Quotes about reader
page 7

“AT ABOUT THIS POINT the weak-hearted reader usually sits down in the road, removes his shoes and weeps that he 'is a bad linguist' or that he or she can't possibly learn all those languages. One has to divide the readers who want to be experts from those who do not, and divide, as it were, those who want to see the world from those who merely want to know WHAT PART OF IT THEY LIVE IN.”

Ezra Pound book ABC of Reading

Source: ABC of Reading (1934), p. 42

World, Shoe, Learning, Heart

“Ludwig's book is outstanding. It pulls together a mound of pertinent data, much of it new, into coherent patterns…Throughout the book the reader is offered a wealth of insights and serious questions…Ludwig's development of a Creative Achievement Scale [is] a valued contribution in its own right, allowing researchers a comprehensive objective tool for scoring subjects' degree of achievement… Ludwig has cleared up much of the confusion and opinionated muddleheadedness… that has been attached to the topic and the thinking regarding a relationship between psychopathology and creativity.”

Arnold M. Ludwig

Imagination, Cognition and Personality, review of The Price of Greatness.

Books, Question, Thinking, Wealth

“As the reader is aware, at the cradle of our learning stood the philosophy of Asia Minor and Greece, itself influenced in turn by Indian and Oriental philosophical and religious conceptions. It is the tragedy of this philosophy that, although it was traditionally directed towards the undogmatic acquisition of wisdom and virtue, always regarding the freedom of human rational thought in visionary fashion as the highest good, it nevertheless inevitably led to a mental hardening of the arteries into coercive thought models.”

Fred Polak (1907–1985) Dutch futurologist

Source: Prognostics, 1971, p. 57. Chapter 4: Philosophical models of the future http://www.compilerpress.ca/Competitiveness/Anno/Anno%20Polak%204.%20Philosophical%20Models.htm

Wisdom, Fashion, Freedom, Learning

“As writers become more numerous, it is natural for readers to become more indolent.”

Oliver Goldsmith (1728–1774) Irish physician and writer

No. 175, Upon Unfortunate Merit.
The Bee (1759)

Nature

“My beliefs are clearly that of a hardened skeptic […] I use the term "occult" to refer to any of all of these subjects. The reader is forewarned that The Skeptics Dictionary does not try to present a balanced account of occult subjects. If anything, this book is a Davidian counterbalance to the Goliath of occult literature. I hope that an occasional missile hits its mark…”

Robert Todd Carroll book The Skeptic's Dictionary

The Skeptic's Dictionary (book), pp. 1-3

Books, Hope, Literature

“The cinema may have a specific beauty of its own, but it does not permit that constant re-reading, that meditative brooding, those turning-back to passages heavily charged with meaning, which form the special pleasure of the novel-reader.”

André Maurois (1885–1967) French writer

The Art of Writing

Pleasure, Beauty, Reading

“Ask any British journalist who were their editor-heroes over the last 30 or 40 years and two names keep recurring. One is Harry Evans. The other is Hugh Cudlipp. Why were they so admired? Because they seemed to represent the best of journalistic virtues – courage, campaigning, toughness, compassion, humour, irreverence; a serious engagement with serious things; a sense of fairness; an eye for injustice; a passion for explaining; knowing how to achieve impact; a connection with readers. Even if you missed their editorships – as I did with Hugh Cudlipp – both men wrote inspiring books about journalism: about how to do it, but, more importantly, about why it mattered.”

Alan Rusbridger (1953) British newspaper editor

Source: 2010s, Does journalism exist? (2010), p. 1.

Men, Books, Courage, Sense

“Foolish people laugh at those readers a century ago who wept over the novels of Dickens. Is it a sign of superior intellect to read anything and everything unmoved, in a grey, unfeeling Limbo?”

Robertson Davies book A Voice from the Attic

A Voice from the Attic (1960)

People, Reading

“If the pages of this book contain some successful verse, the reader must excuse me the discourtesy of having usurped it first. Our nothingness differs little; it is a trivial and chance circumstance that you should be the reader of these exercises and I their author.”

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

"To the Reader" ["A quien leyere"], preface to Fervor of Buenos Aires [Fervor de Buenos Aires] (1923)

Books, Exercises, Chance, Success

“…one straggles gracelessly through a wilderness of common sense. It is an experience for which the reader of modern criticism is unprepared: in that jungle through which one wanders, with its misshapen and extravagant and cannibalistic growths, bent double with fruit and tentacles, disquieting with their rank eccentric life, one comes surprisingly on something so palely healthy: a decorous plant, without thorns or flowers, rootless in the thin sand of the drawing room.”

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

of Modern Poetry: A Personal Essay by Louis MacNiece, “From That Island”, pp. 31–32
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

Life, Flowers, Sense, Drawing

“The simple fact is that Chairman Mao was a pretty perceptive political thinker. You can deplore what he did in China and still realize that not everything he wrote was the sheer embodiment of evil. […] Is this really how you want to start judging politicians -- by their favorite philosophers? […] Actually thinking about issues has gone way out of style on the right. It's much easier to march in lockstep with populist goons like Glenn Beck. […] It's appalling that so many LGF readers are buying into this insanity. What's wrong with you people?”

Charles Foster Johnson (1953) American musician

October 16, 2009 http://littlegreenfootballs.com/article/34925_Video-_John_McCain_Quotes_Chairman_Mao/comments/

People, Way, Thinking, Evil

“Frequently I am asked if I will take my life when I have a terminal illness. My answer is: "I'll wait and see." If my dying is bearable, the pain well managed, and my self-control and dignity are not damaged, then I shall hang on and die naturally. But if I am one of the unlucky few who suffer abysmally, then I shall make a quick exit. This book is intended for readers who think much the same as me.”

Derek Humphry book Final Exit

"Introduction", p. XX
Final Exit

Life, Pain, Books, Nature

“To say that an author is a reader or a reader an author, to see a book as a human being or a human being a book, to describe the world as text or a text as the world, are ways of naming the readers craft.”

Alberto Manguel (1948) writer

Metaphors of Reading, p. 168.
A History of Reading (1996)

Books, World, Way

“The lower animals, like man, manifestly feel pleasure and pain, happiness and misery. Happiness is never better exhibited than by young animals, such as puppies, kittens, lambs, &c., when playing together, like our own children. Even insects play together, as has been described by that excellent observer, P. Huber, who saw ants chasing and pretending to bite each other, like so many puppies.
The fact that the lower animals are excited by the same emotions as ourselves is so well established, that it will not be necessary to weary the reader by many details. Terror acts in the same manner on them as on us, causing the muscles to tremble, the heart to palpitate, the sphincters to be relaxed, and the hair to stand on end. Suspicion, the offspring of fear, is eminently characteristic of most wild animals. Courage and timidity are extremely variable qualities in the individuals of the same species, as is plainly seen in our dogs. Some dogs and horses are ill-tempered and easily turn sulky; others are good-tempered; and these qualities are certainly inherited.”

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

volume I, chapter II: "Comparison of the Mental Powers of Man and the Lower Animals", pages 39-40 http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?pageseq=52&itemID=F937.1&viewtype=image <br class="br">The Descent of Man (1871)

Pain, Happiness, Children, Pleasure

“My father often told me, “It is better to have a gun and not need it than to need a gun and not have it.” I urge readers to use less than lethal means when safe and practicable, but at times there is not a satisfactory substitute for well-aimed lead going down range at high velocity.”

James Wesley Rawles (1960) Survivalist-fiction author and blogger

Source: How to Survive the End of the World as We Know It, Plume, New York (2009), p. 12.

Time

“The Author to the Reader
I’ve read that Luther said (it’s come to me
So often that I’ve made it into meter):
And even if the world should end tomorrow
I still would plant my little apple-tree.
Here, reader, is my little apple-tree.”

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

epigraph, p. vi
A Sad Heart at the Supermarket: Essays & Fables (1962)

World, Tree, Reading

“Proceeding on the assumption that the reader of this preface is interested in the development of my musical talent, I will try to explain, as concisely as I can, how, in this respect, my personal wheels go round. To begin with, I have only had two music lessons in my life. These were the first steps of what was to have been a full course at the Guildhall School of Music, and they faltered and stopped when I was told by my instructor that I could not use consecutive fifths. He went on to explain that a gentleman called Ebenezer Prout had announced many years ago that consecutive fifths were wrong and must in no circumstances be employed. At that time Ebenezer Prout was merely a name to me (as a matter of fact he still is, and a very funny one at that) and I was unimpressed by his Victorian dicta. I argued back that Debussy and Ravel had used consecutive fifths like mad. My instructor waved aside this triviality with a pudgy hand, and I left his presence forever with the parting shot that what was good enough for Debussy and Ravel was good enough for me. This outburst of rugged individualism deprived me of much valuable knowledge, and I have never deeply regretted it for a moment.”

Noel Coward (1899–1973) English playwright, composer, director, actor and singer

Preface, The Noël Coward Song Book, pp. 12–13.

Life, School, Music, Knowledge

“As a type for study, or a standard for education, Lodge was the more interesting of the two. Roosevelts are born and never can be taught; but Lodge was a creature of teaching — Boston incarnate — the child of his local parentage; and while his ambition led him to be more, the intent, though virtuous, was — as Adams admitted in his own case — restless. An excellent talker, a voracious reader, a ready wit, an accomplished orator, with a clear mind and a powerful memory, he could never feel perfectly at ease whatever leg he stood on, but shifted, sometimes with painful strain of temper, from one sensitive muscle to another, uncertain whether to pose as an uncompromising Yankee; or a pure American; or a patriot in the still purer atmosphere of Irish, Germans, or Jews; or a scholar and historian of Harvard College. English to the last fibre of his thought — saturated with English literature, English tradition, English taste — revolted by every vice and by most virtues of Frenchmen and Germans, or any other Continental standards, but at home and happy among the vices and extravagances of Shakespeare — standing first on the social, then on the political foot; now worshipping, now banning; shocked by the wanton display of immorality, but practicing the license of political usage; sometimes bitter, often genial, always intelligent — Lodge had the singular merit of interesting. The usual statesmen flocked in swarms like crows, black and monotonous. Lodge's plumage was varied, and, like his flight, harked back to race. He betrayed the consciousness that he and his people had a past, if they dared but avow it, and might have a future, if they could but divine it.”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

Pain, Happiness, People, Education

“It is in the translation that the innocence lost after the first reading is restored under another guise, since the reader is once again faced with a new text and its attendant mystery. That is the inescapable paradox of translation, and also its wealth.”

Alberto Manguel (1948) writer

The Translator As Reader, p. 273-274.
A History of Reading (1996)

Reading, Wealth

“The great masses, who have never been, in the history of mankind, more subject to hypnotic suggestion than they are right now, have become the puppets of the “public opinion” that is engineered by the newspapers in the service, it need hardly be emphasized, of the reigning powers of finance. What is printed in the morning editions of the big city newspapers is the opinion of nine out of ten readers by nightfall. The United States of America, whose more rapid “progress” enables us to predict the future on a daily basis, has pulled far ahead of the pack when it comes to standardizing thought, work, entertainment, etc.”

Ludwig Klages (1872–1956) German psychologist and philosopher

Sämtliche Werke, vol. 4, p. 408, as translated by Joseph Pryce

History, Future

“Unique descriptions of scene play a significant role in the success of fiction, and any first-rate novelists knows enough to keep changing the scenes in which his characters carry out action, since that no only conceals the novelist's shortcomings, but also heightens the reader's enthuisiasm in the reading process”

Mo Yan book The Republic of Wine

Source: The Republic of Wine (1992), Chapter 10, Section 2

Change, Reading, Success

“Absolutists frighten me. During all the endless discussions on my blog about evolution, intelligent design, God, and the afterworld, numbering altogether thousands of comments, I have never named my beliefs, although readers have freely informed me that I am an atheist, and agnostic, or at the very least a secular humanist”

Roger Ebert (1942–2013) American film critic, author, journalist, and TV presenter

which I am.
Source: Life Itself : A Memoir (2011), Ch. 54 : How I Believe In God

God, Intelligence

““Myth, Symbol, and Tradition” was the phrase I originally wrote at the top of the page, for editors like large, cloudy titles. Then I looked at what I had written and, wordlessly, the words reproached me. I hope I had the grace to blush at my own presumption and their portentousness. How could I, if I lived for a thousand years, attempt to cover more than a hectare of that enormous landscape?
So, I let out the air, in a manner of speaking, dwindled to my appropriate size, and gave myself over to that process which, for lack of a more erudite term, I have coined the phrase “Thinking is linking.” I thought of Kerenyi — “Mythology occupies a higher position in the bios, the Existence, of a people in which it is still alive than poetry, storytelling or any other art.” And of Malinowski — “Myth is not merely a story told, but a reality lived.” And, along with those, the word “Pollen,” the most pervasive substance in the world, kept knocking at my ear. Or rather, not knocking, but humming. What hums? What buzzes? What travels the world? Suddenly I found what I sought. “What the bee knows,” I told myself. “That is what I’m after.”
But even as I patted my back, I found myself cursing, and not for the first time, the artful trickiness of words, their capriciousness, their lack of conscience. Betray them and they will betray you. Be true to them and, without compunction, they will also betray you, foxily turning all the tables, thumbing syntactical noses. For — note bene! — if you speak or write about What The Bee Knows, what the listener, or the reader, will get — indeed, cannot help but get — is Myth, Symbol, and Tradition! You see the paradox? The words, by their very perfidy — which is also their honorable intention — have brought us to where we need to be. For, to stand in the presence of paradox, to be spiked on the horns of dilemma, between what is small and what is great, microcosm and macrocosm, or, if you like, the two ends of the stick, is the only posture we can assume in front of this ancient knowledge — one could even say everlasting knowledge.”

P. L. Travers (1899–1996) Australian-British novelist, actress and journalist

"What the Bee Knows" in Parabola : The Magazine of Myth and Tradition, Vol. VI, No. 1 (February 1981); later published in What the Bee Knows : Reflections on Myth, Symbol, and Story (1989)

People, World, Hope, Art

“Monckton Milnes was a social power in London, and of course he himself affected social eccentricity, challenging ridicule with the indifference of one who knew himself to be the first wit in London, and a maker of men — of a great many men. A word from him went far. An invitation to his breakfast-table went farther. Behind his almost Falstaffian mask and laugh of Silenus, he carried a fine, broad, and high intelligence which no one questioned. As a young man he had written verses, which some readers thought poetry, and which were certainly not altogether prose. Later, in Parliament he made speeches, chiefly criticised as too good for the place and too high for the audience. Socially, he was one of two or three men who went everywhere, knew everybody, talked of everything.”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

Men, Intelligence, Question, Indifference

“The reader will, I think, soon discover that I have tried to affirm the processes of his mental development and ripening of personality---something quite independent both of the self-idolatries of the mass and of those primitive emotional fixations and stereotypes whose antiquated symbolisms linger on under the terminology of religion. If there is anything affirmative in the assertion of the meaning of spiritual maturity in the modern world, then I may hope that the effort of this book will be regarded as constructive.”

Everett Dean Martin (1880–1941)

Source: Civilizing Ourselves: Intellectual Maturity in the Modern World (1932), p. xi, Foreword

Books, World, Religion, Hope

“A war was on. … On July 14 he was expelled from his home with the rest of his family. He never returned to the city he loved. He never forgot the scenes of Lod in 1948, nor did he forget the idea of violent resistance. Can the Israeli reader understand how he felt?”

Gideon Levy (1953) Israeli journalist

This Biography Makes It Clear: The Founder of the Palestinian Popular Front Was Right (April 15, 2018)

Love, War, Family, Home

“… acting on Hacker's wishes, the editor of his collected works excluded the author's polemical Christian writings from the compilation…. Many such polemical writings also appeared in fringe religious pamphlets and propaganda literature which are unknown to most scholars…. Hacker's suppression of this material compromised his integrity as an objective scholar, as it misled readers into thinking his writings on Hinduism were objective evaluations when in fact they were, in Andrew Nicholson's words, the work of a 'Christian polemicist'. In his posthumously published wrigings, Hacker is as explicit in his support for Christianity as he is in his attack on contemporary Hinduism.”

Rajiv Malhotra book Indra's Net

Indra's Net (2014)

Literature, Support, Thinking, Appearance

“An unbiased reader, on opening one of their [Fichte’s, Schelling’s or Hegel’s] books and then asking himself whether this is the tone of a thinker wanting to instruct or that of a charlatan wanting to impress, cannot be five minutes in any doubt. … The tone of calm investigation, which had characterized all previous philosophy, is exchanged for that of unshakeable certainty, such as is peculiar to charlatanry of every kind and at all times. … From every page and every line, there speaks an endeavor to beguile and deceive the reader, first by producing an effect to dumbfound him, then by incomprehensible phrases and even sheer nonsense to stun and stupefy him, and again by audacity of assertion to puzzle him, in short, to throw dust in his eyes and mystify him as much as possible.”

Arthur Schopenhauer book Parerga and Paralipomena

E. Payne, trans. (1974) Vol. 1, p. 23
Parerga and Paralipomena (1851), Sketch of a History of the Doctrine of the Ideal and the Real

Books, Time

“Three imaginary readers looked over my shoulder while I was writing, and I now dedicate the book to them. […] First the general reader, the layman […] second the expert [and] third the student.”

Richard Dawkins book The Selfish Gene

Preface
The Selfish Gene (1976, 1989)

Books

“If the reader now asks what do I think of this paper or that process, of this brand of plates or of that? Is intensification or reduction to be resorted to? Are enlargements as good as direct work? I have but one answer to all, and that is that only those methods are good which will give you a satisfactory realization of the idea you have in mind. Any paper or process which will do this is good. If an enlargement from a small negative seems to give a fairly satisfactory expression of the idea intended, and the smaller direct print fails, there is your answer; and neither the writer or any one else has any knowledge which can give you a better.”

Alfred Horsley Hinton (1863–1908) British photographer

Source: Practical Pictorial Photography, 1898, Development of negatives, p. 107

Idea, Knowledge, Thinking

“When modernist poetry, or what not so long ago passed for modernist poetry, can reach the stage where the following piece by Mr. Ezra Pound is seriously offered as a poem, there is some justification for the plain reader and orthodox critic who shrinks from anything that may be labelled 'modernist' either in terms of condemnation or approbation…. Better he thinks, that ten authentic poets should be left for posterity to discover than one charlatan should be allowed to steal into the Temple of Fame.”

Laura Riding Jackson (1901–1991) poet, critic, novelist, essayist and short story writer

Laura Riding and Robert Graves from A Survey of Modernist Poetry (London: Heinemann, 1927)

Thinking

“This is, after all, a book about reading, and the kind of reader I am addressing does not care primarily about being in fashion.”

Robertson Davies book A Voice from the Attic

A Voice from the Attic (1960)

Books, Fashion, Reading

“The moistened thumb of the expectant reader has not yet marked the soft tissues of this lean clean smiling volume. Spread me, and break me open, for pleasure.”

Peter Greenaway (1942) British film director

From the second book, "The Book of the Innocent"
The Pillow Book

Pleasure, Smile

“It is outrageous that a strictly abstemious reader should sit in judgement on a poet a little drunk.”
Iniurium est de poeta male sobrio lectorem abstemium iudicare.

Ausonius (310–395) poet

Griphus Ternarii Numeri, "Ausonio Symmacho"; translation from Helen Waddell The Wandering Scholars ([1927] 1954) p. 37.

“They insist that an author should write in the strictest, purest and noblest language: in short, they expect the Russian language to drop from the clouds, already refined, and that it should come naturally to the lips, so that all they have to do is to open their mouth and stick out their tongue. It goes without saying, of course, that the feminine half of the human species is very wise; but it must be confessed that our respected readers are even wiser.”

Nikolai Gogol book Dead Souls

Dead Souls (1842)

Nature

“There are some good things and some fantastic ones in Auden’s early attitude; if the reader calls it a muddle I shall acquiesce, with the remark that the later position might be considered a more rarefied muddle. But poets rather specialize in muddles—and I have no doubt which of the muddles was better for Auden’s poetry: one was fertile and usable, the other decidedly is not. Auden sometimes seems to be saying with Henry Clay, “I had rather be right than poetry”; but I am not sure, then, that he is either.”

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

“Changes of Attitude and Rhetoric in Auden’s Poetry”, p. 131
The Third Book of Criticism (1969)

“Open your newspaper any day of the week and you will find a report from somewhere in the world of someone being imprisoned, tortured or executed because his opinions or religion are unacceptable to his government … The newspaper reader feels a sickening sense of impotence. Yet if these feelings of disgust could be united into common action, something effective could be done.”

Peter Benenson (1921–2005) English human rights activist

Benenson (1961), in: The Observer, 28 May 1961.
Opening of article, which gave birth to Amnesty International.

World, Religion, Feeling, Sense

“I write worstsellers. I guess most of my readers are themselves writers. Myself, for example.”

Tarik Gunersel (1953) Turkish actor

"Same interview.
Other

“I hope that the reader will not regard the contents of this book as an escape from the present world but rather as a key part of it.”

Cyrus H. Gordon (1908–2001) American linguist

Introduction
Adventures in the Nearest East (1957)

Books, World, Hope, Parting

“I have not used rhyme, because what is really, in the long run, of most interest to American readers is what the poems say; and if one uses rhyme, it is impossible not to sacrifice sense to sound.”

Arthur Waley (1889–1966) British academic

Translations from the Chinese (1941), p. 1

Sense

“Every day, the New York Times carries a motto in a box on its front page. "All the News That's Fit to Print," it says. It's been saying it for decades, day in and day out. I imagine most readers of the canonical sheet have long ceased to notice this bannered and flaunted symbol of its mental furniture. I myself check every day to make sure that the bright, smug, pompous, idiotic claim is still there. Then I check to make sure that it still irritates me. If I can still exclaim, under my breath, why do they insult me and what do they take me for and what the hell is it supposed to mean unless it's as obviously complacent and conceited and censorious as it seems to be, then at least I know I still have a pulse. You may wish to choose a more rigorous mental workout but I credit this daily infusion of annoyance with extending my lifespan.”

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) British American author and journalist

2000s, 2001, Letters to a Young Contrarian (2001)

Imagination, Hell, Time, Box

“Has our reader ever heard about the parallel strands of time, in two-track time? Yes, such branch stretches of time do exist, a little illegal, to be sure, and problematic, but when carrying such contraband as ours, such supernumerary, unclassifiable events, one cannot be too particular. And so, at some point in our story, we shall attempt to take such a branch turning, a siding, and shunt this illegal history into it.”

Bruno Schulz (1892–1942) Polish novelist and painter

“The Brilliant Epoch” http://www.schulzian.net/translation/sanatorium/epoch1.htm <br class="br">His father, Time

History, Time

“From psychics to spiritualists to palm readers to graphologists to astrologists, the ‘expert’ in question either just simply deluded and naive or they’re using a skill called cold-reading.”

Derren Brown (1971) British illusionist

Other TV and web appearances, The Enemies of Reason (Richard Dawkins)

Question, Reading

“Before the reader is introduced to the modest country medical practitioner who is to be the chief personage of the following tale, it will be well that he should be made acquainted with some particulars as to the locality in which, and the neighbours among whom, our doctor followed his profession.”

Anthony Trollope book Doctor Thorne

First lines
Doctor Thorne (1858)

Country

“Perhaps because so much of what the classical economists wrote about traditional systems of agricultural production was divorced from the seemingly more timeless remarks about pure theory, later readers have passed over such portions of their works in haste. … I argue that these interventionist recommendations were a significant element in the overall thrust of their works. Specifically, classical political economy advocated restricting the viability of traditional occupations in the countryside to coerce people to work for wages.”

Michael Perelman (1939) American economist

Source: The Invention of Capitalism: Classical Political Economy and the Secret History of Primitive Accumulation (2000), p. 3

People

“In the case of a novel, or any imaginative work, especially if the tone is poetic, my own preference is for ending with a touch of symbolism which shall leave the reader brooding. A fine novel, a well-written story, "proves" nothing. Certain characters have played their parts, life goes on, and the final passage may be allowed to remain with one foot in the air, as is the case with some of Chopin's conclusions. But there is no absolute rule in such matters, and there are epic novelists who like to end on a powerful crescendo, as Ravel does in Bolero, or Dvorak in the New-World Symphony. Composition has features which are common to all the arts, and the author can learn as much about his business in the concert hall as in the library.”

André Maurois (1885–1967) French writer

The Art of Writing

Life, World, Art, Imagination

Jayant Narlikar (1938) Indian physicist

On his approach to science popularization
An Exclusive Interview with Prof. Jayant Vishnu Narlikar

Science, Personality

“These are primitive beginnings in art, such as one usually finds in ethnographic collections or at home in one's nursery. Do not laugh, reader! Children also have artistic ability, and there is wisdom in their having it! The more helpless they are, the more instructive are the examples they furnish us; and they must be preserved from corruption at an early age. Parallel phenomena are provided by the works of the mentally diseased; neither childish behaviour nor madness are insulting words here, as they commonly are. All this is to be taken very seriously, more seriously than all the public galleries, when it comes to reforming today's art.”

Paul Klee (1879–1940) German Swiss painter

Diary entry (January 1912), # 905, quoting his "Munich Art Letter" in the journal Die Alpen
1911 - 1914

Wisdom, Children, Age, Disease

“Some things are worth fighting for. I encourage my readers to avoid trouble, most importantly via relocation to safe areas where trouble is unlikely to visit. But there may come an unavoidable day when you have to make a stand to defend your own family or your neighbors. Furthermore, if you value your liberty, then be prepared to fight for it, both for yourself and for the sake of your progeny.”

James Wesley Rawles (1960) Survivalist-fiction author and blogger

Source: How to Survive the End of the World as We Know It, Plume, New York (2009), p. 18

Family, Fight

“Out of respect for my gay male readers, I'll resist the temptation to characterize this ruling as "shoving gay marriage down our throats."”

Ann Coulter (1961) author, political commentator

Massachusetts Supreme Court abolishes capitalism!
2003-12-04
Townhall
http://townhall.com/columnists/anncoulter/2003/12/04/massachusetts_supreme_court_abolishes_capitalism!/page/full/
2003

Marriage

“But metre itself implies a passion, i. e. a state of excitement, both in the Poet's mind, & is expected in that of the Reader.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) English poet, literary critic and philosopher

Letter to William Sotheby (13 July 1802)
Letters

Passion

“I am not shooting at immortality through my books, no. Nor do I think Chopin was shooting at immortality through his music. That strikes me as a very selfish goal, and I don't think Chopin was particularly selfish. I would also say that I think that music comes much closer to capturing the essence of a composer's soul than do a writer's ideas capture the writer's soul. Perhaps some very emotional ideas that I express in my books can get across a bit of the essence of my soul to some readers, but I think that Chopin's music probably does a lot better job”

Douglas Hofstadter (1945) American professor of cognitive science

and the same holds, of course, for many composers

Books, Music, Soul, Idea

“A poem is good if it contains a new analogy and startles the reader out of the habit of treating words as counters.”

T. E. Hulme (1883–1917) English Imagist poet and critic

Speculations (Essays, 1924)

“The first class contains four, which, we are informed, may be properly called beasts for hunting; namely, the hare, the hart, the wolf, and the wild boar. The second class contains the names of the beasts of the chase, and they are five; that is to say, the buck, the doe, the fox, the martin, and the roe. In the third class we find three, that are said to afford "greate dysporte" in the pursuit, and they are denominated, the grey or badger, the wild-cat and the otter…The reader may possibly be surprised, when he casts his eye over the foregoing list of animals for hunting, at seeing the names of several that do not exist at this time in England, and especially of the wolf, because he will readily recollect the story so commonly told of their destruction during the reign of Edgar.”

Joseph Strutt (1749–1802) British engraver, artist, antiquary and writer

pg. 17
The Sports and Pastimes of the People of England (1801), Animals

Cats, Wolf, Time, Animals

“I think Miss Moore was right to cut “The Steeple-Jack” — the poem seems plainer and clearer in its shortened state — but she has cut too much… The reader may feel like saying, “Let her do as she pleases with the poem; it’s hers, isn’t it?” No; it’s much too good a poem for that, it long ago became everybody’s, and we can protest just as we could if Donatello cut off David’s left leg.”

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

“Her Shield”, p. 177
Poetry and the Age (1953)

Feeling, Thinking

“.. even MSJ readers will tire of watching Bill Gates adjust his glasses.”

Paul DiLascia (1959–2008) American software developer

1995/10
About the readers

“Books are the way that we communicate with the dead. The way that we learn lessons from those who are no longer with us, that humanity has built on itself, progressed, made knowledge incremental rather than something that has to be relearned, over and over. There are tales that are older than most countries, tales that have long outlasted the cultures and the buildings in which they were first told. I think we have responsibilities to the future. Responsibilities and obligations to children, to the adults those children will become, to the world they will find themselves inhabiting. All of us – as readers, as writers, as citizens – have obligations.”

Neil Gaiman (1960) English fantasy writer

Why our future depends on libraries, reading and daydreaming (2013)

Children, Books, World, Way

“At our website, Breitbart News, we have about 20 million readers most of them are grassroots conservative voters, and some of them are very loyal, and their number one issue has consistently been since last year, immigration. And they’re looking for someone who’s going to seal the border, and prioritize border security as number one, unlike the people who are outside”

Alexander Marlow (1986) american journalist

Breitbart’s Marlow: Immigration Is ‘Number One’ With Grassroots, Trump ‘Growing Big Tent’ http://www.breitbart.com/video/2015/09/14/breitbarts-marlow-immigration-is-number-one-with-grassroots-trump-growing-big-tent/ (September 14, 2015)

People

“In an age of global standardization, regional voices also remind both writer and reader that no life is lived generically. If the purpose of literature is truly, as the ancients insisted, to instruct and delight, then what better to understand and enjoy than the here and the now?”

Dana Gioia (1950) American writer

"Fallen Western Star," Denver Quarterly (Fall 1998)
Essays

Life, Age, Literature, Understanding

“On occasion, quite apart from any threat of persecution, an advocate may believe her ideas will be more persuasive if her readers are unaware of her identity. Anonymity thereby provides a way for a writer who may be personally unpopular to ensure that readers will not prejudge her message simply because they do not like its proponent.”

John Paul Stevens (1920–2019) Former Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

McIntyre v. Ohio Elections Commission (Majority opinion, 514 U.S. 334 (1995)

Way, Idea, Personality

“Something about the possession of a book - an object that can contain infinite fables, words of wisdom, chronicles of times gone by, humorous anecdotes and divine revelation - endows the reader with the power of creating a story, and the listener with a sense of being present at the moment of creation.”

Alberto Manguel (1948) writer

Being Read To, p. 120.
A History of Reading (1996)

Wisdom, Books, Sense, Time

“The very concept of history implies the scholar and the reader. Without a generation of civilized people to study history, to preserve its records, to absorb its lessons and relate them to its own problems, history, too, would lose its meaning.”

George F. Kennan (1904–2005) American advisor, diplomat, political scientist and historian

As quoted in The New York Times (27 May 1984)

People, History, Problem, Study

“The other major impression to emerge from Magick Without Tears is that -- as odd as it sounds -- one of Crowley's chief drawbacks was his sense of humour. This is a disability he shares with Bernard Shaw: both were driven by a strange compulsion to be flippant. But when he becomes absorbed in an idea, Shaw can remain serious for a sufficiently long time to convince the reader of his intellectual stature. In Crowley, the flippancy has the tone of a schoolmaster trying to be funny for the benefit of the sixth form, or a muscular Christian trying to convince you that he isn't really religious. 'How can a yogi ever feel worried?... That question I have been expecting for a very long time!' (Crowley has never learned that exclamation marks give the impression of a gushing schoolgirl.) 'And what you expect is to see my middle stump break the wicket-keeper's nose, with the balls smartly fielded by Third Man and Short Leg!' It makes us aware that there was something wrong with Crowley's 'self-image.”

Colin Wilson (1931–2013) author

He is one of those people who, no matter how hard they try, never feel quite grown up.
Source: Aleister Crowley: The Nature of the Beast (1987), p. 150

People, Feeling, Idea, Question

“It is unsafe to take your reader for more of a fool than he is.”

W. Somerset Maugham book Ten Novels and Their Authors

Ten Novels and Their Authors (1954)

Fools

“I could only see myself making a living through writing, as I had done in China. But should I write in Chinese here, a foreign land, or enrol in a language class and study English grammar? If I continued to write in Chinese I would have no readers here. Besides, I would never create a community of fellow artists and thinkers in my Western life while speaking Chinese.”

Xiaolu Guo (1973) Chinese-British novelist and film director

Once Upon A Time in the East: A Story of Growing up, Chatto & Windus, 2017, page 259 (ISBN 9781784740689).
Memoir, 2017

Life, Communication, Study

“When Paul’s Foundations was published in the 1940s, readers experienced a kind of revelation that created a sensation. This brings to mind the post-WWI public’s similar reaction to Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. Critics compared Proust’s prolific writings to those of Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare. But, what a difference in Proust’s and Paul’s dispositions!”

Michael Szenberg (1934) American economist

3.Paul Samuelson is a Mentor.
Ten Ways to Know Paul A. Samuelson (2006)

Past

“Bly is a poet, he is a big cat, so to speak, and not some chipmunk from the how-to culture. But it is the how-to culture that has picked up on his book. … And yet, for a while Iron John transformed male consciousness in the United States. The wild men weekends and initiation, adventure holidays and whatnot, which were big business, may prove to be ephemeral. But what does one make of the unabashed references in the press to "men's liberation" and the men's movement and the fact that there are now at least half a dozen magazines devoted to nothing else? Changing men, journeymen, man. … Bly's average reader is not a poet and a critic, but a weightlifter from Brooklyn.”

Martin Amis (1949) Welsh novelist

"Political Correctness: Robert Bly and Philip Larkin" (1997)

Men, Books, Cats, Business

“Not every poet is a great reader of his own work.”

David Yezzi (1966) American poet

Interview with Ernest Hibert (2006)

“The only part I understand is what went into the creation of the strip. What readers take away from it is up to them. Once the strip is published, readers bring their own experiences to it, and the work takes on a life of its own. Everyone responds differently to different parts. I just tried to write honestly, and I tried to make this little world fun to look at, so people would take the time to read it. That was the full extent of my concern. You mix a bunch of ingredients, and once in a great while, chemistry happens. I can't explain why the strip caught on the way it did, and I don't think I could ever duplicate it. A lot of things have to go right all at once.”

Bill Watterson (1958) American comic artist

Interview with John Campanelli of The Plain Dealer http://www.cleveland.com/living/index.ssf/2010/02/bill_watterson_creator_of_belo.html

Life, People, World, Way

“If young people don’t like reading, let’s not blame television or the modern world or school. Or rather, blame them all, but only after asking what we have done to that ideal reader since the days when we played at being both storyteller and book.”

Daniel Pennac (1944) French author

The Rights of the Reader (2008 translation by Sarah Adams)

People, Books, World, School

“I myself was, for nearly six years, in such close touch with the Malay language that it affected my English and still affects my thinking. When I wrote a novel called A Clockwork Orange, no European reader saw that the Malay word for "man" – orang – was contained in the title (Malay students of English invariably write "orang squash"…”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Non-Fiction, Joysprick: An Introduction to the Language of James Joyce (1973)

Thinking

“The reader is the content of any poem or of the language he employs, and in order to use any of these forms, he must put them on.”

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

"Roles, Masks, and Performances", New Literary History, Vol. 2, No. 3, Performances in Drama, the Arts, and Society (Spring, 1971), p. 520
1970s

“Tsenov comes out of a detailed source-check which many of his predecessors have hardly ever seen. It facilitates the reader by printing these sources in the original … From the same sources it can be seen that the Bulgarians were south of the Danube for 350 years, so they did not come until 679. from the Volga, but not only before the Slavs, but before the Huns in Illyria and Thrace, that the Bulgarians lived in 350 AD. along the lower Danube in the Byzantine Empire, i. south of the lower Danube, and that they were a mighty people, not only in Moesia but also in Thrace and Illyria.”

Gancho Tsenov (1870–1949) Bulgarian historian

quotations for him <br class="br">Source: Hans Filipp, рецензия на "Die Abstammung der Bulgaren..." http://stahlhelm-wse.narod.ru/PHILOLOGISCHEWOCHENSCHRIFT.htm, “Philologishe Wochenschrift”, Heft 10/11, 14 März 1931

People

“The Current Approaches to Management Theory and Science
I hope the reader will realize that, in outlining the eleven approaches, I must necessarily be terse.”

Harold Koontz (1909–1984)

The empirical or case approach : The members of this school study management by analyzing experience, usually through cases...
The interpersonal behavior approach: This approach is apparently based on the thesis that managing involves getting things done through people, and that therefore the study of management should be centered on interpersonal relations...
The group behavior approach : This approach is ... primarily with behavior of people in groups rather than with interpersonal behavior...
The cooperative social system approach : A modification of the interpersonal and group behavior approaches has been the focus of some behavioral scientists on the study of human relationships as cooperative social systems...
The sociotechnical systems approach : One of the newer schools of management identifies itself as the sociotechnical systems approach...
The decision theory approach : This approach to management theory and science has apparently been based on the belief that, because it is a major task of managers to make decisions, we should concentrate on decision making...
The systems approach ; ... the systems approach to the study and analysis of management thought...
The mathematical or "management science" approach : There are some theorists who see managing as primarily an exercise in mathematical processes, concepts, symbols, and models...
The contingency or situational approach : ... the contingency approach to management.
The managerial roles approach :... popularized by Henry Mintzberg [1973, 1975]...
The operational approach : The operational approach to management theory and science, a term borrowed from the work of P. W. Bridgman [1938, pp. 2-32], attempts to draw together the pertinent knowledge of management by relating it to the functions of managers...
The nature of the operational approach can perhaps best be appreciated by reference to Figure 1. As this diagram shows, the operational management school of thought includes a central core of science and theory unique to management plus knowledge eclectically drawn from various other schools and approaches...
Source: "The Management Theory Jungle Revisited," 1980, p. 177-182

Hope, Science

“The reviewers of fifty years ago knew that their primary loyalty must lie not with their fellow poets or publishers but with the reader. Consequently they reported their reactions with scrupulous honesty even when their opinions might lose them literary allies and writing assignments. In discussing new poetry they addressed a wide community of educated readers. Without talking down to their audience, they cultivated a public idiom. Prizing clarity and accessibility they avoided specialist jargon and pedantic displays of scholarship. They also tried, as serious intellectuals should but specialists often do not, to relate what was happening in poetry to social, political, and artistic trends. They charged modern poetry with cultural importance and made it the focal point of their intellectual discourse.”

Dana Gioia (1950) American writer

Essays, Can Poetry Matter? (1991)

Lie, Education, Communication, Loyalty

“A religious spirit animates the infancy of our literature, and must continue to gloe in its maturity. The public taste calls for this quality, and would relish no work in which it might be supplanted by a principle of infidelity. Our best authors have written under the influence of Christian feeling; but had they been destitute of this sentiment, they would have found it necessary to accommodate themselves to the opinions of the people, and follow Christian precedents. The beneficent influence of religion on literature, is like that of our evening sun, when it awakens in the clouds those beautiful and burning tints, which clothe the firmament in gold and purple. It constitutes the heart of learning - the great source of its moral power. Religion addresses itself to the highest and holiest of our sentiments - benevolence and veneration, and their excitement stirs up the imagination, strengthens the undeerstanding, and purifies the taste. Thus, both in the mind of the author and the reader, Christianity and literature act and react on each other, with the effect of elevating both, and carrying the human character to the highest perfection which it is destined to reach. Learning should be proud of this companionship, and exert all her wisdom to render it perpetual.”

Daniel Drake (1785–1852) American physician and writer

Daniel Drake (1834). Discourse on the History, Character, and Prospects of the West: Delivered to the Union Literary Society of Miami University, Oxford, Ohio, at Their Ninth Anniversary, September 23, 1834. Truman and Smith. p. 31

Wisdom, People, Religion, Beauty

“Readers of histories and novels can hardly fail to be struck by their similarities. There are many histories that could pass for novels, and many novels that could pass for histories, considered in purely formal (or, I should say, formalist) terms. Viewed simply as verbal artifacts histories and novels are indistinguishable from one another. We cannot easily distinguish between them on formal grounds unless we approach them with specific preconceptions about the kinds of truths that each is supposed to deal in. But the aim of the writer of a novel must be the same as that of the writer of a history.”

Hayden White (1928–2018) American historian

"The fictions of factual representation"

Truth, History

“The bourgeois novel is the greatest enemy of truth and honesty that was ever invented. It's a vast, sentimentalizing structure that reassures the reader, and at every point, offers the comfort of secure moral frameworks and recognizable characters. This whole notion was advanced by Mary McCarthy and many others years ago, that the main function of the novel was to carry out a kind of moral criticism of life. But the writer has no business making moral judgments or trying to set himself up as a one-man or one-woman magistrate's court. I think it's far better, as Burroughs did and I've tried to do in my small way, to tell the truth.”

J. G. Ballard (1930–2009) British writer

"J.G. Ballard on William S. Burrough's Naked Truth" by Richard Kadrey in Salon (2 September 1997) http://web.archive.org/web/20000511215816/http://www.salon.com/sept97/wsb2970902.html

Life, Truth, Way, Business

“A book unwritten is a delightful universe of infinite possibilities. Set down one word, however, and immediately it becomes earthbound. Set down one sentence and its halfway to being just like every other bloody book that's ever been written. But the best must never be allowed to drive out the good. In the absence of genius there is always craftsmanship. One can at least try to write something that will arrest the readers' attention, that will encourage them, after reading the first paragraph, to take a look at the second, and then the third.”

Robert Harris book The Ghost

Source: The Ghost (2007), Ch. 9.

Books, Universe, Reading

“Let me remind my readers that the term divine did not originally imply the existence of gods: on the contrary, gods were constructed to interpret man's experiences of this quality.”

Julian Huxley (1887–1975) English biologist, philosopher, author

The New Divinity (1964)

God

“A number of statistical assumptions are made in the application of his (Thurstone's) attitude scale e. g. that the scale values of the statements are independent of the attitude distribution of the readers who sort the statements assumptions which as Thurstone points out, cannot always be verified. The method is more over laborious. It seems legitimate to Enquirer whether it actually does its work better than the simple scales which may be employed and the same breath to ask also whether it is not possible to construct equally reliable scales without making unnecessary statistical assumptions.”

Rensis Likert (1903–1981) American statistician

Likert, Rensis. "A technique for the measurement of attitudes." Archives of psychology (1932). p. 7

“Both these men are in love with Natasha, Count Rostov's younger daughter, and in her Tolstoy has created the most delightful girl in fiction. Nothing is so difficult as to portray a young girl who is at once charming and interesting. Generally the young girls of fiction are colorless (Amelia in Vanity Fair), priggish (Fanny in Mansfield Park), too clever by half (Constantia Durham in The Egoist), or little geese (Dora in David Copperfield), silly flirts or innocent beyound belief. It is understandable that they should be an awkward subject for the novelist to deal with, for at that tender age the personality is undeveloped. Similarly a painter can only make a face interesting when the vicissitudes of life, thought, love and suffering have given it character. In the portrait of a girl the best he can do is to represent the charm and beauty of youth. But Natasha is entirely natural. She is sweet, sensitive, and sympathetic, willful, childish, womanly already, idealistic, quick-tempered, warm-hearted, headstrong, capricious and in everything enchanting. Tolstoy created many women and they are wonderfully true to life, but never another who wins the affection of the reader as does Natasha.”

W. Somerset Maugham (1874–1965) British playwright, novelist, short story writer

Leo Tolstoy and War and Peace
Great Novelists and Their Novels

Love, Life, Women, Men

“Nothing requires so little mental effort as to narrate or follow a story. Hence everybody tells stories and the readers of stories outnumber all others.”

John Lancaster Spalding (1840–1916) Catholic bishop

Source: Aphorisms and Reflections (1901), p. 193

Effort

“We may say that a poem in the first place should offer us new perceptions, not only of the exterior universe, but of human experience as well; it should add, in other words, to what we have already seen. This is the elementary function for the reader. The corresponding function for the poet is a sharpening and training of his sensibilities; the very exigencies of the medium as he employs it in the act of perception should force him to the discovery of values which he never would have found without the convening of all the conditions of that particular act, conditions one or more of which will be the necessity of solving some particular difficulty such as the location of a rhyme or the perfection of a cadence with disturbance to the remainder of the poem.”

Yvor Winters (1900–1968) American poet and literary critic

The Morality of Poetry
Primitivism and Decadence : A Study of American Experimental Poetry (1937)

Universe, Perfection, Training

“Sheer power of a great poem is enough to guarantee that it will ultimately make itself felt, if the reader is in a receptive mood.”

Dennis O'Driscoll (1954–2012) Irish poet, critic

Interview Michael Garvey @Irish Literary Supplement' Fall 1998
Poetry Quotes

Mood

“I have been induced to adopt this course by a desire that my readers should be taught to think as well as to experiment, and thus be qualified at an early part of their study to discriminate between the true and the false, and acquire the facts of the science without being mystified by its fictions.”

John Joseph Griffin (1802–1877) English chemist and publisher

Chemical Recreations (7th Edition, 1834) Preface xiv

Thinking, Study, Science, Parting

“I have only [written the Water Margin] to fill up my spare time, and give pleasure to myself; […] I have written it so that the uneducated can read it as well as the educated […]. Alas! Life is so short that I shall not even know what the reader thinks about it, but still I shall be satisfied if a few of my friends will read it and be interested. Also I do not know what I may think of it in my future life after death, because then I may not able to even read it. So why think anything further about it?”

Shi Nai'an (1296–1372) Chinese writer

Variant translation by Pearl S. Buck: "Alas, I was born to die! How can I know what those who come after me and read my book will think of it? I cannot even know what I myself, born into another incarnation, will think of it. I do not even know if I myself afterwards can even read this book. Why therefore should I care?" (All Men are Brothers, 1933; p. xiii)
Preface to Water Margin

Life, Death, Pleasure, Education

“Every text assumes a reader.”

Alberto Manguel (1948) writer

Endpaper Pages, p. 314.
A History of Reading (1996)

“I may be biased, but I think I have the best readers ever.”

Veronica Roth (1988) American author

About That Allegiant Leak, Roth, Veronica, Veronica Roth, September 25, 2013, November 4, 2013 http://veronicarothbooks.blogspot.com/2013/09/about-that-allegiant-leak.html,

Thinking

“The rhythmic pattern of the poem, which forces continuity of attention – incites a pleasurable compulsion to ‘follow’ – is either a tried metrical suasion-contrivance or a specially invented pattern of physical insistences, equally, if not more, binding in its effect on the reader. From a straight linguistic point of view, there is room for wonder if there is not latent vice in this environment in which pleasurable physically-compelled responses, produced by incidents of poetic utterance, are identified with the Good.”

Laura Riding Jackson (1901–1991) poet, critic, novelist, essayist and short story writer

"The Promise of Words" in London Review of Books, Vol. 17, No. 17, p. 23

Pleasure

“Gentle reader, may you never feel what I then felt? May your eyes never shed such stormy, scalding, heart-wrung tears as poured from mine. May you never appeal to Heaven in prayers so hopeless and so agonized as in that hour left my lips; for never may you, like me, dread to be the instrument of evil to what you wholly love.”

Charlotte Brontë book Jane Eyre

Jane (Ch. 27)
Jane Eyre (1847)

Love, Feeling, Tear, Evil

“The reader should understand that this book forms a small part of a larger intellectual program: a struggle against fate through thought, an effort to give new meaning and new life to projects of individual and social liberation that for the last two hundred years have shaken and aroused the whole world, a fight to imagine the forms that those projects can and should take if they are to have a future.”

Roberto Mangabeira Unger book The Left Alternative

Source: The Left Alternative (2009), p. 187

Life, Fate, Books, World

“Thus, the way Romila Thapar equates Mahmud Ghaznavi with Harsha of Kashmir (twelfth century) as being both temple plunderers, can be shown up to be in gross conflict with the contemporary testimonies about the two….. Romila Thapar's explanation that Ghaznavi's behaviour was essentially the same as Harsha's, can only rest on an utter incompetence in reading the source material, or in a deliberate attempt to distort history. What is more, if at all one wants to compare Harsha's behaviour with that of the Muslim rulers, one should face the connection that the contemporary historian Kalhan explicitly makes. Commenting on Harsha's temple plundering, he writes :"Prompted by the Turks in his employ, he behaved like a Turk"…. Kalhan is simply saying that the very idea that a temple need not be respected, was borrowed by Harsha from the Muslim Turks. These already had a well-established reputation for temple desecration, and that is a fact to which the Nehruvian historians prefer not to draw the readers' attention….. So, here we have a case of a history professor who does not realize that the proofs he cites have hardly any logical connection with the thesis he proposes; or who is so assured about his eminence that he doesn't expect readers to notice the faulty reasoning.”

Harsha of Kashmir

Koenraad Elst 1991: Ayodhya and after: issues before Hindu society.

Way, History, Idea, Reading

“In every field there is a need for writing where the main objective is to extend the reader's field of acquaintance with the complex cases of the real world. Such writing does not have to be very exact or quantitative; it does not even have to formulate or to demonstrate hypotheses. It constitutes, as it were, travel over the field of study. Travel is certainly not enough, even for a geographer, but we would feel, I imagine, that a geographer who had never travelled would be under a serious handicap. Similarly the student of organizations who has never, even vicariously through reading, been in a hospital, a bank, a research laboratory, a large corporation, a Soviet factory, a revolution, an Egyptian civil service department, and so on, has missed something. His generalizations are apt to be based on too narrow a selection of the field.”

Kenneth E. Boulding (1910–1993) British-American economist

Kenneth Boulding (1958) "Evidences for an Administrative Science: A review of the Administrative Science Quarterly, volumes 1 and 2". In Administrative Science Quarterly. vol. 3, no. 1, pp. 1-22.as cited in: John Van Maanen (1998) Qualitative Studies of Organizations. p.xx
1950s

World, Travel, Feeling, Imagination