Quotes about real
page 24

“Who are the real racists? So far, thanks to a Republican Party that is ignorant of its own history and gave up on the black community, Democrats have fifty of those two hundred years under their belt. The problem with today's Republican Party is that it has forgotten its own history and raison d'etre. Individual liberty. The party must come to realize that GOP also stands for 'Growth, Opportunity, Prosperity' and articulate how it stands, as its history and founding clearly demonstrate, for the individual pursuit of happiness as opposed to the progressive socialist Democrat lie of a collective guarantee of happiness. So, happy 160th birthday to my party, the Republican Party. I am a strong conservative and I hope Republicans recommit to those fundamental principles which established this party, the historical antithesis of the Democrats.”

Allen West (politician) (1961) American politician; retired United States Army officer

2010s, Voting Democratic for the next 200 years (2014)

Happiness, Lie, Hope, History

“Sarah Palin is absolutely the real deal. You know, I only got to spend a short amount of time with her but, you know, it was been asked if I felt any presence when I was with John McCain or Barack Obama. You know, with Sarah Palin, I don't want to say I felt a presence but she definitely had energy and she definitely went to work for American people, and it disgusts me on how often they try to bash her just for her sincerity. It's just, you know, she really wants to work for America and I mean, I wish people would listen to her and let them, and let her work for us. You know, she wants to serve us. She's not looking for power.”

Joe the Plumber (1973) American conservative activist and commentator

"Glenn talks to Joe the Plumber" at GlennBeck.com (10 December 2008) http://www.glennbeck.com/content/articles/article/198/19055/.

People, Time, Sincerity

“Peace before everything, God before anything / Love before anything, real before everything / Home before anyplace, truth before anything / Style and stay radiate, love power slay the hate”

Mos Def (1973) American rapper and actor

From "Priority"
Album The Ecstatic

Love, God, Hate, Truth

“Jesus Christ has not come to establish social justice any more than he has come to establish the power of the state or the reign of money or art. Jesus Christ has come to save men, and all that matters is that men may come to know him. We are adept at finding reasons—good theological, political, or practical reasons, for camouflaging this. But the real reason is that we let ourselves be impressed and dominated by the forces of the world, by the press, by public opinion, by the political game, by appeals to justice, liberty, peace, the poverty of the third world, and the Christian civilization of the west, all of which play on our inclinations and weaknesses. Modern protestants are in the main prepared to be all things to all men, like St. Paul, but unfortunately this is not in order that they may save some but in order that they may be like all men.”

Jacques Ellul (1912–1994) French sociologist, technology critic, and Christian anarchist

Source: The Ethics of Freedom (1973 - 1974), p. 254

Men, Money, World, Peace

“[It is] a question of personal appeal and conviction, rather than any argument. The cards I fancy are sympathy, understanding of his hopes, suspicions and disappointments, but above all, striving to convey to him, through what one says, a real echo of the sincerity that pervaded your doings in London.”

Edward Wood, 1st Earl of Halifax (1881–1959) British politician

Letter (16 February 1931), quoted in Birkenhead, Halifax (Hamish Hamilton, 1965), p. 296
Viceroy of India

Hope, Disappointment, Understanding, Question

“That Somerset Maugham anthology Cakes and Ale. How destructive he is, venomous, pulling everything down in biting, corrosive cynicism. Yet somewhere deep down under all the conceit, sarcasm and snobbery is real quivering pain, helpless bewilderment at the inexplicable fact that human nature is chequered. And what perplexes him is less the common, mean element in decent people than the goodness and kindness of wicked, vicious ones.”

Ida Friederike Görres (1901–1971) Austrian writer and noble

Broken Lights Diaries 1955-57.

Pain, People, Nature

“We have now isolated four "ideal types" of causal texture, approximations to which may be thought of as existing simultaneously in the "real world" of most organizations--though, of course, their weighting will vary enormously from case to case.”

Fred Emery (1925–1997) Australian psychologist

Source: The Causal Texture of Organizational Environments (1963), p. 27.

World

“They [say] everybody's creative. Well, everybody is. But any real creativity has to rest on a basis of an acquired technique and an acquired knowledge; you can't be creative in a void, or you just get a mess.”

Robertson Davies (1913–1995) Canadian journalist, playwright, professor, critic, and novelist

"The Grand Old Man of Can Lit"
Conversations with Robertson Davies (1989)

Knowledge

“To hope for [immortality],' said the Patriarch, 'would be like trying to fish the moon out of the water.'
'There you go again!' said Monkey. 'What pray do you mean by fishing the moon out of the water?'
'When the moon is in the sky,' said the Patriarch, 'it is reflected in the water. It looks just like a real thing, but if you try to catch hold of it, you find it is only an illusion.”

Arthur Waley (1889–1966) British academic

Source: Translations, Monkey: Folk Novel of China (1942), Ch. 2 (p. 22)

Hope, Fish, Water

“The immediacy of falling in love recognizes but one immediacy that is ebenburtig (of equal standing), and this is a religious immediacy; falling in love is too virginal to recognize any confidant other than God. But the religious is a new immediacy, has reflection in between-otherwise, paganism would actually be religious and Christianity not. That the religious is a new immediacy every person easily understands who is satisfied with following the honest path of ordinary common sense. And although I imagine I have but few readers, I confess nevertheless that I do imagine my readers to be among these, since I am far from wanting to instruct the admired ones, who make systematic discoveries a la Niels Klim, who have left their good skin in order to put on the “real appearance.””

Sören Kierkegaard book Stages on Life's Way

Stages on Life's Way, p. 161-162
1840s, Stages on Life's Way (1845)

Love, God, Confidence, Imagination

“Secretary-General Annan spoke for all of us … when he said that ethnic cleansers and mass murderers can find no refuge in the United Nations, no source of comfort or justification in its charter. We must do more to make these words real. Of course, we must approach this challenge with some considerable degree of humility. It is easy to say, "Never again," but much harder to make it so. Promising too much can be as cruel as caring too little. But difficulties, dangers, and costs are not an argument for doing nothing. When we are faced with deliberate, organized campaigns to murder whole peoples or expel them from their land, the care of victims is important but not enough. We should work to end the violence.”

Bill Clinton (1946) 42nd President of the United States

Remarks to the 54th Session of the United Nations General Assembly (September 21, 1999)
1990s

People

“And we would play together,
like fine musicians should,
And it would sound like music,
and the music would sound good.
But in real life I'm stuck with
that same old formula,
me and my monophonic symphony,
six string orchestra.”

Harry Chapin (1942–1981) American musician

Six String Orchestra
Song lyrics, Verities & Balderdash (1974)

Life, Music

“These stories offer us a model of how real refreshment of body and spirit is achieved. Three things are worth noting. First, rest comes as an invitation from Jesus. Recently, Pope Francis recommended to a group of priests that they should be open to the rest that comes from Jesus, rather than relying on other ways to relax, some of which can be very unhealthy, if not destructive. We can use entertainment, mind altering substances and other means that only serve as a temporary release of tension and fatigue. Superficial at best, these efforts end up provoking more restlessness and lethargy, especially if they bring upon guilt and depression. It is known, for instance, that alcohol can be a depressant and impact our overall mood. Jesus offers us the gift of rest, and so the first step is to surrender to the kind of rest he offers, and accept his invitation, rather than taking on this burden ourselves. Second, his invitation is to go to an “out of the way” place, a deserted place. This is not an invitation to take a vacation to an exotic location, but rather a summons to enter into those places in our lives that we ignore, yet which have an impact on us.”

Blase J. Cupich (1949) Catholic bishop

"The gift of rest", from the online edition of The Catholic New World, the Chicago archdiocesan newspaper, in the Archbishop's Column (July 26 - August 8, 2015)

Alcohol, Way, Mood, Effort

“The hardest theme in science fiction is that of the alien. The simplest solution of all is in fact quite profound—that the real difficulty lies not in understanding what is alien, but in understanding what is self. We are all aliens to each other, all different and divided. We are even aliens to ourselves at different stages of our lives. Do any of us remember precisely what it was like to be a baby?”

Greg Bear (1951) American writer best known for science fiction

"Introduction to 'Plague of Conscience'", The Collected Stories of Greg Bear (2002)

Understanding, Science, Baby

“I stopped reading the comics page a long time ago. It seems that whoever is in charge of what to put on that page is given an edict that states: “For God’s sake, try to be as bland as possible and by no means offend any one!” Thus, whenever something like Doonesbury would come along, it would be continually censored and, if lucky, eventually banished to the editorial pages. The message was clear: Keep it simple, keep it cute, and don’t be challenging, outrageous or political.
And keep it white!
It’s odd that considering all the black ink that goes into making the comics section (and color on Sundays) that you rarely see any black faces on that page. Well, maybe it’s not so odd after all, considering the makeup of most newsrooms in our country. It is even more stunning when you consider that in many of our large cities like New York, Los Angeles, or Chicago where the white population is barely a third of the overall citizenry, the comics pages seem to be one of the last vestiges of the belief that white faces are just…well, you know…so much more happy and friendly and funny!
Of course, the real funnies are on the front pages of most papers these days. That’s where you can see a lot of black faces. The media loves to cover black people on the front page. After all, when you live in a society that will lock up 30 percent of all black men at some time in their lives and send more of them to prison than to college, chances are a fair number of those black faces will end up in the newspaper.
Oops, there I go playing the race card. You see, in America these days, we aren’t supposed to talk about race. We have been told to pretend that things have gotten better, that the old days of segregation and cross burnings are long gone, and that no one needs to talk about race again because, hey, we fixed that problem.
Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. Sure, the “whites only” signs are down, but they have just been replaced by invisible ones that, if you are black, you see hanging in front of the home loan department of the local bank, across the entrance of the ritzy suburban or on the doors of the U. S. Senate”

Michael Moore (1954) American filmmaker, author, social critic, and liberal activist

100 percent Caucasian and going strong!
Foreword to "The Boondocks Treasury: a Right to be Hostile" by Aaron McGruder, (2003).
2003

Love, Men, God, Happiness

“We were all in awe of Penny [Woolcock]. You feel so safe with her, you end up doing things that might seem offensive to other people. It's almost like being in a therapy session. You go a little bit further than you would normally. But in the orgy scene, where Marc's really getting a blowjob, I was like, `You've crossed the line!' Me and Alec were acting, and being loving and safe and showing the feeling of wanting to climb under someone's skin. For it to suddenly become something purely physical - I didn't think that needed to be real. But it was a situation that got out of hand. They filmed it at a swingers' club. There wasn't any way of stopping things, once they'd started. It's really gruesome and awful. But for the story, it's perfect. That scene was out of control. But by that point, so are the characters.”

Sienna Guillory (1975) British actress

FILM: Beauty and the Beasts Article http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4158/is_20040312/ai_n12769890/pg_1. The London Independent. March 12, 2004. Guillory speaks about Sorted and director Penny Woolcock.

Love, People, Way, Feeling

“We're not Republican or Democrat. We won't fold into one party or the other. We're a tax-paying party that can make a difference and a party of normal people who want change. Bigger government and higher taxes is not working. Right now we're at a real crossroads to make change, and the bottom line is there's never been so much disdain for politicians.”

Scott Ashjian (1963) American businessman

[Jourdan, Kristi, Tea Party hopeful - gives voters third choice, Las Vegas Review-Journal, 1B, March 8, 2010]

People, Change

“If it came on the evening news tonight that there were five grizzly bears roaming around Cobb County, do you know what would happen by six o'clock in the morning? They would all be dead. Because every redneck in four states would be out there with a rifle, trying to shoot one, right? And whoever could shoot the biggest one would be a hero. They would have his picture on the front page, "Bubba shot the Grizzly Bear" and saved the village. That is exactly what happened to the dragons. If you could figure out a way to kill a dragon, they would be telling stories about you around the campfire. People killed dragons for meat, because they were a menace, to prove that you were a hero, or to prove that you are superior, in competition for land, or for medicinal purposes. Many ancient recipes call for dragon blood, dragon bones, dragon saliva, why? Gilgamesh is famous for slaying a dragon. A Chinese legend tells about a guy named Yu that surveyed the land of China. It says, that after the Flood he surveyed the land, he divided it off into sections. He built channels to drain water off to sea and make the land livable again. Many snakes and dragons were driven from the marshlands. You know that's normal that if you want to build a city. You have to drive off the dragons, then build your city. It was expected that you have got to drive the dragons away or kill them. Why would the Chinese calendar have eleven real animals: the pig, the duck, the dog, and … the dragon? Why would they put just one "mythical" animal in there? Could it be at the time they that they came up with these animals there were 12 real animals? There is one of the oldest pieces of pottery on Planet Earth. It's a piece of slate from Egypt; the first dynasty of United Egypt. It shows long necked dragons […] Why would they put long necked dinosaurs on pottery 3,800 years ago? Here are two long necked dinosaurs with a sheep in between them in their mouths. Here is a hippo tusk from the twelve century B. C., showing an animal with a long neck, and a long tail. Here's a cylinder seal, showing what appears quite obviously to be a long neck dinosaur. The Bible talks about a fiery flying serpent, in Isaiah 14.”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Creation seminars (2003-2005), Dinosaurs and the Bible

People, Dogs, Way, Guy

“I used many times to touch my own chest and feel, under its asthmatic quiver, the engine of the heart and lungs and blood and feel amazed at what I sensed was the enormity of the power I possessed. Not magical power, but real power. The power simply to go on, the power to endure, that is power enough, but I felt I had also the power to create, to add, to delight, to amaze and to transform.”

Stephen Fry (1957) English comedian, actor, writer, presenter, and activist

1990s, Moab is My Washpot (autobiography, 1997)

Feeling, Sense, Time, Heart

“"Welcome to the real world", she said to me
Condescendingly.
Take a seat,
Take your life
Plot it out in black and white.
Well I never lived the dreams of the prom kings
And the drama queens.
I'd like to think the best of me
Is still hiding
Up my sleeve.They love to tell you:
Stay inside the lines,
But something's better
On the other side.”

John Mayer (1977) guitarist and singer/songwriter

No Such Thing, written by John Mayer and Clay Cook
Song lyrics, Room for Squares (2001)

Love, Life, World, Dreams

“Why is compassion not part of our established curriculum, an inherent part of our education? Compassion, awe, wonder, curiosity, exaltation, humility — these are the very foundation of any real civilization, no longer the prerogatives, the preserves of any one church, but belonging to everyone, every child in every home, in every school.”

Yehudi Menuhin (1916–1999) American violinist and conductor

Just for Animals; quoted in Souls Like Ourselves by Andrea Wiebers and David Wiebers (Rochester, MN: Sojourn Press, 2000), p. 16.

Education, School, Home, Parting

“There's real strangeness in this world of ours. Back in the machine times, there was so much noise front and back, so to speak, it kept us from knowing what lies behind the surface of things.”

James Howard Kunstler book World Made By Hand

Source: World Made By Hand (2008), Chapter 55, p. 262

World, Time

“Rats and mice are not generally regarded as pets, but as pests; they have few defenders. Yet the pain a rat or a mouse feels is every bit as real as that of any pet. In laboratories, they suffer, as anybody who has heard them moan, cry, whimper and even scream knows. The experimenters dissimulate about this by insisting that they are merely vocalising. Descartes lives on.”

Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson book When Elephants Weep

Conclusion, p. 217
When Elephants Weep (1994)

Pain, Feeling, Suffering, Cry

“She simply has no concept of what’s real and what’s fantasy—did I say? She’s in the theater.”

Samuel R. Delany book Triton

Source: Triton (1976), Chapter 7 “Tiresias Descending, or Trouble on Triton” (p. 322)

“On entering life, then, young people meet with various collective opinions, more or less narrow-minded. The more the individual has it in him to become a real personality, the more he will resist following a herd. But even if an inner voice says to him; “Become thyself! Be thyself!” he hears its appeal with despondency. Has he a self? He does not know; he is not yet aware of it. He therefore looks about for a teacher, an educator, one who will teach him, not something foreign, but how to become his own individual self.
We had in Denmark a great man who with impressive force exhorted his contemporaries to become individuals. But Søren Kierkegaard’s appeal was not intended to be taken so unconditionally as it sounded. For the goal was fixed. They were to become individuals, not in order to develop into free personalities, but in order by this means to become true Christians. Their freedom was only apparent; above them was suspended a “Thou shalt believe!” and a “Thou shalt obey!” Even as individuals they had a halter round their necks, and on the farther side of the narrow passage of individualism, through which the herd was driven, the herd awaited them again one flock, one shepherd.
It is not with this idea of immediately resigning his personality again that the young man in our day desires to become himself and seeks an educator. He will not have a dogma set up before him, at which he is expected to arrive.”

Georg Brandes (1842–1927) Danish literature critic and scholar

Source: An Essay on Aristocratic Radicalism (1889), pp. 9-10

Life, People, Education, Idea

“My quarrel with Chomsky goes back to the Balkan wars of the 1990s, where he more or less openly represented the "Serbian Socialist Party" (actually the national-socialist and expansionist dictatorship of Slobodan Milosevic) as the victim. Many of us are proud of having helped organize to prevent the slaughter and deportation of Europe's oldest and largest and most tolerant Muslim minority, in Bosnia-Herzegovina and in Kosovo. But at that time, when they were real, Chomsky wasn't apparently interested in Muslim grievances. He only became a voice for that when the Taliban and Al Qaeda needed to be represented in their turn as the victims of a "silent genocide" in Afghanistan. Let me put it like this, if a supposed scholar takes the Christian-Orthodox side when it is the aggressor, and then switches to taking the "Muslim" side when Muslims commit mass murder, I think that there is something very nasty going on. And yes, I don't think it is exaggerated to describe that nastiness as "anti-American" when the power that stops and punishes both aggressions is the United States … In some awful way, his regard for the underdog has mutated into support for mad dogs. This is not at all like watching the implosion of an obvious huckster and jerk like Michael Moore, who would have made a perfectly good Brownshirt populist. The collapse of Chomsky feels to me more like tragedy.”

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

"Love, Poverty and War" http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=C78DC231-4599-4745-9CA5-A398398916A0, FrontPageMagazine.com (2004-12-29): On Noam Chomsky 2000s, 2004

War, Dogs, Jerk, Way

“In a 1988 Sports Illustrated interview: "Real freedom is having nothing. I was freer when I didn't have a cent. Do you know what I do sometimes? Put on a ski mask and dress in old clothes, go out on the streets and beg for quarters."”

Mike Tyson (1966) American boxer

http://www.boxing-monthly.co.uk/content/0008/three.htm
On himself

Sport, Freedom, Clothes

“It is all work and forgotten work, this peopled, clothed, articulate-speaking, high-towered, wide-acred World. The hands of forgotten brave men have made it a World for us; they,— honour to them; they, in spite of the idle and the dastard. This English Land, here and now, is the summary of what was found of wise, and noble, and accordant with God's Truth, in all the generations of English Men. Our English Speech is speakable because there were Hero-Poets of our blood and lineage; speakable in proportion to the number of these. This Land of England has its conquerors, possessors, which change from epoch to epoch, from day to day; but its real conquerors, creators, and eternal proprietors are these following, and their representatives if you can find them: All the Heroic Souls that ever were in England, each in their degree; all the men that ever cut a thistle, drained a puddle out of England, contrived a wise scheme in England, did or said a true and valiant thing in England.”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

1840s, Past and Present (1843)

Men, God, People, Truth

“One of the greatest investments of our lifetime has been New York City real estate, and investors made the highest returns when they bought stuff during the 1970s and 1980s when people were getting mugged. The lesson is that you make the most money when you buy stuff that's out of consensus.”

Mary Meeker (1959) American venture capitalist and securities analyst

Newsweek: "Climbing Back Up" http://www.newsweek.com/climbing-back-126731 (29 August 2004)

Money, People

“In a world that daily disconnects further from truth, more and more people accept the virtual in place of the real, and all things virtual are also malleable.”

Dean Koontz book The Good Guy

Krait's musings
Source: The Good Guy (2007), Chapter 21, p. 147

People, Truth, World

“The real world with its common logic pushes us toward catastrophe. The artists seek in his work to free himself from this weight. Art is being transformed into politics, love into trade, education into an apparatus for stifling the mind. In the midst of such horrors, clearly only the dream within me has life. But how do other people live? -There is color, virginal expression - new, without a cage, without routine, without limit, a bath of sun and light. We must realize that nothing man does is of any value. The trouble is that people want to be paid. Only sick men can be artists. Their suffering pushes them into the accomplishment of deeds which reinvest the world with meaning. The sensitive man or the artist can only be a sick man in our civilized life, so full of lies. To think of art as a profession, how appealing!”

Bram van Velde (1895–1981) Dutch painter

Painting is man in the face of his downfall.
1960's
Source: Abstract Painting, Michel Seuphor, Dell Publishing Co., 1964, p. 134

Love, Life, Men, People

“Technically, Reconstruction was "over" when the last of the Confederate states had written new state constitutions and elected representatives and senators in conformity with the Reconstruction Acts. This happened fairly quickly, between June 1868 and July 1870, and it put in place state governments that were largely dominated by Republicans and that made heroic efforts to make a reality of voting rights for the freed slaves. But one by one, the wheels came off these reconstructed state governments and the old Southern Democratic power machines regained control. But “regained” is too anodyne; “overthrew” is the real word, since the recapture of these state governments was accomplished by violence and black voter intimidation.”

Allen C. Guelzo (1953) American historian

2010s, Interview with Sara Gabbard (2018)

Reality, Effort

“Mrs. Driscoll clapped her hands together and the bracelets jingled brightly. "Yes, Mr. Morgan! The theater can heal a wounded spirit and broken heart! I've seen it countless times. When we are completely artificial, we can find out what's real."”

John Twelve Hawks book Spark

Spark (2014)

Time, Heart

“The crucial and monumental development in the art music of our century has been the qualitative change in the foundational premises of our musical language--the change from a highly chromaticized tonality whose principle functions and operations are still based on a limited selection, the seven notes of the diatonic scale, from the universal set of twelve pitch classes to a scale that comprehends the total pitch-class content of that universal set. We can point to the moment of that change with some precision. It occurs most obviously in the music of Scriabin and the Vienna circle, Schoenberg, Webern, and Berg, in 1909-1910, and very soon afterwards, though less obviously, in the music of Bartok and Stravinsky. I think it is safe to say that nothing of comparable significance for music has ever occurred, because the closing of the circle of fifths gives us a symmetrical collection of all twelve pitch classes that eliminates the special structural function of the perfect fifth itself, which has been the basis of every real musical system that we have hitherto known.”

George Perle (1915–2009) American composer

Pages 42-43
The Listening Composer

Art, Music, Thinking, Universe

“I may be furious and sad about what happened with us, but that doesn't make me believe that what we had wasn't real. And it doesn't make me believe that I won't find something that real again.”

Mary Kay Andrews (1954) American writer(original name/Kathy Hogan Trocheck)

Summer Rental (2011).

Sadness

“It is from the education of the new generations that we will especially be able to expect a real moral progress. It is important first of all to develop in it (or 'him', the next generations…) self-control, love of truth and solidarity spirit.”

African Spir (1837–1890) Russian philosopher

Source: Words of a Sage : Selected thoughts of African Spir (1937), p. 58.

Love, Truth, Education

Neal A. Maxwell (1926–2004) Mormon leader

Popularity and Principle, Ensign, Mar. 1995, p. 12 Ensign http://www.lds.org/ldsorg/v/index.jsp?vgnextoid=2354fccf2b7db010VgnVCM1000004d82620aRCRD&locale=0&sourceId=73933ff73058b010VgnVCM1000004d82620a____&hideNav=1 ( Morm. 8:39 http://scriptures.lds.org/en/morm/8#39). It is a sad fact, therefore, that popularity gets in the way of our keeping both of the two great commandments!"" (See Matt. 22:36–40 http://scriptures.lds.org/en/matt/22#36.)

World

“We don't ideologically believe in the separation of spirit and matter, but in practice, we still tend to think that things that are too material, too real-life, are somehow not as spiritual. So a trance to Faery is perceived as "spiritual," whereas a trance to a Brazilian favela slum is not. We can argue about the reality of Faery, but the favela is undeniably real. If we truly believe that our spirituality is about deep interconnectedness, maybe it's more important for us to grapple internally with the reality of the favela than to dance with the faeries.”

Starhawk (1951) American author, activist and Neopagan

Toward an Activist Spirituality (2003)

Life, Thinking, Reality, Dance

“It’s important to understand how we got where we are today. In 1966, the unthinkable happened: a madman climbed the University of Texas clock tower and opened fire, killing more than a dozen people. It was the first mass shooting in the age of television, and it left a real impression on the country. It was the kind of terror we didn’t expect to ever see again. But around 30 years ago, we started to see an uptick in these types of shootings, and over the last decade they’ve become the new norm.
In July 2012, a gunman walked into a darkened theater in Aurora and shot 12 people to death, injuring 70 more. One of his weapons was an assault rifle. The sudden and utterly random violence was a terrifying sign of what was to come.
In December 2012, a young man entered an elementary school in Newtown and murdered six educators and 20 young children. One of his weapons was an assault rifle. Watching the aftermath of these young babies being gunned down was heartrending.
In June 2016, a gunman entered a nightclub in Orlando and sprayed revelers with gunfire. The shooter fired hundreds of rounds, many in close proximity, and killed 49. Many of the victims were shot in the head at close range. One of his weapons was an assault rifle.
Last month, a gunman opened fire on concertgoers in Las Vegas, turning an evening of music into a killing field. All told, the shooter used multiple assault rifles fitted with bump-fire stocks to kill 58 people. The concert venue looked like a warzone.
Over the weekend in Sutherland Springs, 26 were killed by a gunman with an assault rifle. The dead ranged from 17 months old to 77 years. No one is spared with these weapons of war. When so many rounds are fired so quickly, no one is spared. Another community devastated and dozens of families left to pick up the pieces.
These are just a few of the many communities we talk about in hushed tones—San Bernardino, Littleton, Aurora, towns and cities across the country that have been permanently scarred.”

Dianne Feinstein (1933) American politician

[Senators Introduce Assault Weapons Ban, November 8, 2017, w:Diane Feinstein, Diane, Feinstein, https://www.feinstein.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/2017/11/senators-introduce-assault-weapons-ban]
On the introduction of the Assault Weapons Ban of 2017

Death, War, Children, People

“The human mind is a wanton storyteller and even more, a profligate seeker after pattern. We see faces in clouds and tortillas, fortunes in tea leaves and planetary movements. It is quite difficult to prove a real pattern as distinct from a superficial illusion.”

Richard Dawkins book A Devil's Chaplain

"Snake Oil"
A Devil's Chaplain (2003)

Tea

“Greek mythology tells us that the Gods invented woman as a punishment after man got a hold of some stolen goods. Obviously, this was just the mythological explanation given by the primitive early men to explain the real origin of women, which was this: THEY CAME DOWN IN SPACESHIPS. Yes, all women are space aliens who have come from a far-off galaxy to enslave mankind.”

Ben Croshaw (1983) English video game journalist

Ask Yahtzee
Fully Ramblomatic, Features

Women, Men, God

“I regret exceedingly the arrest of many gentlemen and persons in Kentucky, and still more that they should give causes of arrest. I cannot in person inquire into these matters, but must leave them to the officer who is commissioned and held responsible by Government for the peace and safety of Kentucky. It does appear to me when our national integrity is threatened and the very fundamental principles of all government endangered that minor issues should not be made by Judge Bullitt and others. We cannot all substitute our individual opinions, however honest, as the test of authority. As citizens and individuals we should waive and abate our private notions of right and policy to those of the duly appointed agents of the Government, certain that if they be in error the time will be short when the real principles will manifest themselves and be recognized. In your career how often have you not believed our Congress had adopted a wrong policy and how short the time now seems to you when the error rectified itself or you were willing to admit yourself wrong.”

William T. Sherman (1820–1891) American General, businessman, educator, and author.

1860s, 1864, Letter to James Guthrie (August 1864)

Peace, Error, Appearance, Time

“Don't talk back;
Just drive the car.
Shut your mouth;
I know what you are.
Don't say nothing;
Keep your hands on the wheel.
Don't turn around;
This is for real.
Digging in the dirt.
Stay with me, I need support.
I'm digging in the dirt
To find the places I got hurt.
Open up the places I got hurt.”

Peter Gabriel (1950) English singer-songwriter, record producer and humanitarian

Digging in the Dirt
Song lyrics, Us (1992)

Cars, Support, Hurt

“If we go on as we are, we are protecting the mind of the American public from any real contact with the menacing world that squeezes in upon us. We are engaged in a great experiment to discover whether a free public opinion can devise and direct methods of managing the affairs of the nation. We may fail. But we are handicapping ourselves needlessly.”

Edward R. Murrow (1908–1965) Television journalist

RTNDA Convention Speech (1958)

World

“Disinterestedness is a necessary attribute to real friendship and it is the duty of one friend to guess another's problems and render assistance before it is asked. If our friends have needs that we can satisfy, we should relieve them of the necessity of seeking our help. Apart from the satisfaction usually produced by an action, this permanent ability to give pleasure is perhaps the only advantage of wealth and power.”

André Maurois (1885–1967) French writer

Un Art de Vivre (The Art of Living) (1939), The Art of Friendship

Friendship, Pleasure, Problem, Help

“I hear you guys all the time talking about Daniel Bryan, trained by Shawn Michaels. One curious thing to me is, how come you guys never mention William Regal? William Regal did the real work with this young man. Shawn Michaels took $3,000 from him, that's all he ever did.”

Phil Brooks (1978) American professional wrestler and mixed martial artist

October 25, 2010
WWE Raw

Guy, Time, Training

“People have different professions, different points of view. They are like observers looking at the world through the narrow windows of an otherwise closed structure. Occasionally they assemble at the center and discuss what they have seen; then one observer will talk about a beautiful landscape with red trees, a red sky, and a red lake in the middle; the next one about an infinite blue plane without articulation; and the third about an impressive, five-floor-high building; they will quarrel. The observer on top of the structure (me) can only laugh at their quarrels-but for them the quarrels will be real and he (the observer on top) will be an unworldly dreamer. Real life… is exactly like that. Every person has his own well-defined opinions, which color the section of the world he percieves. And when people come together, when they try to discover the nature of the whole which they belong, they are bound to talk past each other; they will understand neither themselves nor their companions.”

Paul Karl Feyerabend book Killing Time

Pg 48.
Killing Time (1995)

Life, People, World, Beauty

“Gibbs is thankful to be alive. He really thought life was over, and for him to admit that is huge, because he’s not that kind of guy. After all this time, the writers still find new places to take him. NCIS was never a show about the crime cases, because sometimes we solve ’em, sometimes we don’t. This is a show about characters. The audience takes real ownership of the people we play.”

Mark Harmon (1951) actor from the United States

TV Insider interview (2017)

Life, People, Guy, Time

“All poetry is an affair of the body, that is, to be real, it must affect the body.”

Remy de Gourmont (1858–1915) French writer

Le Problème du Style (1902)

“I saw it," said James. "I saw it when he made the sparrows out of clay on the Sabbath. The teacher told him he shouldn’t do such things on the Sabbath. Jesus looked at the birds and they turned into real birds. They flew away. You saw it too. He killed Eleazer, Mother, I saw it.”

Anne Rice (1941) American writer

Christ The Lord: Out Of Egypt (2005)

Bird, Teachers

“We loosely talk of Self-realization, for lack of a better term. But how can one realize or make real that which alone is real? All we need to do is to give up our habit of regarding as real that which is unreal. All religious practices are meant solely to help us do this. When we stop regarding the unreal as real, then Reality alone will remain, and we will be That.”

Ramana Maharshi (1879–1950) Indian religious leader

Abide as the Self

Reality, Help

“There's a reason the left's rhetoric bears such a striking resemblance to some of the nuttier religions: Abhorring real religions, liberals refuse to condemn what societies have condemned for thousands of years — e. g., promiscuity, divorce, illegitimacy, homosexuality. Consequently the normal human instinct to condemn something bubbles up against a legion of quite modern vices, such as smoking, fur, red meat, excessive consumption, and land development.”

Ann Coulter (1961) author, political commentator

Source: 2002, Slander : Liberal Lies About the American Right (2002), p. 247.

Religion

“If any student comes to me and says he wants to be useful to mankind and go into research to alleviate human suffering, I advise him to go into charity instead. Research wants real egotists who seek their own pleasure and satisfaction, but find it in solving the puzzles of nature.”

Albert Szent-Györgyi (1893–1986) Hungarian biochemist who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1937

Attributed to Szent-Györgyi by :w:Gerald Holton (1978); cited in: Robert Cohen (1985) The Development of spatial cognition. p. 363.

Pleasure, Nature, Suffering

“Illusionistic art appeals to what the public knows not about art but about things. This ability to brush art aside is the secret of the popularity of illusionism. Ever since the Greeks told of painted grapes being pecked by real birds, wonder at skill in deceiving the eye has moved more people than appreciation of aesthetic quality. But for art to depend exclusively upon reproducing appearances has the disadvantage of requiring that the painting or sculpture conform to the common perception of things.”

Harold Rosenberg (1906–1978) American writer and art critic

Source: Art on the Edge, (1975), p. 239, "Reality Again: The New Photorealism"

People, Secret, Art, Bird

“[RAM1989]I have to say that in 1981, making those decisions, I felt like I was providing enough freedom for 10 years. That is, a move from 64 K to 640 K felt like something that would last a great deal of time. Well, it didn't - it took about only 6 years before people started to see that as a real problem.”

Bill Gates (1955) American business magnate and philanthropist

1989 speech on the history of the microcomputer industry. http://www.csclub.uwaterloo.ca/media/1989%20Bill%20Gates%20Talk%20on%20Microsoft.html 1980s

People, Problem, Decision, Freedom

“It is impossible to answer your question briefly; and I am not sure that I could do so, even if I wrote at some length. But I may say that the impossibility of conceiving that this grand and wondrous universe, with our conscious selves, arose through chance, seems to me the chief argument for the existence of God; but whether this is an argument of real value, I have never been able to decide. I am aware that if we admit a first cause, the mind still craves to know whence it came, and how it arose. Nor can I overlook the difficulty from the immense amount of suffering through the world. I am, also, induced to defer to a certain extent to the judgment of the many able men who have fully believed in God; but here again I see how poor an argument this is. The safest conclusion seems to me that the whole subject is beyond the scope of man's intellect; but man can do his duty.”

Charles Darwin (1809–1882) British naturalist, author of "On the origin of species, by means of natural selection"

volume I, chapter VIII: "Religion", pages 306-307 http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?pageseq=324&itemID=F1452.1&viewtype=image; letter http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/entry-8837 to Dutch student N.D. Doedes (2 April 1873) The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin (1887)

Men, God, World, Question

“It is not by these means [modern humanism and humanitarianism, idealism, etc. ] that humanity can get that radical change of its ways of life which is yet becoming imperative, but only by reaching the bed-rock of Reality behind,… not through mere ideas and mental formations, but by a change of the consciousness, an inner and spiritual conversion. But that is a truth for which it would be difficult to get a hearing in the present noise of all kinds of many-voiced clamour and confusion and catastrophe…. Science has missed something essential; it has seen and scrutinised what has happened and in a way how it has happened, but it has shut its eyes to something that made this impossible possible, something it is there to express. There is no fundamental significance in things if you miss the Divine Reality; for you remain embedded in a huge surface crust of manageable and utilisable appearance. It is the magic of the Magician you are trying to analyse, but only when you enter into the consciousness of the Magician himself can you begin to experience the true origination, significance and circles of the Lila…. Another danger may then arise [once materialism begins to give way]… not of a final denial of the Truth, but the repetition in old or new forms of a past mistake, on one side some revival of blind fanatical obscurantist sectarian religionism, on the other a stumbling into the pits and quagmires of the vitalistic occult and the pseudo-spiritual'mistakes that made the whole real strength of the materialistic attack on the past and its credos. But these are phantasms that meet us always on the border line or in the intervening country between the material darkness and the perfect Splendour. In spite of all, the victory of the supreme Light even in the darkened earth-consciousness stands as the one ultimate certitude….”

Sri Aurobindo (1872–1950) Indian nationalist, freedom fighter, philosopher, yogi, guru and poet

Undated
India's Rebirth

Life, Truth, Religion, Way

“Suddenly I remembered Jeannie Windflow, who’d taught me how to kiss when we were kids. At the age of seventeen, she’d run off with a Mexican guy from Pozole Town who was nineteen years old, had a job, and was one of the handsomest guys I’d ever seen. He was a semi-professional boxer and real dark. She was a track star, a straight-A student, and real blonde.”

Victor Villaseñor (1940) American writer

Crazy Loco Love: A Memoir (2008)

Age, Guy, Star, Kiss

“With the development of the human race (and perhaps a little earlier), a new structure emerges, which we can call know-what. This consists of the structures in the nervous system which presumably map into some kind of images in the of the 'mind', which also map into structure in the 'real world', whatever that is. Know-what is very different from know-how. The fertilized egg certainly has the know-how to make whatever organism it knows how to make, but it is very doubtful that it knows what it is doing. The remarkable thing about know-what is that it creates know-how, as we see with the fantastic burgeoning of human artifacts under the influence of a science-based technology. Science, fundamentally, deals with know-what and this enormously increases know-how.”

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

Kenneth Boulding (1984) In: Meheroo Jussawalla, Helene Ebenfield eds. Communication and information economics: new perspectives. p. vii as cited in: John Laurent (2003) Evolutionary Economics and Human Nature. p. 177
1980s

World, Science

“The paralysis you feel right now – the impotent helplessness that washes over you as news of another mass slaughter scrolls across the television screen – isn’t real. It's a fiction created and methodically cultivated by the gun lobby, designed to assure that no laws are passed to make America safer, because those laws would cut into their profits…As my colleagues go to sleep tonight, they need to think about whether the political support of the gun industry is worth the blood that flows endlessly onto the floors of American churches, elementary schools, movie theaters, and city streets. Ask yourself – how can you claim that you respect human life while choosing fealty to weapons-makers over support for measures favored by the vast majority of your constituents?”

Chris Murphy (1973) American politician

Statement on the shootings in Sutherland Springs, TX http://www.businessinsider.com/chris-murphy-texas-church-shooting-sutherland-springs-2017-11 (November 5, 2017)

Life, School, Law, Feeling

“…we live in such an instantaneous age. We want everything right away—whether it’s an Uber or your favorite TV show—and we want it tailored to our exact preferences and beliefs. We fill our Twitter feed with voices that confirm, rather than challenge, our views. If we dislike someone’s Facebook post, we just un-follow them, we un-friend them. …in the real world, there are plenty of people who think very differently than you do, and they hold their opinions just as passionately. So if you want to change their minds, if you want to work with them to move this country forward, you can’t just shut them out. You have to persuade them, and you have to compromise with them. That is what so many of our heroes of history have done.”

Michelle Obama (1964) lawyer, writer, wife of Barack Obama and former First Lady of the United States

2010s, Commencement speech for Oberlin College Prep graduates (2015)

People, Age, World, History

“Perl is another example of filling a tiny, short-term need, and then being a real problem in the longer term. Basically, a lot of the problems that computing has had in the last 25 years comes from systems where the designers were trying to fix some short-term thing and didn’t think about whether the idea would scale if it were adopted. There should be a half-life on software so old software just melts away over 10 or 15 years.”

Alan Kay (1940) computer scientist

ACM Queue A Conversation with Alan Kay Vol. 2, No. 9 - Dec/Jan 2004-2005 http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1039523 2000s, A Conversation with Alan Kay, 2004–05

Life, Idea, Problem, Thinking

“A propensity to hope and joy is real riches: One to fear and sorrow, real poverty.”

David Hume book Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary

Part I, Essay 18: The Sceptic
Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary (1741-2; 1748)

Fear, Hope, Joy

“Make no mistake, the real power resides not where present authority is exercised but where it is expected that authority will in future be exercised. The magnetic attraction of power is exercised by the prospect long before the reality is achieved; and the trek towards the rising sun, which is already in progress in 1972, would swell to an exodus before long. What do you imagine is the reason why Roy Jenkins is prepared to resign the front bench and divide his party in the endeavour to give a Conservative Prime Minister a majority in the House of Commons? The motive is not ignoble or discreditable—I am not asserting that—but it is a motive which it behoves people in Britain well to understand. It is the ambition to exercise his talents on the stage of Europe and to participate in taking decisions not for Britain here at home but for Europe in Brussels, Paris, Luxembourg or wherever else the imperial pavilions may be pitched. He does not, I assure you, forsee his future triumphs and achievements where his predecessors have seen them in the past – at the despatch box in the House of Commons or in the Cabinet room at Downing St. These are not good enough: the vision splendid beckons elsewhere.”

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

Speech at Millom, Cumberland (29 April 1972), from A Nation or No Nation? Six Years in British Politics (Elliot Right Way Books, 1977), p. 42. Jenkins had resigned from the Shadow Cabinet and as deputy leader of the Labour Party due to Labour's opposition to British entry into the EEC. Jenkins wrote to Powell to claim what he said was "totally untrue". Four years later Jenkins would leave front line British politics to become President of the European Commission.
1970s

People, Exercises, Home, Imagination

“The ugly fallout from the American Dream has been coming down on us at a pretty consistent rate since Sitting Bull's time — and the only real difference now, with Election Day '72 only a few weeks away, is that we seem to be on the verge of ratifying the fallout and forgetting the Dream itself.”

Hunter S. Thompson (1937–2005) American journalist and author

1970s, Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72 (1973)

Dreams, Time, Forgetting

“Personal responsibility and its correlate of free reality, or real freedom, are the whole foundation on which our enlightened civilisation stands; and the voice of aspiring and successful man, as he lives and acts in Europe and in America, speaks ever more and more plainly the two magic words of enthusiasm and of stability — Duty and Rights. But these are really the signals of his citizenship in the ideal City of God. By them he proclaims: We are many, though indeed one; there is one nature, in manifold persons; personality alone is the measure, the sufficing establishment, of reality; unconditional reality alone is sufficient to the being of persons; for that alone is sufficient to a Moral Order, since a moral order is possible for none but beings who are mutually responsible, and no beings can be responsible but those who originate their own acts.”

George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) American philosopher

Source: The City of God and the True God as its Head (In Royce’s “The Conception of God: a Philosophical Discussion Concerning the Nature of the Divine Idea as a Demonstrable Reality”), p.92-3

God, Nature, Reality, Freedom

“Though the war ended forever the possibility of disunion, there still remain problems between State and Federal authority. There are divisions of interest, perhaps more apparent than real, among geographical sections or social groups. The seaboard thinks it has interests in maritime transportation and overseas commerce which differ greatly from those of the interior, which is peculiarly dependent upon railroads. Difference in climate and physical conditions throughout so great a territory tend to varied social habits and modes of living which react upon the economic and political attitudes. The industrial development of some sections contrasts with the agricultural character of others. Obviously, these differences give rise to many problems in government, which must always be recognized. But it is hardly conceivable that a really menacing contest between the sovereignty of the States and of the Union could ever again arise.”

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

1920s, The Reign of Law (1925)

War, Problem, Thinking, Dependency

“I write about power, that's my real subject - how you get it, what you do with it, how you abuse it. I'm equally wary of liberals and conservatives.”

Rene Balcer (1954) screenwriter, producer and director

Quoted in Le Devoir, September 14, 2009, Un surdoué du crime: On his writing.

“Elvis was always over the top. It's funny that in those days people who wanted to look like Elvis would wear leather jackets and jeans, because that's what he wore in his movies. In real life, Elvis never wore denim. He thought they were work clothes. When he had to wear them, when he was driving a truck, he would do but he always loved the way black entertainers dressed. He styled himself on them, because he wanted to be flamboyant. That's why he had that gold lamé suit! He designed his jumpsuits himself. He always said, "If you're going to be a star, you should look like one."”

Tom Jones (1940) Welsh singer

On Elvis Presley.
Tom Jones on Sinatra's advice, Chuck Berry's lyrics and the style of Elvis Presley

Love, Life, People, Way

“The substance of all realities is in this religion of Jesus Christ; but it can be real only to those who will do His will.”

Washington Gladden (1836–1918) American pastor

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 135.

Religion, Reality, Christ

“The sixteenth century transformed Middle English into modern English. Grammar was up for grabs. People made up vocabulary and syntax as they went along. Not until the eighteenth century would rules of English usage appear. Shakespearean language is a bizarre super-tongue, alien and plastic, twisting, turning, and forever escaping. It is untranslatable, since it knocks Anglo-Saxon root words against Norman and Greco-Roman importations sweetly or harshly, kicking us up and down rhetorical levels with witty abruptness. No one in real life ever spoke like Shakespeare’s characters. His language does not “make sense,” especially in the greatest plays. Anywhere from a third to a half of every Shakespearean play, I conservatively estimate, will always remain under an interpretive cloud. Unfortunately, this fact is obscured by the encrustations of footnotes in modern texts, which imply to the poor cowed student that if only he knew what the savants do, all would be as clear as day. Every time I open Hamlet, I am stunned by its hostile virtuosity, its elusiveness and impenetrability. Shakespeare uses language to darken. He suspends the traditional compass points of rhetoric, still quite firm in Marlowe, normally regarded as Shakespeare’s main influence. Shakespeare’s words have “aura.””

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

This he got from Spenser, not Marlowe.
Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 195

Life, Hostility, People, Sense

“The man with the real sense of humor is the man who can put himself in the spectator's place and laugh at his own misfortunes.”

Bert Williams (1874–1922) American comedian and actor

Bert Williams, The comic side of trouble, January 1918, American Magazine 85, 33-34, 58-60. Quoted in From traveling show to vaudeville: theatrical spectacle in America, 1830-1910, 2003, Robert M. Lewis, JHU Press, ISBN 0801870879.

Sense

“Constructs extraneous to the real world should be eliminated from the analysis model. They may be needed later during design, but not now. For example, CPU subroutine, process, algorithm, and interrupt are implementation constructs for most applications [and should be excluded from the analysis model]…”

James Rumbaugh (1947) Computer scientist, software engineer

Source: Object-oriented modeling and design (1990), p. 155; as cited in: Roger Chiang et al (2009, p. 165)

World

“Our universities should produce good criticism; they do not—or, at best, they do so only as federal prisons produce counterfeit money: a few hardened prisoners are more or less surreptitiously continuing their real vocations.”

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

“Contemporary Poetry Criticism”, p. 62
No Other Book: Selected Essays (1999)

Money, Universe

“The Asana of Science — Science's anti-Spiritual, anti-religious, anti-psychic point of view, and its Victorian, archaic materialism, and its prejudices against other kinds of knowing — all of this is insidious, not merely nonsensical, because it has such a profoundly negative effect on human beings. Many scientists who adopt this dogmatic approach act as if they were super-intelligent people with their tweedy, pipe-smoking, complicated linguistic minds. This is the archetype of intelligence, is it not? This is the way you are supposed to be if you are intelligent. Well, this archetype does not necessarily represent intelligence. It is just a pose, or asana. Real intelligence must be fiercely capable of investigating every aspect of existence, including the very process of knowledge that is called "science."”

Adi Da Samraj (1939–2008) American writer

http://www.aboutadidam.org/readings/index.html

People, Way, Intelligence, Knowledge

“Painting is a very difficult thing. It absorbs the whole man, body and soul – thus I have passed blindly many things which belong to the real and political life. I assume, though, that there are two worlds: the world of spiritual life and the world of political reality. Both are manifestations of life which may sometimes coincide but are very different in principle. I must leave it to you [the audience] to decide which is the more important.”

Max Beckmann (1884–1950) German painter, draftsman, printmaker, sculptor and writer

Source: 1930s, On my Painting (1938), p. 18

Life, World, Soul, Reality

“Whenever a man and a woman come to words or blows, fools are quick to attribute it to the differences between the sexes. The sexes differ much less than they wish to believe, and such differences as are real tend less to promote strife than to prevent it.”

Gene Wolfe (1931–2019) American science fiction and fantasy writer

Volume 2, Ch. 23
Fiction, The Book of the Short Sun (1999–2001)

Fools, Sex

“There was a third element in reality that concerned me: movement.
Despite all my efforts, it was impossible for me then to endure a sculpture that gave an illusion of movement, a leg advancing, a raised arm, a head looking sideways. I could only create such movement if it was real and actual. I also wanted to give the sensation of motion that could be induced.”

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

Alberto Giacometti in: Peter Selz, Alberto Giacometti. Museum of Modern Art in collaboration with the Art Institute of Chicago [and others], distributed by Doubleday, 1965. p. 20

Reality, Effort

“Unlike philosophy, art does not search for islands of security from which other experiences can be expelled as fantastic or imaginary, or rejected as a world of secondary qualities or enjoyment, of pleasure or common sense. Art radicalizes the difference between the real and the merely possible in order to show through works of its own that even in the realm of possibility there is order after all. Art opposes, to use a Hegelian formulation, “the prose of the world,” but for precisely this reason it needs this contrast.”

Niklas Luhmann (1927–1998) German sociologist, administration expert, and social systems theorist

Source: Art As a Social System (2000), p. 146 as cited in: Astonishment And Recognition http://unrealnature.wordpress.com/2012/01/26/astonishment-and-recognition/ on unrealnature.wordpress.com, January 26, 2012.

Pleasure, World, Art, Search

“Real programmers can write assembly code in any language.”

Larry Wall (1954) American computer programmer and author, creator of Perl

[8571@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV, 1990]
Usenet postings, 1990

“You're a real bastard," Obie said finally, his frustration erupting, like a Coke exploding from a bottle after you shake it. "You know that?" Archie turned and smiled at him benevolently, like a goddamn king passing out favors. "Jesus," Obie said, exasperated. "Don't swear, Obie," Archie chided him. "You'll have to tell it in confession." "Look who's talking. I don't know how you had the nerve to receive communion in the chapel this morning." "It doesn't take nerve, Obie. When you march down the rail, you're receiving The Body, man. Me, I'm just chewing a wafer they buy by the pound in Worcester." Obie looked away in disgust. "And when you say 'Jesus', you're talking about your leader. But when I say 'Jesus,' I'm talking about a guy who walked the earth for thirty-three years like any other guy but caught the imagination of some PR cats. PR for Public Relations, in case you don't know, Obie.”

Robert Cormier book The Chocolate War

Obie didn't bother to answer. You couldn't ever win an argument with Archie.
Source: The Chocolate War (1974), p. 8

Smile, Guy, Imagination, Cats

“He is no parasite on anything, whose work is real: a mechanic, a doctor, a builder, a tailor, a dishwasher. What, in comparison, does a writer produce? Semblances. This is a serious occupation?”

Stanisław Lem (1921–2006) Polish science fiction author

"Rien du tout, ou la conséquence" ("Nothing, or the Consequence"), in A Perfect Vacuum (1971), tr. Michael Kandel (1978)

“The judiciary has a profound and humble, but vitally important role in interpreting the law and following the law, and putting aside personal beliefs and ensuring that the law has been faithfully executed, according to the real lawmaker, which is the legislature, or in the event of an interpretation of our highest law, the Constitution, by virtue of the people themselves.”

William H. Pryor Jr. (1962) American judge

Confirmation Hearing on the Nomination of William H. Pryor, Jr. to be Circuit Judge for the Eleventh Circuit (June 11, 2003)

People, Law, Personality

“I have learned that love is the most powerful force available to us. When we have real love we have the strength to perform miracles.”

Leo Buscaglia (1924–1998) Motivational speaker, writer

A Magazine of People and Possibilities interview (1998)

Love, Learning

“Before I begin, let me say right here and now that I'm a country boy. And, man, I mean the real backwoods! That's at the start of the start of the thing, and that's at the heart of the thing.”

Ray Charles (1930–2004) American musician

Home, p. 1
Brother Ray : Ray Charles' Own Story (1978)

Boy, Heart, Country

“In the preface to the reissue of Risk, Uncertainty and Proﬁt, Frank Knight makes the penetrating observation that under the conditions envisaged above the velocity of circulation would become inﬁnite and so would the price level. This is perhaps an over-dramatic way of saying that nobody would hold money, and it would become a free good to go into the category of shell and other things which once served as money. We should expect too that it would not only pass out of circulation, but it would cease to be used as a conventional numeraire in terms of which prices are expressed. Interest bearing money would emerge. Of course, the above does not happen in real life, precisely because uncertainty, contingency needs, non-synchronization of revenues and outlay, transaction frictions, etc., etc., all are with us. But the abstract special case analyzed above should warn us against the facile assumption that the average levels of the structure of interest rates are determined solely or primarily by these differential factors. At times they are primary, and at other times, such as the twenties in this country, they may not be. As a generalization I should hazard the hypothesis that they are likely to be of great importance in an economy in which there is a “quasi-zero" rate of interest. I think by this hypothesis one can explain many of the anomalies of the United States money market in the thirties.”

Paul A. Samuelson book Foundations of Economic Analysis

Source: 1940s, Foundations of Economic Analysis, 1947, Ch. 5 : Theory of Consumer’s Behavior

Life, Money, Way, Thinking

“That is something I'm very passionate about. I love animals so much. To think that any animal would be trapped — it makes me so sad. It's like living in your bedroom for your entire life and never being able to go outside. … You should always speak up. That's what I'd like to teach my fans — to be real and speak up for things you're passionate about.”

Noah Cyrus (2000) American singer and actress

“Noah Cyrus Fans, Listen Up!,” video for PETA (24 October 2017) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQm-cmCjWYs.

Love, Life, Sadness, Thinking

“I had seen … the mistreatment and abuse of these elephants … and I was brought to tears. When you look at something like the circus and everyone's laughing and there's color and there's music and everything seems so great, but when you go right behind that door and they're in these crates all day long and then they're getting shocked and beat just so they can get up and dance around on a ball — it was just so sickening. … Stop going to the circus, don’t buy real fur, don’t buy a dog, go rescue a dog. You can’t keep supporting people who are doing this to helpless animals, at all.”

Olivia Munn (1980) American actress, comedian, model, television personality and author

“Olivia Munn's Exclusive Interview for PETA,” video on PETA's YouTube channel (27 April 2010) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9Qcq2j2tKA.

People, Dogs, Music, Color

“I believe psychics are either kooks or they're tapping into a real power. But it is not, it's not a holy power, it's an evil power. No offense to James [Van Praagh], because I think that he has a good heart and he really believes that what he is doing is good, and perhaps you are deceived…”

Christine O'Donnell (1969) American Tea Party politician and former Republican Party candidate

TV appearances

Thinking, Evil, Heart

“Every campaign, Garry Wills once wrote, "taught Nixon the same lesson: mobilize resentment against those in power." History taught the same to many conservative and reactionary populist movements, whose real attitude to those in power and authority was one of a servile, envious, vicarious adoration.”

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

"Nixon: Maestro of Resentment" (1990).
1990s, For the Sake of Argument: Essays and Minority Reports (1993)

History

“If dust tries to get together, as it increases in density it increases the temperature, which increases the movement, and it drives it back away - it's called Boyle's Gas Laws. You cannot compress dust into solid matter without creating a real serious physical science problem of overcoming the gas laws. The pressure increases, the temperature increases, which drives them out again - it's not going to happen.”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Star Formation and Boyle's Gas Laws https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OTzoLHdNhP8, at 1 minute 27 seconds, Youtube (February 17, 2010)

Law, Problem, Science

“We have travelled far from the standpoint which identifies the real with the concrete. Even the older philosophy found it necessary to admit exceptions; for example, time must be admitted to be real, although no one could attribute to it a concrete nature.”

Arthur Stanley Eddington (1882–1944) British astrophysicist

III, p.33
Science and the Unseen World (1929)

Travel, Nature, Time

“Cooling systems… need only supply a drop of from 10 to 20 degrees below that of the outside temperature. …greater cooling differentials… are a real injury to health.”

Ken Kern American writer

The Owner Built Home: A How-to-do-it Book (1972)

Health

“The young mathematical disciple 'topology' might be of some help in making psychology a real science.”

Kurt Lewin (1890–1947) German-American psychologist

Source: 1930s, Principles of topological psychology, 1936, p. vii.

Mathematics, Science, Help

“What we are pursuing is beauty, nothing but beauty. It's not true beauty if we didn't create it. Creating beauty with beauty is not true beauty either; real beauty is achieved by transforming the ugly into the beautiful.”

Mo Yan book The Republic of Wine

Source: The Republic of Wine (1992), Chapter Four, Section V

Beauty

“When national debts have once been accumulated to a certain degree, there is scarce, I believe, a single instance of their having been fairly and completely paid. The liberation of the public revenue, if it has ever been brought about at all, has always been brought about by bankruptcy; sometimes by an avowed one, but always by a real one, though frequently by a pretend payment.”

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

Source: (1776), Book V, Chapter III, Part V, p. 1012.

“One of our fan-coloring biographers, who paints small men as very great, inquired of me lately with real affection too, whether he might consider as authentic, the change of my religion much spoken of in some circles. Now this supposed that they knew what had been my religion before, taking for it the word of their priests, whom I certainly never made the confidants of my creed. My answer was "say nothing of my religion. It is known to my God and myself alone. Its evidence before the world is to be sought in my life; if that has been honest and dutiful to society, the religion which has regulated it cannot be a bad one."”

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

Letter to John Adams (11 January 1817), published in The Works of Thomas Jefferson in Twelve Volumes http://oll.libertyfund.org/ToC/0054.php, Federal Edition, Paul Leicester Ford, ed., New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1904, Vol. 12 http://oll.libertyfund.org/Texts/Jefferson0136/Works/0054-12_Bk.pdf, pp. 48–49 1810s

Life, Men, God, World

“I have nothing against the people. I don’t hate Muslims. But Islam is a totalitarian ideology. It rules every aspect of life — economics, family law, whatever. It has religious symbols, it has a God, it has a book — but it’s not a religion. It can be compared with totalitarian ideologies like Communism or fascism. There is no country where Islam is dominant where you have a real democracy, a real separation between church and state.”

Geert Wilders (1963) Dutch politician

Who Says Islam Is Totalitarian?, National Review Online (2009 interview with Jeff Jacoby), 19 October 2010 http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/250189/who-says-islam-totalitarian-andrew-c-mccarthy?page=3, 2000s

Life, God, Hate, People

“Everybody knows that, in the course of mundane and ordinary years, whimsical time will occasionally bring forth from its womb other years, odd years, degenerate years, somewhere in which, like a little sixth finger upon a hand, a spurious thirteenth month sprouts up; spurious, we say; for seldom will it grow to full size. Like late begotten children, it lags behind in its development, a hunchback month, a half-wilted offshoot, and more conjectured than real.”

Bruno Schulz (1892–1942) Polish novelist and painter

“A Night of the High Season” http://www.schulzian.net/translation/shops/night.htm His father, Time

Children, Time

“There is an inborn tendency to be Free. Every being is struggling to be Free. No one wants bondage. No one wants misery. The very idea of disease and death is appalling to all. Still, a being thinks that it will be happy by sense-pleasures. Can these sense-pleasures make one happy? No. Any amount of sense-pleasures will not make one really happy. Sense-pleasures will bring momentary satisfaction and then make one unhappy. Then comes the question: Where does this real happiness lie? It lies in knowing the True Nature. To know your True Nature, you have to control your mind. In order to control your mind, you have to live a true life. You must be a man of good character. That is why all the Scriptures ask their followers to be good, kind, gentle, noble, charitable, truthful, etc. In fact, moral and ethical codes of good conduct are the starting points of all Religions. They start with moral and ethical codes and end with God-realization or Self-realization.”

Swami Narayanananda (1902–1988) Indian guru

The Essence of Life (1980), also in Minor Works II (2001), p. 131f

Life, Death, God, Happiness

Quotes about real page 24

Quotes about real
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