Quotes about reversal (450 quotes, page 5)

“On tight money: It reflects a reversion to the old idea that the tree can be fertilized at the top instead of at the bottom — the old trickle-down theory.”

Harry Truman (1884–1972) American politician, 33rd president of the United States (in office from 1945 to 1953)

Harry Truman at the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Convention, Atlantic City (May 13, 1954), Good Old Harry

Idea , Tree

“A prudent mind can see room for misgiving, lest he who prospers should one day suffer reverse.”

Sophocles Trachiniae

Source: Trachiniae, Line 296.

Suffering

“The current search for new educational funnels must be reversed into the search for their institutional inverse: educational webs which heighten the opportunity for each one to transform each moment of his living into one of learning, sharing, and caring.”

Ivan Illich book Deschooling Society

Introduction (November 1970).
Deschooling Society (1971)
Context: Universal education through schooling is not feasible. It would be no more feasible if it were attempted by means of alternative institutions built on the style of present schools. Neither new attitudes of teachers toward their pupils nor the proliferation of educational hardware or software (in classroom or bedroom), nor finally the attempt to expand the pedagogue's responsibility until it engulfs his pupils' lifetimes will deliver universal education. The current search for new educational funnels must be reversed into the search for their institutional inverse: educational webs which heighten the opportunity for each one to transform each moment of his living into one of learning, sharing, and caring. We hope to contribute concepts needed by those who conduct such counterfoil research on education — and also to those who seek alternatives to other established service industries.

Education , Search , Learning

“The great instrument of all these changes, and what infuses a peculiar venom into all of them, is party. It is of no consequence what the principles of any party, or what their pretensions, are; the spirit which actuates all parties is the same; the spirit of ambition, of self-interest, of oppression, and treachery. This spirit entirely reverses all the principles which a benevolent nature has erected within us; all honesty, all equal justice, and even the ties of natural society, the natural affections.”

Edmund Burke book A Vindication of Natural Society

A Vindication of Natural Society (1756)
Context: Kings are ambitious; the nobility haughty; and the populace tumultuous and ungovernable. Each party, however in appearance peaceable, carries on a design upon the others; and it is owing to this, that in all questions, whether concerning foreign or domestic affairs, the whole generally turns more upon some party-matter than upon the nature of the thing itself; whether such a step will diminish or augment the power of the crown, or how far the privileges of the subject are likely to be extended or restricted by it. And these questions are constantly resolved, without any consideration of the merits of the cause, merely as the parties who uphold these jarring interests may chance to prevail; and as they prevail, the balance is overset, now upon one side, now upon the other. The government is, one day, arbitrary power in a single person; another, a juggling confederacy of a few to cheat the prince and enslave the people; and the third, a frantic and unmanageable democracy. The great instrument of all these changes, and what infuses a peculiar venom into all of them, is party. It is of no consequence what the principles of any party, or what their pretensions, are; the spirit which actuates all parties is the same; the spirit of ambition, of self-interest, of oppression, and treachery. This spirit entirely reverses all the principles which a benevolent nature has erected within us; all honesty, all equal justice, and even the ties of natural society, the natural affections. In a word, my Lord, we have all seen, and, if any outward considerations were worthy the lasting concern of a wise man, we have some of us felt, such oppression from party government as no other tyranny can parallel. We behold daily the most important rights, rights upon which all the others depend, we behold these rights determined in the last resort without the least attention even to the appearance or colour of justice; we behold this without emotion, because we have grown up in the constant view of such practices; and we are not surprised to hear a man requested to be a knave and a traitor, with as much indifference as if the most ordinary favour were asked; and we hear this request refused, not because it is a most unjust and unreasonable desire, but that this worthy has already engaged his injustice to another. These and many more points I am far from spreading to their full extent. <!-- You are sensible that I do not put forth half my strength; and you cannot be at a loss for the reason. A man is allowed sufficient freedom of thought, provided he knows how to choose his subject properly. Tou may criticise freely upon the Chinese constitution, and observe with as much severity as you please upon the absurd tricks or destructive bigotry of the bonzees. But the scene is changed as you come homeward, and atheism or treason may be the names given in Britain, to what would be reason and truth if asserted of China.

Justice , Nature , Change

“There is so much silence between the words,
you say. You say, The sensed absence
of God and the sensed presence
amount to much the same thing,
only in reverse.”

Margaret Atwood book Morning in the Burned House

"In the Secular Night"
Morning in the Burned House (1995)
Context: There is so much silence between the words,
you say. You say, The sensed absence
of God and the sensed presence
amount to much the same thing,
only in reverse.
You say, I have too much white clothing.
You start to hum.
Several hundred years ago
this could have been mysticism
or heresy. It isn’t now.
Outside there are sirens.
Someone’s been run over.
The century grinds on.

God , Sense , Silence

“Christianity leads poetry to the truth. Like it, the modern muse will see things in a higher and broader light. It will realize that everything in creation is not humanly beautiful, that the ugly exists beside the beautiful, the unshapely beside the graceful, the grotesque on the reverse of the sublime, evil with good, darkness with light.”

Victor Hugo (1802–1885) French poet, novelist, and dramatist

Context: Behold, then, a new religion, a new society; upon this twofold foundation there must inevitably spring up a new poetry. Previously following therein the course pursued by the ancient polytheism and philosophy, the purely epic muse of the ancients had studied nature in only a single aspect, casting aside without pity almost everything in art which, in the world subjected to its imitation, had not relation to a certain type of beauty. A type which was magnificent at first, but, as always happens with everything systematic, became in later times false, trivial and conventional. Christianity leads poetry to the truth. Like it, the modern muse will see things in a higher and broader light. It will realize that everything in creation is not humanly beautiful, that the ugly exists beside the beautiful, the unshapely beside the graceful, the grotesque on the reverse of the sublime, evil with good, darkness with light. It will ask itself if the narrow and relative sense of the artist should prevail over the infinite, absolute sense of the Creator; if it is for man to correct God; if a mutilated nature will be the more beautiful for the mutilation; if art has the right to duplicate, so to speak, man, life, creation; if things will progress better when their muscles and their vigour have been taken from them; if, in short, to be incomplete is the best way to be harmonious. Then it is that, with its eyes fixed upon events that are both laughable and redoubtable, and under the influence of that spirit of Christian melancholy and philosophical criticism which we described a moment ago, poetry will take a great step, a decisive step, a step which, like the upheaval of an earthquake, will change the whole face of the intellectual world. It will set about doing as nature does, mingling in its creations — but without confounding them — darkness and light, the grotesque and the sublime; in other words, the body and the soul, the beast and the intellect; for the starting-point of religion is always the starting-point of poetry. All things are connected.
Thus, then, we see a principle unknown to the ancients, a new type, introduced in poetry; and as an additional element in anything modifies the whole of the thing, a new form of the art is developed. This type is the grotesque; its new form is comedy.

Preface to Cromwell (1827) http://www.bartleby.com/39/41.html

Truth , Beauty , Light , Evil

“On these terms they, for their part, embark in the sacred cause; resolute to cure a world's woes by rose-water; desperately bent on trying to the uttermost that mild method. It seems not to have struck these good men that no world, or thing here below, ever fell into misery, without having first fallen into folly, into sin against the Supreme Ruler of it, by adopting as a law of conduct what was not a law, but the reverse of one; and that, till its folly, till its sin be cast out of it, there is not the smallest hope of its misery going,—that not for all the charity and rose-water in the world will its misery try to go till then!”

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

1850s, Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850), Model Prisons (March 1, 1850)
Context: Among the articulate classes, as they may be called, there are two ways of proceeding in regard to this. One large body of the intelligent and influential, busied mainly in personal affairs, accepts the social iniquities, or whatever you may call them, and the miseries consequent thereupon; accepts them, admits them to be extremely miserable, pronounces them entirely inevitable, incurable except by Heaven, and eats its pudding with as little thought of them as possible. Not a very noble class of citizens these; not a very hopeful or salutary method of dealing with social iniquities this of theirs, however it may answer in respect to themselves and their personal affairs! But now there is the select small minority, in whom some sentiment of public spirit and human pity still survives, among whom, or not anywhere, the Good Cause may expect to find soldiers and servants: their method of proceeding, in these times, is also very strange. They embark in the "philanthropic movement;" they calculate that the miseries of the world can be cured by bringing the philanthropic movement to bear on them. To universal public misery, and universal neglect of the clearest public duties, let private charity superadd itself: there will thus be some balance restored, and maintained again; thus,—or by what conceivable method? On these terms they, for their part, embark in the sacred cause; resolute to cure a world's woes by rose-water; desperately bent on trying to the uttermost that mild method. It seems not to have struck these good men that no world, or thing here below, ever fell into misery, without having first fallen into folly, into sin against the Supreme Ruler of it, by adopting as a law of conduct what was not a law, but the reverse of one; and that, till its folly, till its sin be cast out of it, there is not the smallest hope of its misery going,—that not for all the charity and rose-water in the world will its misery try to go till then!

Men , World , Law , Hope

“But we have managed to reverse that. Today, a great many people cannot find any work. People are dispossessed and cannot support themselves or their families. Many are homeless. For many others, work has become a rat race: something to be endured, not enjoyed.”

Charles A. Reich (1928–2019) American lawyer

The Liberals' Mistake (1987)
Context: The liberals were right when they insisted that we had enough food and goods for all of our people. But they did not — and we still do not — know how to distribute those goods in a rational way. We have failed to figure out how to turn this abundance into an advantage. The liberals were also right about labor-saving. If we evenly distributed the work that needs to be done, there ought to be a lot of time left over for everybody to have the leisure that people need. But we have managed to reverse that. Today, a great many people cannot find any work. People are dispossessed and cannot support themselves or their families. Many are homeless. For many others, work has become a rat race: something to be endured, not enjoyed.
Today we are witnessing an impoverishment: the apparent drying up of resources for all kinds of things that are badly needed. We seem to have no money for housing, for education, or for health and social services. And yet we have a deficit, and we are told by candidates for public office that we must cut the federal budget even more. This impoverishment is a mystery.

People , Family , Support

“A system of education under government control, separation of school and church, universal free education — all these are great achievements of social progress. But everything has a reverse side.”

Andrei Sakharov (1921–1989) Soviet nuclear physicist and human rights activist

Progress, Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom (1968), Dangers, The Threat to Intellectual Freedom
Context: A system of education under government control, separation of school and church, universal free education — all these are great achievements of social progress. But everything has a reverse side. In this case it is excessive standardization, extending to the teaching process itself, to the curriculum, especially in literature, history, civics, geography, and to the system of examinations.
One cannot but see a danger in excessive reference to authority and in the limitation of discussion and intellectual boldness at an age when personal convictions are beginning to be formed. In the old China, the systems of examinations for official positions led to mental stagnation and to the canonizing of the reactionary aspects of Confucianism. It is highly undesirable to have anything like that in a modern society.

Education , School , Universe

“Your word-hoard should serve your experience, not the reverse.”

Brian Bates (1944) British academic

The Way of the Wyrd : Tales of an Anglo-Saxon Sorcerer (1983)
Context: The threads of wyrd are a dimension of ourselves that we cannot grasp with words. We spin webs of words, yet wyrd slips through like the wind. The secrets of wyrd do not lie in our word-hoards, but are locked in the soul. We can only discern the shadows of reality with our words, whereas our souls are capable of encountering the realities of wyrd directly. This is why wyrd is accessible to the sorcerer: the sorcerer sees with his soul, not with eyes blinkered by the shape of words.
Do not live your life searching around for answers in your word-hoard. You will find only words to rationalize your experience. Allow yourself to open to wyrd and it will cleanse, renew, change, and develop your casket of reason. Your word-hoard should serve your experience, not the reverse.

“Night flight to San Francisco; chase the moon across America. God, it’s been years since I was on a plane. When we hit 35,000 feet we’ll have reached the tropopause, the great belt of calm air, as close as I’ll ever get to the ozone. I dreamed we were there. The plane leapt the tropopause, the safe air, and attained the outer rim, the ozone, which was ragged and torn, patches of it threadbare as old cheesecloth, and that was frightening. But I saw something that only I could see because of my astonishing ability to see such things: Souls were rising, from the earth far below, souls of the dead, of people who had perished, from famine, from war, from the plague, and they floated up, like skydivers in reverse, limbs all akimbo, wheeling and spinning. And the souls of these departed joined hands, clasped ankles, and formed a web, a great net of souls, and the souls were three-atom oxygen molecules of the stuff of ozone, and the outer rim absorbed them and was repaired. Nothing’s lost forever. In this world, there’s a kind of painful progress. Longing for what we’ve left behind, and dreaming ahead. At least I think that’s so.”

Tony Kushner (1956) American playwright and screenwriter

God , Pain , War , People

“It will be difficult for each of us to even begin to part with our share of honor in those achievements. This must be why all those talking heads on TV are going crazy. Unless Donald Trump decides to reverse his decision to begin withdrawals from Syria and Afghanistan, cable news for the next few weeks is going to be one long Scanners marathon of exploding heads.”

Matt Taibbi (1970) author and journalist

We Know How Trump’s War Game Ends, Rolling Stone:Nothing unites our political class like the threat of ending our never-ending war https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/trump-syria-withdrawal-772177/ (22 December 2018)

Parting , Decision

“He said, that he never had feared what man could do to him, but always had feared Fortune, the most fickle and variable of all deities; and in the late war she had been so constantly present with him, like a favouring gale, that he expected now to meet with some reverse by way of retribution.”

Plutarch book Parallel Lives

Aemilius, sec. 36
Parallel Lives

Way , War , Fear

“I start from the premise that the underlying pressures toward integration and interdependence are growing stronger, not weaker. We cannot reverse or stop the advancing technology that brings us fast and cheap communication and transportation, or the spread of knowledge.”

Paul Volcker (1927–2019) American economist

The political economy of the dollar

Knowledge , Communication

“The Sunday military coup in Bolivia has put in place a government which appears likely to reverse a decision by just-resigned President Evo Morales to cancel an agreement with a German company for developing lithium deposits in the Latin American country for batteries like those in electric cars. …Sen. Jeanine Añez, of the center-right party Democratic Unity, is currently the interim president in the unstable post-coup government in advance of elections.”

Jeanine Áñez (1967) President of Bolivia

Bolivian Coup Comes Less Than a Week After Morales Stopped Multinational Firm's Lithium Deal https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/11/11/bolivian-coup-comes-less-week-after-morales-stopped-multinational-firms-lithium-deal, Common Dreams, Eoin Higgins, (11 November 2019)
About

Cars , Decision , Appearance , Country

“Morales upended politics in this nation long ruled by light-skinned descendants of Europeans by reversing deep-rooted inequality. The economy grew strongly thanks to a boom in prices of commodities and he ushered through a new constitution that created a new Congress with seats reserved for Bolivia’s smaller indigenous groups while also allowing self-rule for all indigenous communities.”

Evo Morales (1959) Bolivian politician

Bolivia caught in a power struggle between Añez at home and Morales in exile https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/bolivia-caught-in-a-power-struggle-between-anez-at-home-and-morales-in-exile, Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), (14 November 2019)
About

Light , Self-confidence , Communication

“One step forward, two steps back. … It happens in the lives of individuals, and it happens in the history of nations and in the development of parties. It would be the most criminal cowardice to doubt even for a moment the inevitable and complete triumph of the principle of revolutionary Social-Democracy, of proletarian organization and Party discipline. We have already won a great deal, and we must go on fighting, undismayed by reverses, fighting steadfastly, scorning the philistine methods of circle wrangling, doing our very utmost to preserve the hard-won single Party tie linking all Russian Social-Democrats, and striving by dint of persistent and systematic work to give all Party members, and the workers in particular, a full and conscious understanding of the duties of Party members, of the struggle and Second Party Congress, of all the causes and all the stages of our divergence, and of the utter and disastrousness of opportunism., which, in the sphere of our programme and our tactics, helplessly surrenders to the bourgeois psychology, uncritically adopts the point of view of bourgeois democracy, and blunts the weapon of the class struggle of the proletariat.”

Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) Russian politician, led the October Revolution

Lenin Anthology, p. 119
1900s, One Step Forward, Two Steps Back (1904)

Democracy , Fight , Understanding , History

“If we would return to the shaggy condition of primitive ages, we need only acquire an environment which will favor from age to age those whose peripheries retain to the intensest extent the hirsute tendency. If the disparities between the sexual tastes of male and female would be leveled or inverted, the conditions which have caused the existing disparity must be reversed. The horse exposed to a fad for dwarfs would, in the course of ages, the length of time depending on the pitch of discrimination, be dwindled to its fox-like proportions of eocene times. In an environment requiring courage, foxes would either disappear or grow heroic. Serpents could be rendered as loving as doves by a procedure no more laborious than that by which they have been made vindictive. And beardless aesthetes may become philosophers as easily as have men.”

J. Howard Moore (1862–1916)

Source: Better-World Philosophy: A Sociological Synthesis (1899), Race Culture, pp. 208–209

Courage , Time , Dependency , Horse

“By an application of the theory of relativity to the taste of readers, today in Germany I am called a German man of science, and in England I am represented as a Swiss Jew. If I come to be represented as a bête noire, the descriptions will be reversed, and I shall become a Swiss Jew for the Germans and a German man of science for the English!”

Albert Einstein book The World as I See It

Noch eine Art Anwendung des Relativitätsprinzips zum Ergötzen des Lesers: Heute werde ich in Deutschland als "deutscher Gelehrter", in England als "Schweizer Jude" bezeichnet; sollte ich aber einst in die Lage kommen, als "bète noire" präsentiert zu werden, dann wäre ich umgekehrt für die Deutschen ein „Schweizer Jude“, für die Engländer ein "deutscher Gelehrter".
Einstein On His Theory
The Times
London
1919-11-28
http://archive.timesonline.co.uk/tol/viewArticle.arc?articleId=ARCHIVE-The_Times-1919-11-28-13-011&pageId=ARCHIVE-The_Times-1919-11-28-13, quoted in Herman Bernstein: Celebrities of Our Time. New York 1924. p. 267 ( archive.org http://www.archive.org/details/celebritiesofour000452mbp). Einstein's original German text in The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein. Volume 7. Doc. 25 p. 210, and at germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org http://germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/docpage.cfm?docpage_id=5438&language=german after Albert Einstein, Mein Weltbild. Amsterdam: Querido Verlag, 1934, pp. 220-28. Manuscript at alberteinstein.info http://alberteinstein.info/vufind1/Digital/EAR000033998#page/7/mode/2up.
Variant translation: If my theory of relativity is proven correct, Germany will claim me as a German and France will say I am a man of the world. If it's proven wrong, France will say I am a German and Germany will say I am a Jew.
1910s
Variant: If my theory of relativity is proven successful, Germany will claim me as a German and France will declare that I am a citizen of the world. Should my theory prove untrue, France will say that I am a German and Germany will declare that I am a Jew. (Address to the French Philosophical Society at the Sorbonne (6 April 1922); French press clipping (7 April 1922) [Einstein Archive 36-378] and Berliner Tageblatt (8 April 1922) [Einstein Archive 79-535])
Variant: If relativity is proved right the Germans will call me a German, the Swiss will call me a Swiss citizen, and the French will call me a great scientist. If relativity is proved wrong the French will call me a Swiss, the Swiss will call me a German and the Germans will call me a Jew.

Science

“I must point out … that the British nation is unique in this respect. They are the only people who like to be told how bad things are, who like to be told the worst, and like to be told that they are very likely to get much worse in the future and must prepare themselves for further reverses.”

Winston S. Churchill book The Second World War

Speech in the House of Commons, June 10, 1941 "Defence of Crete" http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1941/jun/10/defence-of-crete#column_152, in The Churchill War Papers : 1941 (1993), Churchill/Gilbert, Norton, p. 785 ISBN 0393019594
The Second World War (1939–1945)

Bad luck , Future , People

“Many of the dead very considerably retard the process of dissolution by clinging passionately to the earth which they have left; they simply will not turn their thoughts and desires upward, but spend their time in struggling with all their might to keep in full touch with the physical plane, thus causing great trouble to any one who may be trying to help them. Earthly matters are the only ones in which they have had any living interest, and they cling to them with desperate tenacity even after death. Naturally as time passes on they find it increasingly difficult to keep hold of things down here, but instead of welcoming and encouraging this process of gradual refinement and spiritualization they resist it vigorously by every means in their power… thereby not only causing themselves a vast amount of entirely unnecessary pain and sorrow, but also very seriously delaying their upward progress and prolonging their stay in astral regions to an almost indefinite extent. In convincing them that this ignorant and disastrous opposition to the cosmic will is contrary to the laws of nature, and persuading them to adopt an attitude of mind which is the exact reversal of it, lies a great part of the work of those who are trying to help.”

Charles Webster Leadbeater (1854–1934) English theosophist

Source: Invisible Helpers (1915), Ch. 12

Pain , Time , Law , Dead

“My sophomore year, we were in Tallahassee and I ran a reverse very early in the game, and I remember being nailed by Jack Youngblood. I remember watching the ball being pitched to me and thinking, when the ball was about halfway, that it was kind of race to see whether he was going to get to the ball first or me. He was foaming at the mouth. I still have nightmares from the hit he gave me.”

Jack Youngblood (1950) American football player, defensive end, Pro Football Hall of Fame, College Football Hall of Fame

Florida State WR Barry Smith, The Tampa Tribune 2007-11-24

Game , Thinking

“The real challenge for the Democratic Party, and its presidential candidates in particular, is to figure out how to reverse the Right’s stranglehold on our political vocabulary, without adopting the kind of lock-step dogmatic monolithism that empowered the likes of Gingrich. I don’t have a quick solution handy, but I’m pretty sure that if the Dems don’t act fast to reclaim our language, they risk losing the word battle before they realize they’re fighting it.”

Pete Buttigieg (1982) American politician

8 December 2003
The Struggle for Language
The Harvard Crimson
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2003/12/8/the-struggle-for-language-you-heard/
2003

Fight

“The argument, in essence, is that protected speech may be banned as a means to ban unprotected speech. This analysis turns the First Amendment upside down. The Government may not suppress lawful speech as the means to suppress unlawful speech. Protected speech does not become unprotected merely because it resembles the latter. The Constitution requires the reverse.”

Anthony Kennedy (1936) Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition, 535 U.S. 234 (2002) (Opinion of the Court).

Law

“The free being with absolute freedom proposes to itself certain ends. It wills because it wills, and the willing of an object is itself the last ground of such willing. Thus we have previously determined a free being, and any other determination would destroy the conception of an Ego, or of a free being. Now, if it could be so arranged that the willing of an unlawful end would necessarily — in virtue of an always effective law — result in the very reverse of that end, then the unlawful will would always ANNIHILATE ITSELF. A person could not will that end for the very reason because he did will it; his unlawful will would become the ground of its own annihilation, as the will is indeed always its own last ground.”

Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814) German philosopher

Source: The Science of Rights 1796, p. 193

Personality , Law , Freedom

“The influence of Charles Austin over me differed from that of the persons I have hitherto mentioned, in being not the influence of a man over a boy, but that of an elder contemporary. It was through him that I first felt myself, not a pupil under teachers, but a man among men. He was the first person of intellect whom I met on a ground of equality, though as yet much his inferior on that common ground. He was a man who never failed to impress greatly those with whom he came in contact, even when their opinions were the very reverse of his. The impression he gave was that of boundless strength, together with talents which, combined with such apparent force of will and character, seemed capable of dominating the world. Those who knew him, whether friendly to him or not, always anticipated that he would play a conspicuous part in public life. It is seldom that men produce so great an immediate effect by speech, unless they, in some degree, lay themselves out for it; and he did this in no ordinary degree. He loved to strike, and even to startle. He knew that decision is the greatest element of effect, and he uttered his opinions with all the decision he could throw into them, never so well pleased as when he astonished any one by their audacity.”

John Stuart Mill book Autobiography

Source: Autobiography (1873)
Source: https://archive.org/details/autobiography01mill/page/77/mode/1up pp. 77-78

Making love , Parting , Love , Life

“In general, the best thing to do when you suspect people of trying to distract you from the truth is not to actively confront them in the beginning, but in fact to encourage them to continue by showing interest in what they are saying or doing. You want them to talk more, to reveal more signs of tension and contrivance. At the right moment you must surprise them with a question or remark that is designed to make them uncomfortable, revealing you are onto them. Pay attention to the microexpressions and body language they emit at such moments. If they are really deceiving, they will often have a freeze response as they take this in, and then quickly try to mask the underlying anxiety. This was the favorite strategy of detective Columbo in the television series of the same name—facing criminals who had tried to reverse engineer the evidence to make it look like someone else had done it, Columbo would pretend to be perfectly friendly and harmless but then would suddenly ask an uncomfortable question and then pay extra attention to the face and body.”

Robert Greene (1959) American author

Chap. 3 : See Through People’s Masks
The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

Truth , Making love , People , Question

“A rich bank account did not mean rich ideas; in fact, often the reverse. The bigger your ass, the more you want to cover it.”

Gregory Benford (1941) Science fiction author and astrophysicist

Source: Short fiction, The Man Who Sold The Stars (2013), p. 338

Idea

“Other things being equal, the law seems to be directly reversed.”

Antoinette Brown Blackwell (1825–1921) American minister

September 1874, Popular Science Monthly Vol. 5, Article: The Alleged Antagonism Between Growth and Reproduction , p. 608
The Alleged Antagonism Between Growth and Reproduction (1874)

Law

“A New Order of the Ages Begins, says the reverse side of the Great Seal, and the Revolutionaries meant it. The American experiment was consciously conceived as a momentous step in the evolution of the species. The cause of America is in great measure the cause of all mankind, Thomas Paine said in his inflammatory pamphlet Common Sense (1776).”

Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) American writer

The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Five, The American Matrix for Transformation

Sense , Pain , Age

“Although it is rarely noted in histories of the American Revolution, many of the arch-Revolutionaries came from a tradition of mystical fraternity. Except for such traces as the symbols on the reverse side of the Great Seal and the dollar bill, little evidence remains of this esoteric influence (Rosicrucian, Masonic, and Hermetic). That sense of fraternity and spiritual chisement played an important role in the intensity of the Revolutionaries and their commitment to the realization of a democracy.”

Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) American writer

The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Five, The American Matrix for Transformation

Sense , Democracy , History

“Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.
For I have known them all already, known them all: —
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?”

T.S. Eliot The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1915)

Time , Music , Universe , Coffee

“Every day, COVID-19 seems to reach a new and tragic milestone. More than 210,000 cases have now been reported to WHO, and more than 9,000 people have lost their lives. Every loss of life is a tragedy. It’s also motivation to double down and do everything we can to stop transmission and save lives. We also need to celebrate our successes. Yesterday, Wuhan reported no new cases for the first time since the outbreak started. Wuhan provides hope for the rest of the world, that even the most severe situation can be turned around. Of course, we must exercise caution – the situation can reverse. But the experience of cities and countries that have pushed back this virus give hope and courage to the rest of the world.”

Tedros Adhanom (1965) Director-General of the World Health Organization, former Minister in Ethiopia

WHO Director-General's opening remarks at the media briefing on COVID-19 - 20 March 2020 https://www.who.int/dg/speeches/detail/who-director-general-s-opening-remarks-at-the-media-briefing-on-covid-19---20-march-2020, World Health Organization.

Courage , Loss , Time , Success

“The oligarchy understands that a “divide-and-conquer” strategy gives them more room to get what they want without opposition... oligarchies cannot hold on to power forever... When a vast majority of people come to view an oligarchy as illegitimate and an obstacle to their wellbeing, oligarchies become vulnerable. As bad as it looks right now, the great strength of this country is our resilience. We bounce back. We have before. We will again. In order for real change to occur – in order to reverse the vicious cycle in which we now find ourselves – the locus of power in the system will have to change. The challenge we face is large and complex, but we are well suited for the fight ahead. Together, we will dismantle the oligarchy. Together, we will fix the system.”

Robert B. Reich (1946) American political economist

The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/the-system-is-rigged-but-we-can-fix-it/, Alternet, 24 March 2020

Understanding , Country , Bad luck , People

“What is most dangerous is that although this virus will eventually disappear, the assault on our civil liberties is not likely to be reversed. From this point on, whenever local officials, county officials, state governors, or federal bureaucrats decide there is sufficient reason to suspend the Constitution they will not hesitate to do so. Anyone who challenges the suspension of the Constitution “for our own good” will be labeled “unpatriotic” and perhaps even reported to the authorities. We have already seen hotlines springing up across the country for Americans to report other Americans who dare venture outside to enjoy the sun and build up their vitamin D protection against the coronavirus. The government is justified in cancelling the Constitution, we are told, because we are in an emergency situation caused by the Covid-19 virus. But do people forget that the Constitution itself was written and adopted while we were in an “emergency situation”? Did the framers of the Constitution fail to add an 11th Amendment to the Bill of Rights saying, “oh by the way, none of this counts if we get sick?””

Ron Paul (1935) American politician and physician

Of course not! Those who wrote our Constitution understood that these rights are not granted by the government, but rather by our Creator. Thus it was never a question as to when or under what conditions they could be suspended: the government had no authority to suspend them at all because it did not grant them in the first place.
2020, End the Shutdown; It’s Time for Resurrection!

Country , Sun , Forgetting , People

“what the history establishment has done through the models it has proposed for both the ancient and the medieval periods is to exactly reverse the historical picture.”

N. S. Rajaram (1943–2019) Indian mathematician

N.S. Rajaram: From Harappa to Ayodhya, Sahitya Sindhu Prakashana, Bangalore 1997, p.6;

History

“Jesus does not advocate revolt or material conflict. ... He reverses the question, and as so often challenges his interlocutors: "But you ... it must not be the same among you."”

Jacques Ellul book Anarchy and Christianity

In other words, do not be so concerned about fighting kings. Let them be. Set up a marginal society which will not be interested in such things, in which there will be no power, authority or hierarchy. Do not do things as they are usually done in society, which you cannot change. Create another society on another foundation.

p. 62
Anarchy and Christianity (1988)

Question

“What I fear is a new direction for the president and his administration and what could very likely be a catastrophe for the working men and women, small business and entrepreneurs, our middle class, the American family, the very people this president has represented from the moment he announced he would run for the presidency.
That Mr. Trump would advance the interest of the globalist elites ahead of our citizens would be a tragic reversal on any day,
But today, on the same day the Commerce Department reported the United States had the largest trade deficit in our history ... it all means the White House has simply lost its way.
The nation’s heart will be, after all, broken by the very same people who brought 50 years of consecutive trade deficit and the export of millions of middle-class jobs and who have fed the swamp for decades”

Lou Dobbs (1945) American Television Host

6 March 2019 episode of Donahue Tonight on Fox Business Network https://twitter.com/LouDobbs/status/1103453101036658688, reported on 7 March 2019 by The Hill https://thehill.com/homenews/media/432993-lou-dobbs-trump-white-house-has-lost-its-way

Family , Housing , History , Business

“The continuation of diachrony in perceptions of life and death spreads across a form of antinatalism essentially co-opted from a kind of Western fetishism of Buddhism, namely efilism. Coming etymologically from the reverse of 'life', efilism claims it is better never to have been. Efilist philosophers such as David Benatar hinge their arguments on basic binaries of pleasure and pain which roughly correlate to good and bad and extend to a vindication of life and death. Efilism has a vague correspondence with utilitarianism but emphasizes the suffering of life over utilitarianism's greater good. Both are absolute in their perception of the capacity to evaluate which is which, making both dependent on economic measure of value as an either/or, and to an extent both on (anthropocentric) determinism. Efilism's redeeming feature is that it promotes antinatalism, and often veganism, in its aspirations to a reduction in suffering, and this attitude promises potentials for opening the world through the cessation of the human.”

Patricia MacCormack Australian Scholar

Embracing Death, pp. 152-153
The Ahuman Manifesto: Activism for the End of the Anthropocene (2020)

Pain , Dependency , Making love , Bad luck

“The attitude of the ruling classes to the laborers is that of a man who has felled his adversary to the earth and holds him down, not so much because he wants to hold him down, as because he knows that if he let him go, even for a second, he would himself be stabbed, for his adversary is infuriated and has a knife in his hand. And therefore, whether their conscience is tender or the reverse, our rich men cannot enjoy the wealth they have filched from the poor as the ancients did who believed in their right to it. Their whole life and all their enjoyments are embittered either by the stings of conscience or by terror.”

Leo Tolstoy The Kingdom of God Is Within You

Source: The Kingdom of God is Within You (1894), Chapter V, Contradiction Between our Life and our Christian Conscience

Wealth , Life , Men

“One of the greatest errors in the reconstruction of another era lies in our tendency to think of them as being like ourselves in feeling and attitudes. Actually, without considerable study on the part of a present-day man — if he were confronted by a fifteenth-century man — there would be no possible communication. I think it is possible through knowledge and discipline for a modern man to understand, and, to a certain extent, live into a fifteenth-century mind, but the reverse would be completely impossible.”

John Steinbeck book The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights

Appendix, letter to Elizabeth Otis and Chase Horton (14 March 1958)
The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights (1976)

Communication , Understanding , Knowledge , Thinking

“If time can be reversed, I would concentrate on telling stories from my great grannies -Edy kasawuli”

Edykasawuli7

Time

“Over the course of the day, the smile has its value: smiling has the power to reverse the phase of malaise into well-being. Always give importance to your smile.”

Prevale (1983) Italian DJ and producer

Original: (it) Nel corso della giornata, il sorriso ha il suo valore: sorridere ha il potere di invertire la fase di malessere in benessere. Date sempre importanza al vostro sorriso.
Source: prevale.net

Smile

“Mirror-world. The plugs on appliances are huge, triple−pronged, for a species of current that only powers electric chairs, in America. Cars are reversed, left to right, inside; telephone handsets have a different weight, a different balance; the covers of paperbacks look like Australian money.”

William Gibson Blue Ant trilogy

Source: Blue Ant trilogy, Pattern Recognition (2003), Chapter 1, "The Website of Dreadful Night"

Money , World , Cars

“Often, when thinking about Socrates (or about Plato’s depiction of Socrates), we need to remember that he is reacting to the Presocratics, but the reverse is never true.”

Catherine Rowett (1956) Professor of Philosophy at the University of East Anglia (born 1956)

Source: Presocratic Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction (2004), Introduction

Thinking

“Mystery is a word with no objective pertinence, merely describing the limitations of a mind. In fact, a mind may be classified by the order of the phenomena it considers mysterious.… The mystery is resolved, the solution made known. “Of course, it is obvious!” comes the chorus. A word about the obvious: it is always obvious.… The common mind transposed the sequence, letting the mystery generate the solution. This is logic in reverse; actually the mystery relates to the solution as the foam relates to the beer.…”

Jack Vance book The Many Worlds of Magnus Ridolph

The Unspeakable McInch (p. 39; all ellipses in the original)
Short fiction, The Many Worlds of Magnus Ridolph (1966)

Beer

“Because physical theories typically predict numerical values, an improvement in experimental precision reduces the tolerance range and hence increases corroborability. In most psychological research, improved power of a statistical design leads to a prior probability approaching ½ of finding a significant difference in the theoretically predicted direction. Hence the corroboration yielded by "success" is very weak, and becomes weaker with increased precision. "Statistical significance" plays a logical role in psychology precisely the reverse of its role in physics. This problem is worsened by certain unhealthy tendencies prevalent among psychologists, such as a premium placed on experimental "cuteness" and a free reliance upon ad hoc explanations to avoid refutation.”

Paul E. Meehl (1920–2003) American psychologist

Source: [Theory-testing in psychology and physics: A methodological paradox, Philosophy of Science, 34, 2, 1967, 103–115, https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/288135]

Problem , Success