Quotes about root
page 5

Burkard Schliessmann photo
Jacob Bronowski photo
Sarah Schulman photo
Christopher Hitchens photo

“We know that the enemies of our civilization and of Arab-Muslim civilization have emerged from what is actually a root cause. The root cause is the political slum of client states from Saudi Arabia through Iraq, Pakistan and elsewhere, that has been allowed to dominate the region under U. S. patronage, and uses people and resources as if they were a gas station with a few flyblown attendants. To the extent that this policy, this mentality, has now changed in the administration, to the extent that their review of that is sincere and the conclusions that they draw from it are sincere, I think that should be welcomed. It's a big improvement to be intervening in Iraq against Saddam Hussein instead of in his favor. I think it makes a nice change. It's a regime change for us too. Now I'll state what I think is gonna happen. I've been in London and Washington a lot lately and all I can tell you is that the spokesmen for Mr. Blair and Mr. Bush walk around with a look of extraordinary confidence on their faces, as if they know something that when disclosed, will dissolve the doubts, the informational doubts at any rate, of people who wonder if there is enough evidence. [Mark Danner: It's amazing they've been able to keep it to themselves for so long. ] I simply say, I have two reasons for confidence. I know perfectly well that there are many people who would not be persuaded by this evidence even if it was dumped on their own doorstep, because the same people, many of the same people, didn't believe that it was worth fighting in Afghanistan even though the connection between the Taliban and Al Qaeda was as clear as could possibly be. So I know that. There's a strong faction of the so-called peace movement that is immune to evidence and also incapable of self criticism, of imagining what these countries would be like if the advice of the peaceniks has been followed. I also made some inquiries of my own, and I think I know what some of these disclosures will be. But, as a matter of fact I think we know enough. And what will happen will be this: The President will give an order, there will then occur in Iraq a show of military force like nothing probably the world has ever seen. It will be rapid and accurate and overwhelming enough to deal with an army or a country many times the size of Iraq, even if that country possessed what Iraq does not, armed forces in the command structure willing to obey and be the last to die for the supreme leader. And that will be greeted by the majority of Iraqi people and Kurdish people as a moment of emancipation, which will be a pleasure to see, and then the hard work of the reconstitution of Iraqi society and the repayment of our debt — some part of our debt to them — can begin. And I say, bring it on.”

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) British American author and journalist

"How Should We Use Our Power: A Debate on Iraq" http://www.commonwealthclub.org/archive/03/03-01hitchensdanner-qa.html with Mark Danner at UC Berkeley (2003-01-28}: On the 2003 invasion of Iraq
2000s, 2003

Nikolai Berdyaev photo

“Ever since the Industrial Revolution, Western society has benefited from science, logic, and reductionism over intuition and holism. Psychologically and politically we would much rather assume that the cause of a problem is “out there,” rather than “in here.” It’s almost irresistible to blame something or someone else, to shift responsibility away from ourselves, and to look for the control knob, the product, the pill, the technical fix that will make a problem go away.
Serious problems have been solved by focusing on external agents — preventing smallpox, increasing food production, moving large weights and many people rapidly over long distances. Because they are embedded in larger systems, however, some of our “solutions” have created further problems. And some problems, those most rooted in the internal structure of complex systems, the real messes, have refused to go away.
Hunger, poverty, environmental degradation, economic instability, unemployment, chronic disease, drug addiction, and war, for example, persist in spite of the analytical ability and technical brilliance that have been directed toward eradicating them. No one deliberately creates those problems, no one wants them to persist, but they persist nonetheless.
That is because they are intrinsically systems problems-undesirable behaviors characteristic of the system structures that produce them. They will yield only as we reclaim our intuition, stop casting blame, see the system as the source of its own problems, and find the courage and wisdom to restructure it.”

Donella Meadows (1941–2001) American environmental scientist, teacher, and writer

Pages 3-4.
Thinking in systems: A Primer (2008)

John Ruysbroeck photo
Walter Benjamin photo

“The question to address is that of the conscious unity of student life … the will to submit to a principle, to identify completely with an idea. The concept of "science" or scholarly discipline serves primarily to conceal a deep-rooted bourgeois indifference.”

Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) German literary critic, philosopher and social critic (1892-1940)

An das Leben der Studenten tritt die Frage nach seiner bewußten Einheit heran. ... Das Auszeichnende im Studentenleben ist in der Tat der Gegenwille, sich einem Prinzip zu unterwerfen, mit der Idee sich zu durchdringen. Der Name der Wissenschaft dient vorzüglich, eine tiefeingesessene, verbürgerte Indifferenz zu verbergen.
The Life of Students (1915)

Kevin Kelly photo

“Everyday we see evidence of biological growth in technological systems. This is one of the marks of the network economy: that biology has taken root in technology. And this is one of the reasons why networks change everything.”

Kevin Kelly (1952) American author and editor

Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World (1995), New Rules for the New Economy: 10 Radical Strategies for a Connected World (1999)

Wilhelm II, German Emperor photo

“The Party which dares to attack the foundations of our State, which sets itself against religion and does not stop at attacking the person of the All-Highest Ruler must be rooted out to the very last stump.”

Wilhelm II, German Emperor (1859–1941) German Emperor and King of Prussia

Speech (26 February 1897), quoted in Michael Balfour, The Kaiser and His Times (London: Penguin, 1975), p. 159
1890s

Calvin Coolidge photo
Robert Louis Stevenson photo
William Pitt, 1st Earl of Chatham photo

“It must cut up Liberty by the root and poison the Fountain of Publick Security; and who that has an English heart can ever be weary of asserting Liberty?”

William Pitt, 1st Earl of Chatham (1708–1778) British politician

Denouncing the patronage system (February 1740), quoted in Basil Williams, The Life of William Pitt, Earl of Chatham. Volume I (London: Longmans, 1913), p. 80.

Neal Stephenson photo
Dwight D. Eisenhower photo
Corneliu Zelea Codreanu photo
Ilana Mercer photo
Newton Lee photo

“Trying to get rid of the symptoms (terrorists) without paying attention to the root cause (terrorist motives) does not eradicate the disease but may instead exacerbate it.”

Newton Lee American computer scientist

Counterterrorism and Cybersecurity: Total Information Awareness (2nd Edition), 2015

Thomas Carlyle photo
Amber Benson photo

“It was interesting to have humanoid villains that were rooted in our three-dimensional reality… or four dimensional reality, I'm not sure which!”

Amber Benson (1977) actress from the United States

Amber Benson - Interview at Madame Tussaud's - 10 December, 2003

“Sanskrit is constructed like geometry and follows a rigorous logic. It is theoretically possible to explain the meaning of the words according to the combined sense of the relative letters, syllables and roots. Sanskrit has no meanings by connotations and consequently does not age. Panini's language is in no way different from that of Hindu scholars conferring in Sanskrit today.”

Pāṇini ancient Sanskrit grammarian

Alain Danielou in: Virtue, Success, Pleasure, and Liberation: The Four Aims of Life in the Tradition of Ancient India https://books.google.co.in/books?id=IMSngEmfdS0C&pg=PA17, Inner Traditions / Bear & Co, 1 August 1993 , p. 17.

Rollo May photo
William Jones photo
Sun Myung Moon photo
Ralph Waldo Emerson photo

“A ruddy drop of manly blood
The surging sea outweighs;
The world uncertain comes and goes,
The lover rooted stays.”

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

Epigraph to Friendship
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919), Essays, First Series
Variant: A ruddy drop of manly blood
The surging sea outweighs;
The world uncertain comes and goes,
The lover rooted stays.

Piero Manzoni photo
Toni Morrison photo
Kurien Kunnumpuram photo
Navneet Aditya Waiba photo

“I would like to inspire the younger generation to go back to the roots we belong to. I feel that the songs will bring back those memories.”

Navneet Aditya Waiba Nepali folk singer

https://thehimalayantimes.com/entertainment/music/songs-of-tribute-navneet-aditya-waiba-and-satya-aditya-waiba/

Mark Kingwell photo
Ursula K. Le Guin photo
James Meade photo
Laisenia Qarase photo

“Good governance is also about rooting out corruption, which is a stain on the integrity of any nation.”

Laisenia Qarase (1941) Prime Minister of Fiji

Excerpts from a speech to the Association of Development Financing Institutions in Asia and the Pacific, 13 May 2005

Oscar Niemeyer photo

“I have always accepted and respected all other schools of architecture, from the chill and elemental structures of Mies van der Rohe to the imagination and delirium of Gaudi. I must design what pleases me in a way that is naturally linked to my roots and the country of my origin.”

Oscar Niemeyer (1907–2012) Brazilian architect

Quoted in "Gordon Bunshaft and Oscar Niemeyer: Pritzker Architecture Prize Laureates 1988" http://www.pritzkerprize.com/bunnei.htm#...about%20Oscar%20Niemeyer, pritzkerprize.com (1988).

Daniel Dennett photo
Max Müller photo
Robert A. Heinlein photo
Michael Moorcock photo
Gancho Tsenov photo
George Eliot photo
Thomas Jefferson photo
Luther Burbank photo
George C. Lorimer photo
Walter Wink photo
Adolf Hitler photo

“The main plank in the National Socialist program is to abolish the liberalistic concept of the individual and the Marxist concept of humanity and to substitute therefore the folk community, rooted in the soil and bound together by the bond of its common blood.”

Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) Führer and Reich Chancellor of Germany, Leader of the Nazi Party

On National Socialism and World Relations http://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/hitler1.htm, speech in the German Reichstag (January 30, 1937). German translation published by H. Müller & Sohn in Berlin.
1930s

Norman Mailer photo
Harold Macmillan photo
Marcos Pontes photo
Pablo Neruda photo

“I do not want to be the inheritor of so many misfortunes.
I do not want to continue as a root and as a tomb,
as a solitary tunnel, as a cellar full of corpses,
stiff with cold, dying with pain.”

Pablo Neruda (1904–1973) Chilean poet

No quiero para mí tantas desgracias.
No quiero continuar de raíz y de tumba,
de subterráneo solo, de bodega con muertos
ateridos, muriéndome de pena.
Walking Around, Residencia II (Residence II), II, stanza 4-5.
Alternate translation by Donald D. Walsh:
I do not want for myself so many misfortunes.
I do not want to continue as root and tomb,
just underground, a vault with corpses
stiff with cold, dying of distress.
Residencia en la Tierra (Residence on Earth) (1933)

John Fante photo

“I went up to my room, up the dusty stairs of Bunker Hill, past the soot-covered frame buildings along that dark street, sand and oil and grease choking the futile palm trees standing like dying prisoners, chained to a little plot of ground with black pavement hiding their feet. Dust and old buildings and old people sitting at windows, old people tottering out of doors, old people moving painfully along the dark street. The old folk from Indiana and Iowa and Illinois, from Boston and Kansas City and Des Moines, they sold their homes and their stores, and they came here by train and by automobile to the land of sunshine, to die in the sun, with just enough money to live until the sun killed them, tore themselves out by the roots in their last days, deserted the smug prosperity of Kansas City and Chicago and Peoria to find a place in the sun. And when they got here they found that other and greater thieves had already taken possession, that even the sun belonged to the others; Smith and Jones and Parker, druggist, banker, baker, dust of Chicago and Cincinnati and Cleveland on their shoes, doomed to die in the sun, a few dollars in the bank, enough to subscribe to the Los Angeles Times, enough to keep alive the illusion that this was paradise, that their little papier-mâché homes were castles. The uprooted ones, the empty sad folks, the old and the young folks, the folks from back home. These were my countrymen, these were the new Californians. With their bright polo shirts and sunglasses, they were in paradise, they belonged.”

Ask the Dust (1939)

“A typical example of such sufism was Shykh Nuruddin Mubarak Ghaznavi (died 1234-35 AD), a disciple of Shykh Shihabuddin Suhrawardi (1144-1234 AD), and one of the founders of the Suhrawardia sufi silsilã in India. He propounded the doctrine of Dîn Panãhî, and presented it to Sultan Iltutmish (1210-36 AD). This doctrine declared its very first principle as follows: “The kings should protect the religion of Islam with sincere faith. And kings will not be able to perform the duty of protecting the Faith unless for the sake of Allah and the Prophet’s creed, they overthrow and uproot kufr and kafirî, shirk and the worship of idols. But if the total uprooting of idolatry is not possible owing to the firm roots of kufr and the large number of kãfirs and mushriks, the kings should at least strive to insult, disgrace, dishonour and defame the mushrik and idol-worshipping Hindus, who are the worst enemies of Allah and the Prophet. The symptom of the kings being the protectors of religion is this: When they see a Hindu, their eyes grow red and they wish to bury him alive; they also desire to completely uproot the Brahmans, who are the leaders of kufr and shirk and owing to whom kufr and shirk are spread and the commandments of kufr are enforced. Owing to the fear and terror of the kings of Islam, not a single enemy of Allah and the Prophet can drink water that is sweet or stretch his legs on his bed and go to sleep in peace.””

Sita Ram Goel (1921–2003) Indian activist

Such statements from sufis can be multiplied. Amir Khusru, the dearest disciple of Nizamuddin Awliya (Chishtiyya luminary of Delhi), mourned loudly that if the Hanafi law (which accommodated Hindus as zimmîs) had not come in the way, the very name Hindu would not have survived.
Defence of Hindu Society (1983)

Benjamin R. Barber photo
Roy Jenkins photo

“There has been a lot of talk about the formation of a new centre party. Some have even been kind enough to suggest that I might lead it. I find this idea profoundly unattractive. I do so for at least four reasons. First, I do not believe that such a grouping would have any coherent philosophical base…A party based on such a rag-bag could stand for nothing positive. It would exploit grievances and fall apart when it sought to remedy them. I believe in exactly the reverse sort of politics…Second, I believe that the most likely effect of such an ill-considered grouping would be to destroy the prospect of an effective alternative government to the Conservatives…Some genuinely want a new, powerful anti-Conservative force. They would be wise to reflect that it is much easier to will this than to bring it about. The most likely result would be chaos on the left and several decades of Conservative hegemony almost as dismal and damaging as in the twenties and thirties. Third, I do not share the desire, at the root of much such thinking, to push what may roughly be called the leftward half of the Labour Party…out of the mainstream of British politics…Fourth, and more personally, I cannot be indifferent to the political traditions in which I was brought up and in which I have lived my political life. Politics are not to me a religion, but the Labour Party is and always had been an instinctive part of my life.”

Roy Jenkins (1920–2003) British politician, historian and writer

Speech to the Oxford University Labour Club (9 March 1973), quoted in The Times (10 March 1973), p. 4
1970s

Jeremy Corbyn photo
Max Born photo

“The belief that there is only one truth and that oneself is in possession of it, seems to me the deepest root of all that is evil in the world.”

Max Born (1882–1970) physicist

Variants (these could be paraphrases or differing translations): The belief that there is only one truth and that oneself is in possession of it seems to me the deepest root of all evil that is in the world.
The belief that there is only one truth, and that oneself is in possession of it, is the root of all evil in the world.
Source: Natural Philosophy of Cause and Chance (1964), p. 230, also in My Life and Views (1968), p. 183

Miguel de Unamuno photo
Miguel de Unamuno photo
Paul Klee photo
Bobby Jindal photo

“To succeed, we have to be the party of change, we have to root out corruption in our own ranks and we have to be the party of solutions.”

Bobby Jindal (1971) American politician; two-term Governor of Louisiana

"Governors Know Best" http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/11/07/AR2008110703146.html, The Washington Post, November 9, 2008

Willa Cather photo
James Joyce photo
Jeffrey Tucker photo

“If the GOP’s “big tent” is destined to collapse, there’s no one better to be standing under it than Kemp. If the party does not collapse-and it elites continue to ignore the views of its grass roots-it will be too left-wing for any true freedom lover to support.”

Jeffrey Tucker (1963) American writer

Source: "Jack Kemp, American Socialist" by Jeffrey Tucker, The Rothbard-Rockwell Report, September 1996, UNZ.org, 2016-05-22 http://www.unz.org/Pub/RothbardRockwellReport-1996sep-00001,

Conrad Aiken photo
Michael Johns photo
Mark Manson photo

“Uncertainty is he root of all progress and all growth. As the old adage goes, the man who believes he knows everything learns nothing. We cannot learn anything without first not knowing something.”

Mark Manson (1984) American writer and blogger

Source: The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck (2016), Chapter 6, “You’re Wrong About Everything (But So Am I)” (p. 135)

Piet Mondrian photo

“[the double line in his paintings] is still one line, as in the case of your grooves [= the wide sunken lines in the relief's, the artist Gorin made then]... In my last things the double line widens to form a plane, and yet it remains a line. Be that as it may, I believe that this question is one of those which lie beyond the realm of theory, and which are of such subtlety that they are rooted in the mystery of 'art.”

Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) Peintre Néerlandais

But all that is not yet clear in my mind.
Quote in Mondrian's letter to artist Gorin, [who stated that the double line broke the necessary symmetry], 31 January, 1934; as quoted in Mondrian, - The Art of Destruction, Carel Blotkamp, Reaktion Books LTD. London 2001, p. 215
1930's

Ethan Hawke photo
Constant Lambert photo
George Holmes Howison photo
Mohamed ElBaradei photo
Bruce Fairchild Barton photo
Willem de Sitter photo

“We know by actual observation only a comparatively small part of the whole universe. I will call this "our neighborhood." Even within the confines of this province our knowledge decreases very rapidly as we get away from our own particular position in space and time. It is only within the solar system that our empirical knowledge extends to the second order of small quantities (and that only for g44 and not for the other gαβ), the first order corresponding to about 10-8. How the gαβ outside our neighborhood are, we do not know, and how they are at infinity of space or time we shall never know. Infinity is not a physical but a mathematical concept, introduced to make our equations more symmetrical and elegant. From the physical point of view everything that is outside our neighborhood is pure extrapolation, and we are entirely free to make this extrapolation as we please to suit our philosophical or aesthetical predilections—or prejudices. It is true that some of these prejudices are so deeply rooted that we can hardly avoid believing them to be above any possible suspicion of doubt, but this belief is not founded on any physical basis. One of these convictions, on which extrapolation is naturally based, is that the particular part of the universe where we happen to be, is in no way exceptional or privileged; in other words, that the universe, when considered on a large enough scale, is isotropic and homogeneous.”

Willem de Sitter (1872–1934) Dutch cosmologist

"The Astronomical Aspect of the Theory of Relativity" (1933)

Bill Hybels photo

“The idea that God doesn't care about his children is rooted in a lie, plain and simple.”

Bill Hybels (1951) American writer

Too Busy Not to Pray (2008, InterVarsity Press)

John Calvin photo
Rudy Rucker photo
Martin Luther King, Jr. photo
John Mearsheimer photo
Richard Nixon photo
Max Wertheimer photo
W. Brian Arthur photo

“Increasing-returns economics has roots that go back 70 years or more, but its application to the economy as a whole is largely new.”

W. Brian Arthur (1946) American economist

Source: Increasing Returns and Path Dependence in the Economy, (1994), p. 1: Chapter 1. Positive feedback in economics

Mahatma Gandhi photo
Aung San Suu Kyi photo

“The root of a nation's misfortunes has to be sought in the moral failings of the government.”

Aung San Suu Kyi (1945) State Counsellor of Myanmar and Leader of the National League for Democracy

In Quest of Democracy (1991)

“Hindus learn to look at themselves through borrowed eyes. The two approaches, that of self-discovery and creative response and that of self-alienation and imitation, were both inherited from the immediate history of the freedom struggle, though they derive their strength from the deeper sources in the psyche…. For one, the problem is of helping the society to find its roots, for the other to remake it in the image of a chosen pattern. The one serves; the other manipulates…. [The first approach] once formed a powerful current, and the freedom struggle was waged under its auspices. But increasingly its hold became weak, and in our own times it seems to have lost altogether…. Some see in this change a triumph of Nehru over Gandhi…. Nehru represented, in his own way, the response of a defeated nation trying to restore its self-respect and self-confidence through self-repudiation and identification with the ways of the victors. The approach was not altogether unjustified at one time. It had its compulsions and it also had a survival value for us. But its increasing influence can mean no good to us. We, however, believe that deeper Indian nationalism, which is also in harmony with deeper internationalism, may be weak just now, but it has the seed-power and it is bound to come up again under propitious circumstances”

Ram Swarup (1920–1998) Indian historian

Cultural Self-Alienation and Some Problems Hinduism Faces, 1987, p. 4-5

Koenraad Elst photo

“…H. K. Srivastava, made a proposal to attack the problem of communal friction at what he apparently considered its roots. He wanted all press writing about the historical origins of temples and mosques to be banned. And it is true : the discussion of the origins of some mosques is fundamental to this whole issue. For, it reveals the actual workings of an ideology that, more than anything else, has caused countless violent confrontations between the religious communities. However, after the news of this proposal came, nothing was heard of it anymore. I surmise that the proposal was found to be juridically indefensible in that it effectively would prohibit history-writing, a recognized academic discipline of which journalism makes use routinely. And I surmise that it was judged politically undesirable because it would counterproductively draw attention to this explosive topic. The real target of this proposal was the book Hindu Temples : What Happened to Them (A Preliminary Survey) by Arun Shourie and others. In the same period, there has been a proposal in the Rajya Sabha by Congress MP Mrs. Aliya to get this book banned,… The really hard part of the book is a list of some two thousand Muslim buildings that have been built on places of previous Hindu worship (and for which many more than two thousand temples have been demolished). In spite of the threat of a ban on raking up this discussion, on November 18 the U. P. daily Pioneer has published a review of this book, by Vimal Yogi Tiwari,…. "History is not just an exercise in collection of facts though, of course, facts have to be carefully sifted and authenticated as Mr. Sita Ram Goel has done in this case. History is primarily an exercise in self-awareness and reinforcement of that self-awareness. Such a historical assessment has by and large been missing in our country. This at once gives special significance to this book."”

Koenraad Elst (1959) orientalist, writer

1990s, Ayodhya and After: Issues Before Hindu Society (1991)

Hans Ruesch photo