Quotes about root
page 11

“What is called "objectivity," scientific for instance (in which I firmly believe, in a given situation) imposes itself only within a context which is extremely vast, old, firmly established, or rooted in a network of conventions … and yet which still remains a context.”

Jacques Derrida book Limited Inc

Limited Inc (1977)

“That is the greatest thing about him. That he is not only our leader and a great hero. But himself, upright, firm and simple. In him the roots of our world. And his soul touches the stars. And yet he remains a man like you and me.”

Baldur von Schirach (1907–1974) German Nazi leader convicted of crimes against humanity in the Nuremberg trial

A poem written by Schirach about Hitler in 1936. Quoted in "The Trial of the Germans" - Page 287 - by Eugene Davidson - History - 1997

World, Soul, Star

“I'm a future-hacker; I'm trying to get root access to the future. I want to raid its system of thought.”

Jude Milhon (1939–2003) American hacker & author

Interview in Wired (1995)

Future

“In the developed world taxation is always a political construct, a living organism that is always changing due to endless modifications imposed by lawmakers who are themselves sensitive to the public mood and to changes in social ideology. This is a haphazard scaffolding without an architect that lacks rationality and coherency, with tax and social expenditures- referred to here as social and tax expenditures - constituting a superstructure that is all the more complex given its roots in a tax system whose benchmark standards are subject to innumerable exceptions.”

Éric Pichet (1960) economist

Tax policy, Tax and Social Expenditures

World, Mood, Change

“At the root of the assault on our liberties is, in fact, an assault on our character--an assault that assumes that we are not good enough to be free, and that aims to make sure that we are no longer strong enough, courageous enough, disciplined enough to be a free people.”

Alan Keyes (1950) American politician

Rally in Idaho Falls, Idaho, May 12, 2000. http://www.renewamerica.us/archives/speeches/00_05_12idahofalls.htm. 2000

People, Courage, Strong

“The problem of the direct determination of the primitive roots of a prime number is one of the 'cruces' of the Theory of Numbers. Euler, who first observed the peculiarity of these numbers, has yet left us no rigorous proof of their existence; though assuming their existence, he succeeded in accurately determining their number. The defect in his demonstration was first supplied by Gauss, who has also proposed an indirect method for finding a primitive root.”

Henry John Stephen Smith (1826–1883) mathematician

Report on the Theory of Numbers (1859) Part I, p. 49.
The Collected Mathematical Papers of Henry John Stephen Smith (1894) Vol. 1

Problem

“He [ Manet ] begged me to go straight up and see his painting [ 'Le Balcon'] - Berthe was model for this painting], as he was rooted to the spot. I've never seen anyone in such a state, one minute he was laughing, the next insisting his picture was dreadful; in the next breath, sure it would be a huge success.”

Berthe Morisot (1841–1895) painter from France

quote from Berthe Morisot to her sister Edma Morisot, after visiting the Salon of Paris in 1869; as cited in The Correspondence of Berthe Morisot, with her family and friends, Denish Rouart with Adler and Garb; Camden Press London 1984, pp. 33-34
1860 - 1870

Success, Painting

“willow of crystal, a poplar of water,
a pillar of fountain by the wind drawn over,
tree that is firmly rooted and that dances,
turning course of a river that goes curving,
advances and retreats, goes roundabout,
arriving forever:
the calm course of a star
or the spring, appearing without urgency,
water behind a stillness of closed eyelids
flowing all night and pouring out prophecies,
a single presence in the procession of waves
wave over wave until all is overlapped,
in a green sovereignty without decline
a bright hallucination of many wings
when they all open at the height of the sky, course of a journey among the densities
of the days of the future and the fateful
brilliance of misery shining like a bird
that petrifies the forest with its singing
and the annunciations of happiness
among the branches which go disappearing,
hours of light even now pecked away by the birds,
omens which even now fly out of my hand, an actual presence like a burst of singing,
like the song of the wind in a burning building,
a long look holding the whole world suspended,
the world with all its seas and all its mountains,
body of light as it is filtered through agate,
the thighs of light, the belly of light, the bays,
the solar rock and the cloud-colored body,
color of day that goes racing and leaping,
the hour glitters and assumes its body,
now the world stands, visible through your body,
and is transparent through your transparency”

Octavio Paz (1914–1998) Mexican writer laureated with the 1990 Nobel Prize for Literature

Sun Stone (1957)

Fate, Happiness, World, Color

“The History of Institutions cannot be mastered – can scarcely be approached – without an effort. It affords little of the romantic incident or of the picturesque grouping which constitute the charm of History in general, and holds out small temptation to the mind that requires to be tempted to the study of Truth. But it…abounds in examples of that continuity of life, the realisation of which is necessary to give the reader a personal hold on the past and a right judgment of the present. For the roots of the present lie deep in the past, and nothing in the past is dead to the man who would learn how the present comes to be what it is.”

William Stubbs (1825–1901) English historian and clergyman

The Constitutional History of England (1873-8; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1903) vol. 1, p. iii.

Life, Truth, Lie, History

“Although each of our armed services is unique and different, the U. S. Army holds a special position of significance and trust. Its ranks come from the people, the country's roots, and it is closest to the people. In foreign confrontations the United States is not committed until its land forces- its Army- is committed. And in the event of hostilities, the Army historically has borne the brunt of war, the human cost, taking the great bulk of the casualties. The Army as an institution knows this and has been traditionally reluctant to go to war, its leaders seeking to insure that war is truly necessary and that our civilian leaders exploit all other avenues before taking that final step.”

Bruce Palmer Jr. (1913–2000) United States Army Chief of Staff

Source: The 25-Year War: America's Military Role in Vietnam (1984), p. 209

Hostility, War, People, Country

“A Systems Esthetic will become the dominant approach to a maze of socio-technical conditions rooted only in the present.”

Jack Burnham (1931) American art historian

Jack Burnham, "Systems Esthetics," Artforum, (Sept 1968) as cited in: Francis Halsall. "Systems Aesthetics and the System as Medium," in: Francis Halsall (2008), Systems of Art, Peter Lang.

“"Heaven helps those who help themselves" is a well-tried maxim, embodying in a small compass the results of vast human experience. The spirit of self-help is the root of all genuine growth in the individual; and, exhibited in the lives of many, it constitutes the true source of national vigour and strength. Help from without is often enfeebling in its effects, but help from within invariably invigorates. Whatever is done for men or classes, to a certain extent takes away the stimulus and necessity of doing for themselves; and where men are subjected to over-guidance and over-government, the inevitable tendency is to render them comparatively helpless.”

Samuel Smiles (1812–1904) Scottish author

Source: Self-Help; with Illustrations of Character and Conduct (1859), Ch. I : Self-Help — National and Individual; earlier variant of the proverb quoted: God helps them who help themselves; recorded in Jacula Prudentum (1651) by George Herbert

Men, Help

“Although the Protestant Church is accused of much disastrous bigotry, one claim to immortal fame must be granted it: by permitting freedom of inquiry in the Christian faith and by liberating the minds of men from the yoke of authority, it enabled freedom of inquiry in general to take root in Germany, and made it possible for science to develop independently. German philosophy, though it now puts itself on an equal basis with the Protestant Church or even above it, is nonetheless only its daughter; as such it always owes the mother a forbearing reverence.”

Heinrich Heine (1797–1856) German poet, journalist, essayist, and literary critic

Wenn man auch der protestantischen Kirche manche fatale Engsinnigkeit vorwirft, so muß man doch zu ihrem unsterblichen Ruhme bekennen: indem durch sie die freie Forschung in der christlichen Religion erlaubt und die Geister vom Joche der Autorität befreit wurden, hat die freie Forschung überhaupt in Deutschland Wurzel schlagen und die Wissenschaft sich selbständig entwickeln können. Die deutsche Philosophie, obgleich sie sich jetzt neben die protestantische Kirche stellt, ja sich über sie heben will, ist doch immer nur ihre Tochter; als solche ist sie immer in betreff der Mutter zu einer schonenden Pietät verpflichtet.
Source: The Romantic School (1836), p. 24

Men, Faith, Freedom, Science

“When I talk of reality, I am always thinking of essentials. Profundity is not located in some remote, inaccessible region. It is rooted in everyday life. That is what great thinkers have taught me, above all the philosophers of the Far East, for whom true wisdom — which I am far from achieving — is the conjunction of samsara (the ordinary world) and nirvana (profound reality). To achieve contact with reality is not to transport oneself elsewhere, it is not transcendence but thorough immersion in one's surroundings. A reality which is neither purely physical nor metaphysical, but both at once.”

Antoni Tàpies (1923–2012) Catalan painter, sculptor and art theorist

As quoted in 'Antoni Tapies', Serafin Garcia Ibanez, in the UNESCO Courier, June 1994.
1991 - 2000

Life, Wisdom, World, Thinking

“I consider myself a mainstream researcher in the field of business policy, and the ideas I want to describe in this paper concern the foundations of a theory of business strategy that is rooted in economics. But is such a paper, whatever its merits, really appropriate at a conference entitled 'Non-traditional Approaches to Policy Research'? Surprisingly, it is. The use of economic theory to model and explicate business strategy, as it is understood within the field of business policy, is distinctly non-traditional.”

Richard Rumelt (1942) American economist

Source: "Towards a strategic theory of the firm." 1997, p. 131; Lead paragraph

Idea, Business

“In his malodorous brain what slugs and mire,
Lanthorned in his oblique eyes, guttering burned!
His body lodged a rat where men nursed souls
The world flashed grape-green eyes of a foiled cat
To him. On fragments of an old shrunk power,
On shy and maimed, on women wrung awry
He lay, a bullying hulk, to crush them more.
But when one, fearless, turned and clawed like bronze,
Cringing was easy to blunt these stern paws,
And he would weigh the heavier on those after.
Who rests in God's mean flattery now? Your wealth
Is but his cunning to make death more hard.
Your iron sinews take more pain in breaking.
And he has made the market for your beauty
Too poor to buy, although you die to sell.
Only that he has never heard of sleep;
And when the cats come out the rats are sly.
Here we are safe till he slinks in at dawn.
But he has gnawed a fibre from strange roots,
And in the morning some pale wonder ceases.
Things are not strange and strange things are forgetful.
Ah! if the day were arid, somehow lost
Out of us, but it is as hair of us,
And only in the hush no wind stirs it.
And in the light vague trouble lifts and breathes,
And restlessness still shadows the lost ways.
The fingers shut on voices that pass through,
Where blind farewells are taken easily...
Ah! this miasma of a rotting God!”

Isaac Rosenberg (1890–1918) English poet

written 1916 or before
On Receiving News of the War (1914), God

Death, Women, Men, God

“Not a single one of our ancient sources indicates that Jesus was married, let alone married to Mary Magdalene. All such claims are part of modern fictional reconstructions of Jesus' life, not rooted in the surviving accounts themselves. The historical approach to our sources may not be as exciting and sensationalist as fictional claims about Jesus (he kept a lover! he had sex! he made babies!), but there's something to be said for knowing what really happened in history, even if it is not as titillating as what happens in novels.”

Bart D. Ehrman (1955) American academic

Source: Truth and Fiction in The Da Vinci Code (2004), Ch. 7: 'Jesus, Mary Magdalene, and Marriage'

Life, Sex, History, Lovers

“While thus he threw his Elbow round,
Depopulating all the Ground,
And, with his whistling Sythe, does cut
Each stroke between the Earth and Root,
The edged Stele by careless chance
Did into his own Ankle glance;
And there among the Grass fell down,
by his own Sythe, the Mower mown.”

Andrew Marvell (1621–1678) English metaphysical poet and politician

Damon The Mower.

Grass, Chance

“Many [hooligans] discover to their shame that they have scruples; they have roots and, greatest disadvantage of all, they have hope. The fathers superior of the order do not try to influence their children in Satan; they merely shake their heads in sorrow. They know that the apostate must work out his own damnation.”

Quentin Crisp book The Naked Civil Servant

Source: The Naked Civil Servant (1968), Ch. 26

Children, Hope

“We are satisfied that it is right because it gives the freest play to individual energy and initiative and character and the largest liberty both to producer and consumer. …trade is injured when it is not allowed to follow its natural course, and when it is either hampered or diverted by artificial obstacles. …We believe in free trade because we believe in the capacity of our countrymen. That at least is why I oppose protection root and branch, veiled and unveiled, one-sided or reciprocal. I oppose it in any form. Besides we have experience of fifty years, during which our prosperity has become the envy of the world.”

Henry Campbell-Bannerman (1836–1908) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech in Bolton (15 October 1903), quoted in John Wilson, C.B.: A Life of Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman (London: Constable, 1973), p. 413
Leader of the Opposition

World, Nature, Envy

“The process of transforming all direct experience into the supreme symbolic expression, language, monopolizes life. Like ideology, language conceals and justifies, compelling us to suspend our doubts about its claim to validity. It is the root of civilization, the dynamic code of civilization's alienated nature. As the paradigm of ideology, language stands behind all of the massive legitimation necessary to hold civilization together. It remains for us to clarify what forms of nascent domination engendered this justification, made language necessary as basic means of repression”

John Zerzan (1943) American anarchist and primitivist philosopher and author

Elements of Refusal (1988)

Life, Nature

“The Farmer will never be happy again;
He carries his heart in his boots;
For either the rain is destroying his grain
Or the drought is destroying his roots.”

A. P. Herbert (1890–1971) British politician

"The Farmer", Tinker, Tailor (1922).

Happiness, Heart

“A human life, I think, should be well rooted in some spot of native land, where it may get the love of tender kinship for the face of earth, for the labours men go forth to, for the sounds and accents that haunt it, for whatever will give that early home a familiar unmistakeable difference amidst the future widening of knowledge: a spot where the definiteness of early memories may be inwrought with affection, and kindly acquaintance with all neighbours, even to the dogs and donkeys, may spread not by sentimental effort and reflection, but as a sweet habbit of the blood. At five years old, mortals are not prepared to be citizens of the world, to be stimulated by abstract nouns, to soar above preference into impartiality; and that prejudice in favour of milk with which we blindly begin, is a type of the way body and soul must get nourished at least for a time. The best introduction to astronomy is to think of the nightly heavens as a little lot of stars belonging to one's own homestead.”

George Eliot book Daniel Deronda

Daniel Deronda (1876)

Love, Life, Men, World

“Socialism is not the invention of an individual. It is essentially the outcome of economic and social conditions. The evils that Capitalism brings differ in intensity in different countries, but, the root cause of the trouble once discerned, the remedy is seen to be the same by thoughtful men and women. The cause is the private ownership of the means of life; the remedy is public ownership.”

Clement Attlee (1883–1967) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

The Labour Party in Perspective (Left Book Club, 1937), p. 15.
1930s

Life, Women, Men, Evil

“As far as my work is concerned, I felt at that time [1970's] the need to start from the 'nadir' (nothingness); not a zero, but I had to go back to my roots and finally reacquire and make my own many approaches that I had once vaguely internalized, through Surrealism, in my early years. Many of the techniques that validate the anarchic impulses of the imagination and the subconscious became important again, for example, the conscious inclusion of chance, of failure and of error. (quote of Tàpies 1983)”

Antoni Tàpies (1923–2012) Catalan painter, sculptor and art theorist

Quote in: 'Tapies, or the Materiality of Painting', by Klaus Dirscherl; as cited in Materialities of Communication, ed. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Karl Ludwig Pfeiffer, Stanford University Press, 1988, p. 192
1981 - 1990

Error, Quotes, Imagination, Failure

“I shall now address you on the subject of the present situation in research in the foundations of mathematics. Since there remain open questions in this field, I am not in a position to paint a definitive picture of it for you. But it must be pointed out that the situation is not so critical as one could think from listening to those who speak of a foundational crisis. From certain points of view, this expression can be justified; but it could give rise to the opinion that mathematical science is shaken at its roots.”

Paul Bernays (1888–1977) Swiss mathematician

Paul Bernays, Platonism in mathematics http://sites.google.com/site/ancientaroma2/book_platonism.pdf (1935) Lecture delivered June 18, 1934, in the cycle of Conferences internationales des Sciences mathematiques organized by the University of Geneva, in the series on Mathematical Logic.) Translation by: Charles Parsons

Mathematics, Question, Thinking, Science

“Economics, said Mr Stanley, is 50% psychology … What we need, apparently, is not statesman but hypnotists, not scientists, but witchdoctors, not confidence born of scientific prediction of the future, but confidence created by a political Confidence Trick. There is nothing surprising in this. It is the kind of mystic Mumbo-Jumbo to which capitalism is driven when austere reason pronounces sentence of death upon it. It is the primitive recoil from reality and the burdens of reality which lies at the root of Fascist psychology.”

Aneurin Bevan (1897–1960) Welsh politician

Tribune, 5 November 1937
1930s

Death, Confidence, Reality, Future

“We came from many roots, and we have many branches.”

Gerald Ford (1913–2006) American politician, 38th President of the United States (in office from 1974 to 1977)

1970s, State of the Union Address (1975)

“Pāṇini had before him a list of irregularly formed words, which survives, in a somewhat modified form, as the Uṇādi Sūtra. There are also two appendixes to which Pāṇini refers: one is the Dhātupāṭha, "List of Verbal Roots," containing some 2000 roots, of which only about 800 have been found in Sanskrit literature, and from which about fifty Vedic verbs are omitted; the second is the Gaṇapāṭha, or "List of Word-Groups," to which certain rules apply. These gaṇas were metrically arranged in the Gaṇaratna-mahodadhi, composed by Vardhamāna in 1140 A. D.”

Pāṇini ancient Sanskrit grammarian

Appendix A History of Sanskrit Literature

Literature

“Now what are we looking at right here? What’s bang in the middle? Some people think that’s mathematics there. Fine. But if maths is the study that best allows you to think your way to the centre, what’re the forces you’re investigating? Maths is totally abstract, at one level, square roots of minus one and the like, but the world is nothing if not rigorously mathematical. So this is a way of looking at the world which unifies all the forces: mental, social, physical.”

China Miéville book Perdido Street Station

Source: Perdido Street Station (2000), pp. 145-146

People, World, Way, Mathematics

“We all know that the roots of injustice run deep. But violence cannot redress a solitary wrong, or remedy a single unfairness. Of course, all America is outraged at the assassination of an outstanding Negro leader who was at that meeting that afternoon in the White House in 1966. And America is also outraged at the looting and the burning that defiles our democracy. We just must put our shoulders together and put a stop to both. The time is here. Action must be now. So, I would appeal to my fellow Americans by saying, the only real road to progress for free people is through the process of law and that is the road that America will travel.”

Lyndon B. Johnson (1908–1973) American politician, 36th president of the United States (in office from 1963 to 1969)

"Remarks Upon Signing the Civil Rights Act.," April 11, 1968. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project. http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=28799&st=&st1=#axzz2gguIRFi1 1960s, Remarks on the Civil Rights Act (1968)

People, Law, Travel, Democracy

“That the root of love is a thirst for disaster is exhibited throughout its erratic course. At its most elementary love is driven by a longing to be cruelly unrequited; fostering every kind of repellent self-abasement, awkwardness, and idiocy. Sometimes this provokes the contempt that is so obviously appropriate, and the tormented one can then luxuriate in the utter burning loss that each gesture becomes. One wastes away; expending health and finance in orgies of narcosis, breaking down one’s labour-power to the point of destitution, pouring one’s every thought into an abyss of consuming indifference. At the end of such a trajectory lies the final breakage of health, ruinous poverty, madness, and suicide. A love that does not lead such a blasted career is always at some basic level disappointed (…)”

Nick Land (1962) British philosopher

Source: The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism (1992), Chapter 11: "Inconclusive communication", p. 134 (original emphasis)

Love, Health, Disappointment, Suicide

“The veneration of mighty invisible beings, which was extorted from helpless man through natural fear rooted in the sense of his impotence …”

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) German philosopher

Die Verehrung mächtiger unsichtbarer Wesen, welche dem hülflosen Menschen durch die natürliche, auf dem Bewusstsein seines Unvermögens gegründete Furcht abgenöthigt wurde, …
Book IV, Part 2, Section 3
Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone (1793)

Fear, Nature, Sense

“And I think that my whole life, looking back at it, I was so rooted in worldly things, in worldly values, fame, fashion and fortune and all the things that are just transient.”

Jani Allan (1952) South African columnist and broadcaster

Speaking in 1995 in an SABC interview about a change of philosophy following her libel case against Channel 4. http://70.84.171.10/~etools/newsbrief/1995/news0103 Other

Life, Fashion, Thinking

“For ever and ever, my darling, yes—
Goodness and love are undying;
Only the troubles and cares of earth
Are winged from the first for flying.
Our way we plough
In the furrow "now;"
But after the tilling and growing the sheaf;
Soil for the root, but the sun for the leaf—
And God keepeth watch forever.”

Mary Mapes Dodge (1831–1905) Children's writer, novelist, poet, editor

Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 287.

Love, God, Way, Sun

“We do not desire that the unanimity of a jury should be the result of anything but the unanimity of conviction. It is true that a single juryman, or two or three constituting a small minority, may, if their own convictions are not strong and deeply rooted, think themselves justified in giving way to the majority. If is very true, if jurymen have only doubts or weak convictions, they may yield to the stronger and more determined view of their fellows; but I hold it to be of the essence of a juryman's duty, if he has a firm and deeply rooted conviction, either in the affirmative or the negative of the issue he has to try, not to give up that conviction, although the majority may be against him, from any desire to purchase his freedom from confinement or constraint, or the various other inconveniences to which jurors are subject.”

Sir Alexander Cockburn, 12th Baronet (1802–1880) Lord Chief Justice

Winsor v. The Queen (1866), L. R. 1 Q. B. Ca. 305.

Way, Thinking, Freedom, Strong

“There must be some deep-rooted anti-social principle in every man's nature, so dearly does he love aught that separates him from his kind; or is it but one of the many shapes taken by that mental kaleidoscope, vanity, the varying and the glittering, the desire of distinction, sinking into that of notice?”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

Heath's book of Beauty, 1833 (1832)

Love, Nature

“In the root of the word "faith" itself… there is implicit the idea of confidence, of surrender to the will of another, to a person. Confidence is placed only in persons. We trust in Providence, which we perceive as something personal and conscious, not in Fate, which is something impersonal. And thus it is in the person who tells us the truth, in the person that gives us hope, that we believe, not directly or immediately in truth itself or in hope itself.”

Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936) 19th-20th century Spanish writer and philosopher

The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), IX : Faith, Hope, and Charity

Fate, Truth, Faith, Hope

“Man is a moral creature. The moral sense is so deeply rooted in human beings that no thief, no murderer has ever asked the abrogation of the penalties against theft and murder. All the laws that have ruled human organization in the past and rule them at present are based on the moral sense: on what is right and wrong. And no religion, no legislature has ever deemed it necessary to define right and wrong, because no one has any doubt as to the meaning of these terms. Only the worshippers of the pseudoscience of modern times regard morality and immorality, justice and injustice, good and evil, as anti-scientific concepts, since it is not possible to reproduce them in a laboratory. … The reasonings of the vivisectionists are unscientific because they don't take into account the intangible realities of life. The moral law is one such intangible reality: And it is the incomprehension of this reality that marks the inescapable failure of experimental science when applied to living beings, with its inevitable sequence of tragic errors.”

Hans Ruesch (1913–2007) Swiss racing driver

Source: Slaughter of the Innocent (1978), pp. 327-328

Life, Religion, Justice, Law

“The Labour Party should oppose the Government arms plan root and branch.”

Aneurin Bevan (1897–1960) Welsh politician

Tribune, 19 February 1937.
1930s

“We can only assert here, with especial satisfaction, that Gabriele Münters talent, robust, rooted in an inward strength and sensitivity, in fact genuinely German, should in no circumstances be assessed as masculin, or as 'quasi-masculine'. This talent – and we emphasize it, once more, with great satisfaction – can only be described as exclusively and purely feminine… Gabriele Münter doesn't paint feminine subjects, she does not work with feminine materials, and does not permit herself any feminine coquetry. Their are neither raptures, nor agreeable exterior elegance, nor appealing weaknesses to be found here.”

Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944) Russian painter

Quote of Kandinsky, in the introduction of an exhibition-catalog 'Neue Künstlervereinigung', 1913, Munich; as cited by , in Expressionism; Praeger Publishers, New York, 1973, p. 119-120
1910 - 1915

Painting

“This is how we go on: one day a time, one meal at a time, one pain at a time, one breath at a time. Dentists go on one root canal at a time; boat builders go on one hull at a time. If you write books, you go on one page at a time. We turn from all we know and all we fear. We study catalogues, watch football games, choose Sprint over AT&T. We count the birds in the sky and will not turn from the window when we hear the footsteps behind as something comes up the hall; we say yes, I agree that clouds often look like other things - fish and unicorns and men on horseback - but they are really only clouds. Even when the lightning flashes inside them we say they are only clouds and turn our attention to the next meal, the next pain, the next breath, the next page. This is how we go on.”

Stephen King book Bag of Bones

Bag of Bones (1998)

Men, Pain, Books, Fear

“The part assigned to this country in the 'Good Fight of Man' is the total overthrow of the spirit of caste. Luther fought it in the form of ecclesiastical despotism; our fathers fought it as political tyranny; we have hitherto encountered it entrenched in a system of personal slavery. But in all these forms it is the same old spirit of the denial of equal rights. Martin Luther, the monk, had exactly the same right to his religious faith that Giovanni de' Medici, the pope, had to his. Galileo had the same right to hold and teach his scientific theories that the Church doctors had to teach theirs. Patrick Henry, a British subject, had the same right to refuse to be taxed without representation that Lord North, another British subject, had. Robert Small, one of the American people, had exactly the same right to vote upon the same qualifications with other citizens that the President has or the Chief Justice of the United States. The Inquisition in Italy, aristocratic privilege in England, chattel slavery or unfair political exclusion in the United States, are only fruits ripened upon the tree of caste. Our swords have cut off some of the fruit, but the tree and its roots remain, and now that our swords are turned into plough-shares and our Dahlgrens and Parrotts into axes and hoes, our business is to take care that the tree and all its roots are thoroughly cut down and dug up, and burned utterly away in the great blaze of equal rights.”

George William Curtis (1824–1892) American writer

1860s, The Good Fight (1865)

People, Faith, Justice, Business

“Cultures are not made from free-floating values. They are rooted in institutions and organizations.”

Manuel Castells (1942) Spanish sociologist (b.1942)

Source: The Internet Galaxy - Reflections on the Internet, Business, and Society (2001), Chapter 2, The Culture of the Internet, p. 48

“Just as the root feeds the tree, so humility feeds the soul. The spirit of humility is sweeter than honey, and whoever is fed by this sweetness produces fruit.”
Sicut radix portat arborem, sic humilitas animam. Spiritus humilitatis est super mel dulcis, quo qui regitur dulcia poma facit.

Anthony of Padua (1195–1231) Franciscan

Sermon for the Eighth Sunday after Pentecost (Part II: De bonae arboris fructificatione et de malae arboris excisione, par. 10)
Sermons

Soul, Tree

“So lonely am I
My body is a floating weed
Severed at the roots.
Were there water to entice me,
I would follow it, I think.”

Ono no Komachi (825–900) Japanese poet

Source: Donald Keene's Anthology of Japanese Literature (1955), p. 79

Thinking, Water

“… I believe it to be a duty of the General Convention of Harrisburg, not only to support the wool growers and wool manufacturers, but to lay the root at the axe of the tree, by declaring the system of Adam Smith to be erroneous – by declaring war against it on the part of the American System – …”

Friedrich List (1789–1846) German economist with dual American citizenship

Letter I
Outlines of American Political Economy (1827)

War, Support, Tree, Parting

“The famous sixteenth-century algebraist Jerome Cardan called negative roots fictitious, and the founder of modern symbolic algebra, François Viète, discarded negative roots entirely. Descartes, called them false on the ground that they represented numbers less than nothing and so were meaningless.”

Morris Kline (1908–1992) American mathematician

Source: Mathematics and the Physical World (1959), p. 52.

Falseness

“Complaints about the damage done to our "democracy" by outsiders are worse than silly. Such damage pales compared to what we Americans have done to a compact rooted in the consent of the governed and the drastically limited and delimited powers of those who govern.”

Ilana Mercer South African writer

" Whodunit? Who Meddled With Out Democracy? http://www.wnd.com/2018/02/whodunit-who-meddled-with-our-democracy/" February 8, 2018, WND.com. 2010s, 2018

Democracy

“…but suppose we were an influence (as we might be), an idea, a thing invulnerable, intangible, without front or back, drifting about like a gas? Armies were like plants, immobile as a whole, firm-rooted, nourished through long stems to the head, we might be a vapor, blowing where we listed. Our kingdoms lay in each man's mind, as we wanted nothing material to live on, so perhaps we offered nothing material to the killing. It seemed a regular soldier might be helpless without a target. He would own the ground he sat on, and what he could poke his rifle at.”

T. E. Lawrence (1888–1935) British archaeologist, military officer, and diplomat

The Evolution of A Revolt (1920)

Idea

“The troubles are much more deep-rooted because of the inherent difficulties confronting a man who seeks to conduct his business on an ideal basis within an unjust social order.”

Kirby Page (1890–1957) American clergyman

Individualism and Socialism (1933)

Business

“Strong families value their extended family, particularly grandparents. In one study of college students, a majority thought their interactions with grandparents reflected high family strengths. It’s important to create continuity between generations, passing along traditions and making roots ever stronger, so the tree continues to reach for the sun.”

Joyce Brothers (1927–2013) Joyce Brothers

10 Keys to a Strong Family (2002)

Family, Tree, Study, Strong

“With a note of music, one strikes the fundamental, and, in addition to the root note, other notes are generated: these are called the harmonic series…As one fundamental note contains within it other notes in the octave, two fundamentals produce a remarkable array of harmonics, and the number of possible combinations between all the notes increases phenomenally. With a triad, affairs stand a good chance of getting severely out of hand…”

Robert Fripp (1946) English guitarist, composer and record producer

[Denyer, Ralph, The Guitar Handbook, 2002, 114, 0-679-74275-1]
Elsewhere

Music, Chance

“Houses, are but badly built boats so firmly aground that you cannot think of moving them. They are definitely inferior things, belonging to the vegetable not the animal world, rooted and stationary, incapable of gay transition. I admit, doubtfully, as exceptions, snail-shells and caravans. The desire to build a house is the tired wish of a man content thenceforward with a single anchorage. The desire to build a boat is the desire of youth, unwilling yet to accept the idea of a final resting-place.”

Arthur Ransome (1884–1967) English author and journalist

Racundra's First Cruise (Chapter 1), 1923

Youth, World, Idea, Thinking

“Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin. Economics and art are strangers.”

Willa Cather (1873–1947) American writer and novelist

"Four Letters: Escapism" first published in Commonweal (17 April 1936)
Willa Cather on Writing (1949)

Religion, Art, Spring

“The Bible says God gave herb for the service of man and bread to strengthen man's heart. Did you know bread used to strengthen your heart? But keep in mind, you know, "the love of money, the root of all evil." They learned years ago, if they take out the vitamin E, the lecithin, and the omega-3 fatty acids (they take them out of the wheat; and make the bread with white flour), the bread lasts for months. But the people started dying of heart attacks and strokes and circulation problems. See, it's a simple formula: the whiter the bread, the quicker you're dead. Now it's not the white bread that's killing you. It's what's not in the bread that's killing you. See, God made bread to strengthen your heart. Remember the Bible talked about "our daily bread." But people who are making bread to sell, got tired of having half of it go bad on the shelf where they couldn't sell it. So they had to figure out a way to make their bread last longer to increase profits.”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Creation seminars (2003-2005), The Garden of Eden

Love, Money, God, People

“We believe that the idea underlying this integral concept of statistics finds adequate expression in the ancient Indian work Sankhya in Sanskrit the usual meaning is ‘number‘, but the original root meaning was ‘determinate knowledge’ in the Atharva Veda a derivative from Sankhyata occurs both in the sense of ‘well-known‘ as well as ‘numbered’. The lexicons give both meanings. Amarakosa gives Sankhya – vicarana (deliberation, analysis) as well as ‘number’; also Sankhyavan”

Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis (1893–1972) Indian scientist

panditah (wise, learned).
Quote, Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis in Vigyanprasar

Idea, Knowledge, Sense, Learning

“Italy is, after France and perhaps in the same degree, the land in which love of country has the deepest roots in the hearts of its inhabitants. The fact is that perhaps nowhere else has nature been so prodigal with its enchantments and seductions. Therefore, although Italy has been, since the fall of the Caesars, the object of European covetousness, the eternal battlefield of powerful neighbors, and the theatre of the fiercest and most prolonged civil wars, her children have always refused to leave her. Save for some commercial colonies hastily thrown upon the shores of Asia by Genoa and Venice, history has not, in fact, recorded in Italy any important outward movement of population.”

Alfred Legoyt (1812–1869) statistician and author

Alfred Legoyt (1861) cited in: [Richard N. Juliani, Building Little Italy, http://books.google.com/books?id=IbB7AnIJ8fsC&pg=PA184, June 2005, Penn State Press, 978-0-271-02864-4, 184–]

Love, War, Children, History

“The natural food of man, judging from his structure, appears to consist of the fruits, roots, and other succulent parts of vegetables.”

Georges Cuvier (1769–1832) French naturalist, zoologist and paleontologist (1769–1832)

The Animal Kingdom https://books.google.it/books?id=gKBgAAAAcAAJ&pg=PA0, trans. H. McMurtrie, London: Orr and Smith, 1834, p. 37.

Food, Nature, Appearance, Parting

“It is certainly not a matter of indifference whether I learn something without effort or finally arrive at it myself through my system of thought. In the latter case everything has roots, in the former it is merely superficial.”

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–1799) German scientist, satirist

F154
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook F (1776-1779)

Effort, Learning, Indifference

“All characteristics of material things as they are presented to us in the acts of external perception (e. g. colour) are endowed with the separateness of spatial extension, but it is only when we build up a single connected real world out of all our experiences that the spatial extension, which is a constituent of every perception, becomes a part of one and the same all-inclusive space. … every material thing can, without changing content, equally well occupy a position in Space different from its present one. This immediately gives us the property of the homogeneity of space which is the root of the conception, Congruence.”

Hermann Weyl (1885–1955) German mathematician

Introduction
Space—Time—Matter (1952)

World, Change, Parting

“The root of all religions, from the Baha'i point of view, is based on the theory that man will gradually come to understand the unity of the world and the oneness of mankind. It teaches that all the prophets are one – that science and religion are the two great powers which must be balanced if man is to become mature. I feel my work has been influenced by these beliefs. I've tried to decentralize and interpenetrate so that all parts of a painting are of related value.”

Mark Tobey (1890–1976) American abstract expressionist painter

as quoted in Abstract Expressionism, Barbara Hess, Taschen, Köln, 2006, p. 60
posthumous Quotes

World, Religion, Feeling, Understanding

“David, who recently returned to his roots when he bought a house in Hampstead — bang in the middle of the North-West London Jewish heartland — could not be more Jewish if he hung a Star Of David round his neck and spent Friday nights saying kiddush.”

Craig David (1981) English singer

About

Star, Housing, Night

“When Reagan and Thatcher came to power, “authoritarian populism” was a term academics used to describe their politics. Now it’s a phenomenon, growing rapidly, cutting across old definitions of left and right, goes the argument. But it’s not so simple and the phenomenon is not new. The term “authoritarian populist” is a construct that, if we are not careful, could blind us to the real roots of centrism’s sudden crisis – and to the answers.”

Paul Mason (journalist) (1960) British journalist

How do we fight the loudmouth politics of authoritarian populism? (21 November 2016)

“Lolla-Wossiky is left like a White man then. Cut off from the land. Ground crunching underfoot. Branches snagging. Roots tripping. Animals running away.”

Orson Scott Card (1951) American science fiction novelist

Source: The Tales of Alvin Maker, Red Prophet (1988), Chapter 4.

Animals

“Vytas Juozapaitis is simply terrific as the Don; lean, agile, and the possessor of a Zorro-like sexiness, he seemed part old fashioned matinee idol, yet firmly rooted in the here and now a la Johnny Depp. Like the singer, the voice is attractive, lean and powerful. His seduction of Zerlina, smooth as silk. He had the audience in the palm of his hand.”

Vytautas Juozapaitis (1963) Lithuanian opera singer

Paulo Padillo, Opera - L (September 24, 2003)

Fashion, Parting

“In fact, Mr Chairman, what is clear is that the Spanish Government are behaving like the last colonists in Europe! And as a Committee charged with the eradication of colonialism, what you and the C24 must do is prevent Spain’s neo-colonialism. You must stop if from taking root. You must not promote it.”

Fabian Picardo (1972) Gibraltarian politician and barrister

Address to the United Nations Fourth Committee in New York
2015

“Reform is never easy and there are municipalities fighting to maintain the status quo. They are surviving on borrowed time. We continue to fight these bureaucrats and are confident that taxation by citation will soon be coming to an end. Our efforts in Missouri are rooted in the belief that government is supposed to work for the people and not to grow government’s reach and influence by abusive schemes.”

Eric Schmitt (1975) American politician, lawyer

No more taxation by citation in Ferguson: Column https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2016/08/09/taxation-ferguson-police-reform-michael-brown-shooting-column/88445780/ (August 9, 2016)

People, Confidence, Effort, Time

“At one level, this movement on behalf of oppressed farm animals is emotional … Yet the movement is also the product of a deep intellectual ferment pioneered by the Princeton scholar Peter Singer. … This idea popularized by Professor Singer — that we have ethical obligations that transcend our species — is one whose time appears to have come. … What we’re seeing now is an interesting moral moment: a grass-roots effort by members of one species to promote the welfare of others. … animal rights are now firmly on the mainstream ethical agenda.”

Nicholas D. Kristof (1959) journalist, author, columnist

" Humanity Even for Nonhumans http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/09/opinion/09kristof.html", New York Times, 8 April 2009

Idea, Effort, Grass, Appearance

“It's rooted in the fears to which all men are heir and, thus, deserves sympathy, not censure or laughter. The dream may be out of touch with history, but it's a good dream, and it doesn't appear to have been used to bilk gullible widows out of their savings. Never mind that we have a consistent record of slaughtering our messiahs. Look beyond the wacky arguments to the motivation — that sense of brotherhood which is all that has ever saved mankind from going over the brink.”

Frank Herbert (1920–1986) American writer

On belief in UFOs, in "Flying Saucers: Fact or Farce?", San Francisco Sunday Examiner & Chronicle, "People" supplement, (20 October 1963); reprinted in The Maker of Dune : Insights of a Master of Science Fiction (1987), edited by Tim O'Reilly
General sources

Men, Fear, Dreams, History

“I grew up in Baltimore and that's why I root for the Orioles. I'm very suspicious of people who move and take on a new team. You should stick with the team of your youth all the way to your grave. That shows a sense of loyalty and devotion.”

Frank Deford (1938–2017) American sportswriter

Sweetness And Light, Deford, Frank, 2004-08-14, Morning Edition, National Public Radio http://www.npr.org/templates/rundowns/rundown.php?prgId=3&prgDate=08-14-2004,

People, Youth, Way, Sense

“The basic ideals and concepts of rationalist metaphysics were rooted in the concept of the universally human, of mankind, and their formalization implies that they have been severed from their human content. How this dehumanization of thinking affects the very foundations of our civilization can be illustrated by analysis of the principle of the majority, which is inseparable from the principle of democracy. In the eyes of the average man, the principle of the majority is often not only a substitute for but an improvement upon objective reason: since men are after all the best judges of their own interests, the resolutions of a majority, it is thought, are certainly as valuable to a community as the intuitions of a so-called superior reason. … What does it mean to say that “a man knows his own interests best”—how does he gain this knowledge, what evidences that his knowledge is correct? In the proposition, “A man knows [his own interests] best,” there is an implicit reference to an agency that is not totally arbitrary … to some sort of reason underlying not only means but ends as well. If that agency should turn out to be again merely the majority, the whole argument would constitute a tautology. The great philosophical tradition that contributed to the founding of modern democracy was not guilty of this tautology, for it based the principles of government upon … the assumption that the same spiritual substance or moral consciousness is present in each human being. In other words, respect for the majority was based on a conviction that did not itself depend on the resolutions of the majority.”

Max Horkheimer book Eclipse of Reason

Source: Eclipse of Reason (1947), pp. 26-27.

Men, Democracy, Communication, Knowledge

“I think it's bad to talk about one's present work, for it spoils something at the root of the creative act. It discharges the tension.”

Norman Mailer (1923–2007) American novelist, journalist, essayist, playwright, film maker, actor and political candidate

As quoted in The Writer's Quotation Book : A Literary Companion (1980) by James Charlton, p. 43

Thinking

“I'm increasingly convinced that the principal moral errors of contemporary western societies, especially among elites, are rooted in the triumph of Hobbes' view of human beings as basically machines for having experiences. It's the anthropology underwriting the Age of Feeling.”

Robert P. George (1955) American legal scholar

Twitter post https://twitter.com/McCormickProf/status/947851434816655361 (1 January 2018) 2018

Age, Error, Feeling

“Let it be realized by everybody concerned that India has always been and remains, the citadel of the most bigoted and bloodthirsty zealotry of Islam. The historical reasons for why it is so, are many. I do not have the time to detail them here. The main reason may be told. Islam in India has been what it has been because India has continued to stare at Islam as its greatest failure. Islam in India has never been able to relax, as it could do in countries which it converted completely. And it will not relax till Hindus learn to knock out its ideological fangs which are rooted in the Quran.”

Sita Ram Goel book The Calcutta Quran Petition

The Calcutta Quran Petition (1986)

Failure, Learning, Time, Country

“In our imaginations the adults of our childhood remain extreme, essential — we might say radical since they are the roots that fed luxuriant later systems. Those first bohemians, for instance, stay operatic in memory even though were we to meet them today — well, what would we think, we who've elaborated our eccentricities with a patience, a professionalism they never knew?”

Edmund White book A Boy's Own Story

Source: A Boy's Own Story (1982), Chapter Four (p. 92).

Imagination, Thinking, Memory, Childhood

“The sheer decibel level of unreason surrounding the issue of abortion in academic writing about animal rights tells us something interesting. It suggests that, contrary to what the utilitarians and feminists working this terrain wish, the dots between sympathy for animals and sympathy for unborn humans are in fact quite easy to connect—so easy, you might say, that a child could do it. … Since ethical vegetarianism as a practice appears commonly rooted in an a priori aversion to violence against living creatures, so does it often appear to begin in the young. … A sudden insight, igniting empathy on a scale that did not exist before and perhaps even a life-transforming realization—this reaction should indeed be thought through with care. It is not only the most commonly cited feature of the decision to become a vegetarian. It is also the most commonly cited denominator of what brings people to their convictions about the desperate need to protect unborn, innocent human life. … Despite those who act and write in their name, actual vegetarians and vegans are far more likely to be motivated by positive feelings for animals than by negative feelings for human beings. As a matter of theory, the line connecting the dots between “we should respect animal life” and “we should respect human life” is far straighter than the line connecting vegetarianism to antilife feminism or antihumanist utilitarianism.”

Mary Eberstadt American writer

"Pro-Animal, Pro-Life" https://www.firstthings.com/article/2009/06/pro-animal-pro-life, in First Things (June 2009).

Life, People, Feeling, Motivation

“To be thus—
Grey-hair'd with anguish, like these blasted pines,
Wrecks of a single winter, barkless, branchless,
A blighted trunk upon a cursed root,
Which but supplies a feeling to decay—
And to be thus, eternally but thus,
Having been otherwise! Now furrow'd o'er
With wrinkles, plough'd by moments, not by years
And hours—all tortured into ages—hours
Which I outlive!—Ye toppling crags of ice!
Ye avalanches, whom a breath draws down
In mountainous o'erwhelming, come and crush me!
I hear ye momently above, beneath,
Crash with a frequent conflict; but ye pass,
And only fall on things that still would live.”

George Gordon Byron book Manfred

Act I, scene ii.
Manfred (1817)

Age, Feeling, Mountain, Winter

“Where the roots of private virtue are diseased, the fruit of public probity cannot but be corrupt.”

Felix Adler (1851–1933) German American professor of political and social ethics, rationalist, and lecturer

Founding Address (1876)

Disease

“One of the first algebraists to accept negative numbers was… placed negative numbers on a par with positive numbers and gave both roots of a quadratic equation, even when both were negative. Both Girard and Harriot used the minus sign for the operation of subtraction and for negative numbers.”

Morris Kline (1908–1992) American mathematician

Source: Mathematical Thought from Ancient to Modern Times (1972), pp. 252-253.

“Can we reverse these deeply rooted sources sources of inequality? Or are they just endemic to a capitalist economy?”

Robert Kuttner (1943) American journalist

Guardian Weekly, June 30, 1996

“If I love you—
I never behave like a climbing trumpet vine
Using your high branches to show myself off;
If I love you—
I never mimic infatuated little birds
Repeating monotonous songs into the shadows,
Nor do I look at all like a wellspring
Sending out its cooling consolation all year round,
Or just another perilous crag
Augmenting your height, setting off your prestige.
Nor like the sunlight
Or even spring rain.
No, these are not enough.
I would be a kapok tree by your side
Standing with you—
both of us shaped like trees.
Our roots hold hands underground,
Our leaves touch in the clouds.
As a gust of wind passes by
We salute each other
And not a soul
Understands our language.
You have your bronze boughs and iron trunk
Like knives and swords,
Also like halberds;
I have my red flowers
Like heavy sighs,
Also like heroic torches.
We share cold waves, storms and thunderbolts;
Together we savor fog, haze and rainbows.
We seem to always live apart,
But actually depend upon each other forever.
This has to be called extraordinary love.
Faith resides in it:
Love—
I love not only your sublime body
But the space you occupy,
The land beneath your feet.”

Shu Ting (1952) Chinese writer

"To the Oak Tree" [ 致橡树 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=APZjf9K6KX0, Zhi xiangshu] (27 March 1977), in The Red Azalea: Chinese Poetry Since the Cultural Revolution, ed. Edward Morin, trans. Fang Dai and Dennis Ding (University of Hawaii Press, 1990), ISBN 978-0824813208, pp. 102–103.

Love, Faith, Soul, Spring

“Our moral ideas are not transcendent, our moral ideas are historical and History obeys to changing Aions, we feel that ours is fading and no authority can enforce confidence rooted in what no power includes : in Sensibility itself. To every Aion a new Sensibility adheres and to each Sensibility another Aion is related, sin is nowhere, we only see abuse and worst among abuses, the delusion of sin as such.”

Albert Caraco (1919–1971) French-Uruguayan philosopher

Ma confession, Lausanne: L'Âge d'Homme, p. 92
Ma confession (1975)

Feeling, Confidence, History, Idea

“I would emphasize again that social and economic solutions, as such, will not avail to satisfy the aspirations of the people unless they conform with the traditions of our race, deeply grooved in their sentiments through a century and a half of struggle for ideals of life that are rooted in religion and fed from purely spiritual springs.”

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

Herbert Hoover, 1874-1964 (1971)

Life, People, Religion, Spring

“The genuinely innovatory, the truly 'experiential' poetry is always firmly rooted in the achievement of the past.”

Vernon Scannell (1922–2007) British boxer and poet

A Proper Gentleman, 1977

Past

“What are the next steps in the war against terrorism? And beyond immediate next steps, what is the longer-range plan of action? And finally, what should be done to deal with root causes of this threat?”

Al Gore (1948) 45th Vice President of the United States

Quotes, Our Larger Tasks (2002)

War

“Being so deeply rooted in one place and culture allows a genuine writer to experiment wildly with the material without ever losing touch with its essence.”

Dana Gioia (1950) American writer

"The Most Unfashionable Poet Now Alive: Charles Causley," http://www.danagioia.net/essays/ecausley.htm published in The Dark Horse (Summer 1997 and Spring 1998) Essays

“A man is a bundle of relations, a knot of roots, whose flower and fruitage is the world.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

History
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919), Essays, First Series

World, Flowers

“The government of the Israelites was a Federation, held together by no political authority, but by the unity of… faith and founded not on physical force but on a voluntary covenant. The principle of self-government was carried out not only in each tribe, but in every group of at least 120 families; and there was neither privilege of rank nor inequality before the law. Monarchy was so alien to the primitive spirit of the community that it was resisted by Samuel… The throne was erected on a compact; and the king was deprived of the right of legislation among a people that recognised no lawgiver but God, whose highest aim in politics was to… make its government conform to the ideal type that was hallowed by the sanctions of heaven. The inspired men who rose in unfailing succession to prophesy against the usurper and the tyrant, constantly proclaimed that the laws, which were divine, were paramount over sinful rulers, and appealed… to the healing forces that slept in the uncorrupted consciences of the masses. Thus the… Hebrew nation laid down the parallel lines on which all freedom has been won—the doctrine of national tradition and the doctrine of the higher law; the principle that a constitution grows from a root, by process of development… and the principle that all political authorities must be tested and reformed according to a code which was not made by man. The operation of these principles… occupies the whole of the space we are going over together.”

John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton (1834–1902) British politician and historian

Source: The History of Freedom in Antiquity (1877)

Men, God, People, Family

“Nature repairs her ravages, but not all. The uptorn trees are not rooted again; the parted hills are left scarred; if there is a new growth, the trees are not the same as the old, and the hills underneath their green vesture bear the marks of the past rending. To the eyes that have dwelt on the past, there is no thorough repair.”

George Eliot book The Mill on the Floss

The Mill on the Floss (1860)

Nature, Tree, Past, Parting

““When the blessed canopy had been fixed about a mile from the gate of Arangal, the tents around the fort were pitched together so closely that the head of a needle could not go between them… Orders were issued that every man should erect behind his own tent a kathgar, that is wooden defence. The trees were cut with axes and felled, notwithstanding their groans; and the Hindus, who worship trees, could not at that time come to the rescue of their idols, so that every cursed tree which was in that capital of idolatry was cut down to the roots…”

Amir Khusrow (1253–1325) Indian poet, writer, musician and scholar

About Sultan ‘Alau’d-Din Khalji (AD 1296-1316) and his generals conquests in Warangal (Andhra Pradesh) Elliot and Dowson, History of India as told by its own Historians,Vol. III, p. 81-85
Khazainu’l-Futuh

Tree, Time

“Shakespeare gets to the root of the alcohol question in his well-known statement—'Good wine is a good, familiar creature if it be well used.”

William Osler (1849–1919) Canadian pathologist, physician, educator, bibliophile, historian, author, cofounder of Johns Hopkins Hospi…

Alcohol in St. Elizabeth Parish Magazine (1905). As quoted in Counsels and ideals from the writings of William Osler (1921, 2nd edition) http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=hvd.hc1qm3;view=1up;seq=295

Alcohol, Question, Wine

“If Heaven does not completely abandon this land of the Gods, there must be an uprising of grass-roots heroes.”

Yoshida Shoin (1830–1859) Japanese politician

Vol. IX.
Yoshida Shoin Zenshu

God, Grass

“More than four years after the financial crisis began, the world's major advanced economies remain deeply depressed, in a scene all too reminiscent of the 1930s. And the reason is simple: we are relying on the same ideas that governed policy in the 1930s. These ideas, long since disproved, involve profound errors both about the causes of the crisis, its nature, and the appropriate response.These errors have taken deep root in public consciousness and provide the public support for the excessive austerity of current fiscal policies in many countries. So the time is ripe for a Manifesto in which mainstream economists offer the public a more evidence-based analysis of our problems.”

Paul Krugman (1953) American economist

Paul Krugman and Richard Layard, "A Manifesto for Economic Sense" (June 27, 2012)

World, Error, Idea, Support

“One Australian tradition is to cut down the elite and the successful. It had its roots in the era of convicts who naturally opposed those in authority. This levelling or egalitarian tradition continued to flourish on the goldfields in the 1850s when the unusual mining laws gave everyone an opportunity to find gold, and the tradition was accentuated around 1900 by the rising trade unions. The attitude was one of the spurs to Australian democracy.”

Geoffrey Blainey (1930) Australian historian

The Story of Australia's People: The Rise and Rise of a New Australia (2016)

Law, Democracy, Nature, Success

“Oh special day, unveil your essence which redeems –
newness of peace
you are beyond utility.
To love from the root,
all united for ever, beyond the appearance of the transient forms.”

Aldo Capitini (1899–1968) Italian philosopher and political activist

Chorus

Love, Peace, Appearance

“I think the roots of this antagonism to science run very deep. They're ancient. We see them in Genesis, this first story, this founding myth of ours, in which the first humans are doomed and cursed eternally for asking a question, for partaking of the fruit of the "Tree of Knowledge". It's puzzling that Eden is synonymous with paradise when, if you think about it at all, it's more like a maximum-security prison with twenty-four hour surveillance. It's a horrible place. Adam and Eve have no childhood. They awaken full-grown. What is a human being without a childhood? Our long childhood is a critical feature of our species. It differentiates us, to a degree, from most other species. We take a longer time to mature. We depend upon these formative years and the social fabric to learn many of the things we need to know.”

Ann Druyan (1949) American author and producer

Ann Druyan interviewed by the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. — "Ann Druyan Talks About Science, Religion, Wonder, Awe … and Carl Sagan" http://www.csicop.org/si/show/ann_druyan_talks_about_science_religion/. Skeptical Inquirer 27 (6). November–December 2003.

Question, Knowledge, Thinking, Tree

“If in later life she has mastered her hunger drive by ego control, she may assume that she can control her fate herself. But that ego may in fact be very weak, because it has been built by cutting herself off from the mainstream of life through severe dieting. It is built on negative rather than positive need. In a real life crisis, such an ego may fail to operate because she does not know consciously what her own needs are. […] An ego which sets itself up against Fate is attempting to usurp the power of the Self; it swings from light to dark, from inflation to depression. Only when her ego is firmly rooted in her own feminine feeling can a woman be released from her compulsive behavior.”

Marion Woodman (1928–2018) Canadian writer

Source: The Owl Was a Baker's Daughter (1980), p. 33

Life, Hunger, Fate, Behavior

“The demand for a Constituent Assembly was intrinsically linked to our larger goal of Freedom and Independence. The resolution for Purna Swaraj in 1929 had aroused great nationalist fervour and galvanized the people to take part with renewed vigour in the Freedom Movement. The clear and unambiguous articulation of this deep-rooted longing of the people of India to be in control of their own destiny contained within itself the idea of a democratic Constitution which would provide a framework for the governance of independent India by the Indian people. Clearly, such a Constitution could only be drawn up by the elected representatives of the people of India. It was from this unassailable logic that the demand for a Constituent Assembly was articulated by Panditji. The proposal was accepted by the Indian National Congress in 1934, whereafter it became a significant part of the nationalist agenda for Independent India.”

Shankar Dayal Sharma (1918–1999) Indian politician

Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru has compelled me to study, among other things, the implications of a Constituent Assembly. When he first introduced it in the Congress resolutions, I reconciled myself to it because of my belief in his superior knowledge of the technicalities of democracy. But I was not free from skepticism. Hard facts have, however, made me a convert and, for that reason perhaps, more enthusiastic than Jawaharlal himself.
Address By Dr. Shanker Dayal Sharma President Of India On The Occasion Of The 50th Anniversary Of The First Sitting Of The Constituent Assembly

People, Idea, Freedom, Parting

“What will be the influence of communist society on the family? It will transform the relations between the sexes into a purely private matter which concerns only the persons involved and into which society has no occasion to intervene. It can do this since it does away with private property and educates children on a communal basis, and in this way removes the two bases of traditional marriage – the dependence rooted in private property, of the women on the man, and of the children on the parents.”

Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) German social scientist, author, political theorist, and philosopher

(1847)

Women, Marriage, Children, Education

Quotes about root page 11

Quotes about root
page 11