Quotes about reminder
page 6

Pythagoras photo

“Remind yourself that all men assert that wisdom is the greatest good, but that there are few who strenuously seek out that greatest good.”

Pythagoras (-585–-495 BC) ancient Greek mathematician and philosopher

"Pythagorean Ethical Sentences From Stobæus" (1904)
Florilegium

Karel Appel photo
Iltutmish photo
Hal David photo
Jane Roberts photo
Anthony Bourdain photo
Mahatma Gandhi photo

“It is unwise to be too sure of one's own wisdom. It is healthy to be reminded that the strongest might weaken and the wisest might err.”

Mahatma Gandhi (1869–1948) pre-eminent leader of Indian nationalism during British-ruled India

Harijan (17 February 1940)
1940s

John F. Kennedy photo

“I appreciate very much your generous invitation to be here tonight. You bear heavy responsibilities these days and an article I read some time ago reminded me of how particularly heavily the burdens of present day events bear upon your profession. You may remember that in 1851 the New York Herald Tribune under the sponsorship and publishing of Horace Greeley, employed as its London correspondent an obscure journalist by the name of Karl Marx.
We are told that foreign correspondent Marx, stone broke, and with a family ill and undernourished, constantly appealed to Greeley and managing editor Charles Dana for an increase in his munificent salary of $5 per installment, a salary which he and Engels ungratefully labeled as the "lousiest petty bourgeois cheating."
But when all his financial appeals were refused, Marx looked around for other means of livelihood and fame, eventually terminating his relationship with the Tribune and devoting his talents full time to the cause that would bequeath the world the seeds of Leninism, Stalinism, revolution and the cold war.
If only this capitalistic New York newspaper had treated him more kindly; if only Marx had remained a foreign correspondent, history might have been different. And I hope all publishers will bear this lesson in mind the next time they receive a poverty-stricken appeal for a small increase in the expense account from an obscure newspaper man.”

John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) 35th president of the United States of America

1961, Address to ANPA

Thomas Carlyle photo
Michael Elmore-Meegan photo
Torquato Tasso photo

“Oh, such a gentle entreaty
this fool has found,
reminding me of my youth,
of pleasures past and present woes!”

O che gentile
Scongiuro hà ritrovato questo sciocco
Di rammentarmi la mia giovanezza,
Il ben passato, e la presente noia.
Act II, scene ii.
Aminta (1573)

Seba Johnson photo
Harry Turtledove photo

“What will we do when they start capturing our people?" Klein asked. "They will, you know, if they haven't by now. Things go wrong." Heydrich's fingers drummed some more. He didn't worry about the laborers who'd expanded this redoubt- they'd all gone straight to the camps after they did their work. But captured fighters were indeed another story. He sighed. "Things go wrong. Ja. If they didn't, Stalin would be lurking somewhere in the Pripet Marshes, trying to keep his partisans fighting against us. We would've worked Churchill to death in a coal mine." He barked laughter. "The British did some of that for us, when they threw the bastard out of office last month. And we'd be getting ready to fight the Amis on their side of the Atlantic. But… things went wrong." "Yes, sir." After a moment, Klein ventured, "Uh, sir- you didn't answer my question." "Oh. Prisoners." Heydrich had to remind himself what his aide was talking about. "I don't know what to do, Klein, except make sure our people all have cyanide pills." "Some won't have the chance to use them. Some won't have the nerve," Klein said. Not many men had the nerve to tell Reinhard Heydrich the unvarnished truth. Heydrich kept Klein around not least because Klein was one of those men. They were useful to have. Hitler would have done better had he seen that. Heydrich recognized the truth when he heard it now; one more thing Hitler'd had trouble with.”

Harry Turtledove (1949) American novelist, short story author, essayist, historian

Source: The Man With the Iron Heart (2008), p. 56-57

Glen Cook photo

“I sped a prayer heavenward. God needs to be reminded.”

Source: Water Sleeps (1999), Chapter 75 (p. 265)

James K. Morrow photo
Colin Wilson photo
Pete Yorn photo

“Saw my reflection, covered in glass.
How It reminds me of you.”

Pete Yorn (1974) American musician

Turn Of The Century
Song lyrics

Alexis Bledel photo
Francis Escudero photo

“Let her story forever inspire us and future generations of Filipinos, and serve as a constant reminder that the Filipino is worth fighting for.”

Francis Escudero (1969) Filipino politician

The Official Website of the Senate of the Philippines http://www.senate.gov.ph/press_release/2009/0801_escudero1.asp
2009, Statement: on the Passing of Former President Corazon C. Aquino

“Treasure maps; Czarist bonds; a case of stuffed dodos; Scarlett O'Hara's birth certificate; two flattened and deformed silver bullet heads in an old matchbox; Baedeker's guide to Atlantis (seventeenth edition, 1902); the autograph score of Schubert's Unfinished Symphony, with Das Ende written neatly at the foot of the last page; three boxes of moon rocks; a dumpy, heavy statuette of a bird covered in dull black paint, which reminded him of something but he couldn't remember what; a Norwich Union life policy in the name of Vlad Dracul; a cigar box full of oddly shaped teeth, with CAUTION: DO NOT DROP painted on the lid in hysterical capitals; five or six doll's-house-sized books with titles like Lilliput On $2 A Day; a small slab of green crystal that glowed when he opened the envelope; a thick bundle of love letters bound in blue ribbon, all signed Margaret Roberts; a left-luggage token from North Central railway terminus, Ruritania; Bartholomew's Road Atlas of Oz (one page, with a yellow line smack down the middle); a brown paper bag of solid gold jelly babies; several contracts for the sale and purchase of souls; a fat brown envelope inscribed To Be Opened On My Death: E. A. Presley, unopened; Oxford and Cambridge Board O-level papers in Elvish language and literature, 1969-85; a very old drum in a worm-eaten sea-chest marked F. Drake, Plymouth, in with a load of minute-books and annual accounts of the Winchester Round Table; half a dozen incredibly ugly portraits of major Hollywood film stars; Unicorn-Calling, For Pleasure & Profit by J. R. Hartley; a huge collection of betting slips, on races to be held in the year 2019; all water, as far as Paul was concerned, off a duck's {back]”

Tom Holt (1961) British writer

The Portable Door (2003)

Richard Rodríguez photo

“Mr. Bob has been so encouraging to me, not only as a vocal coach, but as a friend. He is always reminding me 'You don’t have to sing it so hard, Taylor!”

Taylor Horn (1992) American musician and actor

Horn on working with her now former vocal coach, Bob Westbrook
The Sunday Star http://www.webcitation.org/query?id=1256525764738342&url=www.geocities.com/thecoolchip03/sundaystar.htm article, unidentifed issue

Cassandra Clare photo
Rousas John Rushdoony photo

“I recall some years ago this mother and son in California who was very angry and stomped out of the meeting and I did not see her again because I said it was the duty of Christian parents to have their child in the Christian school. And she went on about how wonderful their church was, and how marvelous the youth was, and her daughter had the best kind of Christian training imaginable and she was a good witness at school. And I never saw her again but I heard from her about six, seven years later when she called me weeping. Did I know a school that would take her daughter because her daughter was now into demonism, she was out sometimes for two or three nights, was into drugs and promiscuity, if the mother tried to say anything to her the girl thought nothing about pulling a knife and backing the mother against the wall with a knife against her throat and threatening her life. And she wanted to know if there was a Christian school in town, in particular, and I told her it would take a full time guard to stand over your daughter every moment, and she wanted, she felt that it was unchristian that they wouldn’t take her daughter. And I reminded her of her stand a few years back, when she continued to whine and feel sorry for herself, someone was going to take the mess she had created and hand her back her daughter, perhaps to stick her back in the public schools again.”

Rousas John Rushdoony (1916–2001) American theologian

Audio lectures, Dangers Inherent in Public Education (March 24, 1986)

James McNeill Whistler photo

“Yes, madam, Nature is creeping up. [in response to a lady who said that a landscape reminded her of his work]”

James McNeill Whistler (1834–1903) American-born, British-based artist

D.C. Seitz, Whistler Stories (1913)
posthumous published

Angela Merkel photo

“The Freedom Bell in Berlin is, like the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia, a symbol which reminds us that freedom does not come about of itself. It must be struggled for and then defended anew every day of our lives.”

Angela Merkel (1954) Chancellor of Germany

Remarks by German Chancellor Angela Merkel before a joint session of Congress on November 04, 2009. http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,659196,00.html
Dokumentation: Angela Merkels Rede im US-Kongress im Wortlaut http://www.welt.de/politik/ausland/article5079678/Angela-Merkels-Rede-im-US-Kongress-im-Wortlaut.html
2009

Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson photo
Stendhal photo

“People who have been made to suffer by certain things cannot be reminded of them without a horror which paralyses every other pleasure, even that to be found in reading a story.”

Les contemporains qui souffrent de certaines choses ne peuvent s'en souvenir qu'avec une horreur qui paralyse tout autre plaisir, même celui de lire un conte.
Vol. I, ch. XXVII
Le Rouge et le Noir (The Red and the Black) (1830)

Vincent Van Gogh photo
Julian Schwinger photo
Mohamed Azmin Ali photo

“We want to build a clean and healthy party (People's Justice Party) with noble ethical values and as leaders, we must give reminders and advice to everyone so that the party will progress smoothly.”

Mohamed Azmin Ali (1964) Malaysian politician

Mohamed Azmin Ali (2018) cited in " Mohamed Azmin: Dr M wants more time to look into suitability of ECRL https://www.edgeprop.my/content/1430635/mohamed-azmin-dr-m-wants-more-time-look-suitability-ecrl" on EdgeProp, 5 October 2018

Anthony Watts photo

“James Carville used to remind Clinton during the '92 campaign that "its the economy, stupid". I say that on the subject of Global Warming: "its the SUN, stupid".”

Anthony Watts (1958) American television meteorologist

It's the Sun, stupid http://wattsupwiththat.com/2007/04/06/its-the-sun-stupid/, wattsupwiththat.com, April 6, 2007.
2007

John McCain photo

“I am reminded of the words of Chairman Mao: It's always darkest before it goes completely black.”

John McCain (1936–2018) politician from the United States

As quoted in "McCain Wraps It Up" https://www.cbsnews.com/news/mccain-wraps-it-up/ (5 March 2008), by Andante Higgins, CBS News
2000s

Bhakti Tirtha Swami photo
Joanna Newsom photo
Lord Dunsany photo
Ali Zayn al-Abidin photo

“An old racetrack joke reminds you that your program contains all the winners' names. I stare at my typewriter keys with the same thought.”

Mignon McLaughlin (1913–1983) American journalist

The Complete Neurotic's Notebook (1981), Unclassified

Sinclair Lewis photo

“When he gets uppity about his supposed learning, I just take it on myself to remind him that God and his angels know almost as much as college professors.”

Sinclair Lewis (1885–1951) American novelist, short-story writer, and playwright

The God-Seeker (1949), Ch. 23

Keshia Chante photo
Jimmy Carter photo
Edward Coke photo
Chris Cornell photo

“"Most so-called liberated people that I know are full of it," remarked a caustic, albeit articulate, businessman attending a seminar I gave on emerging male/female relationships. "The feminist leadership is a good example. They have the worst qualities of both men and women. They have all the answers and nothing you can say ever changes their mind. Then, from what I read, one turns on and attacks the other—supposedly for ideological reasons, but it's just a variation on the old-fashioned male ritual of ego-tripping—'I'm for real, you're not—I'm the greatest, you're nothing.'"It's a real cast of characters, these feminist leaders," he continued. "There's the glamor queen one who's trying to be a movie star without copping to what she's doing. It's obvious, though. She's always being seen with celebrities and she's always dating the richest, most successful guys. Then there's the other one who's like a Jewish mother—complaining and telling everybody how to change, and how to live. I'm surprised she doesn't try and tell us what to eat."I looked through their magazine recently. It's full of the same kind of ads as the other women's magazines that Ms. supposedly abhors. You know, jewelry, deodorants, perfumes—and the articles are mainly old-fashioned victim variety stuff, an updated variation on the old "poor downtrodden women" theme."The 'liberated' guys they hold up as shining examples of what men should behave like are just as phony as the feminist women pretending to be so pure. They're workaholics, and they're the worst kind of arrogant—because God is on their side and unless you imitate them, you're a misguided pig. It feels like being at a church social when you watch them—at least as hypocritical, if not more so—because at least church types don't pretend to be open to discussing their beliefs. They're out front in thinking that they have all the answers."When what's-her-name ran for vice-president and lost, what did she do—she blamed the male establishment. God save us from female leadership! They can't stop blaming—even at that level. I thought of reminding her that this country has at least ten million more women than men and the odds were totally on her side and it was women who rejected her, and saw through her act; but I know better than to argue against that stuff with facts."”

Herb Goldberg (1937–2019) American psychologist

Earth Mothers in Disguise, p. 149
The Inner Male (1987)

Ai Weiwei photo
John Buchan photo
Stephen Fry photo

“I don't need you to remind me of my age, I have a bladder to do that for me.”

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

"Trefusis Returns!" in Paperweight (1993) p. 279.
Originally printed in The Daily Telegraph circa 1990.
1990s

George William Curtis photo

“That is to say, within less than twenty years after the Constitution was formed, and in obedience to that general opinion of the time which condemned slavery as a sin in morals and a blunder in economy, eight of the States had abolished it by law — four of them having already done so when the instrument was framed; and Mr. Douglas might as justly quote the fact that there were slaves in New York up to 1827 as proof that the public opinion of the State sanctioned slavery, as to try to make an argument of the fact that there were slave laws upon the statute-books of the original States. He forgets that there was not in all the colonial legislation of America one single law which recognized the rightfulness of slavery in the abstract; that in 1774 Virginia stigmatized the slave-trade as 'wicked, cruel, and unnatural'; that in the same year Congress protested against it 'under the sacred ties of virtue, honor, and love of country'; that in 1775 the same Congress denied that God intended one man to own another as a slave; that the new Discipline of the Methodist Church, in 1784, and the Pastoral Letter of the Presbyterian Church, in 1788, denounced slavery; that abolition societies existed in slave States, and that it was hardly the interest even of the cotton-growing States, where it took a slave a day to clean a pound of cotton, to uphold the system. Mr. Douglas incessantly forgets to tell us that Jefferson, in his address to the Virginia Legislature of 1774, says that 'the abolition of domestic slavery is the greatest object of desire in these colonies, where it was unhappily introduced in their infant state'; and while he constantly remembers to remind us that the Jeffersonian prohibition of slavery in the territories was lost in 1784, he forgets to add that it was lost, not by a majority of votes — for there were sixteen in its favor to seven against it — but because the sixteen votes did not represent two thirds of the States; and he also incessantly forgets to tell us that this Jeffersonian prohibition was restored by the Congress of 1785, and erected into the famous Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which was re-enacted by the first Congress of the United States and approved by the first President.”

George William Curtis (1824–1892) American writer

1850s, The Present Aspect of the Slavery Question (1859)

Joe Higgins photo
John Banville photo

“When young writers approach me for advice, I remind them, as gently as I can, that they are on their own, with no help available anywhere.”

John Banville (1945) Irish writer

How I Write: John Banville on ‘Ancient Light,’ Nabokov, and Dublin (2012)

Ken Ham photo
Andrew Scheer photo

“Jewish people in Canada, Israel and around the world will begin celebrating Purim. I would like to extend my best wishes to the community as you celebrate with some of the happiest traditions of the holiday. Chag Purim Sameach!
Happy Purim! Chag Sameach! This evening, Jewish people in Canada, Israel and around the world will begin celebrating Purim. This delightful holiday tells the story of Queen Esther and her uncle Mordechai, who saved the Jewish community of ancient Persia from their persecutor, Haman. Purim celebrates their heroism and bravery, which led to the survival and victory of the Jewish people. For all Canadians, the story of Purim is a reminder of the freedoms we enjoy and our duty to stand against religious intolerance.
I would like to extend my best wishes to Canada’s Jewish community as you celebrate with some of the happiest traditions of the holiday: the reading of the Book of Esther (Megillat Esther); the exchange of special gift baskets with family and friends (Mishloach Manot); and, of course, eating delicious Hamentashen pastries. Have a fun and festive celebration! Happy Purim! Freilichen Purim!”

Andrew Scheer (1979) 35th Speaker of the Canadian House of Commons and MP for Regina—Qu'Appelle

28 February 2018 tweet https://twitter.com/andrewscheer/status/968965231987830786?lang=en referencing Facebook post https://www.facebook.com/notes/andrew-scheer/happy-purim/1939533102747099/

Anthony Burgess photo
Richard Rodríguez photo
Babe Ruth photo

“To My Friend John Sylvester,
Just a few words reminding you that I have not forgotten my sick little pal. Sorry I couldn’t get out to see you but here’s hoping this little message of cheer finds you well on the road to recovery. I will try to knock you another homer maybe two today.
Best regards from your friend and rooter,
“Babe” Ruth.”

Babe Ruth (1895–1948) American baseball player

Handwritten note http://greyflannelauctions.com/lot-31264.aspx, written on October 9, 1926, just prior to Game 6 of the World Series, reproduced in "Bambino's Death Stirs Prayers; Baseball Memories Roused; Message Recalls Story of Homers in '26" https://www.newspapers.com/newspage/10924759/, The Salt Lake Tribune (August 18, 1948), p. 24

Herbert Hoover photo

“Let me remind you that credit is the lifeblood of business, the lifeblood of prices and jobs.”

Herbert Hoover (1874–1964) 31st President of the United States of America

Address at Des Moines, Iowa, (4 October 1932)

Jan Smuts photo

“The groans of the dying and the blanched set faces of the dead … were enough to drive away all unwholesome feelings of exultation, and to remind one of the grim reality that war is. And even though these were the faces and the sufferings of our enemy, one had … a deeper sense of the common humanity which knows no racial distinctions.”

Jan Smuts (1870–1950) military leader, politician and statesman from South Africa

Smuts in Memoirs of the Boer War, p. 151, as cited in Antony Lentin, 2010, Jan Smuts – Man of courage and vision, p. 15. ISBN 978-1-86842-390-3

Chris Cornell photo
Babe Ruth photo
Abbas Ka'bi photo

“Imam warned that disunity undermines Islam and causes to interrupt Divine blessings. He always reminded that only through unity can the Muslim Ummah achieve progress.”

Abbas Ka'bi (1962) Iranian ayatollah

http://ikna.ir/en/news_detail.php?ProdID=129980 Imam Khomeini Regarded Disunity as a Deadly Poison for Islam June 2, 2007.

H.L. Mencken photo

“When women kiss, it always reminds one of prize-fighters shaking hands.”

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

1940s–present, A Mencken Chrestomathy (1949)
Source: Google Books http://books.google.com/books?id=TqEFAQAAIAAJ&q=%22when+women+kiss+it+always+reminds+one+of+prize+fighters+shaking+hands%22&pg=PA619#v=onepage

Patricia A. McKillip photo
Farah Pahlavi photo
Henry James photo
Keith Ellison photo
Ramakrishna photo

“As a toy fruit or a toy elephant reminds one of the real fruit and the living animal, so do the images that are worshipped remind one of the God who is formless and eternal.”

Ramakrishna (1836–1886) Indian mystic and religious preacher

Source: Sayings of Sri Ramakrishna (1960), p. 325

Ann Coulter photo
Alain de Botton photo

“He was reminded of a Dutch book whose moral he often returned to: De Schoonheid van hoogspanningslijnen in het Hollandse landschap, written by a couple of academics in Rotterdam University, Anne Kieke Backer and Arij de Boode. The Beauty of Electricity Pylons in the Dutch Landscape was a defence of the contribution of transmission engineering to the visual appeal of Holland, referencing the often ignored grandeur of the towers on their march from power stations to cities. Its particular interest for Ian, however, lay in its thesis about the history of the Dutch relationship to windmills, for it emphasised that these early industrial objects had originally been felt to have all the pylons’ threateningly alien qualities, rather than the air of enchantment and playfulness now routinely associated with them. They had been denounced from pulpits and occasionally burnt to the ground by suspicious villagers. The re-evaluation of the windmills had in large part been the work of the great painters of the Dutch Golden Age, who, moved by their country’s dependence on the rotating utilitarian objects, gave them pride of place in their canvases, taking care to throw their finest aspect into relief, like their resilience during storms and the glint of their sails in the late afternoon sun. … It would perhaps be left to artists of our own day to teach us to discern the virtues of the furniture of contemporary technology.”

Alain de Botton (1969) Swiss writer

Source: The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work (2009), p. 212.

Peter Akinola photo

“We remind our churches to maintain the emphasis on the war against indecent dressing”

Peter Akinola (1944) Anglican Primate of the Church of Nigeria

Pastoral Letter September 2006

David Brooks photo

“Are we really here? Is this really happening? Is this America? Are we a great country talking about trying to straddle the world and create opportunity in this country? It's just mind-boggling. And we have sort of become acculturated, because this campaign has been so ugly. We have become acculturated to sleaze and unhappiness that you just want to shower from every 15 minutes. The Trump comparison of the looks of the wives, he does have, over the course of his life, a consistent misogynistic view of women as arm candy, as pieces of meat. It’s a consistent attitude toward women which is the stuff of a diseased adolescent. And so we have seen a bit of that show up again. But if you go back over his past, calling into radio shows bragging about his affairs, talking about his sex life in public, he is childish in his immaturity. And his — even his misogyny is a childish misogyny. And that’s why I do not think Republicans, standard Republicans, can say, yes, I’m going to vote for this guy because he’s our nominee. He’s of a different order than your normal candidate. And this whole week is just another reminder of that… The odd thing about his whole career and his whole language, his whole world view is there is no room for love in it. You get a sense of a man who received no love, can give no love, so his relationship with women, it has no love in it. It’s trophy. And his relationship toward the world is one of competition and beating, and as if he’s going to win by competition what other people get by love. And so you really are seeing someone who just has an odd psychology unleavened by kindness and charity, but where it’s all winners and losers, beating and being beat. And that’s part of the authoritarian personality, but it comes out in his attitude towards women.”

David Brooks (1961) American journalist, commentator and editor

David Brooks, as quoted in "Shields and Brooks on Trump-Cruz wife feud, ISIS terror in Brussels" http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/shields-and-brooks-on-trump-cruz-wife-feud-isis-terror-in-brussels/ (25 March 2016), PBS NewsHour
2010s

Anthony Burgess photo
Sonia Sotomayor photo
William Howard Taft photo
Pliny the Elder photo
Jacob Bronowski photo
Orson Scott Card photo
Abdel Fattah el-Sisi photo
Nassim Nicholas Taleb photo
Martin Luther King, Jr. photo
Pentti Linkola photo

“Finnish forests: Let us remind the satellite pictures of the 1970’s winter in which the old forest appeared black and young forest and cut downs white. Already then the Finnish borders were like drawn on the map: White Finland between black Karelian and black Sweden. Finnish Forest Research Institute hicced up some time and then decided that the pictures are fake...”

Pentti Linkola (1932) Finnish ecologist

Can Life Prevail? (2004) Pentti Linkola Voisiko elämä voittaa - ja millä ehdoilla Tammi 2004 page 65 (Muistettakoon vaikka 1970-luvun talviset satelliittikuvat , joissa vrttunut metsä näkyi mustana ja ukot ja taimikot valkeina. Jo silloin Suomen rajat erottuivat ikään kuin ne olisivat karttaan piirretty.: valkea Suomi mustan karjalan ja mustan Ruotsin välissä. Metsäntutkimuslaitos nikotteli aikansa, kunnes se teki päätöksen, että kuvat ovat väärennettyjä. . . )

John Banville photo
George William Russell photo
Iain Duncan Smith photo

“When she gets into negotiations with her European counterparts about trade arrangements, could she remind them that cake exists to be eaten and cherries exist to be picked.”

Iain Duncan Smith (1954) British politician

Speech in Parliament https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2018/03/05/piece-cake-iain-duncan-smiths-peculiar-advice-theresa-may-brexit/ referring to the metaphor, widely-used in reference to the UK government's Brexit policy, that you can't have your cake and eat it (5 March 2018)
2018

Rob Ford photo

“This folks, reminds me of when Saddam attacked Kuwait and President Bush said ‘I warn you, I warn you, I warn you, do not.’ Well folks, if you think American-style politics is nasty, you guys have just attacked Kuwait.”

Rob Ford (1969–2016) Canadian politician, 64th Mayor of Toronto

Comparing city council vote that stripped him of more powers to Saddam Hussein attacking Kuwait http://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/he-said-what-quotes-from-toronto-mayor-rob-ford-on-day-of-council-vote-1.1549474#ixzz2l7Nq3YQ9 (18 November 2013)
2010s, 2013

Ellsworth Kelly photo
Clifford D. Simak photo
Brandon Boyd photo
Leo Tolstoy photo

“The whole world knows that virtue consists in the subjugation of one's passions, or in self-renunciation. It is not just the Christian world, against whom Nietzsche howls, that knows this, but it is an eternal supreme law towards which all humanity has developed, including Brahmanism, Buddhism, Confucianism, and the ancient Persian religion. And suddenly a man appears who declares that he is convinced that self-renunciation, meekness, submissiveness and love are all vices that destroy humanity (he has in mind Christianity, ignoring all the other religions).

One can understand why such a declaration baffled people at first. But after giving it a little thought and failing to find any proof of the strange propositions, any rational person ought to throw the books aside and wonder if there is any kind of rubbish that would not find a publisher today. But this has not happened with Nietzsche´s books. The majority of pseudo-enlightened people seriously look into the theory of the Übermensch, and acknowledge its author to be a great philosopher, a descendant of Descartes, Leibniz and Kant. And all this has come about because the majority of pseudo-enlightened men of today object to any reminder of virtue, or to its chief premise: self-renunciation and love—virtues that restrain and condemn the animal side of their life. They gladly welcome a doctrine, however incoherently and disjointedly expressed, of egotism and cruelty, sanctioning the idea of personal happiness and superiority over the lives of others, by which they live.”

Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) Russian writer

Source: What is Religion, of What does its Essence Consist? (1902), Chapter 11

Pat Conroy photo
Edward R. Murrow photo
Cornel West photo

“I remind young people everywhere I go, one of the worst things the older generation did was to tell them for twenty-five years "Be successful, be successful, be successful" as opposed to "Be great, be great, be great."”

Cornel West (1953) African-American philosopher and political/civil rights activist

There's a qualitative difference.
Speech in San Francisco: Democracy Matters (1 October 2004)

Henry Clay photo