Quotes about rug

A collection of quotes on the topic of rug, likeness, people, time.

Quotes about rug

“But to reach…the pinnacle of power, it will be necessary, to climb rugged heights.”

Jose Cecilio del Valle (1777–1996) Honduran politician-

1821

“In England, a century of strong government has developed what O. Henry called the stern and rugged fear of the police to a point where any public protest seems an indecency. But in France everyone can remember a certain amount of civil disturbance, and even the workmen in the bistros talk of la revolution — meaning the next revolution, not the last one. The highly socialised modern mind, which makes a kind of composite god out of the rich, the government, the police and the larger newspapers, has not been developed — at least not yet.”

George Orwell (1903–1950) English author and journalist

Review of The Civilization of France by Ernst Robert Curtius; translated by Olive Wyon, in The Adelphi (May 1932)

God, Fear, Strong

“The guy was dead as hell. He lay on the floor in his pajamas with his brains scattered all over the rug and my gun was in his hand. I kept rubbing my face to wipe out the fuzz that clouded my mind but the cops wouldn't let me. One would pull my hand away and shout a question at me that made my head ache even worse and another would slap me with a wet rag until I felt like I had been split wide open.”

Mickey Spillane (1918–2006) American writer

Vengeance is Mine! (1950)

Guy, Hell, Question, Dead

“Never have I witnessed such sincere hospitality and the overwhelming spirit of true brotherhood as is practiced by people of all colors and races here in this ancient Holy Land, the House of Abraham, Muhammad, and all the other Prophets of the Holy Scriptures. For the past week, I have been utterly speechless and spellbound by the graciousness I see displayed all around me by people of all colors....
You may be shocked by these words coming from me. But on this pilgrimage, what I have seen, and experienced, has forced me to rearrange much of my thought-patterns previously held, and to toss aside some of my previous conclusions. This was not too difficult for me. Despite my firm convictions, I have always been a man who tries to face facts, and to accept the reality of life as new experience and new knowledge unfolds it. I have always kept an open mind, which necessary to the flexibility that must go hand in hand with every form of intelligent search for truth.

During the past eleven days here in the Muslim world, I have eaten from the same plate, drunk from the same glass, and slept in the same bed (or on the same rug) -- while praying to the same God -- with fellow Muslims, whose eyes were the bluest of blue, whose hair was the blondest of blond, and whose skin was the whitest of white. And in the words and in the actions and in the deeds of the "white" Muslims, I felt the same sincerity that I felt among the black African Muslims of Nigeria, Sudan, and Ghana.

We were truly all the same (brothers) -- because their belief in one God had removed the "white" from their minds, the 'white' from their behavior, and the 'white' from their attitude.

I could see from this, that perhaps if white Americans could accept the Oneness of God, then perhaps, too, they could accept in reality the Oneness of Man -- and cease to measure, and hinder, and harm others in terms of their "differences" in color.

With racism plaguing America like an incurable cancer, the so-called "Christian" white American heart should be more receptive to a proven solution to such a destructive problem. Perhaps it could be in time to save America from imminent disaster -- the same destruction brought upon Germany by racism that eventually destroyed the Germans themselves.

They asked me what about the Hajj had impressed me the most.... I said, "The brotherhood! The people of all races, color, from all over the world coming to gether as one! It has proved to me the power of the One God.... All ate as one, and slept as one. Everything about the pilgrimage atmosphere accented the Oneness of Man under One God.”

Malcolm X (1925–1965) American human rights activist

Text of a letter written following his Hajj (1964)

Life, God, People, Truth

“I have never believed that the securing of material resources ought to form the central interest of human life—but have instead maintained that personality is an independent flowering of the intellect and emotions wholly apart from the struggle for existence. Formerly I accepted the archaic dictum that only a few can be relieved of the engulfing waste of the material struggle in its bitterest form—a dictum which is, of course, true in an agricultural age having scanty resources. Therefore I adopted an aristocratic attitude; regretfully arguing that life, in any degree of fulness, is only for the fortunate few whose ancestors' prowess has given them economic security and leisure. But I did not take the bourgeois position of praising struggle for its own sake. While recognising certain worthy qualities brought out by it, I was too much impressed by its stultifying attributes to regard it as other than a necessary evil. In my opinion, only the leisured aristocrat really had a chance at adequate life—nor did I despise him because he was not forced to struggle. Instead, I was sorry that so few could share his good fortune. Too much human energy was wasted in the mere scramble for food and shelter. The condition was tolerable only because inevitable in yesterday's world of scanty resources. Millions of men must go to waste in order that a few might really live. Still—if those few were not upheld, no high culture would ever be built up. I never had any use for the American pioneer's worship of work and self-reliance for their own sakes. These things are necessary in their place, but not ends in themselves—and any attempt to make them ends in themselves is essentially uncivilised. Thus I have no fundamental meeting-ground with the rugged Yankee individualist. I represent rather the mood of the agrarian feudalism which preceded the pioneering and capitalistic phases. My ideal of life is nothing material or quantitative, but simply the security and leisure necessary for the maximum flowering of the human spirit.... Well—so much for the past. Now we live in an age of easy abundance which makes possible the fulfilment of all moderate human wants through a relatively slight amount of labour. What shall be the result? Shall we still make resources prohibitively hard to get when there is really a plethora of them? Shall we allow antique notions of allocation—"property," etc.—to interfere with the rational distribution of this abundant stock of resources among all those who require them? Shall we value hardship and anxiety and uncertainty so fatuously as to impose these evils artificially on people who do not need to bear them, through the perpetuation of a set of now irrelevant and inapplicable rules of allocation? What reasonable objection is there to an intelligent centralised control of resources whose primary object shall be the elimination of want in every quarter—a thing possible without removing comfortable living from any one now enjoying it? To call the allocation of resources something "uncontrollable" by man—and in an age when virtually all natural forces are harnessed and utilised—is simply infantile. It is simply that those who now have the lion's share don't want any fresh or rational allocation. It is needless to say that no sober thinker envisages a workless equalitarian paradise. Much work remains, and human capacities differ. High-grade service must still receive greater rewards than low-grade service. But amidst the present abundance of goods and minimisation of possible work, there must be a fair and all-inclusive allocation of the chances to perform work and secure rewards. When society can't give a man work, it must keep him comfortable without it; but it must give him work if it can, and must compel him to perform it when it is needed. This does not involve interference with personal life and habits (contrary to what some reactionaries say), nor is the absence of insecurity anything to deplore.... But of course the real need of change comes not from the mere fact of abundant resources, but from the growth of conditions making it impossible for millions to have any chance of getting any resources under the present outworn set of artificial rules. This development is no myth. Machines had displaced 900,000 men in the U. S. before the crash of '29, and no conceivable regime of "prosperity" (where by a few people will have abundant and flexible resources and successfully exchange them among one another) will ever make it possible to avoid the permanent presence of millions of unemployed, so long as old-fashioned laissez-faire capitalism is adhered to.... And so I have readjusted my ideas. … I have gone almost reluctantly—step by step, as pressed by facts too insistent to deny—and am still quite as remote from Belknap's naive Marxism as I am from the equally naive Republican orthodoxy I have left behind. I am as set as ever against any cultural upheaval—and believe that nothing of the kind is necessary in order to achieve a new and feasible economic equilibrium. The best of culture has always been non-economic.”

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

Hitherto it has grown out of the secure, non-struggling life of the aristocrat. In future it may be expected to grow out of the secure and not-so-struggling life of whatever citizens are personally able to develop it. There need be no attempt to drag culture down to the level of crude minds. That, indeed, would be something to fight tooth and nail! With economic opportunities artificially regulated, we may well let other interests follow a natural course. Inherent differences in people and in tastes will create different social-cultural classes as in the past—although the relation of these classes to the holding of material resources will be less fixed than in the capitalistic age now closing. All this, of course, is directly contrary to Belknap's rampant Stalinism—but I'm telling you I'm no bolshevik! I am for the preservation of all values worth preserving—and for the maintenance of complete cultural continuity with the Western-European mainstream. Don't fancy that the dethronement of certain purely economic concepts means an abrupt break in that stream. Rather does it mean a return to art impulses typically aristocratic (that is, disinterested, leisurely, non-ulterior) rather than bourgeois.
Letter to Clark Ashton Smith (28 October 1934), in Selected Letters V, 1934-1937 edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, pp. 60-64
Non-Fiction, Letters

Life, Men, People, Age

“The American conception of advertising is to arouse desires and stimulate wants, to make people dissatisfied with the old and out-of-date and by constant iteration to send them out to work harder to get the latest model—whether that model be an icebox or a rug or a new home.”

Bruce Fairchild Barton (1886–1967) American author, politician and advertising executive

As quoted in Fables of Abundance: a cultural history of advertising in America (1994) by Jackson Lears

People, Home

“There's an insistence that the Being that's spoken into being through Truth is Good. This is the most profound ever. It is also the most believable idea ever. What cures in therapy is Truth. Of course, you must encounter the things that you're afraid of, but this is enacted Truth, because if you know that there's something you need to do by your own set of rules and you're avoiding it, then you're enacting a lie. You're not speaking the lie, but you're enacting it, and that's the same thing: untruth. If you can confront If I can get you to face what it is that you know you shouldn't be avoiding, then what's happening is that we're both partaking in the process of you attempting to act out your deepest truth. That improves people's lives radically. The clinical evidence for that is overwhelming. We know that if you expose people to the things that they're afraid of and are avoiding, they get better. You have to do it carefully, cautiously, and with their approval and participation. Of all the things that clinicians have established that's credible, that's #1. It's redemptive insofar as both people are telling the truth. The difference between deception and repression is very small. People can handle earthquakes and cancer and even death, but they can't handle deception. They can't handle the rug being pulled out from underneath them by people who they love and trust. This does them in. It makes them ill, it hurts them psycho-physiologically, and worse than that it makes them cynical, bitter, vicious, and resentful. And then they also start to act all that out in the world, and that makes it worse.”

Jordan Peterson (1962) Canadian clinical psychologist, cultural critic, and professor of psychology

Concepts

Love, Death, People, Truth

“Pointless but intense excitement holds us in TV dramas. We hear threatening music. A killer with a gun steals into the bedroom of a sleeping woman. More subliminal sounds of danger, pointlessly ominous. The woman wakes and runs into the kitchen for a knife. The cops are on the case. We watch as the criminal is pursued through night streets; shots, a death; a body falls from a roof. Then time is up, another drama begins. Now we are in a church. No, we are in a lecture hall; no again — a drawer opens in a morgue. A woman is looking for her kidnapped child. Then that ends, and we are on the veld with zebras and giraffes. Then with Lenin at a mass meeting. And suddenly we flash away to a cooking school; we are shown how to stuff a turkey. Next the Berlin Wall comes down. Or flags are burning. Or a panel is worrying about the rug crisis. More and more public themes, with less and less personal consciousness. Clearly, personal consciousness is shrinking.”

Saul Bellow (1915–2005) Canadian-born American writer

"The Distracted Public" (1990), pp. 159-160
It All Adds Up (1994)

Death, School, Music, Sleep

“In reaffirming the greatness of our nation, we understand that greatness is never a given. It must be earned. Our journey has never been one of short-cuts or settling for less. It has not been the path for the faint-hearted — for those who prefer leisure over work, or seek only the pleasures of riches and fame. Rather, it has been the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things — some celebrated but more often men and women obscure in their labor, who have carried us up the long, rugged path towards prosperity and freedom. […] Time and again these men and women struggled and sacrificed and worked till their hands were raw so that we might live a better life. They saw America as bigger than the sum of our individual ambitions; greater than all the differences of birth or wealth or faction.”

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

2009, First Inaugural Address (January 2009)

Life, Women, Men, Pleasure

“How strange it is that man on earth should roam,
And lead a life of woe, but not forsake
His rugged path; nor dare he view alone
His future doom which is but to awake. ”

John Keats (1795–1821) English Romantic poet

Life, Future

“[after one of his dogs urinated in the bedroom] Who pissed!!? Who pissed on my fucking carpet!?! That bastard fucking dog man. I'm going to throw you in the pool! Get the fuck out of my house! Why do they do it Sharon? Whats the deal man? It's a fucking terrorist man! It's fucking part of Bin Laden's gang! Fucking Ali Baba used to go work on this rug.”

Ozzy Osbourne (1948) English heavy metal vocalist and songwriter

The Osbournes television show

Dogs, Parting, Housing

“I don't trust happiness. I turn it over as if it were a glass at a flea market or a rug at a souk, looking for chipped rims or loose threads.”

Jennifer Weiner (1970) American writer

Happiness

“To me a lush carpet of pine needles or spongy grass is more welcome than the most luxurious Persian rug.”

Helen Keller (1880–1968) American author and political activist

Grass, Beauty, Peaceful

“Theophane gave birth to a magical ram named Krysomallos, who for some reason had wool made of gold. Eventually, Krysomallos would be skinned for his fleece, which became known as the Golden Fleece, which means I am related to a sheepskin rug.”

Rick Riordan (1964) American writer

Source: Percy Jackson's Greek Gods

Birth

“Warmth, perfume, rugs, soft lights, books. They do not appease me. I am aware of time passing, of all the world contains that I have not seen, of all the interesting people I have not met.”

Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) writer of novels, short stories, and erotica

Source: A Cafe in Space: The Anais Nin Literary Journal, Volume 3

People, Books, World, Light

“Old pictures look very rugged and young, and the people in the photographs always seem a lot happier than you are.”

Stephen Chbosky book The Perks of Being a Wallflower

Source: The Perks of Being a Wallflower

People

“I'd hate to find out that the universe really wasn't conspiring against me. It would jerk the rug out from under my persecution complex.”

Jim Butcher book Grave Peril

Source: Grave Peril

Hate, Jerk, Universe

“Dead kids are put on pedestals, but mentally ill kids get hidden under the rug.”

Neal Shusterman (1962) American novelist

Source: Challenger Deep

Dead

“The serious artist must be as open as nature. Nature does not give all of herself in a paragraph. She is rugged and not set apart into discreet categories.”

Ezra Pound (1885–1972) American Imagist poet and critic

Nature

“We all too often have socialism for the rich and rugged free market capitalism for the poor.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

“Christ is sufficient. We do not need "support groups" for each and every separate tribulation. The most widely divergent sorrows may all be taken to the foot of the same old rugged cross and find there cleansing, peace, and joy.”

Elisabeth Elliot (1926–2015) American missionary

Source: These Strange Ashes

Peace, Support, Joy, Christ

“Are you up? Dressing? (Astrid)
No. I’m pissing on your rug. What do you think I’m doing? (Zarek)
I’m blind. For all I know you really are peeing on my rug, which is a very nice rug incidentally, so I hope you’re kidding. (Astrid)”

Sherrilyn Kenyon book Dance with the Devil

Source: Dance with the Devil

Hope, Thinking

“If you own a rug you own too much.”

Jack Kerouac (1922–1969) American writer

This appears not to be a Kerouac quote. It has not been found in any of Kerouac's published work.
Misattributed

“Puppy presents on the rug. This sucked.”

Kim Harrison (1966) Pseudonym

Source: Once Dead, Twice Shy

“I don’t like this, Artemis. I’m not a dog to be chained outside your house because you’re afraid I’ll piss on your rug. (Acheron)”

Sherrilyn Kenyon (1965) Novelist

Source: Acheron

Dogs, Housing

“In my little box
At the top of the stair
With my Indian rug
And a pipe to share.”

Neil Young (1945) Canadian singer-songwriter

Pocahontas
Song lyrics, Rust Never Sleeps (1978)

Box

“Were castles really as rough and rugged as their owners? The answer seems to be, “not necessarily.” Castles were indeed rough and rugged fortresses, the product of an essentially elite, masculine warrior society, what today we call a feudal society. But they were also among the finest buildings of their times—secure, well-built residences that supported the complex rituals of noble life. To understand how castle form came to meet castle function, we must look briefly at the castle’s social and economic underpinnings.”

Marilyn Stokstad (1929–2016) art historian

Overview: Castles in Context
Medieval castles (2005)

Life, Understanding, Support, Time

“One of the remarkable things about Russ Meyer's films is that they continue to live and play, long after the other work of the soft-core era has been forgotten. That is partly because of their craftsmanship, partly because of Meyer's leading ladies, and partly because of a spirit of paramilitary commitment that can be sensed as the cast and crew struggle through rugged terrain to enact their rural melodramas. But the central reason, I believe, is that Meyer is an auteur whose every frame reflects his own obsessions. Like all serious artists, he doesn't allow any space between his work and his dream.”

Roger Ebert (1942–2013) American film critic, author, journalist, and TV presenter

"Russ Meyer busts sleazy stereotype" Chicago Sun-Times (15 November 1985) http://www.rogerebert.com/interviews/russ-meyer-busts-sleazy-stereotype

Dreams, Sense

“[T]he ideal of the rugged individual opening up the American West is still applied as an essential truth to ten million citizens living in the small area of New York City, as if ten million bulls should and could be squeezed into a china shop.”

John Ralston Saul (1947) Canadian author and essayist

Voltaire's Bastards (1992)

Truth

“You know, the whole American culture is going down the drain, you can't turn on a television set and see anything, or walk in the street and not find garbage, or neighborhoods that were formerly beautiful now have McDonald's in them, and it's all a part of an enormous degeneration of culture in the United States. People that exist in that culture are forced to make moral decisions all the time about their lives, their occupations, their love-lives, and they make decisions that are commensurate with what's happening to them in this culture, and it's too bad that that's happening because that's what Manhattan is about, that New York used to be such a great city, so wonderful, and it has to fight every day for its survival against the encroachment of all this terrible ugliness that is gradually overcoming all the big cities in America.
This ugliness comes from a culture that has no spiritual center, a culture that has money and education, but no sense of being at peace with the world, no sense of purpose in life. They don't know what they're doing, or why they're here. They have no religious center, they have no philosophical center, and so they act, they do what's expedient at the moment. They have no long view of society. They only have the view of quick money, and kill the pain of the moment, and so instead of dealing with the real problems that exist, that are complicated, they sweep them under the rug by turning on the television set, or taking cocaine, or doing many things that enable them to escape confrontation with the unpleasant realities of the world.”

Woody Allen (1935) American screenwriter, director, actor, comedian, author, playwright, and musician

[Allen, Woody, France Roche, Woody Allen, ou L'Anhedoniste; le Plus Drole du Monde, New York, 1979, France 2, 05 January 2013]
Others

Love, Life, Money, Pain

“So it was that Lone came to know himself; and like the handful of people who have done so before him he found, at this pinnacle, the rugged foot of a mountain.”

Theodore Sturgeon book More Than Human

Source: More Than Human (1953), Chapter 1, p. 60

People, Mountain

“I want to say to those who are trying to learn to speak and those who are teaching them: Be of good cheer. Do not think of to-day's failures, but of the success that may come to-morrow. You have set yourselves a difficult task, but you will succeed if you persevere, and you will find a joy in overcoming obstacles — a delight in climbing rugged paths, which you would perhaps never know if you did not sometime slip backward — if the road was always smooth and pleasant. Remember, no effort that we make to attain something beautiful is ever lost. Sometime, somewhere, somehow we shall find that which we seek. We shall speak, yes, and sing, too, as God intended we should speak and sing.”

Helen Keller (1880–1968) American author and political activist

Address to the American Association to Promote the Teaching of Speech to the Deaf (8 July 1896)

God, Beauty, Failure, Thinking

“Several implications follow from Hayek's insights into the nature of capitalism.(a) The claim "I deserve my pretax income" is not generally true. Nor should the basic organization of property rules be based on considerations of moral desert. Hence, claims about desert have no standing in deciding whether taxation for the purpose of funding social insurance is just.
(b) The claim that people rocked by the viccisitudes of the market, or poor people generally, are getting what they deserve is also not generally true. To moralize people's misfortunes in this way is both ignorant and mean. Capitalism continuously and randomly pulls the rug out from under even the most prudent and diligent people. It is in principle impossible for even the most prudent to forsee all the market turns that could undo them. (If it were possible, then efficient socialist planning would be possible, too. But it isn't.)
(c) Capitalist markets are highly dynamic and volatile. This means that at any one time, lots of people are going under. Often, the consequences of this would be catastrophic, absent concerted intervention to avert the outcomes generated by markets. For example, the economist Amartya Sen has documented that sudden shifts in people's incomes (which are often due to market volatility), and not absolute food shortages, are a principal cause of famine.
(d) The volatility of capitalist markets creates a profound and urgent need for insurance, over and above the insurance needs people would have under more stable (but stagnant) economic systems. This need is increased also by the fact that capitalism inspires a love of personal independence, and hence brings about the smaller ("nuclear") family forms that alone are compatible with it. We no longer belong to vast tribes and clans. This sharply reduces the ability of individuals under capitalism to pool risks within families, and limits the claims they can effectively make on nonhousehold (extended) family members for assistance. To avoid or at least ameliorate disaster and disruption, people need to pool the risks of capitalism.”

Elizabeth S. Anderson (1959) professor of philosophy and womens' studies

How Not to Complain About Taxes (III): "I deserve my pretax income" http://left2right.typepad.com/main/2005/01/how_not_to_comp_1.html (January 26, 2005)

Love, People, Family, Food

“Jack: These last 2 miles were rugged, weren't they?”

Jack Benny (1894–1974) comedian, vaudeville performer, and radio, television, and film actor

The Jack Benny Program (Radio: 1932-1955), The Jack Benny Program (Television: 1950-1965)

“So breaks the sun earth's rugged chains,
Wherein rude winter bound her veins;
So grows both stream and source of price,
That lately fettered were with ice.
So naked trees get crispèd heads,
And coloured coats the roughest meads,
And all get vigour, youth and spright,
That are but looked on by his light.”

Ben Jonson (1572–1637) English writer

The Irish Masque at Court (1613)

Youth, Tree, Light, Winter

“If rugged individualists would throw away the right to fight for special privilege and would cooperate in a collective endeavor to secure plenty for everybody, they would have time, energy, and desire to explore higher pathways of living.”

Kirby Page (1890–1957) American clergyman

Property (1935)

Time, Fight

“Let's consider first Hayek's claim that prices in free market capitalism do not give people what they morally deserve. Hayek's deepest economic insight was that the basic function of free market prices is informational. Free market prices send signals to producers as to where their products are most in demand (and to consumers as to the opportunity costs of their options). They reflect the sum total of the inherently dispersed information about the supply and demand of millions of distinct individuals for each product. Free market prices give us our only access to this information, and then only in aggregate form. This is why centralized economic planning is doomed to failure: there is no way to collect individualized supply and demand information in a single mind or planning agency, to use as a basis for setting prices. Free markets alone can effectively respond to this information.
It's a short step from this core insight about prices to their failure to track any coherent notion of moral desert. Claims of desert are essentially backward-looking. They aim to reward people for virtuous conduct that they undertook in the past. Free market prices are essentially forward-looking. Current prices send signals to producers as to where the demand is now, not where the demand was when individual producers decided on their production plans. Capitalism is an inherently dynamic economic system. It responds rapidly to changes in tastes, to new sources of supply, to new substitutes for old products. This is one of capitalism's great virtues. But this responsiveness leads to volatile prices. Consequently, capitalism is constantly pulling the rug out from underneath even the most thoughtful, foresightful, and prudent production plans of individual agents. However virtuous they were, by whatever standard of virtue one can name, individuals cannot count on their virtue being rewarded in the free market. For the function of the market isn't to reward people for past good behavior. It's to direct them toward producing for current demand, regardless of what they did in the past.
This isn't to say that virtue makes no difference to what returns one may expect for one's productive contributions. The exercise of prudence and foresight in laying out one's production and investment plans, and diligence in carrying them out, generally improves one's odds. But sheer dumb luck is also, ineradicably, a prominent factor determining free market returns. And nobody deserves what comes to them by sheer luck.”

Elizabeth S. Anderson (1959) professor of philosophy and womens' studies

How Not to Complain About Taxes (III): "I deserve my pretax income" http://left2right.typepad.com/main/2005/01/how_not_to_comp_1.html (January 26, 2005)

People, Way, Behavior, Exercises

“There can be little doubt that the greater size and strength of man, in comparison with woman, together with his broader shoulders, more developed muscles, rugged outline of body, his greater courage and pugnacity, are all due in chief part to inheritance from his half-human male ancestors. These characters would, however, have been preserved or even augmented during the long ages of man's savagery, by the success of the strongest and boldest men, both in the general struggle for life and in their contests for wives; a success which would have ensured their leaving a more numerous progeny than their less favoured brethren.”

Charles Darwin book The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex

second edition (1874), chapter XIX: "Secondary Sexual Characters of Man", page 563 http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?pageseq=586&itemID=F944&viewtype=image The Descent of Man (1871)

Life, Men, Age, Courage

“I very much enjoyed working on the drawing, so much so that I made a whole series of small watercolors that I can use at any time for application on embroidered purses, pillows, rugs and wall hangings.”

Sophie Taeuber-Arp (1889–1943) Swiss artist

Quote in a letter to her sister Erika Schlegel, 22 February, 1922; from: Today is Tomorrow, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, ed. Thomas Schmutz; Aargauer Kunsthaus, and Zurich: Scheidegger & Spiess, 2014, p. 221
Taeuber describes creating a series of watercolors that she intends to rework across carpets, bags, pillows, and wall covers

Time, Drawing

“Nobody would claim that America has never made mistakes, never failed to live up to its own rhetoric. Nothing in the universe is perfect. There isn’t a nation anywhere on the planet whose record for slavery and slaughter isn’t worse. What the British did to the Irish and the Scots would have had their leaders doing the hemp dance right along with the Nazis at Nuremberg. And even the Swiss thought it was acceptable to inflict unspeakable cruelties on Gypsies and their children.
The difference, for better or worse, is that America never seems to stop examining and reexamining its historical failures, while other countries do their damnedest to sweep theirs under the rug and forget them.”

L. Neil Smith (1946) American writer

"Wanna Buy a Future?" http://www.bigheadpress.com/lneilsmith/?p=173 2 June 2009.

Children, Failure, Universe, Dance

“We are unwilling to let this cabal of radicals pull the rug of freedom out from under us in our lifetime. Now we have this glorious opportunity called November.”

Michele Bachmann (1956) American politician

Frederick County Republican Central Committee's Lincoln-Reagan Dinner, 2010-04-25

2010s

Freedom

“First of all, I can see that you love your daughter and you are a nice person who has a great future ahead of you and I hope your future is here…. This is not the focus…. And so, what we have to do is find a way to make sure that you can get right with the law and we've got to do this in a good way, so that the rug doesn't get pulled out from under you and your family gets separated…but if you're worried about, you know, some deportation force coming, knocking on your door this year, don't worry about that…. Secure the border and the people who are violent criminals, repeat offenders who keep coming back in, we've got to focus on that.”

Paul Ryan (1970) American politician

CNN Town Hall Meeting, responding to DACA audience member about her concern that she could be deported by ICE, CNN "Transcripts" http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/1701/12/se.01.html aired 12 January 2017.

Love, People, Family, Law

“Will the United States pull the rug on New Zealand? The answer is no. They might polish the lino a bit harder and hope that I execute a rather unseemly glide across it.”

David Lange (1942–2005) New Zealand politician and 32nd Prime Minister of New Zealand

Source: Gliding on the Lino: The Wit of David Lange", compiled by David Barber, 1987.

Hope

“The stern hand of fate has scourged us to an elevation where we can see the great everlasting things which matter for a nation — the great peaks we had forgotten, of Honor, Duty, Patriotism, and clad in glittering white, the great pinnacle of Sacrifice pointing like a rugged finger to Heaven.”

David Lloyd George (1863–1945) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech, Queen's Hall, London (19 September 1914)
Chancellor of the Exchequer

Fate

“We plant this stone as some small seed
Is sown at springtime, warm with earth;
We sow this seed as some good deed
Is sown, to grow until its worth
Shall grow, through rugged steeps of time,
To touch the God-built stars sublime.”

Joaquin Miller (1837–1913) American judge

"The Larger College".
In Classic Shades, and Other Poems (1890)

God, Star, Time

“Initially I observed, in sweeping, panoramic vision, a perpetually metamorphosing Persian rug. A few minutes later these patterns segued into cinematic images from childhood—it was kind of like watching home movies.”

David Woodard (1964) American writer, conductor and businessman

LA Weekly (Jul. 26 - Aug. 1, 1996)

Home, Childhood

“Growing up in such a stunning landscape is inevitably going to have an effect on you, whether you rebel or whether you embrace, because it's so striking. I lived on this rugged, rugged coastline with the North Sea hammering at the cliffs, and the weather changes literally every half hour. My parents met as rock climbers, so they're absolute outdoors fiends, and we were constantly up hills and under canvas and camping and tramping around. They're very fond memories and something I still love to do.”

KT Tunstall (1975) Scottish singer-songwriter and guitarist

Barnes & Noble Interview with David Sprague (February 2006).

Love, Parent, Memory, Change

“Honor is like an island, rugged and without a beach; once we have left it, we can never return.”

Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux (1636–1711) French poet and critic

L'honneur est comme une ile escarpée et sans bords ;
On n'y peut plus rentrer dès qu'on en est dehors.
Satire 10, l. 167
Satires (1716)

“The tusks which clashed in mighty brawls
Of mastodons, are billiard balls.
The sword of Charlemagne the Just
Is Ferric Oxide, known as rust.
The grizzly bear, whose potent hug,
Was feared by all, is now a rug.
Great Caesar's bust is on the shelf,
And I don't feel so well myself.”

Arthur Guiterman (1871–1943) United States writer

On the Vanity of Earthly Greatness http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/24.html

Fear, Feeling

“It was an experience of great interest to me to meet Premier Stalin … It is very fortunate for Russia in her agony to have this great rugged war chief at her head. He is a man of massive outstanding personality, suited to the sombre and stormy times in which his life has been cast; a man of inexhaustible courage and will-power and a man direct and even blunt in speech, which, having been brought up in the House of Commons, I do not mind at all, especially when I have something to say of my own. Above all, he is a man with that saving sense of humour which is of high importance to all men and all nations, but particularly to great men and great nations. Stalin also left upon me the impression of a deep, cool wisdom and a complete absence of illusions of any kind. I believe I made him feel that we were good and faithful comrades in this war – but that, after all, is a matter which deeds not words will prove.”

Winston S. Churchill book The Second World War

Speech in the House of Commons, September 8, 1942 "War Situation" http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1942/sep/08/war-situation#column_95. The Second World War (1939–1945)

Life, Wisdom, Men, War

“When I was young I was called a rugged individualist. When I was in my fifties I was considered eccentric. Here I am doing and saying the same things I did then and I'm labeled senile.”

George Burns (1896–1996) American comedian, actor, and writer

Just You and Me Kid (1979)

“No member of a crew is praised for the rugged individuality of his rowing.”

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

"Harvard: The Future," http://books.google.com/books?id=X3k5AQAAIAAJ&q=%22No+member+of+a+crew+is+praised+for+the+rugged+individuality+of+his+rowing%22&pg=PA266#v=onepage The Atlantic Monthly, September 1936 http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/theatlantic/doc/203819851.html?FMT=CITE&FMTS=CITE&type=current&date=Sep+1936&author=Alfred+North+Whitehead&pub=The+Atlantic+(1932-1971)&edition=&startpage=260-270&desc=Harvard:+The+future 1930s

For Team

“[speaking about a Persian rug…] how modern their conception of space was! They understood it in the seventeenth century; we are only just beginning to re-understand it in the twentieth – see how they mesh the vines, the tendrils, the flowers with space and utilize these linked forms to create wholeness and radiance.”

Arshile Gorky (1904–1948) Armenian-American painter

Source: 1942 - 1948, Arshile Gorky, – Goats on the roof' (2009), p. 359: in: 'A visit to the Metropolitan Museum with Gorky', Ethel Schwabacher, 1947

Flowers, Understanding

“In my skeptical days, people who wanted to appear very spiritual were always telling me to forget my questions, to shove them under the rug and go on in "faith." In fact, some of my friends thought my questions were my own devices to dodge the "real issues." They thought I must be morally decadent to voice such questions. -Appalachian Melody.”

Mark Heard (1951–1992) American musician and record producer

Liner Notes

People, Faith, Question, Appearance

“The rugged trees are mingling
Their flowery sprays in love;
The ivy climbs the laurel
To clasp the boughs above.”

William Cullen Bryant (1794–1878) American romantic poet and journalist

The Serenade http://www.gutenberg.org/files/16341/16341-h/16341-h.htm#page189, St. 14

Love, Tree

“It can be stated as a sober fact that the iron-heel attitude has already reduced by half the ability of Wisconsin to support a cooperative community of men, animals, and plants during the next century. Moreover, it has saddled us with a repair bill, the magnitude of which we are just beginning to appreciate. If some foreign invader attempted such loot, the whole nation would resist to the last man and the last dollar. But as long as we loot ourselves, we charge the indignity to 'rugged individualism', and try to forget it.”

Aldo Leopold (1887–1948) American writer and scientist

"The Arboretum and the University" [1934]; Published in The River of the Mother of God and Other Essays by Aldo Leopold, Susan L. Flader and J. Baird Callicott (eds.) 1991, p. 210.
1930s

Men, Communication, Support, Animals

“Dear Jones, - Two months nearly in getting to this Terra Pictura, and at work; but the length of time is my own fault. [because] I must see the South of France, which almost knocked me up, the heat was so intense, particularly at Nismes and Avignon; and until I got a plunge into the sea at Marseilles, I felt so weak that nothing but the change of scene kept me onwards to my distant point. Genoa, and all the sea-coast from Nice to Spezzia, is remarkably rugged and fine; so is Massa... Hope that you have been better than usual, and that the pictures go on well.”

J.M.W. Turner (1775–1851) British Romantic landscape painter, water-colourist, and printmaker

Quote in Turner's letter from Rome, 13 Oct. 1828 to his friend George Jones; as cited in The Life of J. M. W. Turner R.A. , Walter Thornbury - A new Edition, Revised https://ia601807.us.archive.org/24/items/gri_33125004491185/gri_33125004491185.pdf; London Chatto & Windus, 1897, p. 101 1821 - 1851

Hope, Distant, Change, Time

“You think me ambitious: ambition, alas! is composed of more rugged materials. If I were ambitious, I should not for so many years have been a prey to all the hell of conscientious scruples.”

Horace Walpole book The Castle of Otranto

Section 3
The Castle of Otranto (1764)

Hell, Thinking

“I respect and value the ideals of rugged individualism and self-reliance. But rugged individualism didn’t defeat the British, it didn’t get us to the moon, build our nation’s highways, or map the human genome. We did that together.”

Cory Booker (1969) 35th Class 2 senator for New Jersey in U.S. Congress

[Drabold, Will, Read Cory Booker's Speech at the Democratic Convention, http://time.com/4421756/democratic-convention-cory-booker-transcript-speech/, 21 August 2018, Time, July 26, 2016]
2016

“The windy springs and the blazing summers, one after another, had enriched and mellowed that flat tableland; all the human effort that had gone into it was coming back in long, sweeping lines of fertility. The changes seemed beautiful and harmonious to me; it was like watching the growth of a great man or of a great idea. I recognized every tree and sandbank and rugged draw. I found that I remembered the conformation of the land as one remembers the modelling of human faces.”

Willa Cather book My Ántonia

Book IV, Ch. 3
My Antonia (1918)

Beauty, Spring, Idea, Effort

“Well, I was missing my earplugs. And the way that I found out why they're missing is because the little Elmo -- his five pounds -- came in to the bedroom and deposited something on -- he came in from outside, he put something on the rug and was going to eat it. And I walked over and it was an earplug that had already been in and back out -- and apparently so delicious … he wanted it again!”

Megan Mullally (1958) American actress

On her new dog, Elmo.
Attributed

Way

“This statement appears to us to be conclusive with respect to the insufficiency of the undulatory theory, in its present state, for explaining all the phenomena of light. But we are not therefore by any means persuaded of the perfect sufficiency of the projectile system: and all the satisfaction that we have derived from an attentive consideration of the accumulated evidence, which has been brought forward, within the last ten years, on both sides of the question, is that of being convinced that much more evidence is still wanting before it can be positively decided. In the progress of scientific investigation, we must frequently travel by rugged paths, and through valleys as well as over mountains. Doubt must necessarily succeed often to apparent certainty, and must again give place to a certainty of a higher order; such is the imperfection of our faculties, that the descent from conviction to hesitation is not uncommonly as salutary, as the more agreeable elevation from uncertainty to demonstration. An example of such alternations may easily be adduced from the history of chemistry. How universally had phlogiston once expelled the aërial acid of Hooke and Mayow. How much more completely had phlogiston given way to oxygen! And how much have some of our best chemists been lately inclined to restore the same phlogiston to its lost honours! although now again they are beginning to apprehend that they have already done too much in its favour. In the mean time, the true science of chemistry, as the most positive dogmatist will not hesitate to allow, has been very rapidly advancing towards ultimate perfection.”

Thomas Young (scientist) (1773–1829) English polymath

Miscellaneous Works: Scientific Memoirs (1855) Vol. 1 https://books.google.com/books?id=-XAXAQAAMAAJ, ed. George Peacock & John Leitch, p. 249

Way, Travel, History, Mountain

“I tried the door. It opened, darkness inside, and I switched on the light. She lay there in the Murphy bed. Her face was the face of an old rose pressed and dried in a book, yellowish, with only the eyes to prove there was life in it. The room stank. The blinds were down, the door opened with difficulty until I kicked away the rug against the crack.”

John Fante book Ask the Dust

Ask the Dust (1939)

Life, Books, Light

“Here Skugg lies snug
As a bug in a rug.”

Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790) American author, printer, political theorist, politician, postmaster, scientist, inventor, civic activist, …

Letter to Miss Georgiana Shipley (September, 1772); reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).
Epistles

“Microsoft NT…is going to be very far-reaching. It's going to grab the rug out from under Unix.”

Gordon Bell (1934) American computer engineer

Computer World "VAX Man" interview

“Sharpe led the way towards the right hand door, all waiting done, all nervousness dispelled because the fight was on and there was nothing now but to win. This was the Sharpe who had saved Wellington's life at Assaye, who had hacked through the ranks to take an Eagle with Harper, who had gone, maddened, into the breach at Badajoz. This was the Sharpe whom Major General Nairn had only been able to guess at as he looked at the quiet, dark-haired man across the rug in Frenada.”

Bernard Cornwell (1944) British writer

Narrator, p. 118
Sharpe (Novel Series), Sharpe's Enemy (1984)

Life, Way, Waiting, Fight

“Proceeding on the assumption that the reader of this preface is interested in the development of my musical talent, I will try to explain, as concisely as I can, how, in this respect, my personal wheels go round. To begin with, I have only had two music lessons in my life. These were the first steps of what was to have been a full course at the Guildhall School of Music, and they faltered and stopped when I was told by my instructor that I could not use consecutive fifths. He went on to explain that a gentleman called Ebenezer Prout had announced many years ago that consecutive fifths were wrong and must in no circumstances be employed. At that time Ebenezer Prout was merely a name to me (as a matter of fact he still is, and a very funny one at that) and I was unimpressed by his Victorian dicta. I argued back that Debussy and Ravel had used consecutive fifths like mad. My instructor waved aside this triviality with a pudgy hand, and I left his presence forever with the parting shot that what was good enough for Debussy and Ravel was good enough for me. This outburst of rugged individualism deprived me of much valuable knowledge, and I have never deeply regretted it for a moment.”

Noel Coward (1899–1973) English playwright, composer, director, actor and singer

Preface, The Noël Coward Song Book, pp. 12–13.

Life, School, Music, Knowledge

“Our "society" is not a community, but merely a collection of isolated family units. Desperately insecure, fearing his woman will leave him if she's exposed to other men or to anything remotely resembling life, the male seeks to isolate her from other men and from what little civilization there is, so he moves her out to the suburbs, a collection of self-absorbed couples and their kids. Isolation, further, enables him to try to maintain his pretense of being an individual by being a "rugged individualist", a loner, equating non-co-operation and solitariness with individuality.”

Valerie Solanas (1936–1988) American radical feminist and writer. Attempted to assassinate Andy Warhol.

Source: SCUM MANIFESTO (1967), p. 7 (line break in "non-"/"co-operation").

Life, Men, Fear, Family

“… my mother will settle on the rug and unclip the bellows, pulling and pushing them with a mild aquatic motion with her left hand, the fingers of the right hand flowering upon the keys, the wedding-bangle suspended around her wrist. Each time the bellows are pushed, the round holes on the back open and close like eyes. Without the body music is not possible; it provides the hollow space for resonance as does the curved wooden box of the violin or the round urn of the sitar. At the moment of singing, breath tips in the swelling diaphragm as water does in a pitcher. The voice-box itself is a microscopic harp, its cords tautening and relaxing with each inflection.”

Amit Chaudhuri (1962) contemporary Indian-English novelist

Afternoon Raag (1993)

Music, Flowers, Wedding, Water

“Wit will shine
Through the harsh cadence of a rugged line.”

John Dryden (1631–1700) English poet and playwright of the XVIIth century

To the Memory of Mr. Oldham, line 15.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

“I returned to the Holiday Inn — where they have a swimming pool and air-conditioned rooms — to consider the paradox of a nation that has given so much to those who preach the glories of rugged individualism from the security of countless corporate sinecures, and so little to that diminishing band of yesterday's refugees who still practice it, day by day, in a tough, rootless and sometimes witless style that most of us have long since been weaned away from.”

Hunter S. Thompson book The Great Shark Hunt

Gonzo Papers, Vol. 1: The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales from a Strange Time (1979)
1970s

Holiday

“I think it is interesting that God designed people to need other people. We see those cigarette advertisements with the rugged cowboy riding around alone on a horse, and we think that is strength, when, really, it is like setting your soul down on a couch and not exercising it. The soul needs to interact with other people to be healthy.”

Donald Miller book Blue Like Jazz: nonreligious thoughts on Christian spirituality

Blue Like Jazz (2003, Nelson Books)

God, People, Exercises, Soul

“The rugged old Norsemen spoke of death as Heimgang — home-going. So the snow-flowers go home when they melt and flow to the sea, and the rock-ferns, after unrolling their fronds to the light and beautifying the rocks, roll them up close again in the autumn and blend with the soil. Myriads of rejoicing living creatures, daily, hourly, perhaps every moment sink into death’s arms, dust to dust, spirit to spirit — waited on, watched over, noticed only by their Maker, each arriving at its own heaven-dealt destiny. All the merry dwellers of the trees and streams, and the myriad swarms of the air, called into life by the sunbeam of a summer morning, go home through death, wings folded perhaps in the last red rays of sunset of the day they were first tried. Trees towering in the sky, braving storms of centuries, flowers turning faces to the light for a single day or hour, having enjoyed their share of life’s feast — all alike pass on and away under the law of death and love. Yet all are our brothers and they enjoy life as we do, share heaven’s blessings with us, die and are buried in hallowed ground, come with us out of eternity and return into eternity. 'Our little lives are rounded with a sleep.”

John Muir (1838–1914) Scottish-born American naturalist and author

pages 439-440 ("Trees towering … into eternity" are the next-to-last lines of the documentary film " John Muir in the New World http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/episodes/john-muir-in-the-new-world/watch-the-full-documentary-film/1823/" (American Masters), produced, directed, and written by Catherine Tatge.) John of the Mountains, 1938

Love, Life, Death, Law

“Dependence on the State became a virtue; dependence on oneself was derided as ‘rugged individualism.”

Frank Chodorov (1887–1966) American libertarian thinker

Source: Out of Step: The Autobiography of an Individualist (1962), p. 154

Dependency

“Madonna: "Is that a rug?" (referring to David Letterman's hair).”

Madonna (1958) American singer, songwriter, and actress

On The Late Show with David Letterman (1994)

“No member of a crew is praised for the rugged individuality of his rowing.”

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

Widely misattributed to Emerson on the Internet, this quote is actually taken from Alfred North Whitehead's essay "Harvard: The Future" (The Atlantic Monthly, September 1936.)
Misattributed

For Team

“Poor captive bird! Who, from thy narrow cage,
Pourest such music, that it might assuage
The rugged hearts of those who prisoned thee,
Were they not deaf to all sweet melody.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley Epipsychidion

Source: Epipsychidion (1821), l. 9

Music, Bird, Heart

“The central fact for me is, I think, that the [role of the] intellectual … cannot be played without a sense of being someone whose place it is publicly to raise embarrassing questions, to confront orthodoxy and dogma (rather than to produce them), to be someone who cannot easily be co-opted by governments or corporations, and whose raison d'être is to represent all those people and issues that are routinely forgotten or swept under the rug.”

Edward Said (1935–2003) Professor of English and literature

Representation of the Intellectual http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00gmx4c (1994)

People, Question, Thinking, Sense

“he seldom or never spoke except actually to convey an idea. Measured by quantity of words, he was a talker of fully average copiousness; by extent of meaning communicated, he was the most copious I have listened to. How in few sentences he would sketch you off an entire biography, an entire object or transaction, keen, clear, rugged, genuine, completely rounded In! His words came direct from the heart by the inspiration of the moment.”

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

1880s, Reminiscences (1881)

Communication, Idea, Heart

“"One time, when I was with Boston and he was with the Lakers, Happy Hairston and I were about to get in a scrape," said Charlotte Hornets coach Paul Silas, who was a rugged, no-nonsense enforcer. "All of a sudden, I felt an enormous vise around me. I was 6-7, 235, and Wilt had picked me up and turned me around. He said, 'We're not going to have that stuff.'”

Wilt Chamberlain (1936–1999) basketball player

I said, 'Yes sir.'"
Goliath's Wonderful Life, Hoop Magazine; May 1999; Chris Ekstrand
Strength

Happiness, Time

“Luther's merit in literary history is of the greatest: his dialect became the language of all writing. They are not well written, these Four-and-twenty Quartos of his; written hastily, with quite other than literary objects. But in no Books have I found a more robust, genuine, I will say noble faculty of a man than in these. A rugged honesty, homeliness, simplicity; a rugged sterling sense and strength. He dashes out illumination from him; his smiting idiomatic phrases seem to cleave into the very secret of the matter. Good humor too, nay tender affection, nobleness and depth: this man could have been a Poet too! He had to work an Epic Poem, not write one.”

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

1840s, Heroes and Hero-Worship (1840), The Hero as Priest

Secret, Books, History, Sense

“To be a tough, rugged boy is every lad’s ambition. But to be a gentleman, to be kindly, charitable, thoughtful as well as tough and rugged is much more to be desired. And he who can be both is much the better man and usually much tougher in the long run.”

Nile Kinnick (1918–1943) College football player

Letter to his younger brother George (July 18, 1938)

Boy

“And o'er them lowers destruction, high in air,
Upon those jutting crags, whose rugged sides,
Riven in fragments, and like ruins pil'd,
Seem as that giants of those ancient days
When earthborn creatures braved th' Olympic Gods,
Those of whom fable tells, had torn away
Rocks from their solid base, and with strong arm,
Parted the mountains: there the avalanche hangs,
Mighty, but tremulous; just a light breath
Will loosen it from off its airy throne;
Then down it hurls in wrath, like to the sound
Of thunder amid storms, or as the voice
Of rushing waters—death in its career.”

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

Canto I, I
The Fate of Adelaide (1821)

Death, God, Mountain, Light

““You sound like a rugged individualist,” said Webster.
“You say that like you think it’s funny,” yapped the mayor.
“I do think it’s funny,” said Webster. “Funny, and tragic, that anyone should think that way today.”
“The world would be a lot better off with some rugged individualism,” snapped the mayor. “Look at the men who have gone places—”
“Meaning yourself?” asked Weber.
“You might take me, for example,” Carter agreed. “I worked hard. I took advantage of opportunity. I had some foresight. I did—”
“You mean you licked the correct boots and stepped in the proper faces,” said Webster. “You’re the shining example of the kind of people the world doesn’t want today. You positively smell musty, your ideas are so old. You’re the last of the politicians, Carter, just as I was the last of the Chamber of Commerce secretaries. Only you don’t know it yet. I did. I got out. Even when it cost me something, I got out, because I had to save my self-respect. Your kind of politics is dead. They are dead because any tinhorn with a loud mouth and a brassy front could gain power by appeal to mob psychology. And you haven’t got mob psychology any more. You can’t have mob psychology when people don’t give a damn what happens to a thing that’s dead already—a political system that broke down under its own weight.””

Clifford D. Simak book City

Source: City (1952), Chapter 1, “City” (pp. 34-35)

Men, People, World, Way

“When President Kennedy sounded me out about becoming Chairman, I was of course pleased to be considered but, at the same time, felt a certain depression at the thought of returning to the bear pit of the Pentagon where I spent four less-than-happy years as Army Chief of Staff. However, I recognized that the atmosphere had changed and that the strategic heresy of Flexible Response which I had advocated to little avail had become the orthodoxy of the Kennedy Administration. Also, I had gotten to know Secretary McNamara and, in spite of the occasional differences of view, had a high regard for him as a man of decision who tackled fearlessly the tough problems of defense and refuse to yield to the temptation to sweep them under the rug.”

Maxwell D. Taylor (1901–1987) United States general

Source: Swords and Plowshares (1972), p. 252-253

Happiness, Problem, Decision, Change

“We had stayed up all night — my friends and I — beneath mosque lamps hanging from the ceiling. Their brass domes were filigreed, starred like our souls; just as, again like our souls, they were illuminated by the imprisoned brilliance of an electric heart. On the opulent oriental rugs, we had crushed our ancestral lethargy, arguing all the way to the final frontiers of logic and blackening reams of paper with delirious writings.”

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876–1944) Italian poet and editor, founder of the Futurist movement

Original Italian text:
Avevamo vegliato tutta la notte — i miei amici ed io — sotto lampade di moschea dalle cupole di ottone traforato, stellate come le nostre anime, perchè come queste irradiate dal chiuso fulgòre di un cuore elettrico. Avevamo lungamente calpestata su opulenti tappeti orientali la nostra atavica accidia, discutendo davanti ai confini estremi della logica ed annerendo molta carta di frenetiche scritture.
Source: 1900's, The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism' 1909, p. 49 Lead paragraph

Way, Soul, Star, Heart

“I'm sort of planting Post-It notes all over my psyche. Do not skateboard wasted. Do not buy $10,000 rugs. Be careful what you say to journalists. You don't have to stay up until 7 A. M.”

Ryan Adams (1974) American alt-country/rock singer-songwriter

tomorrow is a new day.
Blender (December 2003)

“A woman telling her true age is like a buyer confiding his final price to an Armenian rug dealer.”

Mignon McLaughlin (1913–1983) American journalist

The Complete Neurotic's Notebook (1981), Women & men

Age, Confidence

“Strenuously competitive parents may indeed produce high-achieving grownups, but it’s in the nature of things that high-achieving adults are likely to become frustrated and embittered old people, once the rug is pulled out from under their occupation.”

Adam Gopnik (1956) American journalist

How to Raise a Prodigy, The New Yorker (2018)

People, Nature, Parent

“In the first four centuries A. D. the world was full of Gnostics peddling special revelations, and, of course, Christ was only one of the Saviors: others were Baruch, Gamaliel, Tat (= the Egyptian god Toth), Seth (Egyptian god), Balaam, Ezechiel, Adam (whose books had just been discovered), Moses, Enoch, Marsanes, Nicotheus, Phosilampes, Mithra, Zoroaster, Zervan, et al., et al. In the early centuries of our era, the Near East was a Bedlam filled with the insane ravings of fakirs peddling their Saviors and their forged Gospels, and at this distance it is impossible to tell the difference between madmen, hallucinés who got visions of god from eating the sacred mushroom, Amanita muscaria, and shysters fleecing the yokels with mystic gabble. One cannot read much of the gibberish without feeling queasy and dizzy, but for a quick survey of the stuff that our holy men want to sweep under the rug, see Jean Doresse, Les livres secrets des Gnostiques d'Égypte, Paris, 1959, which surveys the books found at Chenoboskion a few years before. The one significant thing is that the peddlers of all forms of Gnosticism (including Christian cults before the Third Century) were almost all Jews. If you will look in your Scientific American for January 1973, pp. 80-87, you will note that the author has to admit that "it becomes increasingly evident that much of Gnosticism is probably of Jewish origin." He is naturally cautious, wary of offending God's Peculiar People. Although I admit that one cannot identify the race of some of the more prominent Salvation-hucksters, I think it significant that those whom one can identify racially always turn out to be Jews, and I would delete "much of" and "probably" in the author's statement.”

Revilo P. Oliver (1908–1994) American philologist

The Jewish Strategy, Chapter 12 "Christianity"
1990s, The Jewish Strategy (2001)

Men, God, People, Secret

“What a visionary thing is the independence of youth! how full of projects, which take the shape of certainties! How much of rugged and stern experience it requires to convince the young and the eager, that the efforts of an individual unaided by connexion or circumstance, are the true reading of the allegory of the Danaides : —industry and skill, alas, how often are they but water drawn with labour into a bucket full of holes!”

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

Heath's book of Beauty, 1833 (1832)

Youth, Effort, Water, Reading

“He would listen, he said, to a great man talking, with one eye on the cat on the rug, thinking to himself how much more the cat knew than the man.”

John Buchan (1875–1940) British politician

Space (1912)
Context: Remember his mind and no other part of him lived in his new world. He said it gave him an odd sense of detachment to sit in a room among people, and to know that nothing there but himself had any relation at all to the infinite strange world of Space that flowed around them. He would listen, he said, to a great man talking, with one eye on the cat on the rug, thinking to himself how much more the cat knew than the man.

Cats, Thinking

“The Air Force and the Navy carriers may have kept us from losing the war, but they were denied the opportunity of influencing the outcome decisively in our favor. They gained complete mastery of the skies, gave magnificent support to the infantry, destroyed every worthwhile target in North Korea and took a costly toll of enemy personnel and supplies. But as in Italy, where we learned the same bitter lesson in the same kind of rugged country, our air power could not keep a steady stream of enemy supplies and reinforcements from reaching the battle line. Air could not "isolate" the front. This made it a footslogger's war. To have pushed that war to a conclusion in the mud and mountains of Korea would have required more trained divisions, more supporting air and naval forces, would have incurred staggering casualties and could not have been attempted with any hope of success unless we had lifted the self-imposed tactical restrictions which gave the enemy a sanctuary north of the Yalu. I believe, however, that we could have obtained better truce terms, shortened the war and saved lives, if we had got tougher faster.”

Mark W. Clark (1896–1984) American general

Source: From the Danube to the Yalu (1954), p. 2-3

War, Hope, Mountain, Support

“I just love that rug.”

Bill Clinton (1946) 42nd President of the United States

Small chatter with George W. Bush in the Oval Office
Newsweek magazine
2000s

Love

“Abdali’s soldiers would be paid 5 Rupees (a sizeable amount at the time) for every enemy head brought in. Every horseman had loaded up all his horses with the plundered property, and atop of it rode the girl-captives and the slaves. The severed heads were tied up in rugs like bundles of grain and placed on the heads of the captives…Then the heads were stuck upon lances and taken to the gate of the chief minister for payment.”

Ahmed Shah Durrani (1722–1772) founder of the Durrani Empire, considered founder of the state of Afghanistan

Tarikh-i-Alamgiri, Kazim 1865, https://books.google.co.in/books?id=lhUwDwAAQBAJ&pg=PA56&lpg=PA56&dq=Abdali%E2%80%99s+soldiers+would+be+paid+5+Rupees+(a+sizeable+amount+at+the+time)+for+every+enemy+head+brought+in.+Every+horseman+had+loaded+up+all+his+horses+with+the+plundered+property,+and+atop+of+it+rode+the+girl-captives+and+the+slaves.+The+severed+heads+were+tied+up+in+rugs+like+bundles+of+grain+and+placed+on+the+heads+of+the+captives%E2%80%A6Then+the+heads+were+stuck+upon+lances+and+taken+to+the+gate+of+the+chief+minister+for+payment.&source=bl&ots=A22xMHoI9O&sig=ACfU3U3cQpuPeB4cwY8beK1nWw8rvuBaHA&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjQ4MzCnY3mAhXaZSsKHcPcBjQQ6AEwAnoECAkQAQ#v=onepage&q=Abdali%E2%80%99s%20soldiers%20would%20be%20paid%205%20Rupees%20(a%20sizeable%20amount%20at%20the%20time)%20for%20every%20enemy%20head%20brought%20in.%20Every%20horseman%20had%20loaded%20up%20all%20his%20horses%20with%20the%20plundered%20property%2C%20and%20atop%20of%20it%20rode%20the%20girl-captives%20and%20the%20slaves.%20The%20severed%20heads%20were%20tied%20up%20in%20rugs%20like%20bundles%20of%20grain%20and%20placed%20on%20the%20heads%20of%20the%20captives%E2%80%A6Then%20the%20heads%20were%20stuck%20upon%20lances%20and%20taken%20to%20the%20gate%20of%20the%20chief%20minister%20for%20payment.&f=false

Girl, Time, Horse

“Money drives politics. We all know that now. But the other side of this is that it’s not just an economic system, it’s also an ideological system. As an ideological system, what it generally does is three things that are pernicious and which set the groundwork for a kind of right-wing populism and a fascist politics. First, it operates off the assumption that all social problems are individual problems. Therefore whatever problems people face, the blame for those problems rests with themselves — whether we’re talking about ecological disasters, about poverty, about homelessness, about ignorance and illiteracy, and so forth and so on. Secondly, in doing so it tends to depoliticize people, and by depoliticizing them it becomes very difficult for people — operating under that notion of self-interest, a brutal form of competition, and this heightened notion of rugged individualism — to translate private troubles into larger systemic issues. Hence they find it very hard to understand the conditions in which they find themselves. Thirdly, it creates an enormous culture of ignorance.”

Henry Giroux (1943) American academic

Interview with Media For Us, 2019

Money, People, Understanding, Problem

“there is a great free human heart in this man. The common speech of him has a rugged nobleness, idiomatic, expressive, genuine; gleams here and there with beautiful poetic tints.”

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

1840s, Heroes and Hero-Worship (1840), The Hero as Priest

Beauty, Heart

“Let's talk about democratic socialism. We are living in many ways in a socialist society right now. The problem is, as Dr. Martin Luther King reminded us, "We have socialism for the very rich, rugged individualism for the poor."”

Bernie Sanders (1941) American politician, senator for Vermont

When Donald Trump gets $800 million in tax breaks and subsidies to build luxury condominiums, that's socialism for the rich. We have to subsidize Walmart’s workers on Medicaid and food stamps because the wealthiest family in America pays starvation wages. That's socialism for the rich. I believe in democratic socialism for working people. Not billionaires. Health care for all. Educational opportunity for all.

2020-02-19

Bloomberg takes a beating, Sanders defends socialism in fiery debate

Politico

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/02/19/democratic-debate-2020-best-moments-116169
2020

Way, Problem

“Kiss a little baby
Give the world a smile
If you take an inch
Give 'em back a mile
Cause if you lie like a rug
And you don't give a damn
You're never gonna be
As happy as a clam
So I'm sitting in a hotel
Trying to write a song
My head is just as empty
As the day is long.”

John Prine (1946–2020) American country singer/songwriter

"It’s a Big Old Goofy World"
Song lyrics, The Missing Years (1991)

Happiness, Lie, World, Smile

“O'er the rugged mountain's brow
Clara threw the twins she nursed,
And remarked, "I wonder now
Which will reach the bottom first?"”

Harry Graham (1874–1936) British writer

Calculating Clara
Ruthless Rhymes for Heartless Homes (1899)

Mountain