Quotes about routine (275 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

“If you think adventure is dangerous, try routine; it is lethal.”

Paulo Coelho (1947) Brazilian lyricist and novelist

Thinking

“We require routine and tradition. That’s order. Order can become excessive, and that’s not good, but chaos can swamp us, so we drown—and that is also not good. We need to stay on the straight and narrow path.”

Jordan Peterson book 12 Rules for Life

12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, Overture

“The secret of your future is hidden in your daily routine.”

Mike Murdock (1946) American televangelist

Motivational , Success , Deep , Inspirational

“Large newspapers are routinely censored by legal costs. It is time this stopped. It is time a country said, enough is enough, justice must be seen, history must be preserved, and we will give shelter from the storm.”

Julian Assange (1971) Australian editor, activist, publisher and journalist

[Mark, Tran, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/feb/12/iceland-haven-freedom-speech-wikileaks?KeepThis=true&TB_iframe=true&height=600&width=990, Iceland plans future as global haven for freedom of speech, The Guardian, February 12, 2010, 2010-06-17]

Justice , History , Time , Country

“Destiny is God's routine.”

Teodor Burnar

God

“If you follow the classical pattern, you are understanding the routine, the tradition, the shadow -- you are not understanding yourself.”

Bruce Lee book Tao of Jeet Kune Do

Source: Tao of Jeet Kune Do

Understanding

“Alcohol is like love," he said. "The first kiss is magic, the second is intimate, the third is routine. After that you take the girl's clothes off.”

Raymond Chandler book The Long Goodbye

The Long Goodbye (1954)

Love , Alcohol , Girl , Kiss

“I know, my dear Watson, that you share my love of all that is bizarre and outside the conventions and humdrum routine of daily life.”

Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930) Scottish physician and author

Love , Life

“Most middle-class whites have no idea what it feels like to be subjected to police who are routinely suspicious, rude, belligerent, and brutal.”

Benjamin Spock (1903–1998) American pediatrician and author of Baby and Child Care

Source: Decent and Indecent: Our Personal and Political Behavior (1970), p. 103

Feeling , Idea

“Routine is not a prison, but the way to freedom from time.”

May Sarton (1912–1995) American poet, novelist, and memoirist

Way , Freedom , Time

“We routinely leave our small children in day care among strangers. At the same time, in our guilt we evince paranoia about strangers and foster fear in children.”

Thomas Harris book Hannibal

Source: Hannibal

Children , Fear , Time

“The refusal to allow a multiply-disadvantaged class to represent others who may be singularly-disadvantaged defeats efforts to restructure the distribution of opportunity and limits remedial relief to minor adjustments within an established hierarchy. Consequently, “bottom-up” approaches, those which combine all discriminatees in order to challenge an entire employment system, are foreclosed by the limited view of the wrong and the narrow scope of the available remedy. If such “bottom-up” intersectional representation were routinely permitted, employees might accept the possibility that there is more to gain by collectively challenging the hierarchy rather than by each discriminatee individually seeking to protect her source of privilege within the hierarchy. But as long as antidiscrimination doctrine proceeds from the premise that employment systems need only minor adjustments, opportunities for advancement by disadvantaged employees will be limited. Relatively privileged employ- ees probably are better off guarding their advantage while jockeying against others to gain more. As a result, Black women — the class of employees which, because of its intersectionality, is best able to challenge all forms of discrimination — are essentially isolated and often required to fend for themselves.”

Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw book Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex

Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex (1989)

Women , Effort

“Whenever undiscussables exist, their existence is also undiscussable. Moreover, both are covered up, because rules that make important issues undiscussables violate espoused norms… It is very difficult to manage [organizational defense routines]. They continue to exist and proliferate because they are relegated to the realm of “underground management” and all sides tacitly agree to this state of affairs. As a result, organizational defense routines often are very powerful”

Chris Argyris (1923–2013) American business theorist/Professor Emeritus/Harvard Business School/Thought Leader at Monitor Group

Source: On organizational learning (1999), p. 438 as cited in: Leni Wildflower, ‎Diane Brennan (2011) The Handbook of Knowledge-Based Coaching. p. 159

“It is a natural impulse of human beings to evade the narrowness of personal and family routine to venture into the wider universe of history, where you feel that your life is transcendent and get a higher "sense". The most banal and clumsy way to do it, accessible even to the poor, incapable and rogue is the militancy in a party or a "cause", that is, in some group embellished with pompous words like "freedom", "equality", "justice", "patriotism", "morality" or "human rights". These words can represent any substantive value, but not when the individual acquires from them all the value they may have, rather than filling them with his own personal substance. The most criminal illusion of modernity was to persuade men that they can be noble by identifying with a "cause", when in fact all causes, while names of abstract values, only acquire concrete value by the nobility of men who represent them. The bottom of degradation is achieved when some "causes" are so valued that they seem to infuse virtues automatically in any bum, fake or bandit who agrees to represent them.”

Olavo de Carvalho (1947) Brazilian journalist, essayist and professor of philosophy

Diário do Comércio - Causas Sagradas http://www.olavodecarvalho.org/semana/120117dc.html (17 January 2012)

Life , Men , Family , Justice

“I absolutely reject the premise there is anything wrong with Black people “talking white”. It is as if to vast swathes of the privileged white left and impoverished Black community diction, education and a mastery of thought is somehow “white”… comrade, how wrong you are to say that after decades in academia I’m acting white. I’m being black. I’m being black everyday a cop pulls my car over for a “routine stop”, I’m being black each time I look in the mirror, and I’m damn well being black when I school young fools out of the myth our race is too ill-evolved to be both black and accomplished.”

Elaine Brown (1943) American activist

People , Education , School , Fools

“We know today that nothing will restore the pre-machine condition of reasonably universal employment save an artificial allocation of working hours involving the use of more men than formerly to perform a given task.... The primary function of society, in spite of all the sophistries spurred of selfishness, is to give men better conditions than they could get without it; and the basic need today is jobs for all—not for "property" for a few of the luck and the acquisitive.... In view of the urgent need for change, there is something almost obscene in the chatter of the selfish about various psychological evils allegedly inherent in a New Deal promising decent economic security and humane leisure for all instead of for a few.... What is worth answering is the kindred outcry about "regimentation", "collective slavery", "violation of Anglo-Saxon freedom", "destruction of the right of the individual to make his own way" and so on; with liberal references to Stalin, Hitler, Mustapha Kemal, and other extremist dictators who have sought to control men's personal, intellectual, and artistic lives, and traditional habits and folkways, as well as their economic fortunes. Naturally the Anglo-Saxon balks at any programme calculated to limit his freedom as a man and a thinker or to disturb his inherited perspectives and daily customs—and need we say that no plan ever proposed in an Anglo-Saxon country would conceivably seek to limit such freedom or disturb such perspectives and customs? Here we have a deliberate smoke-screen—conscious and malicious confusion of terms. A decent planned society would indeed vary to some extent the existing regulations (for there are such) governing commercial and economic life. Yet who save a self-confessed Philistine or Marxist (the plutocrat can cite "Das Kapital" for his purpose!) would claim that the details and conditions of our merely economic activities form more than a trivial fraction of our whole lives and personalities? That which is essential and distinctive about a man is not the routine of material struggle he follows in his office; but the civilised way he lives, outside his office, the life whose maintenance is the object of his struggle. So long as his office work gains him a decently abundant and undisputedly free life, it matters little what that work is—what the ownership of the enterprise, and what and how distributed its profits, if profits there be. We have seen that no system proposes to deny skill and diligence an adequate remuneration. What more may skill and diligence legitimately ask? Nor is any lessening in the pride of achievement contemplated. Man will thrill just as much at the overcoming of vast obstacles, and the construction of great works, whether his deeds be performed for service or for profit. As it is, the greatest human achievements have never been for profit. Would Keats or Newton or Lucretius or Einstein or Santayana flourish less under a rationally planned society? Any intimation that a man's life is wholly his industrial life, and that a planned economic order means a suppression of his personality, is really both a piece of crass ignorance and an insult to human nature. Incidentally, it is curious that no one has yet pointed to the drastically regulated economic life of the early Mass. Bay colony as something "American!"”

H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American author

Unpublished (and probably unsent) letter to the Providence Journal (13 April 1934), quoted in Collected Essays, Volume 5: Philosophy, edited by J. T. Joshi, pp. 115-116
Non-Fiction, Letters

Life , Men , Way , Nature

“As in my other works of fiction: All persons living and dead are purely coincidental, and should not be construed. No names have been changed in order to protect the innocent. Angels protect the innocent as a matter of Heavenly routine.”

Kurt Vonnegut book Bagombo Snuff Box

Bagombo Snuff Box (1999)

Angels , Change , Personality , Dead

“Waliullah had travelled all the way to Mecca and Medina - a difficult and dangerous undertaking in his days - and studied under half a dozen Sufis and savants of ‘Islamic sciences’, only to ‘discover’ and declare what the meanest mullah in the most obscure village mosque in India had been mouthing for more than a thousand years. He himself wrote as many as 43 books between 1732 and 1762 - thirty thoughtful years - only to re-echo the routine ravings of a thousand theologians who had continued to thunder ever since the advent of Islam in this country! He wrote hundreds of letters to his contemporary Muslim monarchs and mercenaries, including Ahmad Shah Abdali, whom he considered to be the saviours of Islam in India, only to convey the conventional Islamic message which all of them had crammed in their cradles - convert of kill the kãfirs, humiliate the Hindus, and establish an Islamic state in keeping with the ‘holy’ commandments of the Quran!”

Shah Waliullah Dehlawi (1703–1762) Indian muslim scholar

Goel, Sita Ram (1995). Muslim separatism: Causes and consequences. ISBN 9788185990262

Books , Way , Travel , Study

“When we do something we have never done, we are already on the road to healing. We must break the routines.”

Alejandro Jodorowsky (1929) Filmmaker and comics writer

Psychomagic: The Transformative Power of Shamanic Psychotherapy (2010)

“It's a routine thing women go through with cops. They treat women, particularly from the lower classes or those they think of as "loose", in a very humiliating, lecherous manner.”

Flavia Agnes (1947) Indian activist and lawyer

On the attitude of Mumbai policemen towards women, as quoted in " The Law's A Beast http://outlookindia.com/story.aspx?sid=4&aid=227327" Outlook India (9 May 2005)

Women , Thinking

“Not one of these nobly equipped young men has escaped the restless, exhausting, confusing, debilitating crisis of education. … He feels that he cannot guide himself, cannot help himself—and then he dives hopelessly into the world of everyday life and daily routine, he is immersed in the most trivial activity possible, and his limbs grow weak and weary.”

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) German philosopher, poet, composer, cultural critic, and classical philologist

Anti-Education (1872)

Life , Men , World , Education

“You can practice this by taking any routine activity that normally is only a means to an end and giving it your fullest attention, so that it becomes an end in itself.”

Eckhart Tolle book The Power of Now

The Power of Now (1997)

“Had the routine of our life at this place been known to the world, we should have been regarded as madmen —; although, perhaps, as madmen of a harmless nature.”

Edgar Allan Poe book The Murders in the Rue Morgue

"The Murders in the Rue Morgue" (1841).

Life , World , Nature

“In the coming days, we’ll learn about the victims — young men and women who were studying and learning and working hard, their eyes set on the future, their dreams on what they could make of their lives. And America will wrap everyone who’s grieving with our prayers and our love.
But as I said just a few months ago, and I said a few months before that, and I said each time we see one of these mass shootings, our thoughts and prayers are not enough. It’s not enough. It does not capture the heartache and grief and anger that we should feel. And it does nothing to prevent this carnage from being inflicted someplace else in America — next week, or a couple of months from now.
We don’t yet know why this individual did what he did. And it’s fair to say that anybody who does this has a sickness in their minds, regardless of what they think their motivations may be. But we are not the only country on Earth that has people with mental illnesses or want to do harm to other people. We are the only advanced country on Earth that sees these kinds of mass shootings every few months.
Earlier this year, I answered a question in an interview by saying, “The United States of America is the one advanced nation on Earth in which we do not have sufficient common-sense gun-safety laws — even in the face of repeated mass killings.” And later that day, there was a mass shooting at a movie theater in Lafayette, Louisiana. That day! Somehow this has become routine. The reporting is routine. My response here at this podium ends up being routine. The conversation in the aftermath of it. We’ve become numb to this.
We talked about this after Columbine and Blacksburg, after Tucson, after Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, after Aurora, after Charleston. It cannot be this easy for somebody who wants to inflict harm on other people to get his or her hands on a gun.
And what’s become routine, of course, is the response of those who oppose any kind of common-sense gun legislation.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

2015, Remarks after the Umpqua Community College shooting (October 2015)

Love , Women , Men , People

“Thus shall he prosper, every day's success
Adding, to what is he, a solid strength —
An aery might to what encircles him,
Till at the last, so life's routine lends help,
That as the Emperor only breathes and moves,
His shadow shall be watched, his step or stalk
Become a comfort or a portent, how
He trails his ermine take significance, —
Till even his power shall cease to be most power,
And men shall dread his weakness more, nor dare
Peril their earth its bravest, first and best,
Its typified invincibility.”

Robert Browning Colombe's Birthday

Valence of Prince Berthold, in Act IV.
Colombe's Birthday (1844)
Context: p>He gathers earth's whole good into his arms;
Standing, as man now, stately, strong and wise,
Marching to fortune, not surprised by her.
One great aim, like a guiding-star, above—
Which tasks strength, wisdom, stateliness, to lift
His manhood to the height that takes the prize;
A prize not near — lest overlooking earth
He rashly spring to seize it — nor remote,
So that he rest upon his path content:
But day by day, while shimmering grows shine,
And the faint circlet prophesies the orb,
He sees so much as, just evolving these,
The stateliness, the wisdom and the strength,
To due completion, will suffice this life,
And lead him at his grandest to the grave.
After this star, out of a night he springs;
A beggar's cradle for the throne of thrones
He quits; so, mounting, feels each step he mounts,
Nor, as from each to each exultingly
He passes, overleaps one grade of joy.
This, for his own good: — with the world, each gift
Of God and man, — reality, tradition,
Fancy and fact — so well environ him,
That as a mystic panoply they serve —
Of force, untenanted, to awe mankind,
And work his purpose out with half the world,
While he, their master, dexterously slipt
From such encumbrance, is meantime employed
With his own prowess on the other half.
Thus shall he prosper, every day's success
Adding, to what is he, a solid strength —
An aery might to what encircles him,
Till at the last, so life's routine lends help,
That as the Emperor only breathes and moves,
His shadow shall be watched, his step or stalk
Become a comfort or a portent, how
He trails his ermine take significance, —
Till even his power shall cease to be most power,
And men shall dread his weakness more, nor dare
Peril their earth its bravest, first and best,
Its typified invincibility.Thus shall he go on, greatening, till he ends—
The man of men, the spirit of all flesh,
The fiery centre of an earthly world!</p

Life , Men , Success , Help

“Suitcases full of banknotes were said to be routinely taken to the Prime Minister’s house. Former Syndicate member S. K. Patil is reported to have said that Mrs Gandhi did not even return the suitcases... The Prime Minister is unlikely to have paid close attention to the dubious origins of some of the funds which went into Congress’s coffers. That was a matter which she left largely to her principal fundraiser, Lalit Narayan Mishra, who – though she doubtless did not realize it – also accepted Soviet money. On at least one occasion a secret gift of 2 million rupees from the Politburo to Congress (R) was personally delivered after midnight by the head of Line PR in New Delhi, Leonid Shebarshin. Another million rupees were given on the same occasion to a newspaper which supported Mrs Gandhi. Short and obese with several chins, Mishra looked the part of the corrupt politician he increasingly became. Indira Gandhi, despite her own frugal lifestyle, depended on the money he collected from a variety of sources to finance Congress (R). So did her son and anointed heir, Sanjay, whose misguided ambition to build an Indian popular car and become India’s Henry Ford depended on government favours.”

Indíra Gándhí (1917–1984) Indian politician and Prime Minister

The Mitrokhin Archive

Money , Housing , Dependency , Support

“The political worshipers of routine, incapable of surveying the historical process in its complexity, in its internal clashes and contradictions, imagined to themselves that history was preparing the way for the Socialist order simultaneously and systematically on all sides, so that concentration of production and the development of a Communist morality in the producer and the consumer mature simultaneously with the electric plough and a parliamentary majority.”

Leon Trotsky book Terrorism and Communism

Source: Terrorism and Communism (1920), Ch. 1

Way , Imagination , History

“For nearly five hundred years, these rules and theories of an Arab Shaikh and the interpretations of generations of lazy and good-for-nothing priests have decided the civil and criminal law of Turkey. They have decided the form of the Constitution, the details of the lives of each Turk, his food, his hours of rising and sleeping the shape of his clothes, the routine of the midwife who produced his children, what he learned in his schools, his customs, his thoughts-even his most intimate habits. Islam – this theology of an immoral Arab – is a dead thing. Possibly it might have suited tribes in the desert. It is no good for modern, progressive state. God’s revelation! There is no God! These are only the chains by which the priests and bad rulers bound the people down. A ruler who needs religion is a weakling. No weaklings should rule.”

Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (1881–1938) Turkish army officer, revolutionary, and the first President of Turkey

As quoted in Grey Wolf: Mustafa Kemal – An intimate study of a dictator (1932) by Harold Courtenay Armstrong, pp. 199-200
Disputed

School , Sleep , God , Clothes

“Instead of "watching the thinker," you can also create a gap in the mind stream simply by directing the focus of your attention into the Now. Just become intensely conscious of the present moment. This is a deeply satisfying thing to do. In this way, you draw consciousness away from mind activity and create a gap of no-mind in which you are highly alert and aware but not thinking. This is the essence of meditation. In your everyday life, you can practice this by taking any routine activity that normally is only a means to an end and giving it your fullest attention, so that it becomes an end in itself.”

Eckhart Tolle book The Power of Now

The Power of Now (1997)

Way , Life , Drawing , Thinking

“One must indeed be ignorant of the methods of genius to suppose that it allows itself to be cramped by forms. Forms are for mediocrity, and it is fortunate that mediocrity can act only according to routine. Ability takes its flight unhindered.”

Napoleon I of France (1769–1821) French general, First Consul and later Emperor of the French

Napoleon : In His Own Words (1916)

“No amount of security is worth the suffering of a mediocre life chained to a routine that has killed your dreams.”

Stephie Pahlavi Zan

Dreams , Suffering , Life

“One of the main reasons that we lose our enthusiasm in life is because we become ungrateful.. we let what was once a miracle become common to us. We get so accustomed to his goodness it becomes a routine..”

Joel Osteen (1963) American televangelist and author

Source: Your Best Life Now: 7 Steps to Living at Your Full Potential

Life

“Life is like topography, Hobbes. There are summits of happiness and success, flat stretches of boring routine and valleys of frustration and failure.”

Bill Watterson (1958) American comic artist

Life , Failure , Success , Happiness

“The less of routine, the more of life.”

Amos Bronson Alcott (1799–1888) American teacher and writer

Life

“With him, life was routine; without him, life was unbearable.”

Harper Lee book To Kill a Mockingbird

Source: To Kill a Mockingbird

Life

“And to those who believe that adventures are i say try routine: it kills you far more quickly.”

Paulo Coelho book Manuscript Found in Accra

Source: Manuscript Found in Accra (2012), Afraid to Change

“Routine is the one thing the can get you killed. It tells the enemy where you're going and when you're going to be there.”

Anthony Horowitz book Point Blanc

Source: Point Blank

“Leave home, leave the country, leave the familiar. Only then can routine experience—buying bread, eating vegetables, even saying hello—become new all over again.”

Anthony Doerr (1973) American writer

Home , Country

“Try to find pleasure in the speed that you're not used to. Changing the way you do routine things allows a new person to grow inside of you. But when all is said and done, you're the one who must decide how you handle it.”

Paulo Coelho (1947) Brazilian lyricist and novelist

Pleasure , Way , Change , Personality

“It’s a hard thing to leave any deeply routine life, even if you hate it.”

John Steinbeck book East of Eden

Source: East of Eden

Life , Hate

“Routine, repetition, tedium, monotony, ephemeracy, inconsequence, abstraction, disorder, boredom, angst, ennui—these are the true hero’s enemies, and make no mistake, they are fearsome indeed. For they are real.”

David Foster Wallace book The Pale King

Source: The Pale King (2011)

“Routine feeds the illusion of safety…”

Christopher Moore book Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal

Source: Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal

“That's why people take vacations. No to relax or find excitement or see new places. To escape the death that exists in routine things.”

Don DeLillo book White Noise

Source: White Noise

Death , People

“Fernanda, on the other hand, looked for it in vain along the paths of her everyday itinerary without knowing that the search for lost things is hindered by routine habits and that is why it is so difficult to find them.”

Gabriel García Márquez book One Hundred Years of Solitude

Source: One Hundred Years of Solitude

Search

“People need routines. It's like a theme in music. But it also restricts your thoughts and actions and limits your freedom. It structures your priorities and in some cases distorts your logic.”

Haruki Murakami book 1Q84

Source: 1Q84

People , Music , Freedom

“I am wary of the whole dreary deadening structured mess we have built into such a glittering top-heavy structure that there is nothing left to see but the glitter, and the brute routines of maintaining it.”

John D. MacDonald (1916–1986) writer from the United States

Travis McGee series, The Deep Blue Good-by (1964)
Source: The Deep Blue Good-By
Context: I am wary of a lot of things, such as plastic credit cards, payroll deductions, insurance programs, retirement benefits, savings accounts, Green Stamps, time clocks, newspapers, mortgages, sermons, miracle fabrics, deodorants, check lists, time payments, political parties, lending libraries, television, actresses, junior chambers of commerce, pageants, progress, and manifest destiny. I am wary of the whole dreary deadening structured mess we have built into such a glittering top-heavy structure that there is nothing left to see but the glitter, and the brute routines of maintaining it.

“Routine kills creative thought.”

Scarlett Thomas book PopCo

Source: PopCo

“Greeting cards routinely tell us everybody deserves love. No. Everybody deserves clean water. Not everybody deserves love all the time.”

Zadie Smith book White Teeth

Source: White Teeth (2000)
Context: You hear girls in the toilets of clubs saying, 'Yeah, he fucked off and left me. He just couldn't deal with love. He was too fucked up to know how to love me.' Now how did that happen? What was it about this unlovable century that convinced us we were, despite everything, eminently lovable as a people, as a species? What made us think that anyone who fails to love us is damaged, lacking, malfunctioning in some way? And particularly if they replace us with a god, or a weeping madonna, or the face of Christ in a ciabatta roll—then we call them crazy. Deluded. Regressive. We are so convinced of the goodness of ourselves, and the goodness of our love, we cannot bear to believe that there might be something more worthy of love than us, more worthy of worship. Greeting cards routinely tell us everybody deserves love. No. Everybody deserves clean water. Not everybody deserves love all the time.

Love , Water , Time

“Our units of temporal measurement, from seconds on up to months, are so complicated, asymmetrical and disjunctive so as to make coherent mental reckoning in time all but impossible. Indeed, had some tyrannical god contrived to enslave our minds to time, to make it all but impossible for us to escape subjection to sodden routines and unpleasant surprises, he could hardly have done better than handing down our present system. It is like a set of trapezoidal building blocks, with no vertical or horizontal surfaces, like a language in which the simplest thought demands ornate constructions, useless particles and lengthy circumlocutions. Unlike the more successful patterns of language and science, which enable us to face experience boldly or at least level-headedly, our system of temporal calculation silently and persistently encourages our terror of time.
…
It is as though architects had to measure length in feet, width in meters and height in ells; as though basic instruction manuals demanded a knowledge of five different languages. It is no wonder then that we often look into our own immediate past or future, last Tuesday or a week from Sunday, with feelings of helpless confusion.”

Robert Grudin (1938) American writer

Time and the Art of Living (1982)

God , Feeling , Knowledge , Science

“All of that to gain a piece of paper, that minimally guarantees a job of stability, a job where one follows a daily routine and gets a monthly salary, and a job, in my opinion, of sheer boredom and unhappiness. And they with the piece of paper, claiming that they have faired better in their lives, compared to fellow hawkers and construction workers. But I retort, at least they didn’t spend up to 10 years in a place they didn’t like, filling their brains with knowledge they never wanted. Some people say it’s a life they want, not for me. Some people they say it is worth going to school for over 10 years for such a life, no it isn’t.”

Amos Yee (1998) blogger

Tumblr postings

Life , People , School , Knowledge

“In his discussion on slavery Aristotle said that when the shuttle wove by itself and the plectrum played by itself chief workmen would not need helpers nor masters slaves. At the time he wrote, he believed that he was establishing the eternal validity of slavery; but for us today he was in reality justifying the existence of the machine. Work, it is true, is the constant form of man's interaction with his environment, if by work one means the sum total of exertions necessary to maintain life; and the lack of work usually means an impairment of function and a breakdown in organic relationship that leads to substitute forms of work, such as invalidism and neurosis. But work in the form of unwilling drudgery or of that sedentary routine which… the Athenians so properly despised—work in these forms is the true province of machines. Instead of reducing human beings to work-mechanisms, we can now transfer the main part of burden to automatic machines. This potentially… is perhaps the largest justification of the mechanical developments of the last thousand years.”

Lewis Mumford book Technics and Civilization

Source: Technics and Civilization (1934), Ch. 6, sct. 4

Life , Reality , Time , Parting

“Many of these constitutional violations have become routine. For instance, even though it’s illegal for police officers to detain a person – even briefly – without reasonable suspicion, it’s become common practice for officers in Ferguson to stop pedestrians and request identification for no reason at all. And even in cases where police encounters start off as constitutionally defensible, we found that they frequently and rapidly escalate – and end up blatantly and unnecessarily crossing the line.”

Eric Holder (1951) 82nd Attorney General of the United States

2010s, Update on Investigations in Ferguson (2015)

Personality

“Sexual dysfunction often plays a key role in risk management by couples over time. It seems crucial not to get too excited about the other, and diminished excitement serves the purposes at once of self-protection and revenge. I was once excited about you, the diminished arousal seems to be expressing, but there is not much to get excited about now. Often lovers work together to pretend they are safer (even if also a bit sadder) over time, by collapsing their expectations of each other in collusively arranged, choreographed routine. Each feels the other is less exciting because of being so familiar and predictable. And each acts towards the other in as wholly and artificially predictable a fashion as possible. But, of course, lowering expectations also empties out passion. No risk, no gain.”

Stephen Mitchell (1946–2000) American psychologist

Can Love Last? (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2002), p. 143

Feeling , Lovers , Fashion , Revenge

“He shared the common human hallmark: he was simultaneously predictable and unfathomable—a routine miracle.”

Robert Sheckley book Dimension of Miracles

Source: Dimension of Miracles (1968), Chapter 1 (p. 14)

“The ultimate stakes in politics are the qualities of the direct relations among people…. This fine texture of routinized human relations is the primary social reality. Even the boldest transformative efforts often take it for granted or, having acknowledged its importance, fail to alter it.”

Roberto Mangabeira Unger (1947) Brazilian philosopher and politician

Source: False Necessityː Anti-Necessitarian Social Theory in the Service of Radical Democracy (1987), p. 397

People , Reality , Effort

“In the history of education, the most striking phenomenon is that schools of learning, which at one epoch are alive with a ferment of genius, in a succeeding generation exhibit merely pedantry and routine.”

Ted Sizer (1932–2009) American education reformer

Source: Horace's Compromise: The Dilemma of the American High School (1984), p. 95.

Education , School , History , Learning

“[T]wo moments, of trance and struggle, mingle in the real life of societyː an undercurrent of conflict and disbelief always counteracts the routines of dependence and deference. Society, no matter how impregnable it seems to its inhabitants, always stands at the edge of the cliff. The petty practical quarrels and normative disputes, endlessly refought to reproduce a social world in the face of divergent interests and changing circumstance, can escalate at any moment into broader and more intense conflicts that put this world at risk.”

Roberto Mangabeira Unger (1947) Brazilian philosopher and politician

Source: Social Theoryː Its Situation and Its Task (1987), p. 205

Life , World , Change , Dependency

“Fascism is the result of the collapse of Europe's spiritual and social order… catastrophes broke through the everyday routine which makes men accept existing forms, institutions and tenets as unalterable natural laws. They suddenly exposed the vacuum behind the facade of society.”

Peter F. Drucker (1909–2005) American business consultant

Source: 1930s- 1950s, The End of Economic Man (1939), p. 24

Men , Law , Nature

“From a succession of historians we learn of a particularly gruesome component of Carthaginian daily life: the routine and ritualized sacrificing of not just animals—animal sacrifice was a common religious activity of all Mediterranean cultures—but of infants and children. …Greek and Roman historians were unanimous in their abhorrence of the Carthaginian practice…”

Jeffrey H. Schwartz (1948) American anthropologist

What the Bones Tell Us (1997)

Life , Children , Learning , Success

“Muslims are allowed to get away with almost anything. They can shut down and intimidate prominent ex-Muslims. They’re allowed to engage in the most brazen anti-semitism, even as they run for office in European left-wing political parties. And, of course, politicians and the media routinely turn a blind eye to the kind of sexism and homophobia that would instantly end the career of a non-Muslim conservative — and perhaps get the latter arrested for hate speech when he dared to object.”

Milo Yiannopoulos (1984) British journalist

The Left chose Islam over Gays http://www.breitbart.com/milo/2016/06/12/left-chose-islam-gays-now-100-people-killed-maimed-orlando/, Breitbart (12 Jun 2016)
2016

Hate

“Over time, it’s clear that this culture of enforcement actions being disconnected from the public safety needs of the community – and often to the detriment of community residents – has given rise to a disturbing and unconstitutional pattern or practice. Our investigation showed that Ferguson police officers routinely violate the Fourth Amendment in stopping people without reasonable suspicion, arresting them without probable cause, and using unreasonable force against them. According to the Police Department’s own records, its officers frequently infringe on residents’ First Amendment rights. They interfere with the right to record police activities. And they make enforcement decisions based on the way individuals express themselves.”

Eric Holder (1951) 82nd Attorney General of the United States

2010s, Update on Investigations in Ferguson (2015)

People , Way , Communication , Decision

“It is restful to leave one's home; not because traveling does not entail varied and difficult daily actions, but because it removes our responsibilities. Except in the case of official persons, the traveler now lives for himself alone, and is no longer accountable to a community or a family clan. A foreign country is merely a spectacle; in it we no longer have the continual awareness of responsibility. All of us, from time to time, need a plunge into freedom and novelty, after which routine and discipline will seem delightful by contrast. Periods of rest, however, must be brief, but it is amazing to discover how a few days of travel can restore our mental freshness.”

André Maurois (1885–1967) French writer

Un Art de Vivre (The Art of Living) (1939), The Art of Working

Family , Travel , Home , Communication

“The Basic Argument In its simplest form, the argument goes like this: when the tasks people perform are well understood, predictable, routine, and repetitive, a bureaucratic structure is the most efficient. Things can be "programmed," to use March and Simon's term. Where tasks are not well understood, generally because the 'raw material' that each person works on is poorly understood and possibly reactive, recalcitrant or self activating. the tasks are non-routine. Such units or organizations are difficult to bureaucratize.”

Charles Perrow (1925–2019) American sociologist

Source: 1970s, Complex organizations, 1972, p. 166

People , Personality

“Under these circumstances, men lose sight of themselves and escape into the security of work or sociability or other forms of what Vidich and Bensman have called the “externalization of the self.” Vidich and Bensman sketch a troubling picture of such men: “What is left of the personality is the dulled, autonomic ritualization of behavior where … no disturbing interferences are allowed to enter into thought. … Personal and social life becomes barren, and the personal mechanics and daily routine of living become the end-all of existence. All types of activity whose operation is based upon an objective, external, automatic rhythm to which an individual can bend himself serve the function of enabling him to lose himself in an objective ceremony.””

Benjamin R. Barber (1939–2017) US political scientist

Source: Forced to be Free (1971), p. 69, quotation is from A. J. Vidich and J. Bensman, Small Town in Mass Society (New York), p. 315

Life , Men , Behavior , Personality

“In an age when nations and individuals routinely exchange murder for murder, when the healing grace of authentic spirituality is usurped by the divisive politics of religious organization, and when broken hearts bleed pain in darkness without the relief of compassion, the voice of an exceptional poet producing exceptional work is not something the world can afford to dismiss.”

Aberjhani (1957) author

Visions of the Poets, p. 247
Book Sources, The American Poet Who Went Home Again (2008)

Pain , Age , World , Heart

“Patriarchy, routinely blamed for everything, produced the birth control pill, which did more to free contemporary women than feminism itself.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Vamps and Tramps (1994), "No Law in the Arena: A Pagan Theory of Sexuality", p. 38

Women , Birth

“Consider, for example, the mechanical precision with which many of our institutions are expected to operate. Organizational life is often routinized with the precision demanded of clockwork. People are frequently expected to arrive at work at a given time, perform a predetermined set of activities, rest at appointed hours, and then resume their tasks until work is over. In many organizations, one shift of workers replaces another in methodical fashion so that work can continue uninterrupted twenty-four hours a day every day of the year. Often, the work is very mechanical and repetitive. Anyone who has observed work in the mass-production factory or in any of the large “office factories” processing paper forms such as insurance claims, tax returns, or bank checks will have noticed the machine-like way in which such organizations operate. They are designed like machines, and their employees are in essence expected to behave as if they were parts of machines.”

Gareth Morgan book Images of Organization

Source: Images of Organization (1986), p. 20; As cited in as Vivien Martin -(2003) Leading change in health and social care. p. 157: About the organization as machine:

Life , People , Way , Fashion

“If low-wage workers do not always behave in an economically rational way, that is, as free agents within a capitalist democracy, it is because they dwell in a place that is neither free nor in any way democratic. When you enter the low-wage workplace — and many of the medium-wage workplaces as well — you check your civil liberties at the door, leave America and all it supposedly stands for behind, and learn to zip your lips for the duration of the shift. The consequences of this routine surrender go beyond the issues of wages and poverty. We can hardly pride ourselves on being the world's preeminent democracy, after all, if large numbers of citizens spend half their waking hours in what amounts, in plain terms, to a dictatorship.”

Barbara Ehrenreich (1941) American writer and journalist

Evaluation (p. 210)
Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America (2001)

World , Way , Democracy , Learning

“In training a child to activity of thought, above all things we must beware of what I will call "inert ideas"—that is to say, ideas that are merely received into the mind without being utilised, or tested, or thrown into fresh combinations.
In the history of education, the most striking phenomenon is that schools of learning, which at one epoch are alive with a ferment of genius, in a succeeding generation exhibit merely pedantry and routine. The reason is, that they are overladen with inert ideas. Education with inert ideas is not only useless: it is, above all things, harmful—Corruptio optimi, pessima”

Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) English mathematician and philosopher

the corruption of the best is the worst
1920s, The Aims of Education (1929)

Education , School , History , Idea

“No agony, no ecstacy, no pleasure and no pain —
so exquisitely uninteresting you drive your wife insane
The TV is your oracle, the newspapers your guide
and your shiny little vehicle is your passion and your pride
You've done the same things every day for nigh on forty years
and in your ludicrous routines you hide your worthless fears
On the blandest boat in Boredom you are captain of the crew
and every time I eat vegetables it makes me think of you.”

Attila the Stockbroker (1957) punk poet, folk punk musician and songwriter

"Every Time I Eat Vegetables...", from Cautionary Tales for Dead Commuters (1985)

Pain , Pleasure , Fear , Thinking

“Here is the story, as far as I can trace it, of Chomsky's effort to "minimize" or "deny" the harvest of the Khmer Rouge. It will be seen that the phony "credibility" of the charge against him derives from his lack of gullibility about the American mass killings in Indochina (routinely euphemized or concealed by large sections of the domestic intelligentsia). From this arises the idea that Chomsky might have said such things; was the sort of person who could decline to criticize "the other side"; was a well-known political extremist. Couple this with the slothful ease of the accusation, the reluctance of certain authors to prove they are not unpatriotic dupes, and you have a scapegoat in the making.”

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

" The Chorus and Cassandra https://web.archive.org/web/20070220102220/http://www.zmag.org/chomsky/other/85-hitchens.html" in: Grand Street Magazine, Autumn 1985: On Noam Chomsky/Cambodia.
1980s

Idea , Effort , Personality

“The words "routine analyses" are used to denote the analyses performed by laboratories, frequently attached to industrial plants, and distinguished by the following characteristics: (1) All the analyses or measurements of the same kind, for example, are designed to measure the sugar content in beets or to determine the coordinates of a star. (2) The analyses are carried out day after day using the same methods and the same instruments. (3) While all the analyses are of the same kind, the quantity n varies from time to time, where n represents some small number, 2, 3, 4, 5.”

Jerzy Neyman (1894–1981) Polish statistician

p. 46 of "On a statistical problem arising in routine analyses and in sampling inspections of mass production." http://www.jstor.org/stable/2235624 The Annals of Mathematical Statistics 12, no. 1 (1941): 46–76.

Star , Time

“Institutions consist of cognitive, normative and regulative structures and activities that provide stability and meaning to social behaviour. Institutions are transported by various carriers – cultures, structures, and routines – and they operate at multiple levels of jurisdiction.”

W. Richard Scott (1932) American sociologist

Source: Institutions and Organizations., 1995, p. 33

“Those who rise in peace are men of formality and routine, cautious, inoffensive…Hawke represented the spirit of war, the ardour, the swift initiative, the readiness of resource, the impatience of prescription and routine, without which no great things are done!”

John Fisher, 1st Baron Fisher (1841–1920) Royal Navy admiral of the fleet

Fisher of Kilverstone (1973), Ruddock F. Mackay, Clarendon Press, p. 265.

Men , War , Peace

“I knew that good like bad becomes a routine, that the temporary tends to endure, that what is external permeates to the inside, and that the mask, given time, comes to be the face itself.”

Marguerite Yourcenar book Memoirs of Hadrian

Je savais que le bien comme le mal est affaire de routine, que le temporaire se prolonge, que l'extérieur s'infiltre au dedans, et que le masque, à la longue, devient visage.
Source: Memoirs of Hadrian (1951), p. 97

Time

“How do you think those routines were accomplished? With mirrors?… Well, I thought I knew what concentrated work was before I met Fred, but he's the limit. Never satisfied until every detail is right, and he will not compromise. No sir! What's more, if he thinks of something better after you've finished a routine, you do it over.”

Fred Astaire (1899–1987) American dancer, singer, actor, choreographer and television presenter

Ginger Rogers (M) op. cit.

Thinking

“It is exceptional that one should be able to acquire the understanding of a process without having previously acquired a deep familiarity with running it, with using it, before one has assimilated it in an instinctive and empirical way… Thus any discussion of the nature of intellectual effort in any field is difficult, unless it presupposes an easy, routine familiarity with that field. In mathematics this limitation becomes very severe.”

John Von Neumann (1903–1957) Hungarian-American mathematician and polymath

As quoted in "The Mathematician" in The World of Mathematics (1956), by James Roy Newman

Way , Mathematics , Understanding , Nature

“Faith, Quinn mused, was a strange power. They had committed their lives to the sect, never questioning its gospels. Yet in all of that time, they had the reassurance of routine… The bedrock of every religion, that your God is a promise, never to be encountered in this life, this universe.”

Peter F. Hamilton (1960) English novelist

Quin Dexter of the Lightbringer Sect on faith
The Night's Dawn Trilogy (1996-1999), The Naked God (1999)

Life , God , Faith , Religion

“…Clemenza's overriding responsibility is to his family. He takes a moment out of his routine madness to remember that he had promised his wife that he would bring dessert home. His instruction to his partner in crime is an entire moral manifesto in six little words: 'Leave the gun. Take the cannoli.”

Sarah Vowell book Take the Cannoli

On the Godfather and family
Take the Cannoli (2000)

Family , Home , Madness

“Split routines make about as much sense as sleeping with one eye open. Best results will almost always occur from exercising both your upper body and your lower body in the same workout.”

Arthur Jones (inventor) (1926–2007) American inventor

The New High Intensity Training (2004)

Exercises , Sense , Sleep

“…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)

Books , Exercises , History , Communication

“Many of us have developed an attitude' one of "we cannot bear to be insulted, and we do not want to create any tension." I always say that if serving the religion in a peaceful and calm manner is all that is demanded of us, then Allah would have accepted such service from His Messenger, peace be upon him, or would have accepted such peaceful service from the Esteemed Companions. But we see that Allah made them go through stages of hardship and tension too. Did not the Holy Prophet, peace be upon him, endure tense moments? He waged jihad too. His Holy blood was spilled. Even his blessed teeth were martyred. How many of us have even had a stone thrown at us?; we have adopted the attitude: "One of my routine should not be disturbed; I should keep to my routine."”

Abdul Rashid Ghazi (1964–2007) Pakistani fundamentalist

Instead, we should be prepared for everything, and we should not surrender so easily.

Peace , Religion

“President Trump is too set in his ways and independent-minded to imbibe the layers of debased semiotics with which government lawyers routinely rape reality.”

Ilana Mercer South African writer

"Trump Fends Off 'Showboat' Comey And The Federal Zombies," http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2017/06/trump_fends_off_showboat_comey_and_the_federal_zombies.html The American Thinker, June 9, 2017.
2010s, 2017

Way , Reality

“If I have been critical, it is because I believe it is my obligation to do so. And as a matter and duty of conscience, the notion that one should stay silent — and as the norms and values that keep America strong are undermined and as the alliances and agreements that ensure the stability of the entire world are routinely threatened by the level of thought that goes into 140 characters — the notion that we should say or do nothing in the face of such mercurial behavior is ahistoric and, I believe, profoundly misguided.”

Jeff Flake (1962) American politician

Speech in the U.S. Senate (2017)

World , Behavior , Strong

“The real world with its common logic pushes us toward catastrophe. The artists seek in his work to free himself from this weight. Art is being transformed into politics, love into trade, education into an apparatus for stifling the mind. In the midst of such horrors, clearly only the dream within me has life. But how do other people live? -There is color, virginal expression - new, without a cage, without routine, without limit, a bath of sun and light. We must realize that nothing man does is of any value. The trouble is that people want to be paid. Only sick men can be artists. Their suffering pushes them into the accomplishment of deeds which reinvest the world with meaning. The sensitive man or the artist can only be a sick man in our civilized life, so full of lies. To think of art as a profession, how appealing!”

Bram van Velde (1895–1981) Dutch painter

Painting is man in the face of his downfall.
1960's
Source: Abstract Painting, Michel Seuphor, Dell Publishing Co., 1964, p. 134

Love , Life , Men , People

“The eternally repetitive routine, the imposed anonymity and the rigid atomization of numbers and cages are just a few of the dehumanizing, desocializing mechanisms. As for the relationship of prisoners to life outside, it is supposed to be virtually nonexistent. In this respect, the impenetrable concrete, the barbed wire and the armed keepers, ostensibly there to deter escape-bound captives, also suggest something further: prisoners must be guarded from the ingressions of a moving, developing world outside. Disengaged from normal social life, its revelations and influences, they must finally be robbed of their humanity. Yet human beings cannot be willed and molded into nonexistence. In reality the facts of prison life have begun in recent years to bespeak the irrationality of its goals. Even the most drastic repressive measures have not obstructed the progressive ascent of captive men and women to new heights of social consciousness. This has been especially intense among Black and Brown prisoners”

Angela Davis (1944) American political activist, scholar, and author

Source: If They Come in The Morning (1971), Chapter 2, "Lessons: From Attica to Soledad"

Life , Women , Men , World

“The reality is simple: every country struggles with madmen and ideologues with guns, and every country--Canada, Norway, Britain--has had a gun massacre once, or twice. Then people act to stop them, and they do--as over the past few years has happened in Australia. Only in America are gun massacres of this kind routine, expectable, and certain to continue.”

Adam Gopnik (1956) American journalist

One More Massacre, The New Yorker (2012)

People , Reality , Past , Country

“Realists are, as a rule, only men in the rut of routine who are incapable of transcending a narrow circle of antiquated notions.”

Theodor Herzl (1860–1904) Austro-Hungarian journalist and writer

Der Judenstaat [The Jewish State] (1896)

Men

“Routine and discipline. It held the ship together no less securely than copper and tar.”

Douglas Reeman (1924–2017) British author

A Tradition of Victory, Cap 11 "So Little Time"

“When in the course of human events somebody does something that puts somebody else to the trouble of adjusting the numb routine of his life, the adjustee is resentful. The richer he is and the more satisfactory he considers his life, the more resentful he is at any change, however minute. And of all the changes which offend people, changes which require them to think are most disliked.”

Murray Leinster book The Pirates of Zan

Source: The Pirates of Zan (1959), Chapter 1

Life , People , Thinking , Change

“My father has always used the confidential information extracted from people during auditing sessions to intimidate, threaten and coerce them to do what he wanted, which often meant getting them to give him money. My father routinely used false threats and auditing information particularly about crimes people had committed to extort money from them.”

Ronald DeWolf (1934–1991) American critic of Scientology

Affidavit for a US District Court

Money , People , Falseness

“The root of the problem is that domesticated animals have inherited from their wild ancestors many physical, emotional and social needs that are redundant in human farms. Farmers routinely ignore these needs without paying any economic price. They lock animals in tiny cages, mutilate their horns and tails, separate mothers from offspring, and selectively breed monstrosities.”

Yuval Noah Harari (1976) Israeli historian

Introduction to Animal Liberation

Problem , Animals

“As for me, I'm stuck in a loveless relationship with myself, the backseat driver who can't stop tutting and nagging. There's no escape from me's relentless criticism. Me even knows what I'm thinking, and routinely has a pop at Me for that. "You're worrying about your obsessive degree of self-criticism again," whines Me. "How pathetically solipsistic." And then it complains about its own bleating tone of voice and starts petulantly kicking the back of the seat, asking if we're there yet.”

Charlie Brooker (1971) journalist, broadcaster and writer from England

The Guardian 16 August 2010 http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/aug/16/charlie-brooker-writing-deadlines
Guardian columns

Thinking

“Research in statistical theory and techniques is necessarily mathematical, scholarly, and abstract in character, requiring some degree of leisure, detachment, and access to a good mathematical and historical library. The importance of continuing such research is very great, though it is not always obvious to those whose interest is entirely in practical applications of already existing theory. Excepting in the presence of active research in pure science, the application of the science tend to drop into a deadly rut of unthinking routine, incapable of progress beyond a limited range predetermined by the accomplishments of pure science, and are in constant danger of falling into the hands of people who do not really understand the tools that they are working with and who are out of touch with those that do. … It is in fact rather absurd, though quite in line with the precedents of earlier centuries, that scientific men of the highest talents can live only by doing work that could be done by others of lesser special abilities, while the real worth of their most important work receives no official recognition.”

Harold Hotelling (1895–1973) American economist and statistician

Men , People , Mathematics , Understanding

“Whom could this operetta offend? Only those of us who, despite the fact that we may respond, loathe being manipulated in this way and are aware of how cheap and ready-made are the responses we are made to feel. We may become even more aware of the way we have been turned into emotional and aesthetic imbeciles when we hear ourselves humming the sickly, goody-goody songs. The dauntless, scrubbed-face heroine (Julie Andrews), in training to become a nun, is sent from the convent to serve as governess to the motherless Von Trapp children, and turns them into a happy little troupe of singers before marrying their father (Christopher Plummer). She says goodbye to the nuns and leaves them outside at the fence, as she enters the cathedral to be married. Squeezed again, and the moisture comes out of thousands--millions--of eyes and noses. Wasn't there perhaps one little Von Trapp who didn't want to sing his head off, or who screamed that he wouldn't act out little glockenspiel routines for Papa's party guests, or who got nervous and threw up if he had to get on a stage? The only thing the director, Robert Wise, couldn't smooth out was the sinister, archly decadent performance by Christopher Plummer--he of the thin, twisted smile; he seems to be in a different movie altogether.”

Pauline Kael (1919–2001) American film critic

"The Sound of Music," p. 697
5001 Nights at the Movies (1982)

Children , Smile , Way , Feeling

“Voluptuaries, consumed by their senses, always begin by flinging themselves with a great display of frenzy into an abyss. But they survive, they come to the surface again. And they develop a routine of the abyss: “It’s four o’clock … At five I have my abyss.””

Colette (1873–1954) 1873-1954 French novelist: wrote Gigi

Le Pur et l'Impur (The Pure and the Impure) (1932)

Sense

“In the 21st century, the world needs a confident and effective United Nations. This unique institution should build on its successes and improve its performance. Where there is inefficiency and corruption, it must be corrected. Where there are bloated bureaucracies, they must be streamlined. Where members fail to uphold their obligations, there must be strong action. For example, there should be an immediate review of the Human Rights Council, which has routinely protected violators of human rights. There should be a stronger effort to help the people of Burma live free of the repression they have suffered for too long. And all nations, especially members of the Security Council, must act decisively to ensure that the government of Sudan upholds its commitment to address the violence in Darfur.”

George W. Bush (1946) 43rd President of the United States

2000s, 2008, Address to the United Nations General Assembly (September 2008)

People , World , Confidence , Decision

“I would love to debate any politician in any western state on the question of whether the rule of law ought to be respected in a world where even the most "respectable" governments establish intelligence agencies that routinely violate those laws at taxpayer expense and at no real penalty to anyone involved.”

Barrett Brown (1981) American journalist, essayist and satirist

The Guardian, "Anonymous: a net gain for liberty" http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/jan/27/anonymous-internet, 27 January 2011.

Love , World , Law , Penalty

“The leader of the controversial Church of Scientology routinely physically attacked members of his management team, according to former executives, a Florida newspaper has reported. Defectors from the controversial organisation who spoke to the St Petersburg Times told the paper that David Miscavige was "constantly denigrating and beating on people". Mike Rinder, the church's spokesman for decades, said he was attacked by Miscavige some 50 times.”

David Miscavige (1960) leader of the Church of Scientology

.
About

People , Time

“But that leads me to my third hard truth: something happens to people in law enforcement. Many of us develop different flavors of cynicism that we work hard to resist because they can be lazy mental shortcuts. For example, criminal suspects routinely lie about their guilt, and nearly everybody we charge is guilty. That makes it easy for some folks in law enforcement to assume that everybody is lying and that no suspect, regardless of their race, could be innocent. Easy, but wrong.”

James Comey (1960) American lawyer and the seventh director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)

2010s, Hard Truths: Law Enforcement (2015)

People , Truth , Lie , Law