Quotes about relative (1015 quotes, page 4)

“Our performance, relatively, is likely to be better in a bear market than in a bull market … in a year when the general market had a substantial advance, I would be well satisfied to match the advance of the averages.”

Warren Buffett (1930) American business magnate, investor, and philanthropist

Second annual letter to Limited Partners (1957) http://www.safalniveshak.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/Warren-Buffett-Berkshire-Letters-1957-2012.pdf
Letters to Shareholders (1957 - 2012)

“Scientific "facts" are taught at a very early age and in the very same manner in which religious "facts" were taught only a century ago. There is no attempt to waken the critical abilities of the pupil so that he may be able to see things in perspective. At the universities the situation is even worse, for indoctrination is here carried out in a much more systematic manner. Criticism is not entirely absent. Society, for example, and its institutions, are criticised most severely and often most unfairly… But science is excepted from the criticism. In society at large the judgment of the scientist is received with the same reverence as the judgement of bishops and cardinals was accepted not too long ago. The move towards "demythologization," for example, is largely motivated by the wish to avoid any clash between Christianity and scientific ideas. If such a clash occurs, then science is certainly right and Christianity wrong. Pursue this investigation further and you will see that science has now become as oppressive as the ideologies it had once to fight. Do not be misled by the fact that today hardly anyone gets killed for joining a scientific heresy. This has nothing to do with science. It has something to do with the general quality of our civilization. Heretics in science are still made to suffer from the most severe sanctions this relatively tolerant civilization has to offer.”

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

How To Defend Society Against Science (1975)

Age , Motivation , Idea , Suffering

“The greatest threat to a robust, autonomous civil society is the ever-growing Leviathan state and those like Obama who see it as the ultimate expression of the collective. Obama compounds the fallacy by declaring the state to be the font of entrepreneurial success. How so? It created the infrastructure — roads, bridges, schools, Internet — off which we all thrive. Absurd. We don't credit the Swiss postal service with the Special Theory of Relativity because it transmitted Einstein’s manuscript to the Annalen der Physik.”

Charles Krauthammer (1950–2018) American journalist

Column, July 20, 2012, "Did the state make you great? : Virtues Obama discounts" http://jewishworldreview.com/cols/krauthammer072012.php3#.U4HWbMJOWUk at jewishworldreview.com.
2010s, 2012

School , Success

“In what respect… does the general theory of relativity differ…? The answer is: in its universality; the force of gravitation in the geometrical structure acts equally on all matter. There is here a close analogy between the gravitational mass M…(Sun) and the inertial mass m… (Earth) on the one hand, and the heat conduction k of the field (plate)… and the coefficient of expansion c… on the other. …The success of the general relativity theory… is attributable to the fact that the gravitational and inertial masses of any body are… rigorously proportional for all matter.”

Howard P. Robertson (1903–1961) American mathematician and physicist

Geometry as a Branch of Physics (1949)

Universe , Success , Sun

“There is another side to the theory of relativity. We have pointed out in the beginning how the development of science is in the direction to make it less subjective, to separate more and more in the observed facts that which belongs to the reality behind the phenomena, the absolute, from the subjective element, which is introduced by the observer, the relative. Einstein's theory is a great step in that direction. We can say that the theory of relativity is intended to remove entirely the relative and exhibit the pure absolute.”

Willem de Sitter (1872–1934) Dutch cosmologist

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

Reality , Science

“We are right when, and only when, we stand in a right position relative to God, and we are wrong so far and so long as we stand in any other position.”

Aiden Wilson Tozer (1897–1963) American missionary

The Pursuit of God (1957)

God

“Off and on during my life, I have passed sleepless nights in making up lists of the dozen or so books a person might choose to take along if suddenly marooned on a desert island. This is a relatively easy game for serious readers: At least half the titles would be recognized classics — the Bible, Plato, Shakespeare, a good dictionary, that sort of thing. But occasionally I have made the challenge a little more difficult: "What if you could take just one book?"”

Michael Dirda (1948) American literary critic

Washington Post article [concerning Geary's Guide to the World's Great Aphorists]: Arts & Living, 21 Oct 2007.

Life , Books , Game , Personality

“Nothing is more certain than that whatever has to court public favor for its support will sooner or later be prostituted to utilitarian ends. The educational institutions of the United States afford a striking demonstration of this truth. Virtually without exception, liberal education, that is to say, education centered about ideas and ideals, has fared best in those institutions which draw their income from private sources. They have been able … to insist that education be not entirely a means for breadwinning. This means that they have been relatively free to promote pure knowledge and the training of the mind. … In state institutions, always at the mercy of elected bodies and of the public generally, and under obligation to show practical fruits for their expenditure of money, the movement toward specialism and vocationalism has been irresistible. They have never been able to say that they will do what they will with their own because their own is not private. It seems fair to say that the opposite of the private is the prostitute.”

Richard M. Weaver (1910–1963) American scholar

Source: Ideas have Consequences (1948), pp. 136-137.

Money , Truth , Education , Idea

“People have always said - those words, 'too conservative,' is fairly relative. I'm sure that they probably said that about Thomas Jefferson and George Washington and Benjamin Franklin. And truly, when you look at the Constitution and our founding fathers and their writings, the things that made this country great, you might draw those conclusions: That they were conservative. They were fiscally conservative and socially conservative.”

Sharron Angle (1949) Former member of the Nevada Assembly from 1999 to 2007

interview with New York Times, 2010-08-12
Adam
Nagourney
Tea Party Choice Scrambles in Taking On Reid in Nevada
New York Times
03624331
2010-08-17
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/18/us/politics/18vegas.html
Interview With Sharron Angle
2010-08-18
New York Times
03624331
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/18/us/politics/18angle.html

People , Drawing , Country

“The prophecy of Professor Yeshayahu Leibovitz, that the occupation would corrupt us through and through and turn us into a people of exploiters and secret-service-men, has come awfully true. Nothing has remained of the "beautiful Eretz Israel " but a cloying nostalgia, of which Naomi Shemer was a standard-bearer. A small and gallant state, progressive and (relatively) egalitarian, respected by the world, has become an occupying and looting state, hostage to delirious settlers, full of internal violence and "swinish capitalism" (a phrase coined by Shimon Peres, one of those most responsible for this situation). Throughout the world, the idea of boycotting Israel is gaining ground.”

Uri Avnery (1923–2018) Israeli writer

Death of a Myth (May 12, 2005)

Men , People , Secret , World

“There are other difficulties in the way of accepting imperialism as an explanation of Muslim hostility, even if we define imperialism narrowly and specifically, as the invasion and domination of Muslim countries by non-Muslims. If the hostility is directed against imperialism in that sense, why has it been so much stronger against Western Europe, which has relinquished all its Muslim possessions and dependencies, than against Russia, which still rules, with no light hand, over many millions of reluctant Muslim subjects and over ancient Muslim cities and countries? And why should it include the United States, which, apart from a brief interlude in the Muslim-minority area of the Philippines, has never ruled any Muslim population? The last surviving European empire with Muslim subjects, that of the Soviet Union, far from being the target of criticism and attack, has been almost exempt. Even the most recent repressions of Muslim revolts in the southern and central Asian republics of the USSR incurred no more than relatively mild words of expostulation, coupled with a disclaimer of any desire to interfere in what are quaintly called the "internal affairs" of the USSR and a request for the preservation of order and tranquillity on the frontier.
One reason for this somewhat surprising restraint is to be found in the nature of events in Soviet Azerbaijan. Islam is obviously an important and potentially a growing element in the Azerbaijani sense of identity, but it is not at present a dominant element, and the Azerbaijani movement has more in common with the liberal patriotism of Europe than with Islamic fundamentalism. Such a movement would not arouse the sympathy of the rulers of the Islamic Republic. It might even alarm them, since a genuinely democratic national state run by the people of Soviet Azerbaijan would exercise a powerful attraction on their kinsmen immediately to the south, in Iranian Azerbaijan.
Another reason for this relative lack of concern for the 50 million or more Muslims under Soviet rule may be a calculation of risk and advantage. The Soviet Union is near, along the northern frontiers of Turkey, Iran, and Afghanistan; America and even Western Europe are far away. More to the point, it has not hitherto been the practice of the Soviets to quell disturbances with water cannon and rubber bullets, with TV cameras in attendance, or to release arrested persons on bail and allow them access to domestic and foreign media. The Soviets do not interview their harshest critics on prime time, or tempt them with teaching, lecturing, and writing engagements. On the contrary, their ways of indicating displeasure with criticism can often be quite disagreeable.”

Bernard Lewis (1916–2018) British-American historian

Books, The Roots of Muslim Rage (1990)

Hostility , People , Way , Exercises

“But some of our moral behaviors, if not sentiments, almost certainly evolved. Evidence for that comes from finding parallels between the behavior of our own species and that of our relatives.”

Jerry Coyne book Faith vs. Fact: Why Science and Religion are Incompatible

Source: Faith vs. Fact (2015), p. 171

Behavior

“I am willing to believe that my unobtainable sixty seconds within a sponge or a flatworm might not reveal any mental acuity that I would care to call consciousness. But I am also confident […] that vultures and sloths, as close evolutionary relatives with the same basic set of organs, lie on our side of any meaningful (and necessarily fuzzy) border—and that we are therefore not mistaken when we look them in the eye and see a glimmer of emotional and conceptual affinity.”

Stephen Jay Gould book Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms

"Can We Truly Know Sloth and Rapacity?" pp. 389–390
Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms (1998)

Lie , Confidence

“Involuntarily and without any definite motive, I had a thought that often occurs to me. Not only did I begin drawing relatively late in life, but it may also be that I shall not live for so very many years to come… I think I may presume without rashness: that my body will keep a certain number of years "quand bien meme" - a certain number, say between six and ten years for instance… This is the period on which I reckon firmly.”

Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890) Dutch post-Impressionist painter (1853-1890)

Quote in his letter to brother Theo, from The Hague, Summer 1883; as quoted in Vincent van Gogh, edited by Alfred H. Barr; Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1935 https://www.moma.org/documents/moma_catalogue_1996_300061887.pdf, (letter 309), p 23
1880s, 1883

Life , Motivation , Thinking , Drawing

“The individual has been allowed out of his socially constructed cage. That, at least, is the contemporary myth. What is not clear, however, is what that liberation has to do with the fulfullment of individualism. The lessons of history seem relatively clear. Societies on the rise are simple, unadorned and relatively uncompromising. Those on the decline are given to open-mindedness, self-indulgence and the baroque.”

John Ralston Saul (1947) Canadian author and essayist

Voltaire's Bastards (1992)

History

“All interesting issues in natural history are questions of relative frequency, not single examples. Everything happens once amidst the richness of nature. But when an unanticipated phenomenon occurs again and again—finally turning into an expectation—then theories are overturned.”

Stephen Jay Gould book Wonderful Life

Source: Wonderful Life (1989), p. 136

History , Question , Nature

“How are you going to teach virtue if you teach the relativity of all ethical ideas? Virtue, if it implies anything at all, implies an ethical absolute. A person whose idea of what is proper varies from day to day can be admired for his broadmindedness, but not for his virtue.”

Robert M. Pirsig book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Source: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), Ch. 29

Idea , Personality

“I've always been really anti-social, and being relatively famous has just given me an excuse to go out even less. If I didn't play in Soundgarden I'd have no excuse for being the way I am. My friends and family would hate me, whereas now they probably feel sorry for me. Y'know, 'Poor kid, he can't come out because he gets hassled a lot.”

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

Interview with Team Rock Magazine, Summer 1996 http://teamrock.com/feature/2018-02-06/archive-the-real-chris-cornell,
On being anti-social

Hate , Family , Way , Feeling

“It is better to have a home of one’s own than to always be a typist. Hilda did not talk quite as she should, and her husband had not scrupled to correct her. She had never forgotten – it was such a small thing, yet she could not forget it – she had never forgotten that night on their honeymoon when she had said something ungrammatical about the relative position of their limbs.”

E.M. Forster (1879–1970) English novelist

The Obelisk
The Life to Come and other stories (1972)

Home , Night , Forgetting

“(On creating) And you get that little endorphin buzz, it's great. Why do you think Einstein looked like that? I don't think he was going "You know this is some dynamite weed! It's all relative you know."”

Robin Williams (1951–2014) American actor and stand-up comedian

Inside the Actors Studio (2001)

Thinking

“The firm as a relatively durable organizational structure is able to deal with the lack of knowledge about the future fruits of research and development and innovation. Its relative internal stability means that it can carry unquantifiable risks which would be eschewed in the volatility of the market. In particular large firms are able to set up and sustain R&D departments with their own funds. It is widely recognized that atomized, small-scale private enterprise is not well able to make such long-term commitments.”

Geoffrey Hodgson (1946) British economist

Source: Economics and Institutions, 1988, p. 213

Knowledge , Future

“p. 651Abstract. Investigations of the function of consciousness in human information processing have focused mainly on two questions: (1) where does consciousness enter into the information processing sequence and (2) how does conscious processing differ from preconscious and unconscious processing. Input analysis is thought to be initially "preconscious," "pre-attentive," fast, involuntary, and automatic. This is followed by "conscious," "focal-attentive" analysis which is relatively slow, voluntary, and flexible. It is thought that simple, familiar stimuli can be identified preconsciously, but conscious processing is needed to identify complex, novel stimuli. Conscious processing has also been thought to be necessary for choice, learning and memory, and the organization of complex, novel responses, particularly those requiring planning, reflection, or creativity. The present target article reviews evidence that consciousness performs none of these functions. Consciousness nearly always results from focal-attentive processing (as a form of output) but does not itself enter into this or any other form of human information processing. This suggests that the term "conscious process" needs re-examination. Consciousness appears to be necessary in a variety of tasks because they require focal-attentive processing; if consciousness is absent, focal-attentive processing is absent. Viewed from a first-person perspective, however, conscious states are causally effective. First-person accounts are complementary to third-person accounts. Although they can be translated into third-person accounts, they cannot be reduced to them.”

Max Velmans (1942) British psychologist

Is human information processing conscious?, 1991

Question , Learning , Appearance , Memory

“What mathematics, therefore are expected to do for the advanced student at the university, Arithmetic, if taught demonstratively, is capable of doing for the children even of the humblest school. It furnishes training in reasoning, and particularly in deductive reasoning. It is a discipline in closeness and continuity of thought. It reveals the nature of fallacies, and refuses to avail itself of unverified assumptions. It is the one department of school-study in which the sceptical and inquisitive spirit has the most legitimate scope; in which authority goes for nothing. In other departments of instruction you have a right to ask for the scholar’s confidence, and to expect many things to be received on your testimony with the understanding that they will be explained and verified afterwards. But here you are justified in saying to your pupil “Believe nothing which you cannot understand. Take nothing for granted.” In short, the proper office of arithmetic is to serve as elementary 268 training in logic. All through your work as teachers you will bear in mind the fundamental difference between knowing and thinking; and will feel how much more important relatively to the health of the intellectual life the habit of thinking is than the power of knowing, or even facility of achieving visible results. But here this principle has special significance. It is by Arithmetic more than by any other subject in the school course that the art of thinking—consecutively, closely, logically—can be effectually taught.”

Joshua Girling Fitch (1824–1903) British educationalist

Source: Lectures on Teaching, (1906), pp. 292-293.

Life , Children , Health , School

“The courtiers tried every trick to lure or force him into making complaints against Tiberius; always, however, without success. He not only failed to show any interest in the murder of his relatives, but affected an amazing indifference to his own ill-treatment, behaving so obsequiously to his adoptive grandfather and to the entire household, that someone said of him, very neatly: "Never was there a better slave, or a worse master!"”
Haec omnibus insidiis temptatus elicientium cogentiumque se ad querelas nullam umquam occasionem dedit, perinde obliterato suorum casu ac si nihil cuiquam accidisset, quae vero ipse pateretur incredibili dissimulatione transmittens tantique in avum et qui iuxta erant obsequii, ut non immerito sit dictum nec servum meliorem ullum nec deteriorem dominum fuisse.

Sueton book The Twelve Caesars

Source: The Twelve Caesars, Gaius Caligula, Ch. 10

Success , Indifference

“Of the three great skeptics I interviewed, Popper was the first to make his mark. His philosophy stemmed from his effort to distinguish pseudoscience, such as Marxism or astrology or Freudian psychology, from genuine science, such as Einstein's theory of relativity. The latter, Popper decided, was testable; it made predictions about the world that could be empirically checked. The logical positivists had said as much. But Popper denied the positivist assertion that scientists can prove a theory through induction, or repeated empirical tests or observations. One never knows if one's observations have been sufficient; the next observation might contradict all that preceded it. Observations can never prove a theory but can only disprove, or falsify it. Popper often bragged that he had "killed" logical positivism with this argument.”

John Horgan (journalist) (1953) American science journalist

Source: The End of Science (1996), p. 27

World , Effort , Science

“Peoples of European descent are not only in a relative but a real decline. They are aging, dying, disappearing. This is the existential crisis of the West.”

Patrick Buchanan (1938) American politician and commentator

2010s, Suicide of a Superpower (2011)

People , Age

“At the ULB, Brout and I initiated a research group in fundamental interactions, that is, in the search for the general laws of nature. Joined by brilliant students, many of them becoming world renowned physicists, our group contributed to the many fields at the frontier of the challenges facing contemporary physics. While the mechanism discovered in 1964 was developed all over the world to encode the nature of weak interactions in a "Standard Model," our group contributed to the understanding of strong interactions and quark confinement, general relativity and cosmology. There we introduced the idea of a primordial exponential expansion of the universe, later called inflation, which we related to the origin of the universe itself, a scenario, which I still think may possibly be conceptually the correct one. During these developments, our group extended our contacts with other Belgian universities and got involved in many international collaborations.
With our group and many other collaborators I analysed fractal structures, supergravity, string theory, infinite Kac-Moody algebras and more generally all tentative approaches to what I consider as the most important problem in fundamental interactions: the solution to the conflict between the classical Einsteinian theory of gravitation, namely general relativity, and the framework of our present understanding of the world, quantum theory.”

François Englert (1932) Belgian theoretical physicist

excerpt[François Englert - Biographical, Nobel Prize in Physics (nobelprize.org), 2013, https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/2013/englert-bio.html]

World , Law , Search , Idea

“It is absurd in general relativity to speak of a universe in which nothing happens.”

Lee Smolin book Three Roads to Quantum Gravity

Three Roads to Quantum Gravity (2000)

Universe

“In my world, everything is possible and everything is relative.”

Paulo Coelho book The Zahir

Source: The Zahir (2005), p. 167.

World

“Human process music using both absolute and relational processing… we attend to the actual pitches and duration we hear in music, as well as their relative values. This dual mode of processing is rare among species… These modes of processing and the brain mechanisms that gave rise to them were necessary for the development of language, music, poetry, and art.”

Daniel Levitin book The World in Six Songs

The World in Six Songs (2008)

Art , Music

“Here’s to dodgy adventures with disreputable relatives!”

Stephen R. Lawhead (1950) American writer

Source: The Skin Map (2010), p. 18

“.. the characteristic motion peculiar to the object (absolute motion), with the transformations the object undergoes in its shifting in relation to the environment, mobile or immobile (relative motion; both motions should be conceived in art)”

Umberto Boccioni (1882–1916) Italian painter and sculptor

Boccioni's quote on motion; as quoted in Futurism, ed. Didier Ottinger; Centre Pompidou / 5 Continents Editions, Milan, 2008, p. 328.
1914 - 1916, Pittura e scultura futuriste' Milan, 1914

Art

“The star rating system is relative, not absolute. When you ask a friend if Hellboy is any good, you're not asking if it's any good compared to Mystic River, you're asking if it's any good compared to The Punisher. And my answer would be, on a scale of one to four, if Superman (1978) is four, then Hellboy is three and The Punisher is two. In the same way, if American Beauty gets four stars, then [The United States of] Leland clocks in at about two.”

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

Review http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/shaolin-soccer-2004 of Shaolin Soccer (23 April 2004)
Reviews, Three star reviews

Beauty , Way , Star

“Property rights develop to internalize externalities when the gains of internalization become larger than the cost of internalization. Increased internalization, in the main, results from changes in economic values, changes which stem from the development of new technology and the opening of new markets, changes to which old property rights are poorly attuned [G]iven a community's tastes… [for private versus state ownership], the emergence of new private or state-owned property rights will be in response to changes in technology and relative prices.”

Harold Demsetz (1930–2019) American economist

Harold Demsetz, (1967). "Toward a Theory of Property Rights." American Economic Review 57 (May, No. 2): 347-359. p. 350, as cited in Eggertsson (1990; 250)

Communication , Change

“In recent centuries the only near spiritual relative of Tolstoy is the English poet, who in the fourteenth century, in the form of Piers Plowman, preached religious ideas so strikingly like those of Tolstoy. They are both individualists and they seek individual, not social, regeneration. …Both point to the simple toiling God-fearing peasant as one expressing the ideal of the Christian life and service.”

Robert Hunter (author) (1874–1942) American sociologist, author, golf course architect

Source: Why We Fail as Christians (1919), p. 29-30

Life , God , Fear , Idea

“It is with regret that I have again to announce a continuance of the disturbed condition of the island of Cuba. No advance toward the pacification of the discontented part of the population has been made. While the insurrection has gained no advantages and exhibits no more of the elements of power or of the prospects of ultimate success than were exhibited a year ago, Spain, on the other hand, has not succeeded in its repression, and the parties stand apparently in the same relative attitude which they have occupied for a long time past.”

Ulysses S. Grant (1822–1885) 18th President of the United States

1870s, Fourth State of the Union Address (1872)

Time , Success , Past , Parting

“I firmly believe that any organization, in order to survive and achieve success, must have a sound set of beliefs on which it premises all its policies and actions.
Next I believe that the most important single factor in corporate success is faithful adherence to those beliefs.
And, finally I believe if an organization is to meet the challenge of a changing world, it must be prepared to change everything about itself except those beliefs as it moves through corporate life.
Basic philosophy, spirit and drive of an organization have far more to do with its relative achievements than do technological or economic resources, organizational structure, innovation and timing…”

Thomas Watson, Jr. (1914–1993) American businessman and diplomat

Watson, Jr. (1962) as cited in: Heather Clark, John Chandler, Jim Barry (1994) Organisation and Identities: : Text and Readings in Organizational Behaviour. p. 355.

Life , World , Faith , Change

“The line separating investment and speculation, which is never bright and clear, becomes blurred still further when most market participants have recently enjoyed triumphs. Nothing sedates rationality like large doses of effortless money. After a heady experience of that kind, normally sensible people drift into behavior akin to that of Cinderella at the ball. They know that overstaying the festivities—that is, continuing to speculate in companies that have gigantic valuations relative to the cash they are likely to generate in the future—will eventually bring on pumpkins and mice. But they nevertheless hate to miss a single minute of what is one helluva party. Therefore, the giddy participants all plan to leave just seconds before midnight. There's a problem, though: They are dancing in a room in which the clocks have no hands.”

Warren Buffett (1930) American business magnate, investor, and philanthropist

2000 Chairman's Letter http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/2000.html
Letters to Shareholders (1957 - 2012)

Money , Hate , People , Behavior

“I am reasonably certain of one thing. The unquestioning acceptance of the Copenhagen interpretation has served to hold back progress on the development of alternative approaches. Blind acceptance of the orthodox position cannot produce the challenges needed to push the theory eventually to its breaking point. And break it will, probably in a way nobody can predict, to produce a theory nobody can imagine. The arguments about reality will undoubtedly persist, but at least we will have a better theory.
I have tried to argue that quantum theory is a difficult subject for modern students of physical science because its interpretation is so firmly rooted in philosophy. If, in arguing the case, I have only made the subject seem even more confusing, then I apologize. However, my most important message is a relatively simple one: quantum theory is rife with conceptual problems and contradictions, and its most common interpretation is anti-realist in nature. If you fine the theory difficult to understand, this is the theory's fault—not yours.”

Jim Baggott (1957) British writer

Closing remarks
Beyond Measure (2004)

Way , Imagination , Understanding , Nature

“[The equilibrium model describes systems] which, in moving to an equilibrium point, typically lose organization, and then tend to hold that minimum level within relatively narrow conditions of disturbance.”

Walter F. Buckley (1922–2006) American sociologist

Source: Sociology and modern systems theory (1967), p. 40 as cited in: Jacquie L'Etang, Magda Pieczka (2006) Public Relations: Critical Debates and Contemporary Practice. p. 335.

“Dear Muslima

Stop whining, will you. Yes, yes, I know you had your genitals mutilated with a razor blade, and . . . yawn . . . don't tell me yet again, I know you aren't allowed to drive a car, and you can't leave the house without a male relative, and your husband is allowed to beat you, and you'll be stoned to death if you commit adultery. But stop whining, will you. Think of the suffering your poor American sisters have to put up with.

Only this week I heard of one, she calls herself Skep"chick", and do you know what happened to her? A man in a hotel elevator invited her back to his room for coffee. I am not exaggerating. He really did. He invited her back to his room for coffee. Of course she said no, and of course he didn't lay a finger on her, but even so . . .

And you, Muslima, think you have misogyny to complain about! For goodness sake grow up, or at least grow a thicker skin.

Richard”

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

Blog comment, , to PZ Myers, " Always Name Names https://web.archive.org/web/20110706204901/http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2011/07/always_name_names.php" (), Pharyngula, quoted in Rebecca Watson, " The Privilege Delusion http://skepchick.org/2011/07/the-privilege-delusion/", Skepchick.
Regarding the Rebecca Watson elevator incident.

Death , Cars , Coffee , Thinking

“Einstein had drawn attention to nonlocality in 1935 in an effort to show that quantum mechanics must be flawed. …Einstein proposed a thought experiment—now called the EPR experiment—involving two particles that spring from a common source and fly in opposite directions.
According to the standard model of quantum mechanics, neither particle has a definite position or momentum before it is measured; but by measuring the momentum of one particle, the physicist instantaneously forces the other particle to assume a fixed position… Deriding this effect as "spooky action at a distance," Einstein argued that it violated both common sense and his own theory of special relativity, which prohibits the propagation of effects faster than the speed of light; quantum mechanics must therefore be an incomplete theory. In 1980, however, a group of French physicists carried out a version of the EPR experiment and showed that it did indeed give rise to spooky action.”

John Horgan (journalist) (1953) American science journalist

The reason that the experiment does not violate special relativity is that one cannot exploit nonlocality to transmit information.
Source: The End of Science (1996), p. 83

Spring , Sense , Effort , Light

“In the realm of physics it is perhaps only the theory of relativity which has made it quite clear that the two essences, space and time, entering into our intuition, have no place in the world constructed by mathematical physics. Colours are thus "really" not even æther-vibrations, but merely a series of values of mathematical functions in which occur four independent parameters corresponding to the three dimensions of space, and the one of time.”

Hermann Weyl (1885–1955) German mathematician

Introduction
Space—Time—Matter (1952)

World , Mathematics , Time

“I cannot refrain… from expressing my surprise that, according to the report in The Times there should be so much complaint about the difficulty of understanding the new theory. It is evident that Einstein's little book "About the Special and the General Theory of Relativity in Plain Terms," did not find its way into England during wartime. Any one reading it will, in my opinion, come to the conclusion that the basic ideas of the theory are really clear and simple; it is only to be regretted that it was impossible to avoid clothing them in pretty involved mathematical terms, but we must not worry about that. …
The Newtonian theory remains in its full value as the first great step, without which one cannot imagine the development of astronomy and without which the second step, that has now been made, would hardly have been possible. It remains, moreover, as the first, and in most cases, sufficient, approximation. It is true that, according to Einstein's theory, because it leaves us entirely free as to the way in which we wish to represent the phenomena, we can imagine an idea of the solar system in which the planets follow paths of peculiar form and the rays of light shine along sharply bent lines—think of a twisted and distorted planetarium—but in every case where we apply it to concrete questions we shall so arrange it that the planets describe almost exact ellipses and the rays of light almost straight lines.
It is not necessary to give up entirely even the ether. …according to the Einstein theory, gravitation itself does not spread instantaneously, but with a velocity that at the first estimate may be compared with that of light. …In my opinion it is not impossible that in the future this road, indeed abandoned at present, will once more be followed with good results, if only because it can lead to the thinking out of new experimental tests. Einstein's theory need not keep us from so doing; only the ideas about the ether must accord with it.”

Hendrik Lorentz (1853–1928) Dutch physicist

Theory of Relativity: A Concise Statement (1920)

Books , Way , Imagination , Mathematics

“Star Wars is adolescent nonsense; Close Encounters is obscurantist drivel; Star Trek can turn your brains to puree of bat guano; and the greatest science fiction series of all time is Doctor Who! And I'll take you all on, one-by-one or all in a bunch to back it up!"
Auditorium monitors moved in, truncheons ready to club down anyone foolish enough to try jumping the lecture platform; and finally there was relative silence. And I heard scattered voices screaming from the back of the room, "Who? And I said, "Yes. Who!”

Harlan Ellison (1934–2018) American writer

Recalling an address to science-fiction fans, in his Introduction to Doctor Who and the Talons of Weng-Chiang (1977) by Terrance Dicks, p. vii

War , Star , Silence , Science

“Some people are your relatives but others are your ancestors, and you choose the ones you want to have as ancestors. You create yourself out of those values.”

Ralph Ellison (1914–1994) American novelist, literary critic, scholar and writer

Time Magazine (27 March 1964).

People

“The basic hypothesis is that, while the total supply of entrepreneurs varies among societies, the productive contribution of the society's entrepreneurial activities varies much more because of their allocation between productive activities such as innovation and largely unproductive activities such as rent seeking or organized crime. This allocation is heavily influenced by the relative payoffs society offers to such activities. This implies that policy can influence the allocation of entrepreneurship more effectively than it can influence its supply. Historical evidence from ancient Rome, early China, and the Middle Ages and Renaissance in Europe is used to investigate the hypotheses.”

William J. Baumol (1922–2017) American economist

Source: "Entrepreneurship: Productive, unproductive, and destructive," 1996, p. 3

Age

“Fascism conceives of the State as an absolute, in comparison with which all individuals or groups are relative, only to be conceived in their relation to the State.”

Benito Mussolini book The Doctrine of Fascism

"The Doctrine of Fascism" (1932), quoted in The New York Times (11 January 1935)
1930s

“God thus includes the world; he is, in fact, the totality of world parts, which are indifferently causes and effects. Now AR [absolute perfection in some respects, relative perfection in all others] is equally far from either of these doctrines; thanks to its two-aspect view of God, it is able consistently to embrace all that is positive in either deism or pandeism. AR means that God is, in one aspect of himself, the integral totality of all ordinary causes and effects, but that in another aspect, his essence (which is A), he is conceivable in abstraction from any one or any group of particular, contingent beings (though not from the requirement and the power always to provide himself with some particulars or other, sufficient to constitute in their integrated totality the R aspect of himself at the given moment).”

Charles Hartshorne (1897–2000) Philosopher

Source: Man's Vision of God and the Logic of Theism (1941), P. 348.

God , World , Parting , Perfection

“Two currents of ideas are very prominent in modern thought and culture. On the one hand, there is an intense commitment to truthfulness--or, at any rate, a pervasive suspiciousness, a readiness against being fooled, an eagerness to see through appearances to the real structures and motives that lie behind them. Always familiar in politics, it stretches to historical understanding, to the social sciences, and even to interpretations of discoveries and research in the natural sciences.
Together with this demand for truthfulness, however, or (to put it less positively) this reflex against deceptiveness, there is an equally pervasive suspicion about truth itself: whether there is such a thing; if there is, whether it can be more than relative or subjective or something of that kind; altogether, whether we should bother about it, in carrying on our activities or in giving an account of them. These two things, the devotion to truthfulness and the suspicion directed to the idea of truth, are connected to one other. The desire for truthfulness drives a process of criticism which weakens the assurance that there is any secure or unqualifiedly stateable truth.”

Bernard Williams (1929–2003) English moral philosopher

Source: Truth and Truthfulness (2002), p. 1; Chapter 1: The problem

Truth , Lie , Fools , Motivation

“The amazing part of the great Danish cartoon caper isn't that Muslims immediately engage in acts of mob violence when things don't go their way. That is de rigueur for the Religion of Peace. Their immediate response to all bad news is mass violence. That's a "dog bites man" story and belongs on page B-34, next to the grade school hot lunch menu and the birth notices. After an Egyptian ferry capsized recently, killing hundreds of passengers, a whole braying mob of passengers' relatives staged an organized attack on the company, throwing furniture out the window and burning the building to the ground. Witnesses say it was the most violent ocean liner-related incident since Carnival Cruise Lines fired Kathie Lee Gifford. The "offense to Islam" ruse is merely an excuse for Muslims to revert to their default mode: rioting and setting things on fire.”

Ann Coulter (1961) author, political commentator

"Muslim Bites Dog" (15 February 2006) http://www.anncoulter.com/cgi-local/printer_friendly.cgi?article=100.
2006

School , Peace , Religion , Dogs

“[M]ost of our structures in the past consisted of individual members having relatively small transverse dimensions as compared with their length, and in such members stress analysis is much more simple. …[M]any modern structures consist of frameworks of this type, and frequently the word "structure" refers specifically to assemblies consisting of linear elements.”

Eduardo Torroja (1899–1961) Spanish architect

Philosophy of Structures (1958)

Past

“A theory, is a body of knowledge, that is supportive of, and explanative of facts. Scientific laws are included within a theory, facts are included within a theory, that's why you have the theory of evolution, the theory of gravity, the theory of relativity. There is no concept in creationism, which meets any of the qualifications of a scientific theory, none. You have no facts, you have no laws, you have no evidence, you have no explanative power. All you have, is whatever science can't explain, you pretend you can.”

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

Youtube, Other, Reason Rally Ra Rant https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=isrST6wOUJA (March 28, 2012)

Law , Support , Knowledge , Science

“The family ties between hundreds of thousands of German families and their American relatives led many to think that America would never join a second war against Germany. Now that that has happened, many Germans still believe that America will never allow Bolshevism to conquer and destroy Germany. Recent events have proven how false and dangerous this idea is. One has to be foolish or irredeemably stupid to believe that anything good can come to Europe from the land of presumed opportunity. That that did not happen after the First World War, and will not happen after the second. The Jews have made America what it is today: a nation raped by the Jews, a nation whose 130,000,000 people of many colors and races have been forced into helping the Jews achieve world domination! The descendants of European immigrants do not govern the United States of America today. The foreign and domestic policies of the country are made by the Jews and their lackeys. The American people wanted peace, but were maneuvered into war by Delano Roosevelt, a tool of World Jewry who himself has Jewish blood in his veins. It was the same in World War I, when Woodrow Wilson, also a tool of the Jews, maneuvered it into the war.”

Julius Streicher (1885–1946) German politician

Der Stürmer, 1944

War , People , Stupidity , World

“I can think of no moral objection to eating human road kills except for the ones that you mentioned like 'what would the relatives think about it?' and 'would the person themselves have wanted it to happen?', but I do worry a bit about slippery slopes; possibly a little bit more than you do.There are barriers that we have set up in our minds and certainly the barrier between Homo sapiens and any other species is an artificial barrier in the sense that its a kind of 'accident' that the evolutionary intermediates happen to be extinct. Never the less it exists and natural barriers that are there can be useful for preventing slippery slopes and therefore I think I can see an objection to breaching such a barrier because you are then in a weaker position to stop people going further.Another example might be suppose you take the argument in favour of abortion up until the baby was one year old, if a baby was one year old and turned out to have some horrible incurable disease that meant it was going to die in agony in later life, what about infanticide? Strictly morally I can see no objection to that at all, I would be in favour of infanticide but I think i would worry about/I think I would wish at least to give consideration to the person who says 'where does it end?'”

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

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Peter Singer - The Genius of Darwin: The Uncut Interviews (2009)

Life , People , Disease , Nature

“The new vision…. does not proceed from a fixed point. Its viewpoint is everywhere, and not limited to any one position [in space]. Nor is it bound by space or time (in accordance with the theory of relativity) [of Einstein ]. In practice, the viewpoint is in front of the plane… Thus this new vision sees architecture as a multiplicity of planes; again flat. This multiplicity composes itself (in an abstract sense) into a flat image [in contrast to Theo van Doesburg who emphasized the dynamic position of the viewer – a central idea of Futurism in 1919].”

Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) Peintre Néerlandais

Quote, 1919, as cited in Mondrian, -The Art of Destruction, Carel Blotkamp, Reaktion Books LTD. London 2001, p. 148
1910's

Idea , Sense , Time , Future

“The surfaces of three-dimensional space are distinguished from each other not only by their curvature but also by certain more general properties. A spherical surface, for instance, differs from a plane not only by its roundness but also by its finiteness. Finiteness is a holistic property. The sphere as a whole has a character different from that of a plane. A spherical surface made from rubber, such as a balloon, can be twisted so that its geometry changes…. but it cannot be distorted in such a way as that it will cover a plane. All surfaces obtained by distortion of the rubber sphere possess the same holistic properties; they are closed and finite. The plane as a whole has the property of being open; its straight lines are not closed. This feature is mathematically expressed as follows. Every surface can be mapped upon another one by the coordination of each point of one surface to a point of the other surface, as illustrated by the projection of a shadow picture by light rays. For surfaces with the same holistic properties it is possible to carry through this transformation uniquely and continuously in all points. Uniquely means: one and only one point of one surface corresponds to a given point of the other surface, and vice versa. Continuously means: neighborhood relations in infinitesimal domains are preserved; no tearing of the surface or shifting of relative positions of points occur at any place. For surfaces with different holistic properties, such a transformation can be carried through locally, but there is no single transformation for the whole surface.”

Hans Reichenbach (1891–1953) American philosopher

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

Way , Mathematics , Tear , Light

“Every time I write about the impossibility of effectively protecting digital files on a general-purpose computer, I get responses from people decrying the death of copyright. "How will authors and artists get paid for their work?" they ask me. Truth be told, I don't know. I feel rather like the physicist who just explained relativity to a group of would-be interstellar travelers, only to be asked: "How do you expect us to get to the stars, then?"”

Bruce Schneier (1963) American computer scientist

I'm sorry, but I don't know that, either.
Protecting Copyright in the Digital World, Schneier, Bruce, 2001-08-15, Cryptogram newsletter, 2016-05-02 https://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram/archives/2001/0815.html#7,
Digital Rights Management

Death , People , Truth , Travel

“Boughton together with Abbey are making for Harper in New York drawings called "Picturesque Holland".... now I say to myself if the Graphic and Harper send their draughtsmen to Holland they would perhaps not be unwilling to accept a draughtsman from Holland [Vincent himself], if he can furnish some good work for not too much money. I should prefer to be accepted on regular monthly wages rather than to sell a drawing now and then at a relatively high price.”

Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890) Dutch post-Impressionist painter (1853-1890)

Quote in his letter to brother Theo, from The Hague, The Netherlands, Summer 1883; as quoted in Vincent van Gogh, edited by Alfred H. Barr; Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1935 https://www.moma.org/documents/moma_catalogue_1996_300061887.pdf, (letter 288) p. 21
1880s, 1883

Money , Drawing

““I don’t understand why the sight of you should scare me so,” Joseph said. He did not sound frightened. “You don’t look that threatening. Just… very different.”
“Different is threatening to most species,” Nikanj answered. “Different is dangerous. It might kill you. That was true to your animal ancestors and your nearest animal relatives. And it’s true for you.””

Octavia E. Butler book Dawn

Part III “Nursery” chapter 12 (p. 186).
Dawn (1987)

Understanding , Animals

“The total turtle count - two hundred and thirty species - doesn't seem like an irresistible horde compared to the several thousand mammals in today's global ecosystem. However, turtles have scored quite an impressive ecological triumph in one very important role, that of freshwater predator-omnivore… All through the Temperate Zone, otters delight the naturalist and the lay public. But how many other freshwater, semi-aquatic mammal predators can you name? Mink, of course. Relatives of otters on one hand, land weasels on the other, mink do hunt in streams. How many others? If you caught the excellent BBC series "Life on Earth", you saw footage of the swimming shrew, the Desman of the Pyrenees, a molelike furball that dives for aquatic worms and other freshwater small fry. Our own New England star-nosed mole goes hunting in water, using its starburst-shaped snout tip to feel out wriggling prey. Andean streams flowing through Preu are host to the fish-spearing mouse, Ichthyomys, that impales prey on its projecting front teeth. But if we go to a tropical lake or sluggish river, is it full of otters, mink, and paddling shrews? No, it is full of turtles.”

Robert T. Bakker book The Dinosaur Heresies

The Dinosaur Heresies: A Revolutionary View of Dinosaurs (1986), Longman Scientific & Technical, p. 57
The Dinosaur Heresies (1986)

Life , Feeling , Star , Fish

“America`s relatively brief experiment with a generous welfare state was doomed by our African-American population. America tried to import the two fundamentals of the Swedish welfare state—high welfare payments and an end to social disapproval of illegitimacy—beginning about 1961. In parts of the U. S., such as heavily Scandinavian Minnesota, this worked reasonably well. But American voters were confronted with stunning speed with the realization that African-Americans responded differently than Swedes did to the new incentive structures. Welfare allowed much of African-American society to revert to African-style family structures.”

Steve Sailer (1958) American journalist and movie critic

More Diversity = Less Welfare? http://www.vdare.com/articles/more-diversity-less-welfare, VDARE, March 14, 2004

Family , Parting , Speed

“Muhammad bin Tughlaq became notorious for enslaving women and his reputation in this regard spread far and wide. Ibn Battuta who visited India during his reign and stayed at the Court for a long time writes:
“At (one) time there arrived in Delhi some female infidel captives, ten of whom the Vazir sent to me. I gave one of them to the man who had brought them to me… My companion took three girls, and - I do not know what happened to the rest.” On the large scale distribution of girl slaves on the occasion of Muslim festivals like Id, he writes: “First of all, daughters of Kafir (Hindu) Rajas captured during the course of the year, come and sing and dance. Thereafter they are bestowed upon Amirs and important foreigners. After this daughters of other Kafirs dance and sing… The Sultan gives them to his brothers, relatives, sons of Maliks etc. On the second day the durbar is held in a similar fashion after Asr. Female singers are brought out… the Sultan distributes them among the Mameluke Amirs…” Thousands of non-Muslim women were distributed in the above manner in later years.”

Muhammad bin Tughluq (1290–1351) Turkic Sultan of Delhi

Ibn Battuta, 123. quoted from Lal, K. S. (1994). Muslim slave system in medieval India. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan. Chapter 12

Women , Girl , Fashion , Singing

“I have lately spent some Thoughts relative to the Nature of Light, whether it be subject to the common Laws of Motion. In this particular Newton seems to contradict himself. For in his Principia Sect. 14th he applies the common Laws of Motion to account for Reflection and Refraction, as he does also in one Part of his Optics where he proves the Sine of Incid. to Sine Refr, in a given in a given Ratio. But in another Part he says, “nothing more is requisite for producing all the Variety of Colours and Degrees of Refrangibility than that the Rays of Light be Bodies of different Sizes, the least of which may make Violet, and the Greatest the Red"; this manifestly is not consistent with the Theory of Motion applied to Bodies, where the Magnitude of the Bodies is of no Consequence. Now it is evident that if the common Theory of Motion can be applied to Light, the Red Light must have had the greatest Velocity before Incidence, as it suffers the least Deviation, for if the Vels of all the Difft colour'd Light were equal before Incidence, they must by Newton's Principia Sect. Sect. 8. Prop. 1. have continued equal after, and therefore must have suffered the same Deviation. The Determination of this Point seems to be of considerable Importance, as we so often apply the Theory of Motion to Light.”

Samuel Vince (1749–1821) British mathematician, astronomer and physicist

As quoted in: Russell McCormmach (2011) Weighing the World: The Reverend John Michell of Thornhill. p. 193

Law , Nature , Light , Suffering

“Maybe you don't like some of the things I've said tonight, that's ok. Maybe you don't like me. I could care less. Especially you Christians, you don't gotta like me, you gotta love me. See, I'm a member of your family. And you can pick your friends, but you're stuck with your relatives!”

Mike Warnke (1946) Evangelical Christian minister

Alive (album) (1975)

Love , Family

“Do not consider either the security of your personal lives or the transitory happiness of your wives, husbands, children, parents and relatives; for the security of all of your children and their children is in jeopardy.”

Mohamed Nasheed (1967) Maldivian politician, 4th president of the Maldives

After his arrest, and getting dragged into court, quoted on The guardian, "Former Maldives president Mohamed Nasheed jailed for 13 years" http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/mar/14/former-maldives-president-mohamed-nasheed-jailed-for-13-years, March 14, 2015.

Children , Parent , Personality , Happiness

“The reality of the situation is obscured when population is expressed as a percentage proportion taken over the whole of the United Kingdom. The ethnic minority is geographically concentrated, so that areas in which it forms a majority already exists, and these areas are destined inevitably to grow. It is here that the compatibility of such an ethnic minority with the functioning of parliamentary democracy comes into question. Parliamentary democracy depends at all levels upon the valid acceptance of majority decision, by which the nation as a whole is content to be bound because of the continually available prospect that what one majority has decided another majority can subsequently alter. From this point of view, the political homogeneity of the electorate is crucial. What we do not, as yet, know is whether the voting behaviour of our altered population will be able to use the majority vote as a political instrument and not as a means of self-identification, self-assertion and self-enumeration. It may be that the United Kingdom will escape the political consequences of communalism; but communalism and democracy, as the experience of India demonstrates, are incompatible. That is the spectre which the Conservative party's policy of assisted repatriation in the 1960s aimed to banish; but time and events have swept over and passed the already outdated remedies of the 1960s. We are entering unknown territory where the only certainty for the future is the relative increase of the ethnic minority due to the age structure of that population which has been established.”

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

Article on the 25th anniversary of his 'Rivers of Blood speech', The Times (20 April 1993), p. 18
1990s

Age , Democracy , Communication , Question

“That's what really interested me about India, the religious aspect-and the extravagance of it. There was so much of it; the temples had all these things crawling all over them. It was so alive and complicated compared to the relative austerity that I saw in Jewish and especially Protestant ceremonies. Not so much Catholic ceremonies, though. I always loved Catholicism for the same reason that I love Hinduism, they're so much alike: the kitsch, the colors, the incense, the saints and the pageantry.”

Wendy Doniger (1940) American Indologist

Q&A with Wendy Doniger, the Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor and author of The Hindus

Love , Color

“General relativity is certainly a very beautiful theory, but how does one judge the elegance of physical theories generally?”

Roger Penrose book Fashion, Faith, and Fantasy in the New Physics of the Universe

Ch. 1, Mathematical Elegance as a Driving Force, p. 7 https://books.google.com/books?id=T09kCwAAQBAJ&pg=PA7.
Fashion, Faith, and Fantasy in the New Physics of the Universe (2016)

Beauty

“What a social welfare system does is enable people to live with dignity if they don’t have the means on their own. It enables households that are relatively low-income to have a place for their children to get a quality education. It allows everybody to have a dignity of work by having some vacation time or paid leave or maternity leave or father’s leave. And this is decency. This is what it means. We’re rich countries now. We should have the decency to provide dignity for everybody. I happen to live in a country that doesn’t believe it. We soaked up the libertarian ideas. I can tell you what it’s like. We have a large part of our population living in duress, in extreme poverty in the United States. It’s horrible. Because we have this philosophy, “You’re on your own.” Well, “you’re on your own” in this world means living in misery, dying many years earlier, children having no chance in the educational system. People working round the clock, no time off, no paid leave, no opportunities. It’s horrible.”

Jeffrey D. Sachs (1954) American economist

Climate, Welfare..., Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 15 October, 2018 http://www.abc.net.au/tv/qanda/txt/s4892252.htm

Children , People , World , Education

“Societies such as ours that once had democratic traditions or periods when relative openness was possible are often the most easily seduced into totalitarian systems because those who rule and build totalitarian structures continue to pay outward fealty to the ideals, practices and forms of the old system.”

Chris Hedges (1956) American journalist

40:35
“ Our Only Hope Will Come Through Rebellion http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TOlg_2qAbUA” (2014)

“The size of a firm influences its competitive policies in a number of ways. In the first place the scale of its purchases and sales relative to the total volume of transactions in the firm's market is one indication of the extent of its market control. Taken in conjunction with other data it may throw a good deal of light on price and production policies. Certain authorities, on the other hand, brush aside figures on the relative size of firms as irrelevant and emphasize the decisive importance of the elasticity of the firm's demand curve. 3 It would no doubt be extremely convenient if economists knew the shape of individual demand and cost curves and could proceed forthwith, by comparisons of price and marginal cost, to conclusions regarding the existing degree of monopoly power. The extent to which the monopoly theorists, however, refrain from an empirical application of their formulae is rather striking.”

Edward S. Mason (1899–1992) American economist

Source: "Price and production policies of large-scale enterprise," 1939, p. 62

Way , Decision , Light

“To kill a relative of whom you are tired, is something; but to inherit his property afterwards — that is a real pleasure!”

Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) French writer

Tuer un parent de qui l’on se plaint, c’est quelque chose; mais hériter de lui, c’est là un plaisir!
cousin Pons http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Le_Cousin_Pons_-_5#XLVI._Consultation_non_gratuiteLe (1847), translated by Ellen Marriage, ch. XLVI.

Pleasure

“It's not us that loses financially if we don't have a free trade agreement, it's Germany and France and other European countries, and that's why of course there will be a free trade agreement that allows all our business to trade freely to and from continental Europe. It will take a relatively short period time in my view because they lose financially.”

Chris Grayling (1962) British politician

Source: Interviewed on Sunday Politics London https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPJW7s_B91o#t=8m (21 February 2016)

Business , Time , Country

“Injustice is relatively easy to bear; what stings is justice.”

H.L. Mencken (1880–1956) American journalist and writer

Source: 1920s, Prejudices, Third Series (1922), Ch. 3

Justice

“I became aware of Louise Bourgeois in my first or second year at Brighton Art College. One of my teachers, Stuart Morgan, curated a small retrospective of her work at the Serpentine, and both he and another teacher, Edward Allington, saw something in her, and me, and thought I should be aware of her. I thought the work was wonderful. It was her very early pieces, The Blind Leading the Blind, the wooden pieces and some of the later bronze works. Biographically, I don't really think she has influenced me, but I think there are similarities in our work. We have both used the home as a kind of kick-off point, as the space that starts the thoughts of a body of work. I eventually got to meet Louise in New York, soon after I made House. She asked to see me because she had seen a picture of House in the New York Times while she was ironing it one morning, so she said. She was wonderful and slightly kind of nutty; very interested and eccentric. She drew the whole time; it was very much a salon with me there as her audience, watching her. I remember her remarking that I was shorter than she was. I don't know if this was true but she was commenting on the physicality of making such big work and us being relatively small women. When you meet her you don't know what's true, because she makes things up. She has spun her web and drawn people in, and eaten a few people along the way.”

Rachel Whiteread (1963) British sculptor

Rachel Whiteread, " Kisses for Spiderwoman http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2007/oct/14/art2," The Guardian, 14 Oct. 2007: on Louise Bourgeois

Women , People , Art , Way

“Suppose you want to teach the "cat" concept to a very young child. Do you explain that a cat is a relatively small, primarily carnivorous mammal with retractible claws, a distinctive sonic output, etc.? I'll bet not. You probably show the kid a lot of different cats, saying "kitty" each time, until it gets the idea. To put it more generally, generalizations are best made by abstraction from experience. They should come one at a time; too many at once overload the circuits.”

Ralph P. Boas Jr. (1912–1992) American mathematician

[Can We Make Mathematics Intelligible?, The American Mathematical Monthly, 88, 10, 1981, 727–731, 10.2307/2321471]

Cats , Idea , Time

“Madness and insanity are two terms that are so vague and relative that you can’t really apportion proper values to them. The only thing I can think of that has any use it functional and dysfunctional. Are you working as well? In which case, it doesn’t matter if you are mad.”

Alan Moore (1953) English writer primarily known for his work in comic books

De Abaitua interview (1998)

Thinking , Madness

“As he lat in the relative comfort of a hard-sleeeper cot - relative to a hard-seater, that is - the puffy, balding, beady-eyed, twisted mouth, middle-aged writer Mo Yan wasn't sleepy at all. The overhead lights went out as the train carried him into the night leaving only the dim yellow glare of the floor lights to see by. I know there are many similarities between me and this Mo Yan, but many contradictions as well. I'm a hermit crab, and Mo Yan is the shell I'm occupying. Mo Yan is the rain gear that protects me from storms, a dog hide to ward off the chilled winds, a mask I wear to seduce girls from good families. There are times when I feel that this Mo Yan is a heavy burden, but I can't seem to cast it off, just as a hermit crab cannot rid itself of its shell.”

Mo Yan book The Republic of Wine

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

Age , Family , Dogs , Feeling

“If you watch animals objectively for any length of time, you're driven to the conclusion that their main aim in life is to pass on their genes to the next generation. Most do so directly, by breeding. In the few examples that don't do so by design, they do it indirectly, by helping a relative with whom they share a great number of their genes. And in as much as the legacy that human beings pass on to the next generation is not only genetic but to a unique degree cultural, we do the same. So animals and ourselves, to continue the line, will endure all kinds of hardship, overcome all kinds of difficulties, and eventually the next generation appears. This albatross is over 30 years old, she's already a grandmother, and this year once again she has produced a chick. She will devote the next 10 months of her life looking after it. She has faced the trials of life and triumphed, for her little 2 day old chick the trials are just beginning.”

David Attenborough (1926) British broadcaster and naturalist

Closing lines
The Trials of Life (1990)

Life , Appearance , Time , Help

“Imagine that we didn't know the chimpanzee, that all we knew were those bonobos who have sex all the time and are peaceful and female-dominated and that people would say that this is our only close relative. I think we would have totally different theories about ourselves and our background. But, of course, it didn't happen that way.”

Frans de Waal (1948) Dutch primatologist and ethologist

The Bonobo in All of Us (2007)

People , Peace , Sex , Way

“The service professions such as medicine and teaching have proud and age-old traditions. Only relatively recently have we realised that serving people's information needs can be as socially valuable as looking after their health and educational needs.”

Brian Campbell Vickery (1918–2009) British information theorist

Source: A Long Search for Information (2004), p. 1; Opening sentence.

People , Health , Age , Education

“A relatively strong sexual identification is important under those circumstances - but (louder) an over-identification with them, before or afterward, can lead to stereotyped behavior, in which the greater needs and abilities of the individual are not allowed fulfillment.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Session 768, Page 57
The Nature of the Psyche: Its Human Expression (1979)

Behavior , Strong

“I was attracted to studies of cancer families because epidemiological studies show that virtually all cancers manifest a tendency to aggregate in families. Close relatives of a cancer patient are at increased risk of that neoplasm, and perhaps other forms of cancer. The excess site-specific cancer risk is exceptionally high for carriers of certain cancer genes, in whom the attack rate can approach 100 percent. In candidate cancer families, the possibility that clustering is on the basis of chance must be excluded through epidemiological studies that establish the presence of an excess cancer risk. Predisposed families are candidates for laboratory studies to identify the inherited susceptibility factors. These investigations have led to the identification and isolation of human cancer genes, the tumor suppressor genes. These cancer genes are among more than 200 single-gene traits associated with the development of cancer. Approximately a dozen inherited susceptibility genes have been definitively identified, and many more are being sought. From studies of retinoblastoma and other rare cancers, important new information was generated about the fundamental biology of cancers that arise in many patients. Isolation of an inherited cancer susceptibility gene provides opportunities for presymptomatic testing of at-risk relatives. However, testing of healthy individuals also raise important issues regarding informed consent, confidentiality and potential for adverse psychological, social and economic effects.”

Frederick Pei Li (1940–2015) American physician

Frederick Li - Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/frederick-li/.

Family , Study , Chance

“[T]he nature of the new world system was not so different from the old. It was for the moment more stable, but a reasonable forecast would be that Africa in particular had a century of border wars ahead of it. On the other hand, such was the power of the anticolonial idea that great powers from outside a region had relatively little influence unless they were prepared to use force. China altogether backed Fretilin in Timor, and lost. In Spanish Sahara, Russia just as completely backed Algeria, and its front, known as Polisario, and lost. In both instances the United States wished things to turn out as they did, and worked to bring this about. The Department of State desired that the United Nations prove utterly ineffective in whatever measures it undertook. This task was given to me, and I carried it forward with not inconsiderable success.”

Daniel Patrick Moynihan (1927–2003) American politician

A Dangerous Place, Little Brown, p. 247 (1980)

War , World , Idea , Nature

“Relativity and… quantum… remain incomplete…. the main reason each is incomplete is the existence of the other. The mind calls for a third theory to unify all of physics, and for a simple reason. Nature is… "unified." …interconnected, in that everything interacts with everything else.”

Lee Smolin (1955) American cosmologist

The Trouble With Physics: The Rise of String Theory, The Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next (2007)

Nature

“Reflection upon the historical place of dogmatic concepts and the related identifying and relative weighting of the essential themes of Christian doctrine are indispensable to an impartial judgment of their fitness and scope in expressing the universal significance of the history and person of Jesus Christ.”

Wolfhart Pannenberg (1928–2014) German theologian

Foreword
Systematic Theology

History , Universe , Christ , Personality

“With mankind the differences between the sexes are greater than in most species of Quadrumana, but not so great as in some, for instance, the mandrill. Man on an average is considerably taller, heavier, and stronger than woman, with squarer shoulders and more plainly-pronounced muscles. … Man is more courageous, pugnacious, and energetic than woman, and has a more inventive genius. His brain is absolutely larger, but whether relatively to the larger size of his body, in comparison with that of woman, has not, I believe been fully ascertained. In woman the face is rounder; the jaws and the base of the skull smaller; the outlines of her body rounder, in parts more prominent; and her pelvis is broader than in man; but this latter character may perhaps be considered rather as a primary than a secondary sexual character. She comes to maturity at an earlier age than man.”

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

volume II, chapter XIX: "Secondary Sexual Characters of Man", pages 316-317 http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?pageseq=333&itemID=F937.2&viewtype=image
The Descent of Man (1871)

Age , Sex , Courage , Parting

“Paying visits to ones own relatives prolongs the life of a person and prevents poverty and indigence.”

Ja'far al-Sadiq (702–765) Muslim religious person

Majlisi, Bihārul Anwār, vol.74, p. 58
General Quotes

Life , Personality

“Despite a relative control over expenditure in 2013, the persistence of a very high public deficit (4.3%) was mainly due to an unprecedented and unexpected drop in tax revenue which confirms the existence of a tax tolerance threshold, specific to each country, and which may have been reached in France. Above this threshold, any tax increase has a counterproductive effect as compulsory taxes stifle activity by further weakening the economy’s growth potential.”

Éric Pichet (1960) economist

Le programme de stabilité et le pacte de responsabilité : la trajectoire des finances publiques de 2014 à 2017 http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2499496 Article in Revue de Droit Fiscal n31-35 (2014).
Tax policy, The Tax tolerance Threshold

Country

“…as we do bring our troops home, we cannot lose sight of our very real strategic national interests in this region… I will order specialized units to engage in narrow and targeted operations against al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations in the region. They will also provide security for U. S. troops and personnel and train and equip Iraqi security services to keep order and promote stability in the country, but only to the extent we believe such training is actually working. I would also consider, as I have said before, leaving some forces in the Kurdish area to protect the fragile but real democracy and relative peace and security that has developed there.”

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

Speech at the Temple for the Performing Arts in Des Moines, July 10, 2007 http://www.hillaryclinton.com/news/speech/view/?id=2366
Presidential campaign (January 20, 2007 – 2008)

Peace , Democracy , Home , Training

“One of the first things they teach stockbrokers is to stay out of the stock market. Brokers make their pile from selling advice, and from commissions on stock transactions. They can't predict the market, and few risk their own money. They, at least, only affect their clients' fortunes. Economists, though, can ruin the lot of us with their advice — yet if no science can predict a relatively closed system like the stock market, how the devil are you going to 'fine tune' something a large as the American economy? I'd think it arrogant to try; as arrogant as the man with three illiterate drug-addicted spoiled brats writing a book on parenting.”

Jerry Pournelle (1933–2017) American science fiction writer and journalist

"The Voodoo Sciences" http://www.jerrypournelle.com/science/voodoo.html, 1988
Assorted

Money , Books , Thinking , Parent

“Britain, as a relatively large economy which exports more to non-EU than to EU markets, would be better off trading freely with the single market than belonging to it.”

Daniel Hannan (1971) British politician

http://www.conservativehome.com/thecolumnists/2016/09/daniel-hannan-repeat-after-me-single-market-membership-and-single-market-access-are-not-the-same-thing.html
2010s

“Once knowing is no longer understood as the search for an iconic representation of ontological reality but, instead, as a search for fitting ways of behaving and thinking, the traditional problem disappears. Knowledge can now be seen as something which the organism builds up in the attempt to order the as such amorphous flow of experience by establishing repeatable experiences and relatively reliable relations between them. The possibilities of constructing such an order are determined and perpetually constrained by the preceding steps in the construction. That means that the “real” world manifests itself exclusively there where our constructions break down. But since we can describe and explain these breakdowns only in the very concepts that we have used to build the failing structures, this process can never yield a picture of a world that we could hold responsible for their failure.”

Ernst von Glasersfeld (1917–2010) German philosopher

Glasersfeld (1984) "An Introduction to Radical Constructivism", as cited in: Frederick Burwick, Walter Pape (1990) Aesthetic Illusion: Theoretical and Historical Approaches. pp.26-27

World , Way , Search , Failure