Quotes about record

A collection of quotes on the topic of record, recorder, recording, time.

Quotes about record

“At this point I have a request for our fans. If any of you in any way hate homosexuals, people of different color, or women, please do this one favor for us - leave us the fuck alone! Don't come to our shows and don't buy our records.”

Kurt Cobain (1967–1994) American musician and artist

Incesticide liner notes (1992)

People, Hate, Women, Way

“How good are markets in predicting real-world developments? Reading the record, it is striking how many calamities that I anticipated did not in fact materialise.

Financial markets constantly anticipate events, both on the positive and on the negative side, which fail to materialise exactly because they have been anticipated.

It is an old joke that the stock market has predicted seven of the last two recessions. Markets are often wrong.”

George Soros (1930) Hungarian-American business magnate, investor, and philanthropist

World, Reading

“Racism does not have a good track record. It's been tried out for a long time and you'd think by now we'd want to put an end to it instead of putting it under new management.”

Thomas Sowell (1930) American economist, social theorist, political philosopher and author

Thinking, Time

“The boys in my grade talked about sex a lot. Some of them even told me that they had sex with their girlfriends. This was the most devastating and traumatizing thing I’ve ever heard in my life. Boys having sex at my age of Fourteen? I couldn’t fathom it. How is it that they were able to have such intimate and pleasurable experiences with girls while I could only fantasize about it? I frequently started asking myself. This was an all-boys school… How in the hell were those boys even able to meet girls to have sex with? I wondered. I hoped they were lying. I hoped against all hope. […] and one of my obnoxious classmates named Jesse was bragging about having sex with his girlfriend. I defiantly told him that I didn’t believe him, so he played a voice recording of what sounded like him and his girlfriend having sex. I could hear a girl saying his name over and over again while she panted franticly. He grinned at me smugly. I felt so inferior to him, and I hated him.”

Elliot Rodger (1991–2014) American spree killer

My Twisted World (2014), Thoughts at 14

Life, Hate, Pleasure, Age

“The reason I sell 6 million records, the reason I could go to jail and come out without a scratch, the reason I can walk around, the reason I am who I am today is because I can look directly in to my face and find my soul, it's there, it's not sold, i didn't sell it, it's still within me, I still feel it, my heart is still connected to my body.”

Tupac Shakur (1971–1996) rapper and actor

1990s, Interview on the set of Gang Related (1996)

Feeling, Soul, Heart

“To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child. For what is the worth of human life, unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history?”
Nescire autem quid ante quam natus sis acciderit, id est semper esse puerum. Quid enim est aetas hominis, nisi ea memoria rerum veterum cum superiorum aetate contexitur? ([http://www.thelatinlibrary.com/cicero/orator.shtml#120 120])

Marcus Tullius Cicero (-106–-43 BC) Roman philosopher and statesman

Variant translation: To be ignorant of the past is to be forever a child.
Chapter XXXIV, section 120
Orator Ad M. Brutum (46 BC)
Variant: Not to know what happened before you were born is to be a child forever. For what is the time of a man, except it be interwoven with that memory of ancient things of a superior age?

Life, History

“We're at war with the most dangerous enemy that has ever faced mankind in his long climb from the swamp to the stars, and it's been said if we lose that war, and in so doing lose this way of freedom of ours, history will record with the greatest astonishment that those who had the most to lose did the least to prevent its happening.”

Ronald Reagan (1911–2004) American politician, 40th president of the United States (in office from 1981 to 1989)

1960s, A Time for Choosing (1964)
Context: As for the peace that we would preserve, I wonder who among us would like to approach the wife or mother whose husband or son has died in South Vietnam and ask them if they think this is a peace that should be maintained indefinitely. Do they mean peace, or do they mean we just want to be left in peace? There can be no real peace while one American is dying some place in the world for the rest of us. We're at war with the most dangerous enemy that has ever faced mankind in his long climb from the swamp to the stars, and it's been said if we lose that war, and in so doing lose this way of freedom of ours, history will record with the greatest astonishment that those who had the most to lose did the least to prevent its happening. Well I think it's time we ask ourselves if we still know the freedoms that were intended for us by the Founding Fathers.

War, Way, History, Star

“We put everything we had into this record, just like we do with every other record that we make.”

Billie Joe Armstrong (1972) American singer and guitarist

“The past is whatever the records and the memories agree upon.”

George Orwell book 1984

Source: 1984

Memory, Past

“You have to search the absolute demons of your soul to make a great record.”

Green Day

Soul, Search

“Records are always made to be broken no matter what they are. Anybody can do anything that they set their mind to.”

Michael Phelps (1985) American swimmer

Upon winning his eighth straight Gold medal and having set his eighth straight Olympic record, as well as his seventh world record, in his eight events in the 2008 Olympic Games, 17 August 2008. (Source: [Phelps wins historic eighth gold medal, CNN, http://edition.cnn.com/2008/SPORT/08/17/phelps.history.eight.golds/])

“The minute I started breaking the all-time record in record sales—I broke Elvis's records, I broke Beatles records—the minute it became the all-time best-selling album in the history of the Guinness Book of World Records, overnight they called me a freak. They called me a homosexual. They called me a child molester. They said I bleached my skin. They made everything to turn the public against me.”

Michael Jackson (1958–2009) American singer, songwriter and dancer

Remarks at National Action Network headquarters (9 July 2002)

Books, World, History, Time

“[Bill Evans talking about Miles Davis's change of style to jazz fusion] I would like to hear more of the consummate melodic master, but I feel that big business and his record company have had a corrupting influence on his material. The rock and pop thing certainly draws a wider audience. It happens more and more these days, that unqualified people with executive positions try to tell musicians what is good and what is bad music. It’s tempting for the musician to prejudice his own views when recording opportunities are so infrequent but I for one am determined to resist the temptation.”

Bill Evans (1929–1980) American jazz pianist

http://jazztimes.com/articles/20128-miles-davis-and-bill-evans-miles-and-bill-in-black-white.

People, Music, Feeling, Business

“Mathematicians have constructed a very large number of different systems of geometry, Euclidean or non-Euclidean, of one, two, three, or any number of dimensions. All these systems are of complete and equal validity. They embody the results of mathematicians' observations of their reality, a reality far more intense and far more rigid than the dubious and elusive reality of physics. The old-fashioned geometry of Euclid, the entertaining seven-point geometry of Veblen, the space-times of Minkowski and Einstein, are all absolutely and equally real. …There may be three dimensions in this room and five next door. As a professional mathematician, I have no idea; I can only ask some competent physicist to instruct me in the facts.
The function of a mathematician, then, is simply to observe the facts about his own intricate system of reality, that astonishingly beautiful complex of logical relations which forms the subject-matter of his science, as if he were an explorer looking at a distant range of mountains, and to record the results of his observations in a series of maps, each of which is a branch of pure mathematics. …Among them there perhaps none quite so fascinating, with quite the astonishing contrasts of sharp outline and shade, as that which constitutes the theory of numbers.”

G. H. Hardy (1877–1947) British mathematician

"The Theory of Numbers," Nature (Sep 16, 1922) Vol. 110 https://books.google.com/books?id=1bMzAQAAMAAJ p. 381

Beauty, Mountain, Mathematics, Idea

“… I just know that, right now, … the biggest record selling business there is is rock and roll.”

Elvis Presley (1935–1977) American singer and actor

Pop Chronicles: Show 55 - Crammer: A lively cram course on the history of rock and some other things http://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc19838/m1/, interview recorded 1956 http://web.archive.org/web/20110615153027/http://www.library.unt.edu/music/special-collections/john-gilliland/o-s.

Business

“According to old records, it has been a rule with the Muslim rulers from the first to build mosques, monasteries, and inns, spread Islam, and put (a stop to) non-Islamic practices, wherever they found prominence (of kufr). Accordingly, even as they cleared up Mathura, Bindraban etc., from the rubbish of non-Islamic practices, the Babari mosque was built up in AH 923 (?) under the patronage of Sayyid Musa Ashiqan in the Janmasthan temple (butkhane Janmsthan mein) in Faizabad Avadh, which was a great place of (worship) and capital of Rama's father'…'A great mosque was built on the spot where Sita ki Rasoi is situated. During the regime of Babar, the Hindus had no guts to be a match for the Muslims. The mosque was built in AH 923 (?) under the patronage of Sayyid Mir Ashiqan' Aurangzeb built a mosque on the Hanuman Garhi' The Bairagis effaced the mosque and erected a temple in its place. Then idols began to be worshipped openly in the Babari mosque where the Sita ki Rasoi is situated.”

Babur (1483–1530) 1st Mughal Emperor

Muraqqa-i-Khusrawî (Tãrîkh-i-Awadh) by Shykh Azmat Alî Kãkorwî Nãmî , cited by Dr. Harsh Narain, "Rama-Janmabhumi Temple: Muslim Testimony", 1990, and quoted in Goel, S.R. Hindu Temples - What Happened to them.

According to Harsh Narain, the publication of the chapter "dealing with the Jihad led by Amir Ali Amethawi for recapture of Hanuman Garhi from the Bairagis" was suppressed "on the ground that its publication would not be opportune in view of the prevailing political situation". Dr. Kakorawi himself lamented that ‘suppression of any part of any old composition or compilation like this can create difficulties and misunderstandings for future historians and researchers’. Muraqqa-i-Khusrawî (Tãrîkh-i-Awadh) by Shykh Azmat Alî Kãkorwî Nãmî. Shykh Azamat Ali Kakorawi Nami (1811–1893), Muraqqa(h)-i Khusrawi also known as the Tarikh-i Av(w)adh cited by Harsh Narain The Ayodhya Temple Mosque Dispute: Focus on Muslim Sources, 1993, New Delhi, Penman Publications. ISBN 8185504164 Quoted in Dr. Harsh Narain: Rama-Janmabhumi Temple Muslim Testimony Harsh Narain (Indian Express, February 26, 1990) and in Shourie, A., & Goel, S. R. (1990). Hindu temples: What happened to them.
Quotes from Muslim histories of early modern era

“We face the future with our past and our present as guarantors of our promises; and we are content to stand or to fall by the record which we have made and are making.”

Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) American politician, 26th president of the United States

Address at Oyster Bay, New York (27 July 1904) http://www.theodore-roosevelt.com/images/research/txtspeeches/104.txt, in response to the committee appointed to notify him of his nomination for the Presidency. 1900s

Past, Future

“The record companies really do conspire against the artists. They steal. They cheat. They do whatever they can, especially the black artists.… Sony's Tommy Mottola is the president of the record division. He is mean. He is a racist, and he's very, very, very devilish.”

Michael Jackson (1958–2009) American singer, songwriter and dancer

Remarks at National Action Network headquarters (6 July 2002)

Cheating

“Same thing happened in the punk movement in the late 70's…a punk band would start, play one gig, and get signed to a major label right away, 'cause it [was] a trend. That just shows there are a lot of old school dinosaurs in the record industry who need to be weeded out.”

Kurt Cobain (1967–1994) American musician and artist

Date unknown, but believed to be 1992-06-30 in Sweden http://www.livenirvana.com/official/index.html. Interviews (1989-1994), Video

School

“During the Spanish civil war I found myself feeling very strongly that a true history of this war never would or could be written. Accurate figures, objective accounts of what was happening, simply did not exist. And if I felt that even in 1937, when the Spanish Government was still in being, and the lies which the various Republican factions were telling about each other and about the enemy were relatively small ones, how does the case stand now? Even if Franco is overthrown, what kind of records will the future historian have to go upon? And if Franco or anyone at all resembling him remains in power, the history of the war will consist quite largely of "facts" which millions of people now living know to be lies.”

George Orwell (1903–1950) English author and journalist

"As I Please" (1943–1947)

War, People, Feeling, History

“The thing that I think very striking is that no one, or no one I can remember, ever writes of an execution with approval. The dominant note is always horror. Society, apparently, cannot get along without capital punishment—for there are some people whom it is simply not safe to leave alive—and yet there is no one, when the pinch comes, who feels it right to kill another human being in cold blood. I watched a man hanged once. There was no question that everybody concerned knew this to be a dreadful, unnatural action. I believe it is always the same—the whole jail, warders and prisoners alike, is upset when there is an execution. It is probably the fact that capital punishment is accepted as necessary, and yet instinctively felt to be wrong, that gives so many descriptions of executions their tragic atmosphere. They are mostly written by people who have actually watched an execution and feel it to be a terrible and only partly comprehensible experience which they want to record; whereas battle literature is largely written by people who have never heard a gun go off and think of a battle as a sort of football match in which nobody gets hurt.”

George Orwell (1903–1950) English author and journalist

"As I Please" column in The Tribune (3 November 1944) http://alexpeak.com/twr/oocp/ "As I Please" (1943–1947)

People, Feeling, Literature, Question

“But, ultimately, I don't have very cast iron opinions on black music other than black modern music which I detest. I detest Stevie Wonder. I think Diana Ross is awful. I hate all those records in the Top 40 - Janet Jackson, Whitney Houston. I think they're vile in the extreme. In essence this music doesn't say anything whatsoever.”

Morrissey (1959) English singer

From "Home thoughts from abroad", article by Frank Owen, Melody Maker (27 Sep 1986)
In interviews etc., About other artists

Hate, Music, Thinking

“Wherever we are, what we hear is mostly noise. When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we listen to it, we find it fascinating. The sound of a truck at fifty miles per hour. Static between the stations. Rain. We want to capture and control these sounds, to use them not as sound effects but as musical instruments. Every film studio has a library of "sound effects" recorded on film. With a film phonograph it is now possible to control the amplitude and frequency of any one of these sounds and to give to it rhythms within or beyond the reach of the imagination. Given four film phonographs, we can compose and perform a quartet for explosive motor, wind, heartbeat, and landslide.”

John Cage (1912–1992) American avant-garde composer

Quote of John Cage, in: 'The Future of Music: Credo' (1937); in: 'Silence: lectures and writings by Cage, John', Publisher Middletown, Conn. Wesleyan University Press, June 1961, V.
1930s

Music, Imagination

“I just want to make my mark, leave something musically good behind. If it's a big record, that's the frosting on the cake, but music's the main meal.”

Ray Charles (1930–2004) American musician

As quoted "Words of the Week" in Jet magazine, Vol. 64, No. 6 (25 April 1983), p. 40
Context: Music has been around a long time, and there's going to be music long after Ray Charles is dead. I just want to make my mark, leave something musically good behind. If it's a big record, that's the frosting on the cake, but music's the main meal.

Music

“It can never permit either the truthful recording of facts or the emotional sincerity that literary creation demands.”

George Orwell (1903–1950) English author and journalist

"The Prevention of Literature" (1946)
Context: Totalitarianism, however, does not so much promise an age of faith as an age of schizophrenia. A society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial: that is, when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud. Such a society, no matter how long it persists, can never afford to become either tolerant or intellectually stable. It can never permit either the truthful recording of facts or the emotional sincerity that literary creation demands. But to be corrupted by totalitarianism one does not have to live in a totalitarian country. The mere prevalence of certain ideas can spread a kind of poison that makes one subject after another impossible for literary purposes. Wherever there is an enforced orthodoxy — or even two orthodoxies, as often happens — good writing stops. This was well illustrated by the Spanish civil war. To many English intellectuals the war was a deeply moving experience, but not an experience about which they could write sincerely. There were only two things that you were allowed to say, and both of them were palpable lies: as a result, the war produced acres of print but almost nothing worth reading.

Truth, Sincerity

“Right from his early days in the Andamans, Vinayak encouraged people to speak in Hindi....Till then, government records were maintained in Urdu, and even Hindi was written in the Persian script. Vinayak strongly advocated the implementation of the Devanagari script as it was the one in which the oldest language of the subcontinent, Sanskrit, was written. During his interactions with local merchants in his capacity as the foreman of oil collections, Vinayak passed this zeal on to them too. Through his influence, a girls’ school that was started in the Andamans began a compulsory teaching of Hindi in the Devanagari script.”

Vinayak Damodar Savarkar (1883–1966) Indian pro-independence activist,lawyer, politician, poet, writer and playwright

Vikram Sampath - Savarkar, Echoes from a Forgotten Past

Girl, School, People

“Syd was so full of whimsy as well as horrible gas. I swear to God that the early recording sessions of Pink Floyd always smelled like a strange mixture of rotten eggs, rancid cabbage, and crap.”

Syd Barrett (1946–2006) English musician

Nick Mason, Billboard (1972)

God

“Jay Z: We are good friends, but what I got to say has nothing to do with our friendship. I have been in the industry long enough to know when I’m in the presence of a genius… and Chris Martin is just that. In years to come, Britain will look back at him as a modern day Shakespeare, he is an incredible recording artist, an incredible songwriter, but where he really comes alive is performing live. If you get the chance to see Coldplay live, do it, you ain’t gonna regret it.”

Chris Martin (1977) musician, co-founder of Coldplay

http://www.metroguiltypleasures.com/metro/coldplays-chris-martin-is-a-modern-day-shakespeare-says-jay-z/ source

Chance, Friendship

“Suffering is one very long moment. We cannot divide it by seasons. We can only record its moods, and chronicle their return. With us time itself does not progress. It revolves. It seems to circle round one centre of pain.”

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish writer and poet

Source: De Profundis and Other Writings

Pain, Mood, Suffering, Time

“An experiment is a question which science poses to Nature and a measurement is the recording of Nature's answer.”

Max Planck (1858–1947) German theoretical physicist

Source: Scientific Autobiography and Other Papers (1949)
Context: Experimenters are the schocktroops of science… An experiment is a question which science poses to Nature, and a measurement is the recording of Nature’s answer. But before an experiment can be performed, it must be planned – the question to nature must be formulated before being posed. Before the result of a measurement can be used, it must be interpreted – Nature’s answer must be understood properly. These two tasks are those of theorists, who find himself always more and more dependent on the tools of abstract mathematics.

Question, Nature, Science

“This Voyager spacecraft was constructed by the United States of America. We are a community of 240 million human beings among the more than 4 billion who inhabit the planet Earth. We human beings are still divided into nation states, but these states are rapidly becoming a single global civilization.

We cast this message into the cosmos. It is likely to survive a billion years into our future, when our civilization is profoundly altered and the surface of the Earth may be vastly changed. Of the 200 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy, some--perhaps many--may have inhabited planets and spacefaring civilizations. If one such civilization intercepts Voyager and can understand these recorded contents, here is our message:

This is a present from a small distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts, and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours. We hope someday, having solved the problems we face, to join a community of galactic civilizations. This record represents our hope and our determination, and our good will in a vast and awesome universe”

Jimmy Carter (1924) American politician, 39th president of the United States (in office from 1977 to 1981)

World, Hope, Music, Way

“One of my favorite album covers is On the Beach. Of course that was the name of a movie and I stole it for my record, but that doesn't matter. The idea for that cover came like a bolt from the blue. Gary and I traveled around getting all the pieces to put it together. We went to a junkyard in Santa Ana to get the tail fin and fender from a 1959 Cadillac, complete with taillights, and watched them cut it off a Cadillac for us, then we went to a patio supply place to get the umbrella and table. We picke up the bad polyester yellow jacket and white pants at a sleazy men's shop, where we watched a shoplifter getting caught red-handed and busted. Gary and I were stoned on some dynamite weed and stood there dumbfounded watching the bust unfold. This girl was screaming and kicking! Finally we grabbed a local LA paper to use as a prop. It had this amazing headline: Sen. Buckley Calls For Nixon to Resign. Next we took the palm tree I had taken around the world on the Tonight's the Night tour. We then placed all of these pieces carefully in the sand at Santa Monica beach. Then we shot it. Bob Seidemann was the photographer, the same one who took the famous Blind Faith cover shot of the naked young girl holding the airplane. We used the crazy pattern from the umbrella insides for the inside of the sleeve that held the vinyl recording. That was the creative process at work. We lived for that, Gary and I, and we still do.”

Neil Young book Waging Heavy Peace: A Hippie Dream

Source: Waging Heavy Peace: A Hippie Dream

Men, World, Faith, Travel

“We have a large public that is very ignorant about world affairs and very susceptible to simplistic slogans by candidates who appear out of nowhere, have no track record, but mouth appealing slogans.”

Zbigniew Brzeziński (1928–2017) Polish-American political scientist

Morning Joe (July 13, 2011).

World, Appearance

“Religions die when they are proved to be true. Science is the record of dead religions.”

Oscar Wilde book Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young

Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young (1894)

Religion, Science, Dead

“He moved in a way that suggested he was attempting the world speed record for the nonchalant walk.”

Terry Pratchett book The Light Fantastic

Source: The Light Fantastic

World, Way, Speed

“The story of how anti-Hindu laws were enacted… is long. In summary form, it consists of 1) banishing Brahmins on pain of being made prisoners on the galleys; 2) confiscating the properties of those Hindus who sent their families to neighbouring lands for fear of conversion; 3) prohibiting the performance of Hindu rites and ceremonies; 4) banning Hindu priests and preachers from doing their religious duties; 5) compelling Hindus to attend church services and listen to Christian doctrines; 6) depriving Hindus of their traditional rights and privileges in village communities; 7) forcing the baptism of Hindu orphans; and 8) ordering Hindus not to ride on horseback or in palanquins. The laws were so designed as to humiliate the Hindus in every conceivable manner… Missionary records, however, refer to many famous Hindu temples being converted into churches at these places… Even private temples in Hindu homes were prohibited and “transgressors” were severely punished…”

Sita Ram Goel (1921–2003) Indian activist

St. Francis Xavier: The man and his mission. 1985.

Pain, Fear, Family, Law

“Nerds are the only people who know how to operate the video recorder.”

Terry Pratchett (1948–2015) English author

Desert Island Discs (1997) http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00944ry/ General sources

People

“Even in the most insignificant details of our daily life, none of us can be said to constitute a material whole, which is identical for everyone, and need only be turned up like a page in an account-book or the record of a will; our social personality is created by the thoughts of other people.”

Marcel Proust book In Search of Lost Time

Même au point de vue des plus insignifiantes choses de la vie, nous ne sommes pas un tout matériellement constitué, identique pour tout le monde et dont chacun n'a qu'à aller prendre connaissance comme d'un cahier des charges ou d'un testament; notre personnalité sociale est une création de la pensée des autres.
"Overture"
In Search of Lost Time, Remembrance of Things Past (1913-1927), Vol I: Swann's Way (1913)

Life, People, Books, Personality

“Four things a man must learn to do
If he would make his record true:
To think without confusion clearly;
To love his fellow-men sincerely;
To act from honest motives purely;
To trust in God and Heaven securely.”

Henry Van Dyke (1852–1933) American diplomat

"Four Things," Poems, vol. 1 (vol. 9 of The Works of Henry Van Dyke) (1920).

Love, Men, God, Motivation

“But, as it is, this pied collection
begs your indulgence — it's been spun
from threads both sad and humoristic,
themes popular or idealistic,
products of carefree hours, of fun,
of sleeplessness, faint inspirations,
of powers unripe, or on the wane,
of reason's icy intimations,
and records of a heart in pain.”

Aleksandr Pushkin book Eugene Onegin

Eugene Onegin (1823)
Original: (ru) Но так и быть — рукой пристрастной Прими собранье пестрых глав, Полусмешных, полупечальных, Простонародных, идеальных, Небрежный плод моих забав, Бессониц, легких вдохновений, Незрелых и увядших лет, Ума холодных наблюдений И сердца горестных замет.

Heart, Sadness, Pain

“Alexander Hamilton said, "A nation which can prefer disgrace to danger is prepared for a master, and deserves one." Let's set the record straight. There is no argument over the choice between peace and war, but there is only one guaranteed way you can have peace — and you can have it in the next second — surrender.”

Ronald Reagan (1911–2004) American politician, 40th president of the United States (in office from 1981 to 1989)

1960s, A Time for Choosing (1964)

War, Peace, Way

“One of my first jobs at eighteen was singing with a group called The Flirts when one of their members was on a leave of absence. They had a hit with the song "Jukebox (Don't Put Another Dime)" and there was always a three-girl lineup, but it changed a bit. I filled in to record a couple of tracks with them.”

Erika Jayne (1969) American singer, actress and television personality

pg. 110
Pretty Mess book (2018)

Girl, Change, Singing

“[looking at the dead body of his first wife Camille, 5 Sept 1879], watching her tragic forehead, almost mechanically observing the colors which death was imposing on her rigid face. Blue. Blue, yellows, grey, what do I know?... How natural to to want to reproduce the last image of her, who was leaving us for ever. But even before the idea came to me to record her beloved features, something in me automatically responded tot the shocks of colours. I just seem to be compelled in an unconsciousness activity, the one I engage in every day, like an animal turning in its mill.”

Claude Monet (1840–1926) French impressionist painter

Quote in Monet's letter, September 1879; as cited in The Private Lives of the Impressionists Sue Roe; Harper Collins Publishers, New York, 2006, p. 209
1870 - 1890

Death, Color, Idea, Nature

“I used to always think I had to have a reason to record my observations of the day, or even my emotions, but now I think simply being alive is more than enough reason.”

Douglas Coupland Microserfs

Microserfs (1995)

Thinking

“Pimen [writing in front of a sacred lamp]:
One more, the final record, and my annals
Are ended, and fulfilled the duty laid
By God on me a sinner. Not in vain
Hath God appointed me for many years
A witness, teaching me the art of letters;
A day will come when some laborious monk
Will bring to light my zealous, nameless toil,
Kindle, as I, his lamp, and from the parchment
Shaking the dust of ages will transcribe
My true narrations.”

Aleksandr Pushkin Boris Godunov

(Variant translation):
One more story, just one more,
And then my history's completed,
All my chronicles written down
And my sinner's debt repaid to God.
Not for nothing.
The Lord appointed me to bear witness
For many many years and it was he
Taught me the art of creating books.
One day, in the far future,
some hard-working monk
Will find my painstaking,
anonymous writings.
He'll light his lamp,
as I light mine,
He'lll shake the dust of centuries from these scrolls.
Then he'll copy out, carefully, these true accounts,
So the descendants of today's Christians
May know the past of their native land
Remember their mighty Tsars warmly
For their glory and their knidness
And our Lord's mercy on their sins and crimes.
In my old age I live my life anew.
Pushkin, Alexander (2012). Pushkin's Boris Gudunov. Oberon Books.
Boris Godunov (1825)

God, Age, Art, Light

“2014 was the planet’s warmest year on record. Now, one year doesn’t make a trend, but this does: 14 of the 15 warmest years on record have all fallen in the first 15 years of this century.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

2015, State of the Union Address (January 2015)

“Back in 2005, when I was Christopher Eccleston, we saw one of the largest increases on record, of CO2 in the atmosphere. Unless we keep the rise in global temperature to under 2 degrees, by the time I'm Daniel Radcliffe or wee Jimmy Crankie, I won't be able to save the planet. I won't be here to help you -- well I might, but I'll be that bloke who won Any Dream Will Do.”

David Tennant (1971) Scottish actor

Live Earth concert 2007

Dreams, Time, Help

“Now when an American has an idea, he directly seeks a second American to share it. If there be three, they elect a president and two secretaries. Given four, they name a keeper of records, and the office is ready for work; five, they convene a general meeting, and the club is fully constituted.”

Jules Verne book From the Earth to the Moon

Or, quand un Américain a une idée, il cherche un second Américain qui la partage. Sont-ils trois, ils élisent un président et deux secrétaires. Quatre, ils nomment un archiviste, et le bureau fonctionne. Cinq, ils se convoquent en assemblée générale, et le club est constitué.
Source: From the Earth to the Moon (1865), Ch. I: The Gun Club

Idea

“He found that if people wrote about uncertain things - past, present, or future - they could be traumatic things, they could be uncertain things, that their physical health improved. He did a lot of detailed research to find out why this is. He basically figured out that it is an uncertainty reduction mechanism at work, because your brain is always figuring out how well situated you are in the world. How much do you not know compared to how much have you mastered. You can tell that you've mastered things because when you go somewhere and you act, things turn out the way you want them to. That's an indication of mastery. And your brain is keeping track of your whole life, recording information about how many places you have been where things haven't worked out compared to how many places you have been where things have worked out. And if all those places in your past where things haven't worked out, you need to map and master. And that decreases the existential load on you, but that actually decreases your psych-physiological load. It makes you healthier. It makes you less stressed. And so we have put all that together in this Self-Authoring Suite to help people write about their past and to sort it out in a detailed auto-biography.”

Jordan Peterson (1962) Canadian clinical psychologist, cultural critic, and professor of psychology

Concepts

Life, People, Health, World

“In every society, a few individuals acquire the status of an elite through talent. Due to superior achievements of wealth, wisdom, and bravery, these individuals come to possess natural authority, and their opinions and judgments enjoy wide-spread respect. Moreover, because of selective mating, marriage, and the laws of civil and genetic inheritance, positions of natural authority are likely to be passed on within a few noble families. It is to the heads of these families with long-established records of superior achievement, farsightedness, and exemplary personal conduct that men turn to with their conflicts and complaints against each other. These leaders of the natural elite act as judges and peacemakers, often free of charge out of a sense of duty expected of a person of authority or out of concern for civil justice as a privately produced "public good."”

Hans-Hermann Hoppe (1949) Austrian school economist and libertarian anarcho-capitalist philosopher

Natural Elites, Intellectuals, and the State http://www.mises.org/etexts/intellectuals.asp (21 July 2006)

Wisdom, Men, Marriage, Family

“The NSA has built an infrastructure that allows it to intercept almost everything. With this capability, the vast majority of human communications are automatically ingested without targeting. If I wanted to see your emails or your wife's phone, all I have to do is use intercepts. I can get your emails, passwords, phone records, credit cards.
I don't want to live in a society that does these sort of things… I do not want to live in a world where everything I do and say is recorded. That is not something I am willing to support or live under.”

Edward Snowden (1983) American whistleblower and former National Security Agency contractor

Edward Snowden, NSA files source: 'If they want to get you, in time they will' http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/09/nsa-whistleblower-edward-snowden-why, The Guardian, 10 June 2013.

World, Communication, Support

“To dance with the naked [blow-up] doll, that was me! That's what I mean by I'm real, I'm truly hardcore, because I needed the money and I had to work. So if he told me that for me to get paid I had to go out there in bikini briefs and hop on top of this [blow-up] doll and that's how I gotta get paid, and I was homeless at the time, that's what I had to do. But What I did was not let him pimp me, you know what I'm saying. It wasn't like I just did that because that was my order. As soon as I got the check's to say what was on my mind, I said what was on my mind. And we have a platinum record now, you know what I'm saying.”

Tupac Shakur (1971–1996) rapper and actor

1990s, MTV interview (1994)

Money, Time, Dance

“At the end of the day I have to please myself. And I've made a record to please myself.”

Jeff Lynne (1947) British rock musician

On the album Zoom, in "An Electric return for Jeff Lynne" at CNN (3 September 2001)

“To the Youth in Europe and North America,
The recent events in France and similar ones in some other Western countries have convinced me to directly talk to you about them. I am addressing you, [the youth], not because I overlook your parents, rather it is because the future of your nations and countries will be in your hands; and also I find that the sense of quest for truth is more vigorous and attentive in your hearts.
I don’t address your politicians and statesmen either in this writing because I believe that they have consciously separated the route of politics from the path of righteousness and truth.
I would like to talk to you about Islam, particularly the image that is presented to you as Islam. Many attempts have been made over the past two decades, almost since the disintegration of the Soviet Union, to place this great religion in the seat of a horrifying enemy. The provocation of a feeling of horror and hatred and its utilization has unfortunately a long record in the political history of the West.
Here, I don’t want to deal with the different phobias with which the Western nations have thus far been indoctrinated. A cursory review of recent critical studies of history would bring home to you the fact that the Western governments’ insincere and hypocritical treatment of other nations and cultures has been censured in new historiographies.
The histories of the United States and Europe are ashamed of slavery, embarrassed by the colonial period and chagrined at the oppression of people of color and non-Christians. Your researchers and historians are deeply ashamed of the bloodsheds wrought in the name of religion between the Catholics and Protestants or in the name of nationality and ethnicity during the First and Second World Wars. This approach is admirable.
By mentioning a fraction of this long list, I don’t want to reproach history; rather I would like you to ask your intellectuals as to why the public conscience in the West awakens and comes to its senses after a delay of several decades or centuries. Why should the revision of collective conscience apply to the distant past and not to the current problems? Why is it that attempts are made to prevent public awareness regarding an important issue such as the treatment of Islamic culture and thought?
You know well that humiliation and spreading hatred and illusionary fear of the “other” have been the common base of all those oppressive profiteers. Now, I would like you to ask yourself why the old policy of spreading “phobia” and hatred has targeted Islam and Muslims with an unprecedented intensity. Why does the power structure in the world want Islamic thought to be marginalized and remain latent? What concepts and values in Islam disturb the programs of the super powers and what interests are safeguarded in the shadow of distorting the image of Islam? Hence, my first request is: Study and research the incentives behind this widespread tarnishing of the image of Islam.
My second request is that in reaction to the flood of prejudgments and disinformation campaigns, try to gain a direct and firsthand knowledge of this religion. The right logic requires that you understand the nature and essence of what they are frightening you about and want you to keep away from.”

Ali Khamenei (1939) Iranian Shiite faqih, Marja' and official independent islamic leader

Message of Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei To the Youth in Europe and North America http://english.khamenei.ir//index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2001, Khamenei.ir (January 21, 2015) 2015

War, People, Truth, Youth

“Blessed are the legend-makers with their rhyme
of things not found within recorded time.”

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (1892–1973) British philologist and author, creator of classic fantasy works

Mythopoeia (1931)

Time

“Records have images. There are wet records and dry records. And big records.”

Art Garfunkel (1941) American singer, poet, and actor

http://www.artgarfunkel.info/more.html

“I think Euphoria Morning is an album you can always listen to, even in a couple of years; it isn't dated. That's what I was striving for with every Soundgarden album, something lasting, something you want to listen to, again and again. Since it was always part of my approach it wasn't too difficult to record an album like Euphoria Morning. I didn't have to re-invent myself.”

Chris Cornell (1964–2017) American singer-songwriter, musician

NYROCK: Interview with Chris Cornell, 1999-10-01 https://web.archive.org/web/20030919022841/http://www.nyrock.com/interviews/1999/cornell_int.asp, Euphoria Morning Era

Thinking, Parting

“This above all makes history useful and desirable: it unfolds before our eyes a glorious record of exemplary actions.”

Livy (-59–17 BC) Roman historian

Praefatio, sec. 10
History of Rome

History

“Some Vietnam veterans have told me what they did over there when they were animals. They have been giving testimony about it to the public, to juries, to judges. Some of the juries cry, and so do some of the judges.
One Ex-Marine has a face like a Puerto Rican angel and a body count of 390. That means he and his unit killed 390 people in a variety of hideous ways, and the angel got to go count the dead bodies for the record.
And now he and a lot of his buddies are trying to make up for what we made them do. We paid the taxes that bought the war that hired the men and dropped the fire that burned the huts and killed the people who then were the bodies that Scott counted. It's a rotten thing to brainwash someone into doing the dirty part of killing while we stay at home. It's a rotten thing to pretend the war is coming to an end when it's only taken to the air. And in 1972 if you don't fight against a rotten thing you become a part of it.
What I'm asking you to do is take some risks. Stop paying war taxes, refuse the armed forces, organize against the air war, support the strikes and boycotts of farmers, workers and poor people, analyze the flag salute, give up the nation state, share your money, refuse to hate, be willing to work … in short, sisters and brothers, arm up with love and come from the shadows.”

Joan Baez (1941) American singer

Text notes on Come From The Shadows (1972)

Love, Men, Money, Hate

“Throughout their early stages the movements of civilization—for, properly speaking, there was no one movement—were very slow, were local in space, and were partial in the sense that each developed along but few lines. Of the numberless years that covered these early stages we have no record. They were the years that saw such extraordinary discoveries and inventions as fire, and the wheel, and the bow, and the domestication of animals. So local were these inventions that at the present day there yet linger savage tribes, still fixed in the half-bestial life of an infinitely remote past, who know none of them except fire—and the discovery and use of fire may have marked, not the beginning of civilization, but the beginning of the savagery which separated man from brute.”

Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) American politician, 26th president of the United States

1910s, The World Movement (1910)

Life, Sense, Past, Animals

“The text is a product in the sense that it is an output, something that can be recorded and studied, having a certain construction that can be represented in systematic terms. It is a process in the sense of a continuous process of semantic choice, a movement through the network of meaning potential, with each set of choices constituting the environment for a further set.”

Michael Halliday (1925–2018) Australian linguist

Michael Halliday (1985) cited in: Xueyan Yang (2010) Modelling Text As Process. p. 20.
1970s and later

Sense, Study

“I have sometimes amused myself by endeavouring to fancy what would be the fate of an individual gifted, or rather accursed, with an intellect very far superior to that of his race. Of course he would be conscious of his superiority; nor could he (if otherwise constituted as man is) help manifesting his consciousness. Thus he would make himself enemies at all points. And since his opinions and speculations would widely differ from those of all mankind — that he would be considered a madman is evident. How horribly painful such a condition! Hell could invent no greater torture than that of being charged with abnormal weakness on account of being abnormally strong.In like manner, nothing can be clearer than that a very generous spirit — truly feeling what all merely profess — must inevitably find itself misconceived in every direction — its motives misinterpreted. Just as extremeness of intelligence would be thought fatuity, so excess of chivalry could not fail of being looked upon as meanness in the last degree — and so on with other virtues. This subject is a painful one indeed. That individuals have so soared above the plane of their race is scarcely to be questioned; but, in looking back through history for traces of their existence, we should pass over all the biographies of the "good and the great," while we search carefully the slight records of wretches who died in prison, in Bedlam, or upon the gallows.”

Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) American author, poet, editor and literary critic

Marginalia http://www.easylit.com/poe/comtext/prose/margin.shtml (November 1844)

Pain, Fate, Feeling, History

“My published work is just a record of my learning. I'm sharing it with people so they won't make the same mistakes that I did. It's been a painful and slow process. My work is like a journey, a journey of discovery.”

Thomas J. Sargent (1943) American economist

Thomas J. Sargent, in Conversations with Economists (1983) by Arjo Klamer

Pain, People, Learning

“I used to work in a record store. I'm kind of a record nerd.”

Patrick Stump (1984) American musician

TV.com

“It would be very curious to record by means of photographs, not the stage of the picture, but its metamorphoses. Perhaps one would perceive the path taken by the mind in order to put its dreams into a concrete form. But what is really very curious is to observe that fundamentally the picture does not change, that despite appearances the initial vision remains almost intact”

Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer

Boisgeloup, winter 1934
Richard Friedenthal, (1963, p. 256).
Quotes, 1930's, "Conversations avec Picasso," 1934–35

Dreams, Appearance, Winter, Change

“Yes, evolution by descent from a common ancestor is clearly true. If there was any lingering doubt about the evidence from the fossil record, the study of DNA provides the strongest possible proof of our relatedness to all other living things.”

Francis S. Collins (1950) Geneticist; Director of the National Institutes of Health

"Collins: Why this scientist believes in God" http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/04/03/collins.commentary/index.html, editorial, CNN (April 6, 2007)

Study

“On May 27, the New York Times published one of the most incredible sentences I’ve ever seen. They ran an article about the Nixon-Kissinger interchanges. Kissinger fought very hard through the courts to try to prevent it, but the courts permitted it. You read through it, and you see the following statement embedded in it. Nixon at one point informs Kissinger, his right-hand Eichmann, that he wanted bombing of Cambodia. And Kissinger loyally transmits the order to the Pentagon to carry out "a massive bombing campaign in Cambodia. Anything that flies on anything that moves." That is the most explicit call for what we call genocide when other people do it that I’ve ever seen in the historical record. Right at this moment there is a prosecution of Milošević going on in the international tribunal, and the prosecutors are kind of hampered because they can’t find direct orders, or a direct connection even, linking Milošević to any atrocities on the ground. Suppose they found a statement like this. Suppose a document came out from Milošević saying, "Reduce Kosovo to rubble. Anything that flies on anything that moves."”

Noam Chomsky (1928) american linguist, philosopher and activist

They would be overjoyed. The trial would be over. He would be sent away for multiple life sentences - if it was a U.S. trial, immediately the electric chair. Interview by David Barsamian on Alternative Radio, June 11, 2004 http://www.isreview.org/issues/37/chomsky.shtml Quotes 2000s, 2004

Life, People, Time, Reading

“New truth is often uncomfortable, especially to the holders of power; nevertheless, amid the long record of cruelty and bigotry, it is the most important achievement of our intelligent but wayward species.”

Bertrand Russell book Religion and Science

Religion and Science (1935), Ch. X: Conclusion
1930s

Truth, Intelligence

“We did the ‘unplugged’ project, “Acoustica“, in Portugal. There was always something new and exciting. In-between all these records and projects we’re still touring all over the world: last year, with this latest album, “Unbreakable”, we went back to Japan and played in Scandinavia again; before we come to Tel Aviv, we play in Paris, at “Olympia”; we go back to Russia, we play Kazan, the only show this year with an orchestra; so there’s a lot of things. And that, I think, keeps us going, and the fact that after all these years we have a chance to come and play in Israel is very very exciting and emotional, and it also feels like a new chapter.”

Klaus Meine (1948) German singer

World, Feeling, Thinking, Chance

“In India, the negationists have managed what European negationists can only dream of: turn the tables on honest historians and marginalize them. People who have specialized in adapting history to the party-line, are lecturing others about the political abuse of history. By contrast, genuine historians who have refused to tamper with the record of Islam (like Jadunath Sarkar, R. C. Majumdar, K. S. Lal) are held us as examples of communalist historywriting in textbooks which are required reading in all history departments in India.”

Koenraad Elst (1959) orientalist, writer

1990s, Negationism in India, (1992)

People, Dreams, History, Reading

“I've had groups of twentysomethings saying they still talk to each other in SpongeBob memes. It's really touching, you know? You get people who have had very difficult lives, and they say that SpongeBob got them through things, which is very touching. Someone told us that they were considering suicide, and SpongeBob made them laugh, and they cycled through that phase of their life. You get everything from that, to I had a great happy childhood and SpongeBob was part of it. You get all colours of the spectrum in terms of people coming up. Not just with SpongeBob either. It may be some cartoon that was a failure, or a videogame that took an hour to record in 1996. But they say it was the biggest thing in their life at one point. It's mind-blowing. You don't realise the footprint of what you're doing is leaving behind.”

Tom Kenny (1962) American actor

Tom Kenny Interview: The Voice of SpongeBob SquarePants http://www.denofgeek.com/us/tv/spongebob-squarepants/248119/tom-kenny-interview-the-voice-of-spongebob-squarepants (August 3, 2015)

Life, People, Failure, Suicide

“You can knock me down, but you better have a big rock to put me there… It's been tough, but that's alright. I am the oldest of ten kids and I am a survivor. I love this business so much, that there's no way I could think of retiring. When I'm 87, I'll still be walking on the Grand Ole Opry and singing "Here comes more tears to cry…". I still don't feel that I have the biggest record yet, or sang it the best. I think the best is yet to come, and that's the truth!”

Dottie West (1932–1991) American country music singer

From an interview with "The Nashville Network" in 1991, putting rumors aside that she might be retiring.

Love, Truth, Way, Feeling

“My main difficulty was that I could not paint fast enough. My pictures are all moments of my life – I mean instantaneous visual experiences, generally noted very rapidly and spontaneously. When I begin to paint, it's like leaping suddenly into deep waters, and I never know beforehand whether I will be able to swim. Well, it was Kandinsky who taught me the technique of swimming. I mean that he taught me to work fast enough, and with enough self-assurance, to be able to achieve this kind of rapid and spontaneous recording of moments of life.”

Gabriele Münter (1877–1962) German painter

Source: Interview by Edouard Roditi (1958), p. 120

Life, Water, Painting

“The only voice which was heard against this nation-wide exercise in suppressio veri suggestio falsi in the field of medieval Indian history, was that of the veteran historian, R. C. Majumdar. For him, this “national integration” based on a wilful blindness to recorded history of the havoc wrought by Islam in India, could lead only to national suicide. He tried his best to arrest the trend by presenting Islamic imperialism in medieval India as it was, and not as the politicians in league with Stalinist and Muslim historians were tailoring it to become.”

Sita Ram Goel book The Calcutta Quran Petition

The Calcutta Quran Petition (1986)

Exercises, History, Suicide

“In my actual imaginative contact with life, I am vastly more responsive to beauty than to horror—indeed, I never experience real cosmic horror except in infrequent nightmares. However, when I come to record my various imaginative experiences, I generally find that only the horror items have any uniqueness or originality. Others have seen the same beautiful things that I have seen, & have sung them more nobly. Dunsany, indeed, has said exquisitely almost everything I could possibly wish to say; so that when I indulge in sheer phantasy I can do no more than imitate him. Thus horror alone is left as my peculiar kingdom, & in it I must hold my lowly reproduction of a Plutonian court.”

H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American author

Letter to Elizabeth Toldridge (8 March 1929), in Selected Letters II, 1925-1929 edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, pp. 316-317
Non-Fiction, Letters

Life, Beauty, Imagination

“I want to explain my environment to those who don't come any closer to it than the records they buy or the images they see on television. People want the truth. Even if they can't handle it, they want it. I let you know that I survived nine bullets not to sell records, but because it's the truth. Every time I sit down for an interview, I'm asked, "Well, 50, how did it feel to get shot nine times?" But those stories don't hold the weight, the pain, or the hope of my experience. It just can't. This is my mindset and these are the things that go on. This is why I say the rhymes that I say. This is what happened when I was trying to get rich before I died in Southside Queens.”

50 Cent (1975) American rapper, actor, businessman, investor and television producer

Extract of From Pieces to Weight: Once Upon a Time in Southside Queens http://aalbc.com/reviews/50_cent_interview.htm. Song lyrics, From Pieces to Weight: Once Upon a Time in Southside Queens (2005)

Pain, People, Truth, Hope

“My dream is to do whatever I want without any interference from the record company.”

Sarah Vaughan (1924–1990) American jazz singer

Interview, The Los Angeles Times, 1948

Dreams

“The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records. They are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the divinity itself; and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power.”

Alexander Hamilton book The Farmer Refuted

The Farmer Refuted (1775)

Nature

“I am an American, Chicago born — Chicago, that somber city — and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent.”

Saul Bellow book The Adventures of Augie March

Source: The Adventures of Augie March (1953), Ch. 1 (opening line)

Way

“In the beginning of the year 1665 I found the method of approximating Series and the Rule for reducing any dignity of any Binomial into such a series. The same year in May I found the method of tangents of Gregory and Slusius, and in November had the direct method of Fluxions, and the next year in January had the Theory of Colours, and in May following I had entrance into the inverse method of Fluxions. And the same year I began to think of gravity extending to the orb of the Moon, and having found out how to estimate the force with which [a] globe revolving within a sphere presses the surface of the sphere, from Kepler's Rule of the periodical times of the Planets being in a sesquialterate proportion of their distances from the centers of their orbs I deduced that the forces which keep the Planets in their Orbs must [be] reciprocally as the squares of their distances from the centers about which they revolve: and thereby compared the force requisite to keep the Moon in her orb with the force of gravity at the surface of the earth, and found them answer pretty nearly. All this was in the two plague years of 1665 and 1666, for in those days I was in the prime of my age for invention, and minded Mathematicks and Philosophy more than at any time since. What Mr Hugens has published since about centrifugal forces I suppose he had before me. At length in the winter between the years 1676 and 1677 I found the Proposition that by a centrifugal force reciprocally as the square of the distance a Planet must revolve in an Ellipsis about the center of the force placed in the lower umbilicus of the Ellipsis and with a radius drawn to that center describe areas proportional to the times. And in the winter between the years 1683 and 1684 this Proposition with the Demonstration was entered in the Register book of the R. Society. And this is the first instance upon record of any Proposition in the higher Geometry found out by the method in dispute. In the year 1689 Mr Leibnitz, endeavouring to rival me, published a Demonstration of the same Proposition upon another supposition, but his Demonstration proved erroneous for want of skill in the method.”

Isaac Newton (1643–1727) British physicist and mathematician and founder of modern classical physics

(ca. 1716) A Catalogue of the Portsmouth Collection of Books and Papers Written by Or Belonging to Sir Isaac Newton https://books.google.com/books?id=3wcjAAAAMAAJ&pg=PR18 (1888) Preface Also partially quoted in Sir Sidney Lee (ed.), The Dictionary of National Biography Vol.40 http://books.google.com/books?id=NycJAAAAIAAJ (1894)

Books, Age, Thinking, Winter

“I believe the entire records of the world, from the date of the Declaration of Independence up to within three years ago, may be searched in vain for one single affirmation, from one single man, that the negro was not included in the Declaration of Independence; I think I may defy Judge Douglas to show that he ever said so, that Washington ever said so, that any President ever said so, that any member of Congress ever said so, or that any living man upon the whole earth ever said so, until the necessities of the present policy of the Democratic Party, in regard to slavery”

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States

Fifth Lincoln-Douglas Debate http://www.bartleby.com/251/pages/page328.html (7 October 1858), regarding Stephen A. Douglas and the antebellum Democratic Party's claim that African Americans were exempt from Thomas Jefferson's assertion that all men were created equal. 1850s, Lincoln–Douglas debates (1858) Context: The Judge has alluded to the Declaration of Independence, and insisted that negroes are not included in that Declaration; and that it is a slander upon the framers of that instrument, to suppose that negroes were meant therein; and he asks you: Is it possible to believe that Mister Jefferson, who penned the immortal paper, could have supposed himself applying the language of that instrument to the negro race, and yet held a portion of that race in slavery? Would he not at once have freed them? I only have to remark upon this part of the Judge's speech, and that, too, very briefly, for I shall not detain myself, or you, upon that point for any great length of time, that I believe the entire records of the world, from the date of the Declaration of Independence up to within three years ago, may be searched in vain for one single affirmation, from one single man, that the negro was not included in the Declaration of Independence; I think I may defy Judge Douglas to show that he ever said so, that Washington ever said so, that any President ever said so, that any member of Congress ever said so, or that any living man upon the whole earth ever said so, until the necessities of the present policy of the Democratic Party, in regard to slavery, had to invent that affirmation. And I will remind Judge Douglas and this audience that while Mister Jefferson was the owner of slaves, as undoubtedly he was, in speaking upon this very subject he used the strong language that “he trembled for his country when he remembered that God was just;” and I will offer the highest premium in my power to Judge Douglas if he will show that he, in all his life, ever uttered a sentiment at all akin to that of Jefferson.

World, Search, Thinking

“After Olympia Press, in Paris, published the book, an American critic suggested that Lolita was the record of my love affair with the romantic novel. The substitution "English language" for "romantic novel" would make this elegant formula more correct.”

Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) Russian-American novelist, lepidopterist, professor

As quoted in "Nabokov's Love Affairs" by R. W. Flint http://www.powells.com/review/2003_07_17.html in The New Republic (17 June 1957). On a Book Entitled Lolita (1956)

Love, Books

“When you see someone who is great without God’s character, don’t admire him – pray for him because the beginner is not the owner but the finisher… The beginning and middle are off-record; the end is what will put the record straight.”

T. B. Joshua (1963) Nigerian Christian leader

God

“"It is more than a crime; it is a political fault," —words which I record, because they have been repeated and attributed to others.”

Joseph Fouché (1759–1820) French statesman

Memoirs of Fouché. Commonly quoted, "It is worse than a crime,—it is a blunder", and attributed to Talleyrand; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

“No recognised school of sculpture had animated this terrible object, yet centuries and even thousands of years seemed recorded in its dim and greenish surface of unplaceable stone.”

H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American author

Fiction, The Call of Cthulhu (1926)

School, Animals

“JG: Can I ask what your feelings are about God?
EV: Sure. I think it's like a movie that was way too popular. It's a story that's been told too many times and just doesn't mean anything. Man lived on the planet -- [placing his fingers an inch apart], this is 5000 years of semi-recorded history. And God and the Bible, that came in somewhere around the middle, maybe 2000. This is the last 2000, this is what we're about to celebrate [indicating about an 1/8th of an inch with his fingers]. Now, humans, in some shape or form, have been on the earth for three million years [pointing across the room to indicate the distance]. So, all this time, from there [gesturing toward the other side of the room], to here [indicating the 1/8th of an inch], there was no God, there was no story, there was no myth and people lived on this planet and they wandered and they gathered and they did all these things. The planet was never threatened. How did they survive for all this time without this belief in God? I'd like to ask this to someone who knows about Christianity and maybe you do. That just seems funny to me… (sic) Funny strange. Funny bad. Funny frown. Not good. That laws are made and wars occur because of this story that was written, again, in this small part of time.”

Eddie Vedder (1964) musician, songwriter, member of Pearl Jam

March 23, 1998, Janeane Garofalo interviewing Eddie Vedder for CMJ New Music Report at Brendan's, on the Lower East Side.

God, War, People, Law

“When I made my first film, I think the thing was probably helped me the most was that it was such an unusual thing to do in the early 50s for someone who actually go and make a film. People thought it was impossible. It really is terribly easy. All anybody needs is a camera, a tape recorder, and some imagination.”

Stanley Kubrick (1928–1999) American film director, screenwriter, producer, cinematographer and editor

Interviewed by Charles Kohler, East Village Eye (1968)

People, Imagination, Thinking, Help

“I have read your book and its terrible documentation with deepest emotion. I cannot describe the mixed feeling of abhorrence and loathing which has filled my heart while perusing these records of human degradation and abominable cruelty.. . . To keep quiet would serve only the moral indifference of the world. . . You have done your duty in publishing this book and bringing these facts to light.”

Thomas Mann (1875–1955) German novelist, and 1929 Nobel Prize laureate

Cited in Awake! magazine, 1995, 8/22; article: The Evils of Nazism Exposed.
In 1933, The Golden Age carried the first of many reports of the existence of concentration camps in Germany. In 1938, Jehovah’s Witnesses published the book Crusade Against Christianity, in French, German, and Polish. It carefully documented the vicious Nazi attacks on the Witnesses and included diagrams of the Sachsenhausen and Esterwegen concentration camps.

Books, World, Feeling, Light

“There has been no greater artist in French verse, as there has been no greater poet; and the main part of the history of poetry in France is the record of a long forgetting of all that Villon found out for himself.”

Francois Villon (1431–1463) Mediæval French poet

Arthur Symons Figures of Several Centuries (London: Constable, 1916) p. 40.
Criticism

History, Parting, Forgetting

“Everybody does that now. We all take pics… you do the same with holiday photos. You record something to look back on it, even though you’re not really there when you’re taking the picture ‘cause you’re too busy recording it; so you retrospectively go to look back on where you weren’t and tell yourself you had a good time.”

Dylan Moran (1971) Irish actor and comedian

On taking pics.
Monster (2004)

Photo, Business, Time, Holiday

“It's just natural, it's not a great disaster. People keep talking about it like it's The End of The Earth. It's only a rock group that split up, it's nothing important. You know, you have all the old records there if you want to reminisce.”

John Lennon (1940–1980) English singer and songwriter

Interview on Scene And Heard by David Wigg (25 October 1971)

People, Nature

“If you don’t have any fresh ideas, then you use stale tactics to scare the voters. If you don’t have a record to run on, then you paint your opponent as someone people should run from. You make a big election about small things.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

Democratic National Convention Nomination Acceptance Speech (29 August 2008) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmEI9Doctqs 2008

People, Idea, Painting

“Non-Jats also vote for him. How many districts are there in UP and how many districts are there in which in which this animal of a Jat is found? Is there anything in my life to suggest that I am casteist? In 1954, I wrote a letter to Nehru, it is on record, in which I suggested that all candidates for gazette jobs must marry outside their own caste. And if a man married inside his caste while holding such a job, he would have to resign.”

Charan Singh (1902–1987) prime minister of India

Stig Toft Madsen, et al, in: "Trysts with Democracy: Political Practice in South Asia}, P.80

Life, Animals

“I guess we were kinda poor when we were kids, but we didn't know it. That's because my dad always refused to let us look at the family's financial records.”

Jack Handey (1949) American comedian

Fuzzy Memories (1996), Andrews McMeel Publishing, ISBN 0-8362-1040-9

Family

“Algebraic geometry has developed in waves, each with its own language and point of view. The late nineteenth century saw the function-theoretic approach of Riemann, the more geometric approach of Brill and Noether, and the purely algebraic approach of Kronecker, Dedekind, and Weber. The Italian school followed with Castelnuovo, Enriques, and Severi, culminating in the classification of algebraic surfaces. Then came the twentieth-century "American" school of Chow, Weil, and Zariski, which gave firm algebraic foundations to the Italian intuition. Most recently, Serre and Grothendieck initiated the French school, which has rewritten the foundations of algebraic geometry in terms of schemes and cohomology, and which has an impressive record of solving old problems with new techniques. Each of these schools has introduced new concepts and methods.”

Robin Hartshorne book Algebraic Geometry

Algebraic Geometry, Springer, (1977), p. xiii
Algebraic Geometry (1977)

School, Problem

“I declined to be made Pontifex Maximus in succession to a colleague still living, when the people tendered me that priesthood which my father had held. Several years later I accepted that sacred office when he at last was dead who, taking advantage of a time of civil disturbance, had seized it for himself, such a multitude from all Italy assembling for my election, in the consulship of Publius Sulpicius and Gaius Valgius, as is never recorded to have been in Rome before.”

Augustus book Res Gestae Divi Augusti

Res Gestae Divi Augusti

People, Time, Success, Dead

“I didn't want to mask variations; I didn't want to record a path. I wanted to get the paint out of the can and onto the canvas... I tried to keep the paint as good as it was in the can.”

Frank Stella (1936) American artist

Source: Quotes, 1960 - 1970, Questions to Stella and Judd' - September 1966, p. 121

Painting

“These are harsh words for a man only recently canonized by President Clinton and my old friend George McGovern — but I have written worse things about Nixon, many times, and the record will show that I kicked him repeatedly long before he went down.”

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

1990s, He Was A Crook (1994)
Context: These are harsh words for a man only recently canonized by President Clinton and my old friend George McGovern — but I have written worse things about Nixon, many times, and the record will show that I kicked him repeatedly long before he went down. I beat him like a mad dog with mange every time I got a chance, and I am proud of it. He was scum.

Time

“On music record industry: "I moved into the record industry. I was under the impression that in order to be alive and to be able to create what I had in mind I had to become successful. I realised that success and pure creativity are not very compatible. The more successful you become, the more you become a product of something that generates money. Instead of being able to move forward freely and do what you really wish, you find yourself stuck and obliged to repeat yourself and your previous success."”

Vangelis (1943) Greek composer of electronic, progressive, ambient, jazz, pop rock, and orchestral music

2012

Money, Success

“The negative aspect of live work is that the audience expects to be entertained, and not only that, the record company and the promoters expect you to be successful”

Vangelis (1943) Greek composer of electronic, progressive, ambient, jazz, pop rock, and orchestral music

1984
Context: On live performance: "From the creative point of view, live music is always different to what appears on a record because everything is spontaneous and you’re influenced as a performer by your audience. The negative aspect of live work is that the audience expects to be entertained, and not only that, the record company and the promoters expect you to be successful. But to me, the theatre is a meeting place where something unpredictable happens, not necessarily successful, maybe pleasant, maybe not. That’s how I think a concert should be, but in reality things have to be planned down to the last detail, you have to rehearse with other musicians so the scope for improvisation is lessened, and these things prevent a concert from being a truly spontaneous affair. In a way, this reality makes me less keen to do concerts, but in essence I do like playing. I enjoy the risk".

Success