1918–2004)

Source: The Classification Research Group 1952—1962 (1962), p. 137

Literature , Future , Night

“An opportunity for cybernetics to change the course of the philosophy of mind was missed when intentionality was misinterpreted as "the providing of coded knowledge."”

Igor Aleksander (1937) scientist

Aleksander (2001) in: New scientist. Vol. 169. p.56 cited in: Jacques Vallée (2003) The Heart of the Internet. p.8

Knowledge , Change

“Actually, a kind of state socialism seemed to be gaining more and more ground, furthered by many of the [Nazi] party functionaries. They had already managed to have all plants owned by the state distributed among the various party districts and subordinated to their own district enterprises… Our very system of industrial direction in the interests of war production could easily become the framework for a state-socialist economic order. The result was that our organization, the more efficient it became, was itself providing the party leaders with the instruments for the doom of private enterprise.”

Albert Speer (1905–1981) German architect, Minister of Armaments and War Production for Nazi Germany

Source: Inside the Third Reich: Memoirs (1970), p. 359

War

“Liberals have developed a utopian vision of how nature should behave. It must remain in perfect balance. To that end, they'll exterminate harmless critters that violate the liberal idea of Order; of species correctness. For example, when a delightful flock of gentle conure parrots made San Francisco's Telegraph Hill its home, radical environmentalists demanded the flock be exterminated because it wasn't indigenous. While animals may not migrate illegally, or disrupt the preordained 'natural' order—liberal central planners encourage non-indigenous peoples to mess with the social habitat of historic, host populations. Provided they're Caucasian.”

Ilana Mercer South African writer

"Is Diversity Driving A Decline in White Population?" http://www.wnd.com/2018/04/the-decline-of-u-s-whites-and-not-just-in-number/ WND, April 19, 2018
2010s, 2018

People , Home , Idea , Nature

“Someone has said that world history must from time to time be rewritten. When has there been an epoch that made this as necessary as does the present one? You provided a superb example of how it should be done. The hatred of the Romans for the victor, even when he was kindly, presumption upon outmoded privileges, the desire for a different state of affairs without having anything better in view, irrational hopes, haphazard undertakings, alliances with no prospect of benefit, and whatever else is the unhappy retinue of such times—you have described all that magnificently, proving to us that such things really happened in those days.”

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) German writer, artist, and politician

As quoted by Karl Löwith, From Hegel to Nietzsche: The Revolution in Nineteenth Century Thought (1991) from a letter referring to Sartorius' historical study of the rule of the Ostragoths in Italy

World , Hope , History , Time

“Certain truths about human beings have never changed. We are tribal creatures in our very DNA; we have an instinctive preference for our own over others, for “in-groups” over “out-groups”; for hunter-gatherers, recognizing strangers as threats was a matter of life and death. We also invent myths and stories to give meaning to our common lives. Among those myths is the nation — stretching from the past into the future, providing meaning to our common lives in a way nothing else can. Strip those narratives away, or transform them too quickly, and humans will become disoriented. Most of us respond to radical changes in our lives, especially changes we haven’t chosen, with more fear than hope. We can numb the pain with legal cannabis or opioids, but it is pain nonetheless.
If we ignore these deeper facts about ourselves, we run the risk of fatal errors. It’s vital to remember that multicultural, multiracial, post-national societies are extremely new for the human species, and keeping them viable and stable is a massive challenge.”

Andrew Sullivan (1963) Journalist, writer, blogger

The Reactionary Temptation (2017)

Life , Death , Pain , Truth

“Socialism is the legitimate and inevitable corollary of Mr. Bright's doctrine. If want is the crime of the Government, then the duty of the Government must be to provide against want. This is Socialism pure and simple. It begins with national workshops, and ends with what Mr. Carlyle calls a "whiff of grapeshot." Mr. Bright may pretend to direct his attacks against the aristocracy alone, but it is the possessors of capital, the employers of labour, the great middle class of this country who have real cause to dread his revolutionary language.”

William Harcourt (1827–1904) British politician

William Harcourt, ‘Pot and Kettle’, Saturday Review (21 March, 1857).
A. G. Gardiner, The Life of Sir William Harcourt. Volume I (1827-1886) (London: Constable, 1923), p. 90.

Country

“Much of the skill of the true mathematical physicist and of the mathematical astronomer consists in the power of adapting methods and results carried out on an exact mathematical basis to obtain approximations sufficient for the purposes of physical measurements. It might perhaps be thought that a scheme of Mathematics on a frankly approximative basis would be sufficient for all the practical purposes of application in Physics, Engineering Science, and Astronomy, and no doubt it would be possible to develop, to some extent at least, a species of Mathematics on these lines. Such a system would, however, involve an intolerable awkwardness and prolixity in the statements of results, especially in view of the fact that the degree of approximation necessary for various purposes is very different, and thus that unassigned grades of approximation would have to be provided for. Moreover, the mathematician working on these lines would be cut off from the chief sources of inspiration, the ideals of exactitude and logical rigour, as well as from one of his most indispensable guides to discovery, symmetry, and permanence of mathematical form. The history of the actual movements of mathematical thought through the centuries shows that these ideals are the very life-blood of the science, and warrants the conclusion that a constant striving toward their attainment is an absolutely essential condition of vigorous growth. These ideals have their roots in irresistible impulses and deep-seated needs of the human mind, manifested in its efforts to introduce intelligibility in certain great domains of the world of thought.”

E. W. Hobson (1856–1933) British mathematician

Source: Presidential Address British Association for the Advancement of Science, Section A (1910), pp. 285-286; Cited in: Moritz (1914, 229): Mathematics and Science.

Life , World , History , Intelligence

“Some philosophers have believed that a philosophical clarification of space also provided a solution of the problem of time. Kant presented space and time as analogous forms of visualization and treated them in a common chapter in his major epistemological work. Time therefore seems to be much less problematic since it has none of the difficulties resulting from multidimensionality. Time does not have the problem of mirror-image congruence, i. e., the problem of equal and similarly shaped figures that cannot be superimposed, a problem that has played some role in Kant's philosophy. Furthermore, time has no problem analogous to non-Euclidean geometry. In a one-dimensional schema it is impossible to distinguish between straightness and curvature. …A line may have external curvature but never an internal one, since this possibility exists only for a two-dimensional or higher continuum. Thus time lacks, because of its one-dimensionality, all those problems which have led to philosophical analysis of the problems of space.”

Hans Reichenbach (1891–1953) American philosopher

The Philosophy of Space and Time (1928, tr. 1957)

Problem , Time

“#The availability of high-quality Model Compilers and Virtual Execution Environments (VEEs) that provide "out of the box" platforms upon which Executable UML models can execute. These VEEs, which exist today in a somewhat incipient stage, will someday soon reduce low-level system architectures to near-commodity status.”

Grady Booch (1955) American software engineer

Cited in: Gerry Boyd (2003) " Executable UML: Diagrams for the Future http://www.devx.com/enterprise/Article/10717." published at devx.com, February 5, 2003.
The Limits of Software

Box

“These early [Windows Phone sales] reports don't provide any credible figures. But even if sales are as bad as all get-out, you're forgetting one thing: It almost doesn't matter, because Microsoft is in this for the long haul. They're going to continue pushing this system ahead, and pushing it to developers and users.”

Paul Thurrott (1966) American podcaster, author, and blogger

About those Windows Phone Chicken Little stories... http://windowsphonesecrets.com/2010/11/29/about-those-windows-phone-chicken-little-stories in Windows Phone Secrets (29 November 2010)

Forgetting

“The theory that Divine Providence does not extend to man, and that there is no difference between man and other animals, implies very bad notions about God; it disturbs all social order, removes and destroys all the moral and intellectual virtues of man.”

Maimónides book The Guide for the Perplexed

Source: Guide for the Perplexed (c. 1190), Part III, Ch.17

God , Animals

“Today, organizations are competing in complex environments so that an accurate understanding of their goals and the methods for attaining those goals is vital. The Balanced Scorecard translates an organization’s mission and strategy into a comprehensive set of performance measures that provides the framework for a strategic measurement and management system.”

David P. Norton (1941) American business theorist, business executive and management consultant

Source: The Balanced Scorecard, 1996, p. 2

Understanding

“From the day the President announced my nomination as the Attorney General of the United States three months ago, I have thought often about how to best prepare to meet the awesome responsibilities of this office. Outside these walls, the cries of those powerless souls who are injured, disenfranchised or otherwise aggrieved may indeed be faint. But those same pleas for help echo powerfully within the Department of Justice. Every day, like a steady drumbeat we are asked to provide an answer to a problem, to secure a remedy, to be a champion — and every day this Department responds as it has done so time and time again throughout the history of our beloved America.”

Alberto Gonzales (1955) 80th United States Attorney General

Remarks at his installation as Attorney General http://www.usdoj.gov/ag/speeches/2005/02142005_aggonzales.htm (February 14, 2005).

Justice , Soul , History , Problem

“As I understand the various opinions today: One Justice holds that two-parent notification is unconstitutional (at least in present circumstances) without judicial bypass, but constitutional with bypass […]; four Justices would hold that two-parent notification is constitutional with or without bypass […]; four Justices would hold that two-parent notification is unconstitutional with or without bypass, though the four apply two different standards […]; six Justices hold that one-parent notification with bypass is constitutional, though for two different sets of reasons […]; and three Justices would hold that one-parent notification with bypass is unconstitutional […]. One will search in vain the document we are supposed to be construing for text that provides the basis for the argument over these distinctions and will find in our society’s tradition regarding abortion no hint that the distinctions are constitutionally relevant, much less any indication how a constitutional argument about them ought to be resolved. The random and unpredictable results of our consequently unchanneled individual views make it increasingly evident, Term after Term, that the tools for this job are not to be found in the lawyer’s – and hence not in the judges – workbox. I continue to dissent from this enterprise of devising an Abortion Code, and from the illusion that we have authority to do so.”

Antonin Scalia (1936–2016) former Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

On whether a state law may require notification of both parents before a minor can obtain an abortion; Hodgson v. Minnesota (1990, concurring in the judgment and dissenting in part), 497 U.S. 417 http://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-supreme-court/497/417.html, No. 88-605 ; decided June 25, 1990
1990s

Justice , Search , Understanding , Parent

“Light in nature creates movement in color. The movement is provided by the relationships of uneven measures, of colors contrasts among themselves and constitutes Reality [In this quote Delaunay is referring to his series 'Window'-paintings', which he had started in 1912].”

Robert Delaunay (1885–1941) French painter

Quote in: 'Nous irons jusqu'au soleil', Delaunay; as cited in 'Futurism', ed. By Didier Ottinger; Centre Pompidou / 5 Continents Editions, Milan, 2008, p. 217
1915 - 1941

Color , Quotes , Nature , Reality

“To date, most research on information technology (IT) outsourcing concludes that firms decide to outsource IT services because they believe that outside vendors possess production cost advantages. Yet it is not clear whether vendors can provide production”

Jeanne W. Ross (1958) American computer scientist

Natalia Levina and Jeanne W. Ross (2003) "From the vendor's perspective: exploring the value proposition in information technology outsourcing." MIS quarterly p. 331

“[I]n the system of Copernicus there are found many and great inconveniences; for both the loading of the earth with triple motion is very incommodious, and the separation of the sun from the company of the planets, with which it has so many passions in common, is likewise a difficulty, and the introduction of so much immobility into nature, by representing the sun and stars as immovable, especially being of all bodies the highest and most radiant, and making the moon revolve about the earth in an epicycle, and some other assumptions of his, are the speculations of one who cares not what fictions he introduces into nature, provided his calculations answer. But if it be granted that the earth moves, it would seem more natural to suppose that there is no system at all, but scattered globes… than to constitute a system of which the sun is the centre. And this the consent of ages and of antiquity has rather embraced and approved. For the opinion concerning the motion of the earth is not new, but revived from the ancients… whereas the opinion that the sun is the centre of the world and immovable is altogether new… and was first introduced by Copernicus. …But if the earth moves, the stars may either be stationary, as Copernicus thought or, as it is far more probable, and has been suggested by Gilbert, they may revolve each round its own centre in its own place, without any motion of its centre, as the earth itself does… But either way, there is no reason why there should not be stars above stars til they go beyond our sight.”

Francis Bacon (1561–1626) English philosopher, statesman, scientist, jurist, and author

Descriptio Globi Intellectualis (1653, written ca. 1612) Ch. 6, as quoted in "Description of the Intellectual Globe," The Works of Francis Bacon (1889) pp. 517-518, https://books.google.com/books?id=lsILAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA517 Vol. 4, ed. James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis, Douglas Denon Heath.

Age , World , Way , Star

“I was one who supported giving President Bush the authority, if necessary, to use force against Saddam Hussein. I believe that that was the right vote. I have had many disputes and disagreements with the administration over how that authority has been used, but I stand by the vote to provide the authority because I think it was a necessary step in order to maximize the outcome that did occur in the Security Council with the unanimous vote to send in inspectors.”

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

Council on Foreign Relations (15 December 2003) http://www.cfr.org/publication.html?id=6600 ( video http://www.ablogistan.com/archives/2008/01/people_died_cli.html)
Senate years (2001 – January 19, 2007)

Support , Thinking

“Recognition that art was located in an interactive system rather than residing in a material object… provid[ed] a discipline as central to an art of interactivity as anatomy and perspective had been to the renaissance vision.”

Roy Ascott (1934) British academic

“Interactive Art,” unpublished manuscript, 1994, p. 3; as cited in: Edward A. Shanken. " Cybernetics and Art: Cultural Convergence in the 1960s http://www.responsivelandscapes.com/readings/CyberneticsArtCultConv.pdf." 2002

Art

“What we demand from the Soviet architect is that, as an artist and because of his perceptive intellect, he will fully comprehend and amplify the faintest ripple of developing energies much sooner than the masses — who tend to be shortsighted as far as their own growth is concerned — and that he will transform this energy into tangible architectural form... The club's role is to become a University of Culture. If one accepts the premise that private dwellings should strive to operate on the basis of the greatest possible austerity, then by contrast, public dwellings should provide the maximum of available luxury accessible to all. The term 'reconstruction' is therefore not applicable to this case, since there is no building precedent in the past.”

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

Quote from: 'The Club as a social force'
1926 - 1941, Rußland: Die Rekonstruktion der Architektur in der Sowjetunion' (1929)

Universe , Past

“In a fundamental sense, Alchian's theory of economic organizations is different from those of Coase or Simon. He disavows an explicit model of individual choice… and… offers a system-level explanation of organizational emergence, structure, and survival that is largely independent of decision making at the micro level… Yet it is precisely this independence of a distinct model of choice that ultimately renders it compatible with the individualistic theories of both Coase and Simon….
Whether individuals optimize under uncertainty or satisfice under the more limiting conditions of bounded rationality…, Alchian's logic of natural selection, when grafted onto either approach, provides a powerful means of deriving and integrating expectations about individuals, organizations and systems. The result in either case is an approach that gains in scope and coherence, and that does so by remaining true to its underlying model of individual choice.”

Terry M. Moe (1949) American political scientist

Source: "The new economics of organization." 1984, p. 746-747; as cited in Eggertsson (1990; 56)

Optimism , Nature , Decision , Sense

“We are permitted to ride, providing we sit in a position ruinous to the horse; providing we wear a riding-habit long enough to hide the obscene human foot, weighed down by ten pounds of gravel to cheat the wind in its free blowing, so running the risk of disabling ourselves completely should accident throw us from the saddle. Think how we swim! We must even wear clothing in the water, and run the gauntlet of derision, if we dare battle in the surf minus stockings!”

Voltairine de Cleyre (1866–1912) American anarchist writer and feminist

Sex Slavery (1890)

Thinking , Water , Horse , Cheating

“Laboratory or industrial chemical reactions are carried out with quantities that range from milligrams to tons, so we must be able to relate the relative atomic mass scale to the macroscopic scales used in practice. The link between the two scales is provided by Avogadro’s number”

David W. Oxtoby (1951) President of Pomona college

N<sub>A</sub>
Principles of Modern Chemistry (7th ed., 2012), Ch. 2 : Chemical Formulas, Equations, and Reaction Yields

“If the intensity of the material world is plotted along the horizontal axis, and the response of the human mind is on the vertical, the relation between the two is represented by the logarithmic curve. Could this rule provide a clue to the relationship between the objective measure of information, and our subjective perception of it?”

Hans Christian von Baeyer (1938) American physicist

Source: Information, The New Language of Science (2003), Chapter 10, Counting Digits, The ubiquitous logarithm, p. 85

World

“This Parliament exists - and always will - to serve the people and to provide national leadership which reflects their hopes, addresses their fears and raises their aspirations. It is a Parliament which the people demanded. It is also a Parliament of which the people make demands.”

Alex Salmond (1954) Scottish National Party politician and former First Minister of Scotland

Third Session of Parliament (June 30, 2007)

People , Fear , Hope

“Copernicus and Darwin undermined man’s image of himself as the ‘measure of all things’. Newton provided him with a new hope … that of ‘man as the measurer of all things’. Thus the possibility was revealed to man, who had been disinherited from being at the center of the universe, that he might be able know how to work himself back there. Science, at the same time it destroyed his ontological security, gave him the tools for reapproaching Eden.”

John Carroll (1944) Australian professor and author

Source: Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974), p. 97

Hope , Universe , Science , Time

“The reader will understand that I despise these "yellows"; they are utterly without honor, they are vulgar and cruel; and yet, in spite of all their vices, I count them less dangerous to society than the so-called "respectable" papers, which pretend to all the virtues, and set the smug and pious tone for good society — papers like the "New York Tribune" and the "Boston Evening Transcript" and the "Baltimore Sun," which are read by rich old gentlemen and maiden aunts, and can hardly ever be forced to admit to their columns any new or vital event or opinion. These are "kept" papers, in the strictest sense of the term, and do not have to hustle on the street for money. They serve the pocketbooks of the whole propertied class — which is the meaning of the term "respectability" in the bourgeois world. On the other hand the "yellow" journals, serving their own pocketbooks exclusively, will often print attacks on vested wealth, provided the attacks are startling and sensational, and provided the vested wealth in question is not a heavy advertiser.”

Upton Sinclair book The Brass Check

The Brass Check (1919)

Money , World , Understanding , Question

“I love being with people. But I need a script, a role, something that will help me overcome my fears of rejection and shame. Most religions and belief systems provide a blueprint for some sort of community. And the religion’s leaders model a way of being. For example, in my book Choke, a character enacts his own death and resurrection every night – as does the narrator in Fight Club. Here’s Jesus, allowing himself to look terrible in front of his peers. That’s the biggest purpose of religious gathering: permission to look terrible in public.”

Chuck Palahniuk (1962) American novelist, essayist

Quoted in Andrew Lawless, "Those burnt tongue moments - Chuck Palahniuk in interview" http://www.threemonkeysonline.com/threemon_article_chuck_palahniuk_haunted_interview.htm, Three Monkeys (May 2005)

Love , Death , People , Books