Quotes about series
page 2

“But the first lie in the series is the one you make with the greatest trepidation and the heaviest heart.”

Michael Chabon book The Mysteries of Pittsburgh

Source: The Mysteries of Pittsburgh

“Life is such a miracle, a series of small miracles. It really is, if you learn how to look at it with the right perspective.”

James Patterson book Suzanne's Diary for Nicholas

Source: Suzanne's Diary for Nicholas

Life, Learning

“Can you imagine what it would be like to know that your life was just going to be a series of days that were
all the same, that were do-overs?”

Jodi Picoult (1966) Author

Source: Between the Lines

Life, Imagination

“Thinking of a series of dreams
Where the time and the tempo fly
And there's no exit in any direction
'Cept the one that you can't see with your eyes”

Bob Dylan (1941) American singer-songwriter, musician, author, and artist

Dreams, Thinking, Time, Flying

“Despite all evidence to the contrary, Grandmère believes that Ron Weasley, not Voldemort, is the villain of the Harry Potter series.”

Meg Cabot (1967) Novelist

Source: Royal Wedding

“Isn't life a series of images that change as they repeat themselves?”

Andy Warhol (1928–1987) American artist

Life, Change

“Someone once wrote that a novel should deliver a series of small astonishments. I get the same thing spending an hour with you.

Also, here is a green toothbrush tied in a ribbon. It expresses my feelings inadequately.”

E. Lockhart book We Were Liars

Source: We Were Liars

Feeling

“Experience can dull. With most men experience is a series of mistakes; the more experience you have the less you know.”

Charles Bukowski book Notes of a Dirty Old Man

Source: Notes of a Dirty Old Man

Men

“The whole series of my life appeared to me as a dream; I sometimes doubted if indeed it were all true, for it never presented itself to my mind with the force of reality.”

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus

Source: Frankenstein

Life, Dreams, Reality, Appearance

“Monty Python: A documentary series on everyday life in Great Britain.”

Frank Portman King Dork

Source: King Dork

Life

“Life is a series of pulls back and forth… A tension of opposites, like a pull on a rubber band. Most of us live somewhere in the middle. A wrestling match… Which side win? Love wins. Love always wins”

Mitch Albom Tuesdays with Morrie

Source: Tuesdays with Morrie

Love, Life

“Someone once wrote that a novel should deliver a series of small astonishments. I get the same thing spending an hour with you.”

E. Lockhart book We Were Liars

Source: We Were Liars

“But I began then to think of time as having a shape, something you could see, like a series of liquid transparencies, one laid on top of another.”

Margaret Atwood book Cat's Eye

Source: Cat's Eye

Thinking, Time

“What is life but a series of inspired follies…”

George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) Irish playwright

Life

“A quick temper, sharp tongue, and restless spirit were always getting her into scrapes, and her life was a series of ups and downs, which were both comic and pathetic.”

Louisa May Alcott book Little Women

Source: Little Women

Life

“For each person there is a sentence — a series of words — which has the power to destroy him”

Philip K. Dick book VALIS

VALIS (1981)
Context: For each person there is a sentence — a series of words — which has the power to destroy him … another sentence exists, another series of words, which will heal the person. If you're lucky you will get the second; but you can be certain of getting the first: that is the way it works. On their own, without training, individuals know how to deal out the lethal sentence, but training is required to deal out the second.

Personality

“I think the world is a series of broken dams and floods, and my cartoons are tiny little lifeboats.”

Sherman Alexie book The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

Source: The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

World, Thinking

“It is all connected Dominick," she said. "Life is not a series of isolated ponds & puddles; life is this river you see below, before you. It flows from the past through the present on it's way to the future.”

Wally Lamb book I Know This Much Is True

Source: I Know This Much Is True

Life, Way, Past, Future

“The whole world is a series of miracles, but we're so used to them we call them ordinary things.”

Hans Christian Andersen (1805–1875) Danish author, fairy tale writer, and poet

World

“You see? I know where every single book used to be in the library.' She pointed to the shelf opposite. 'Over there was, which was a hugely popular fishing book and one of a series, I believe.”

Jasper Fforde (1961) British novelist

Source: Shades of Grey

Books, Fish

“gold is power-artemis fowl I liked the artemis fowl series because its about a boy genius”

Eoin Colfer (1965) Irish author of children's books

Boy

“People ask, How did you get in there? What they really want to know is if they are likely to end up in there as well. I can't answer the real question. All I can tell them is, It's easy. Most people pass over incrementally, making a series of perforations in the membrane between here and there until an opening exists. And who can resist an opening?”

Susanna Kaysen book Girl, Interrupted

Source: Girl, Interrupted (1994)

People, Question

“Life is a series of collisions with the future; it is not the sum of what we have been, but what we yearn to be.”

José Ortega Y Gasset (1883–1955) Spanish liberal philosopher and essayist

Life, Future

“I am my best work - a series of road maps, reports, recipes, doodles, and prayers from the front lines.”

Audre Lorde (1934–1992) writer and activist

“I see her as a series of marvellous shapes formed at random in the kaleidoscope of desire.”

Angela Carter book The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman

Source: The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman

“Life is a series of surprises and would not be worth taking or keeping if it were not.”

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

Life

“An argument is a connected series of statements intended to establish a definite proposition… A contradiction is just the automatic gainsaying of anything the other person says."

No, it's not…”

Graham Chapman (1941–1989) English comedian, writer and actor

Personality

“Sometimes it felt like her life was a series of falls from ever-greater heights.”

Scott Westerfeld book Pretties

Source: Pretties

Life

“We cannot tell the precise moment when friendship is formed. As in filling a vessel drop by drop, there is at last a drop which makes it run over; so in a series of kindnesses there is at last one which makes the heart run over.”

Ray Bradbury book Fahrenheit 451

19 September 1777
The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. (1791)
Source: Fahrenheit 451

Friendship, For Friend, For Bestfriend, Friendship

“Learning to stop sweating the small stuff involves deciding what things to engage in and what things to ignore. From a certain perspective, life can be described as a series of mistakes, one right after another with a little space in between.”

Richard Carlson (1961–2006) Author, psychotherapist and motivational speaker

Life, Learning

“So, great. This is Camp…what do you call it? Camp Fish-Blood?”
Aphros frowned. “I hope that was a joke. This is Camp __________.” He made a sound that was a series of sonar pings and hisses.”

Rick Riordan The Mark of Athena

Source: The Mark of Athena

Hope, Fish

“What else should our lives be but a continual series of beginnings, of painful settings out into the unknown, pushing off from the edges of consciousness into the mystery of what we have not yet become.”

David Malouf book An Imaginary Life

Source: An Imaginary Life

Pain

“I love Greek Mythology, wish there was a TV series, like being human or smallville, but with the series based around Percy Jackson and the Olympians, Holla Mayne!”

Rick Riordan book The Battle of the Labyrinth

Source: The Battle of the Labyrinth

Love

“We are told we must choose — the old or the new. In fact, we must choose both. What is a life if not a series of negotiations between the old and the new?”

Susan Sontag (1933–2004) American writer and filmmaker, professor, and activist

Frankfurt Book Fair speech (2003)
Context: We are told we must choose — the old or the new. In fact, we must choose both. What is a life if not a series of negotiations between the old and the new? It seems to me that one should always be seeking to talk oneself out of these stark oppositions.

Life

“Australia's place on new trade routes was decisive in its early history. It aided the convict settlement. It prompted the rise of a new free group of Australian traders who did not depend heavily on the favours of governors, who were alert for new ways of making money, and who were eventually to hasten Australia's transition from a gaol to a series of free colonies.”

Geoffrey Blainey book The Tyranny of Distance: How Distance Shaped Australia's History

The Tyranny of Distance: How Distance Shaped Australia's History (1966)

Money, Way, History, Decision

“By 1954, when Brown came up for decision, it had been apparent for some time that segregation rarely if ever produced equality. Quite aside from any question of psychology, the physical facilities provided for blacks were not as good as those provided for whites. That had been demonstrated in a long series of cases... The Court's realistic choice, therefore, was either to abandon the quest for equality by allowing segregation or to forbid segregation in order to achieve equality. There was no third choice. Either choice would violate one aspect of the original understanding, but there was no possibility of avoiding that. Since equality and segregation were mutually inconsistent, though the ratifiers did not understand that, both could not be honored. When that is seen, it is obvious the Court must choose equality and prohibit state-imposed segregation. The purpose that brought the fourteenth amendment into being was equality before the law, and equality, not separation, was written into the law.”

Robert Bork (1927–2012) American legal scholar

The Tempting of America (1990), page 82; on Brown v. Board of Education.

Law, Understanding, Question, Decision

“Indeed, racist views about the demographic 'threat' that the Palestinians constitute for a Jewish supremacist Israel are not confined to Ariel Sharon and the Israeli Jewish right wing (which is anyway a majority in Jewish Israel), but are also voiced by liberal and leftist Israeli Jews. In December 2000, the Institute of Policy and Strategy at the Herzlia Interdisciplinary Center in Israel held its first of a projected series of annual conferences dealing with the strength and security of Israel, especially with regards to maintaining its Jewish supremacist character. One of the 'Main Points' identified in the 52-page conference report is the concern over the numbers needed to maintain the Jewish supremacy of Israel.”

Joseph Massad (1963) Associate Professor of Arab Studies

Ibid.
"The Ends of Zionism: Racism and the Palestinian Struggle"

“As a full-time longshoreman I am necessarily more a scribbler than a writer. But I am also so by inclination. The writing I can enjoy is the sketching of an idea in a few dozen words — two hundred at most. Elaboration and expansion are for me hard going. An article of several thousand words becomes inevitably a mosaic of ideas — a series of ideas stuck together.”

Eric Hoffer (1898–1983) American philosopher

Entry (1962)
Eric Hoffer and the Art of the Notebook (2005)

Idea, Time

“No, no. Bill should play two or three more years. Talk to him. Tell him he can get in shape. I know he can play better second base than anybody. He is two years younger than I am. He is the greatest second baseman of all time, a real super star. But people forget too fast what he has done for the Pirates. Nobody I ever saw could field with him. He won the World Series with his home run against the Yankees. I don't like to see him retire.”

Roberto Clemente (1934–1972) Puerto Rican baseball player

As quoted in "Sidelights on Sports: Monday Morning's Sports Wash" https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=XOANAAAAIBAJ&sjid=u2wDAAAAIBAJ&pg=7387%2C128274 by Al Abrams, in The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (Monday, October 2, 1972), p. 24 Baseball-related, <big><big>1970s</big></big>, <big>1972</big>

People, World, Home, Star

“I begin a painting with a series of mistakes. The painting comes out of the correction of mistakes by feeling. I begin with shapes and colors which are not related internally nor to the external world; I work without images. Ultimate unifications come about through modulations of the surface by innumerable trials and efforts. The final picture is the process arrested at the moment when what I was looking for flashes into view.”

Robert Motherwell (1915–1991) American artist

Cconversation with W.C. Seitz, in Abstract Expressionist Painting in America, W.C, Seitz, Cambridge Massachusetts, 1983, p. 94
after 1970

World, Color, Feeling, Effort

“[Why do animals] undergo in the course of their growth a series of complicated changes, during which they acquire organs which have no function, and which, after remaining visible for a short time, disappear without leaving a trace... The explanation of such facts is obvious. The stage when the tadpole breathes by gills is a repetition of the stage when the ancestors of the frog had not advanced in the scale of development beyond a fish.”

Francis Maitland Balfour (1851–1882) British biologist

Comparative Embryology, p. 702. (1880)

Fish, Change, Time, Animals

“I was looking for some sort of systematic way of getting down these subjective images and I had always admired, particularly admired the early Italian painters who proceeded the Renaissance and I very much liked some of the altarpieces in which there would be, for example the story of Christ told in a series of boxes... And it seemed to me this was a very rational method of conveying something. So I decided to try it. But I was not interested in telling, in giving something its chronological sequence. What I wanted to do was give something, to present what material I was interested in simultaneously so that you would get an instantaneous impact from it. So, I made boxes..”

Adolph Gottlieb (1903–1974) American artist

Variant: I was looking for some sort of systematic way of getting down these subjective images and I had always admired, particularly admired the early Italian painters who proceeded the Renaissance and I very much liked some of the altarpieces in which there would be, for example the story of Christ told in a series of boxes... And it seemed to me this was a very rational method of conveying something. So I decided to try it. But I was not interested in telling, in giving something its chronological sequence. What I wanted to do was give something, to present what material I was interested in simultaneously so that you would get an instantaneous impact from it. So I made boxes..
Source: 1960s, Interview with Dorothy Seckler, 1967, p. 55-59.

Way, Christ, Box

“Lying down to sleep on the earthen riverbank, I thought, Vrindavan is attracting my heart like no other place. What is happening to me? Please reveal Your divine will. With this prayer, I drifted off to sleep.
Before dawn, I awoke to the ringing of temple bells, signaling that it was time to begin my journey to Hardwar. But my body lay there like a corpse. Gasping in pain, I couldn’t move. A blazing fever consumed me from within, and under the spell of unbearable nausea, my stomach churned. Like a hostage, I lay on that riverbank. As the sun rose, celebrating a new day, I felt my life force sinking. Death that morning would have been a welcome relief. Hours passed.
At noon, I still lay there. This fever will surely kill me, I thought.
Just when I felt it couldn’t get any worse, I saw in the overcast sky something that chilled my heart. Vultures circled above, their keen sights focused on me. It seemed the fever was cooking me for their lunch, and they were just waiting until I was well done. They hovered lower and lower. One swooped to the ground, a huge black and white bird with a long, curving neck and sloping beak. It stared, sizing up my condition, then jabbed its pointed beak into my ribcage. My body recoiled, my mind screamed, and my eyes stared back at my assailant, seeking pity. The vulture flapped its gigantic wings and rejoined its fellow predators circling above. On the damp soil, I gazed up at the birds as they soared in impatient circles. Suddenly, my vision blurred and I momentarily blacked out. When I came to, I felt I was burning alive from inside out. Perspiring, trembling, and gagging, I gave up all hope.
Suddenly, I heard footsteps approaching. A local farmer herding his cows noticed me and took pity. Pressing the back of his hand to my forehead, he looked skyward toward the vultures and, understanding my predicament, lifted me onto a bullock cart. As we jostled along the muddy paths, the vultures followed overhead. The farmer entrusted me to a charitable hospital where the attendants placed me in the free ward. Eight beds lined each side of the room. The impoverished and sadhu patients alike occupied all sixteen beds. For hours, I lay unattended in a bed near the entrance. Finally that evening the doctor came and, after performing a series of tests, concluded that I was suffering from severe typhoid fever and dehydration. In a matter-of-fact tone, he said, “You will likely die, but we will try to save your life.””

Radhanath Swami (1950) Gaudiya Vaishnava guru

Republished on The Journey Home website.
The Journey Home: Autobiography of an American Swami (Tulsi Books, 2010)

Life, Death, Pain, Hope

“General systems theory is a series of related definitions, assumptions, and postulates about all levels of systems from atomic particles through atoms, molecules, crystals, viruses, cells, organs, individuals, small groups, societies, planets, solar systems, and galaxies. General behavior systems theory is a subcategory of such theory, dealing with living systems, extending roughly from viruses through societies. A significant fact about living things is that they are open systems, with important inputs and outputs. Laws which apply to them differ from those applying to relatively closed systems.”

James Grier Miller (1916–2002) biologist

Miller (1956) "General behavior systems theory and summary". In: Journal of Counseling Psychology. 3 (2) 120-124. Cited in: Francis Ferguson (1975) Architecture, cities and the systems approach. p. 12

Law, Behavior

“[with Stephen Colbert, after presenting the award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Comedy Series to Ricky Gervais and being informed that Gervais was not there] Ricky Gervais couldn't be here tonight, so instead we're going to give this to our friend Steve Carell.”

Jon Stewart (1962) American political satirist, writer, television host, actor, media critic and stand-up comedian

Carell, who was among the nominees who had just lost to Gervais, then ran onto the stage, where the three of them group-hugged and jumped around screaming.
The 59th Primetime Emmy Awards (2007)

“The running gag of the Grand Prix series is that whereas Murray [Walker], safe in the commentary box, sounds like a blindfolded man riding a unicycle on the rim of the pit of doom, the men actually facing the danger are all so taciturn that you might as well try interviewing the cars themselves.”

Clive James (1939–2019) Australian author, critic, broadcaster, poet, translator and memoirist

'Hot pistils'
Essays and reviews, Glued to the Box (1983)

Men, Cars, Box

“When I tried to sort out the pernicious disagreements between new classical and new Keynesian economists, I conducted a series of conversations with the protagonists (Klamer 1983). The personal differences were revealing. The viva cious Robert Solow (with a taste for the quick quip), the serious Robert Lucas (never less than self-composed), the chatty Franco Modigliani (not shy of self promotion), and the unassuming James Tobin (wanting an interview at least as long as Lucas’s) quickly taught me how trenchant the rhetorical differences were.”

Arjo Klamer (1953) Dutch columnist, economist and politician

Source: Speaking of economics: how to get in the conversation (2007), Ch. 7 : Why disagreements among economists persist, why economists need to brace themselves for differences within their simultaneous conversations and their conversations over time, and why they may benefit from knowing about classicism, modernism, and postmodernism

Personality

“The whole train of animated beings, from the simplest and oldest up to the highest and most recent, are, then, to be regarded as a series of advances of the principle of development, which have depended upon external physical circumstances, to which the resulting animals are appropriate.”

Robert Chambers (publisher, born 1802) book Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation

Source: Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), p. 203

Animals, Dependency, Training

“Refactoring (noun) : a change made to the internal structure of software to make it easier to understand and cheaper to modify without changing the observable behavior of the software.
To refactor (verb) : to restructure software by applying a series of refactorings without changing the observable behavior of the software.”

Kent Beck (1961) software engineer

Source: Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code, 1999, p. 33-43 as cited in: Militiadis Lytras, Patricia Ordóñez de Pablos, Ernesto Damiani (2011) Semantic Web Personalization and Context Awareness. p. 111

Behavior, Understanding, Change

“(DVD introduction) Well, welcome to your very own DVD of me, DVB, and ‘Mind Control’. If you weren’t expecting me and thought you were buying Reginald Perrin, then press eject now before you begin vomiting. Otherwise, please, please ensure that you are sitting in an extreme level of comfort, preferably in pre-worn slippers and, I trust, with your extended family around you. If you have seen the film ‘Signs’ and would like to wear the pointy tin foil hats now would be a good time to put them on you can’t be too careful. Well, pphhh, goodness me, er, it’s been a meteoric rise over these last years. The money and sex are exhausting and I have you the viewer to thank. Thanks. We’ve put together some of the pieces from the specials and series in glistening digital format, each pixel hand picked and gently polished and brought to you in wide-sound, surround-screen enjoyment. I hope you enjoy watching them as much as I’ll enjoy the royalties from this, which is enormously. If you don’t like it and HMV won’t take it back because you’ve got sticky all over it then the disc makes an excellent beer coaster or wheels for a space truck or can be immense fun just putting it on your finger and [waggling it], like that. But I hope you do like it. When I first started developing these techniques I had no idea that they were going to prove at all popular and for all my nancing about and staring I’m actually really excited to have a DVD out and can’t wait to go and find it in Discount Books & Puzzles next to the Dizzie Gillespie CD box sets and disappointing erotica. I hope you like it and if you do, please go and buy another one.”

Derren Brown (1971) British illusionist

TV Series and Specials (Includes DVDs), Mind Control (1999–2000) or Inside Your Mind on DVD

Money, Books, Family, Hope

“In order for a slave--or, for that matter, a slaveholder--to become free, a series of successive perceptions must be realized. First, the person must perceive that the owners (and slaves) are merely human, that is, putting all rhetoric aside, that there exists a dichotomy of privilege and exploitation, and that the privilege is a result of exploitation. … The second realization is, once again, that the owners and slaves are merely human, meaning this time that the exploitation and consequent privilege are not inevitable, but the result of social arrangements and force (as well as a huge dollop of bad luck on the part of those enslaved). … The third realization is yet again that the owners are merely human, by which I now mean they are vulnerable. Wealth does not protect them.”

Derrick Jensen book The Culture of Make Believe

Source: The Culture of Make Believe (2003), p. 63

Bad luck, Time, Success, Parting

“The semanticists are exactly wrong in regarding language as an obstruction or series of pitfalls. Language, on the contrary, appears as a great storehouse of universal memory, or it may be said to serve as a net, not imprisoning us but supporting us and aiding us to get at a meaning beyond present meaning through the very fact that it embodies others’ experiences.”

Richard M. Weaver (1910–1963) American scholar

Source: Ideas have Consequences (1948), p. 158.

Support, Universe, Appearance, Memory

“The relation of repetitions for learning and for repeating English stanzas needs no amplification. These were learned by heart on the first day with less than half of the repetitions necessary for the shortest of the syllable series.”

Hermann Ebbinghaus (1850–1909) German psychologist

Source: Memory: A contribution to experimental psychology, 1885, p. 85

Learning, Heart

“We never have a full demonstration, although there is always an underlying reason for the truth, even if it is only perfectly understood by God, who alone penetrated the infinite series in one stroke of the mind.”

Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716) German mathematician and philosopher

The Shorter Leibniz Texts (2006) http://books.google.com/books?id=oFoCY3xJ8nkC&dq edited by Lloyd H. Strickland, p. 111

God, Truth

“Aha! The Alien Planet Canada series, where the planet the characters are marooned on seems to be Manitoba. Bad bad world building.”

James Nicoll (1961) Canadian fiction reviewer

ibid.: About Genellan: Planetfall by Scott Gier:
2000s

World

“There must be no more pictures covered in brown sauce [c. 1880, when Munch started to paint series of landscapes in fresh colors]”

Edvard Munch (1863–1944) Norwegian painter and printmaker

a written note; as quoted in Edvard Much – behind the scream, Sue Prideaux; Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2007, p. 41
after 1930

Color, Painting

“A series of ever-decreasing splashes drip and plop into black water… thus the beginning of the film is reprised.”

Peter Greenaway (1942) British film director

Prospero's Books

Water

“Many natural patterns, such as the arrangement of buds on a stem, accord with the series of Fibonacci numbers, and Fibonacci spirals are also observed in spiral nebulae. There are, moreover, no flying pigs …”

Mary Midgley (1919–2018) British philosopher and ethicist

Review of 'What Darwin Got Wrong' by Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli Palmarini (2010) http://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/feb/06/what-darwin-got-wrong.

Nature, Flying

“Then M. Ravel discussed another idea. That was that in these days of cacophony it might be quite an original idea for the orchestra to start, say, in C major, and then, through a series of discords the instruments should divide, some going up a semitone at every three or four bars, while others went down in the same way, eventually ending in perfect harmony in C major two octaves apart. He said: 'It is just an idea but it might be rather fun working it out and certainly a novel way of resolving harmony from discord.”

Maurice Ravel (1875–1937) French composer

Maurice Ravel and unattributed. "Finding Tunes in Factories", Evening Standard, London, 24 February 1932.
Also printed in: Orenstein, Arbie, ed. (1990). A Ravel Reader: Correspondence, Articles, Interviews, p.490-91. New York: Columbia University Press.

Way, Idea, Perfection

“Let us say that the freedom exists, but it is limited to the one unique act of choosing the profession. Afterward all freedom is over. When he begins his studies at the university, the doctor, lawyer, or engineer is forced into an extremely rigid curriculum which ends with a series of examinations. If he passes them, he receives his license and can thereafter pursue his profession in seeming freedom. But in doing so he becomes the slave of base powers; he is dependent on success, on money, on his ambition, his hunger for fame, on whether or not people like him. He must submit to elections, must earn money, must take part in the ruthless competition of castes, families, political parties, newspapers. In return he has the freedom to become successful and well-to-do, and to be hated by the unsuccessful, or vice versa.”

Hermann Hesse book The Glass Bead Game

The Glass Bead Game (1943)

Money, Hunger, Hate, People

“It’s pretty amazing to be a part of the Star Trek family. It’s definitely a highlight of my career. I never imagined it’d lead to so many great opportunities to appear in other films, travel the world to make appearances, be featured in a comic strip, trading cards and even action figures. The fans are the most loyal, more than any franchise or brand. It’s pretty amazing how Star Trek continues to be relevant with so many TV series and films.”

Menina Fortunato (1980) Canadian actress

Enterprise's Orion Slave Girls https://www.startrek.com/article/enterprises-orion-slave-girls-part-2 (March 17, 2016)

World, Family, Travel, Imagination

“Having the security of being in a series week in, week out gives you great flexibility; you can experience with yourself, try a different scene different ways. If you make a mistake one week, you can look at it and say, 'Well, I won't do that again,' and you're still on the air next week.”

Clint Eastwood (1930) actor and director from the United States

On Rawhides impact on his beginning acting career
Zmijewsky, Boris; Lee Pfeiffer (1982). The Films of Clint Eastwood. p. 20. Secaucus, New Jersey: Citadel Press. ISBN 0806508639.

Way

“If I read the future aright Hitler's government will confront Europe with a series of outrageous events and ever-growing military might. It is events which will show our dangers, though for some the lesson will come too late.”

Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Letter to Lord Londonderry (6 May 1936), quoted in Martin Gilbert, Prophet of Truth: Winston S. Churchill, 1922–1939 (London: Minerva, 1990), p. 733
The 1930s

Reading, Future

“The notion of a formal structure of command must be abandoned. It is more useful to think of the mature corporation as a series of concentric circles.”

John Kenneth Galbraith book The New Industrial State

Source: The New Industrial State (1967), Chapter XIII, Section 1, p. 149

Thinking

“Look, I think there is a gay and secular fascism in this country that wants to impose its will on the rest of us, is prepared to use violence, to use harassment. I think it is prepared to use the government if it can get control of it. I think that it is a very dangerous threat to anybody who believes in traditional religion. And I think if you believe in historic Christianity, you have to confront the fact. And, frank— for that matter, if you believe in the historic version of Islam or the historic version of Judaism, you have to confront the reality that these secular extremists are determined to impose on you acceptance of a series of values that are antithetical, they're the opposite, of what you're taught in Sunday school.”

Newt Gingrich (1943) Professor, Speaker of the United States House of Representatives

2008-11-15
The O'Reilly Factor
Fox News
2008-11-17
Gingrich: "<nowiki>[T]</nowiki>here is a gay and secular fascism in this country that wants to impose its will on the rest of us"
Media Matters for America
http://mediamatters.org/mmtv/200811170014
2011-03-30
discussing protesters against a California ballot initiative banning same-sex marriage
2000s

School, Religion, Thinking, Reality

“My first exposure to Batman as a character was Batman the TV series. But honestly, I didn’t know it was supposed to be a parody or campy. I thought it was the coolest thing I’d ever seen. Of course, I was 5 at the time. But all in one fell swoop, I became an instant super hero fan. Later on, as I got older and started reading more comics and getting into the super hero scene, I realized that the Batman show was kind of a comedy. I was reading Neal Adams comics and thinking, "Batman is kind of cooler than that show, he’s kind of scary and mysterious." So my perception of Batman changed over time, and then I went through the periods with Frank Miller and the Tim Burton movies. So now I’ve got these warring Batmans in my head. I still love the Adam West/Batman show. I still love the Neal Adams take on Batman comics. I still love The Dark Knight. All of these things totally contradict each other, and yet it’s fine to me. I’ve said it over and over again, Batman as a character is such a strong concept, he’s the kind of character that you can take him in any number of ways and it still feels right.”

Bruce Timm (1961) Animator

ruce Timm Interview http://www.animationmagazine.net/home-entertainment/batman-under-the-red-hood-clip-and-bruce-timm-interview/ (June 25, 2010)

Love, War, Way, Feeling

“History presents a series of cultural epochs. Each is a span of years within which knowledge presents a more or less unified structure which can be expressed in a classification, but each new epoch requires a new classification.”

Brian Campbell Vickery (1918–2009) British information theorist

Source: Classification and indexing in science (1958), Other Chapters, p. 147 Cited in: Madeline M. Henderson (1966) Cooperation, convertibility, and compatibility among information systems: a literature review. p. 72.

History, Knowledge

“The series of events leading up to the formation of the biblical community and its religion apparently began unexpectedly. Moses killed an Egyptian overseer who was beating one of the slaves. It is difficult to imagine this being a fictional invention, especially since the biblical writers never chose to comment on this noteworthy aspect of the protagonist’s dark past. When Moses later tried to intervene between two quarreling slaves, one of them responded, “Who made you a ruler and a judge over us? Do you mean to kill me as you killed the Egyptian?” (Exodus 2:11-15). Is the monopoly of force — the ability to coerce other human beings — truly the ultimate basis of social authority? If it seems undesirable to ground social authority on something that essentially boils down to the superior ability to commit murder, then what is the alternative?”

George E. Mendenhall (1916–2016) American academic

Ancient Israel’s Faith and History: An Introduction the Bible in Context (2001)

Religion, Imagination, Communication, Past

“The appearance in nineteenth-century psychiatry, jurisprudence, and literature of a whole series of discourses on the species and subspecies of homosexuality, inversion, pederasty, and "psychic hermaphroditism" made possible a strong advance of social controls into this area of "perversity"; but it also made possible the formation of a "reverse" discourse: homosexuality began to speak in its own behalf, to demand that its legitimacy or "naturality" be acknowledged, often in the same vocabulary, using the same categories by which it was medically disqualified.”

Michel Foucault (1926–1984) French philosopher

Vol. I, p. 101
History of Sexuality (1976–1984)

Literature, Nature, Strong, Appearance

“As I admired it [a red pencil and chalk drawing by Degas of a young mother, nursing her child] he showed me a whole series done from the same model and with the same sort of rhythm. He is a draughtsman of the first order; it would be interesting to show all these preparatory studies for a painting to the public, which generally imagines that the impressionists work in a very casual way. I do not think it possible to go further in the rendering of form.”

Berthe Morisot (1841–1895) painter from France

note in Berthe's Journal, Jan. 1886; as quoted in The Private Lives of the Impressionists, Sue Roe; Harper Collins Publishers, New York, 2006, pp. 262-263
Berthe visited Degas in his studio
1881 - 1895

Way, Imagination, Thinking, Study

“Sure. Some of the reviews have been very flattering, but the series is not finished yet. The end needs to be as strong as the beginning.”

George Raymond Richard Martin A Song of Ice and Fire

Talking about his magnum opus, A Song of Ice and Fire, in an interview with Patrick St-Denis on Pat's Fantasy Hotlist http://fantasyhotlist.blogspot.com/2006/05/finally-much-anticipated-george-r-r.html (1 May 2006)

Strong

“We can all agree– it has already been a measure of the debate– that Saddam Hussein is an evil tyrant with no regard for the sanctity of human life, for either his own citizens or the people of other countries. We all agree that he is in flagrant breach of a series of UN resolutions, and in particular those relating to his duty to allow the inspection, and indeed participate in the destruction, of his weapons of mass destruction. We can also agree that he most certainly has chemical and biological weapons and is working towards a nuclear capability. The dossier contains confirmation of information that we either knew or most certainly should have been willing to assume.”

Menzies Campbell (1941) British Liberal Democrat politician and advocate

Hansard HC 6ser vol 390 col 43 http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200102/cmhansrd/vo020924/debtext/20924-12.htm#20924-12_spnew1. Speech in the House of Commons, 24 September 2002.

Life, People, Evil, Country

“But now I play Silent Hill too much, because it is the most awesome series in the world that proves if proof be needed that the Japanese are just so much better at this whole 'horror' thing.”

Ben Croshaw (1983) English video game journalist

Silent Hill Showdown
Fully Ramblomatic, Features

World

“Before seeing Truffaut's Small Change, I was afraid it was going to be one of those simple, natural films about childhood which I generally try to avoid — I'm just not good enough to go to them. But this series of sketches on the general theme of the resilience of children turns out to be that rarity — a poetic comedy that's really funny.”

Pauline Kael (1919–2001) American film critic

Review of Small Change, from When The Lights Go Down (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1980, ISBN 0-030-42511-5).

Children, Nature, Change, Childhood

“It is no exaggeration to state that the classic culture of Tlön comprises only one discipline: psychology. All others are subordinated to it. I have said that the men of this planet conceive the universe as a series of mental processes which do not develop in space but successively in time.”

Jorge Luis Borges book Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius

Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius (1940)

Men, Universe, Time, Success

“Sometimes,” he said, “I think life is just one long series of blown opportunities.”

Jack McDevitt (1935) American novelist, Short story writer

Source: Academy Series - Priscilla "Hutch" Hutchins, Deepsix (2001), Chapter 22 (p. 327)

Life, Thinking

“My hope is that Casino Royale has not only re-invented James Bond, but made him relevant for the 21st century. The target audience has shifted. Although there's nothing in Casino Royale that will exclude teenagers, this 007 is aimed squarely at adults. The November release date is also perfect — the film is almost too dark and serious for the kind of lighthearted, mindless fun we associate with summer blockbusters. In recent years, I have come to each new James Bond movie with a series of ingrained expectations. For the most part, the Brosnan films met them across the board. Casino Royale defies many of them, and I couldn't be happier.”

James Berardinelli (1967) American film critic

Review http://www.reelviews.net/php_review_template.php?identifier=769 of Casino Royale (2006). Three-and-a-half star reviews

Hope, Summer, Parting, Perfection

“Stirner and Nietzsche [adopt] a mode of thinking which is personal, introspective, and which while often operating on alternative systems of belief and action does so only as a means of better grasping one dominant goal—the patterns of individual redemption. Stirner and Nietzsche are not primarily interested in critique as such. … Their work is too egoistically compelled for them ever to employ the external world as more than the repository for a series of projections of their own.”

John Carroll (1944) Australian professor and author

Source: Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974), p. 174

World, Thinking, Personality

“[make drawings of] series of instruments and players; their shapes, twisting of the hands, arms and neck of the violinist; for example, puffing out and hollowing of the cheeks of bassoonists, oboists, etc..”

Edgar Degas (1834–1917) French artist

Quote from Degas' Notebook (undated); as quoted in Impressionism: A Centenary Exhibition, Anne Distel, Michel Hoog, Charles S. Moffett, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, (New York, N.Y.) 1975, pp. 81-82
quotes, undated

Drawing

“It is remarkably difficult to avoid falling under the spell of our own intellectual heritage. As we analyse and reflect on our normative concepts, it is easy to become bewitched into believing that the ways of thinking about them bequeathed to us by the mainstream of our intellectual traditions must be the ways of thinking about them. … The history of philosophy, and perhaps especially of moral, social and political philosophy, is there to prevent us from becoming too readily bewitched. The intellectual historian can help us to appreciate how far the values embodied in our present way of life, and our present ways of thinking about those values, reflect a series of choices made at different times between different possible worlds. This awareness can help to liberate us from the grip of any one hegemonal account of those values and how they should be interpreted and understood. Equipped with a broader sense of possibility, we can stand back from the intellectual commitments we have inherited and ask ourselves in a new spirit of enquiry what we should think of them.”

Quentin Skinner (1940) British historian

Source: Liberty Before Liberalism (1998), pp. 116-117

Life, World, Way, History

“On homosexuals- They're more up for a bit more experimentation an' that -Podcast Series 1 Episode 2”

Karl Pilkington (1972) English television personality, social commentator, actor, author and former radio producer

On Sex

“The pace of life has increased in the last few decades just as the speed of the motor bicycle has been exceeded many times over by the aeroplane. After art passed through a whole series of intermediate stages it reached cubism where for the first time the creative urge to construct instinctively overcame conscious resolve.... from this point the picture started to gain stature as a new world of reality and in this way the foundation stone for a new representation of the shapes and forms of the material world was laid.”

El Lissitsky (1890–1941) Soviet artist, designer, photographer, teacher, typographer and architect

1915 - 1925, Suprematism' in World Reconstruction (1920)

Life, World, Art, Way

“You get the picture. And so did BMW. When they bought the company they could have fitted a new body to one of their 7 Series. That's what Mercedes did to create the Maybach. But instead of wandering around the BMW spare-parts division saying, "What do we want?" the engineers fired up their computers and asked, "What do we need?". Plainly they looked at what Henry Royce and Charles Rolls were trying to achieve a hundred years ago, and thought, "Zis is vot ve must do also."”

Jeremy Clarkson (1960) English broadcaster, journalist and writer

And as a result the Rolls-Royce Phantom is quite simply the best car in the world.
Rolls-Royce, p. 24
I Know You Got Soul (2004)

World, Cars, Parting

“More than two weeks ago, I gave Taliban leaders a series of clear and specific demands: Close terrorist training camps. Hand over leaders of the Al Qaeda network, and return all foreign nationals, including American citizens unjustly detained in our country. None of these demands were met. And now, the Taliban will pay a price.”

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

2000s, 2001, Invasion of Afghanistan (October 2001)

Training, Country

“Probability theory is an ideal tool for formalizing uncertainty in situations where class frequencies are known or where evidence is based on outcomes of a sufficiently long series of independent random experiments. Possibility theory, on the other hand, is ideal for formalizing incomplete information expressed in terms of fuzzy propositions.”

George Klir (1932–2016) American computer scientist

Source: Fuzzy sets and fuzzy logic (1995), p. 205 cited in: Flavio Comim, et al. (2008) The Capability Approach: Concepts, Measures and Applications. p. 298.

“MR. PANSCOPE. (suddenly emerging from a deep reverie.) I have heard, with the most profound attention, everything which the gentleman on the other side of the table has thought proper to advance on the subject of human deterioration; and I must take the liberty to remark, that it augurs a very considerable degree of presumption in any individual, to set himself up against the authority of so many great men, as may be marshalled in metaphysical phalanx under the opposite banners of the controversy; such as Aristotle, Plato, the scholiast on Aristophanes, St Chrysostom, St Jerome, St Athanasius, Orpheus, Pindar, Simonides, Gronovius, Hemsterhusius, Longinus, Sir Isaac Newton, Thomas Paine, Doctor Paley, the King of Prussia, the King of Poland, Cicero, Monsieur Gautier, Hippocrates, Machiavelli, Milton, Colley Cibber, Bojardo, Gregory Nazianzenus, Locke, D'Alembert, Boccaccio, Daniel Defoe, Erasmus, Doctor Smollett, Zimmermann, Solomon, Confucius, Zoroaster, and Thomas-a-Kempis.
MR. ESCOT. I presume, sir, you are one of those who value an authority more than a reason.
MR. PANSCOPE. The authority, sir, of all these great men, whose works, as well as the whole of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, the entire series of the Monthly Review, the complete set of the Variorum Classics, and the Memoirs of the Academy of Inscriptions, I have read through from beginning to end, deposes, with irrefragable refutation, against your ratiocinative speculations, wherein you seem desirous, by the futile process of analytical dialectics, to subvert the pyramidal structure of synthetically deduced opinions, which have withstood the secular revolutions of physiological disquisition, and which I maintain to be transcendentally self-evident, categorically certain, and syllogistically demonstrable.
SQUIRE HEADLONG. Bravo! Pass the bottle. The very best speech that ever was made.
MR. ESCOT. It has only the slight disadvantage of being unintelligible.
MR. PANSCOPE. I am not obliged, Sir, as Dr Johnson remarked on a similar occasion, to furnish you with an understanding.
MR. ESCOT. I fear, Sir, you would have some difficulty in furnishing me with such an article from your own stock.
MR. PANSCOPE. 'Sdeath, Sir, do you question my understanding?
MR. ESCOT. I only question, Sir, where I expect a reply, which from what manifestly has no existence, I am not visionary enough to anticipate.
MR. PANSCOPE. I beg leave to observe, sir, that my language was perfectly perspicuous, and etymologically correct; and, I conceive, I have demonstrated what I shall now take the liberty to say in plain terms, that all your opinions are extremely absurd.
MR. ESCOT. I should be sorry, sir, to advance any opinion that you would not think absurd.
MR. PANSCOPE. Death and fury, Sir!
MR. ESCOT. Say no more, Sir - that apology is quite sufficient.
MR. PANSCOPE. Apology, Sir?
MR. ESCOT. Even so, Sir. You have lost your temper, which I consider equivalent to a confession that you have the worst of the argument.
MR. PANSCOPE. Lightnings and devils!”

Thomas Love Peacock book Headlong Hall

Headlong Hall, chapter V (1816).

Death, Men, Pain, Fear

“We must pursue the removal of church property by any means necessary in order to secure for ourselves a fund of several hundred million gold rubles (do not forget the immense wealth of some monasteries and lauras). Without this fund any government work in general, any economic build-up in particular, and any upholding of soviet principles in Genoa especially is completely unthinkable. In order to get our hands on this fund of several hundred million gold rubles (and perhaps even several hundred billion), we must do whatever is necessary. But to do this successfully is possible only now. All considerations indicate that later on we will fail to do this, for no other time, besides that of desperate famine, will give us such a mood among the general mass of peasants that would ensure us the sympathy of this group, or, at least, would ensure us the neutralization of this group in the sense that victory in the struggle for the removal of church property unquestionably and completely will be on our side.
One clever writer on statecraft correctly said that if it is necessary for the realization of a well-known political goal to perform a series of brutal actions then it is necessary to do them in the most energetic manner and in the shortest time, because masses of people will not tolerate the protracted use of brutality. … Now victory over the reactionary clergy is assured us completely. In addition, it will be more difficult for the major part of our foreign adversaries among the Russian emigres abroad, i. e., the Socialist-Revolutionaries and the Milyukovites, to fight against us if we, precisely at this time, precisely in connection with the famine, suppress the reactionary clergy with utmost haste and ruthlessness.
Therefore, I come to the indisputable conclusion that we must precisely now smash the Black Hundreds clergy most decisively and ruthlessly and put down all resistance with such brutality that they will not forget it for several decades. … The greater the number of representatives of the reactionary clergy and the reactionary bourgeoisie that we succeed in shooting on this occasion, the better because this "audience" must precisely now be taught a lesson in such a way that they will not dare to think about any resistance whatsoever for several decades.”

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

Letter to Comrade Molotov for the Politburo (19 March 1922) http://www.ibiblio.org/expo/soviet.exhibit/ae2bkhun.html Variant translation: It is precisely now and only now, when in the starving regions people are eating human flesh, and hundreds if not thousands of corpses are littering the roads, that we can (and therefore must) carry out the confiscation of church valuables. … I come to the categorical conclusion that precisely at this moment we must give battle to the Black Hundred clergy in the most decisive and merciless manner and crush its resistance with such brutality that it will not forget it for decades to come. The greater the number of representatives of the reactionary clergy and reactionary bourgeoisie we succeed in executing for this reason, the better. As translated in The Unknown Lenin : From the Secret Archive (1996) edited by Richard Pipes, pp. 152-4 1920s

People, Way, Mood, Thinking

“An important point is that the p-adic field, or respectively the real or complex field, corresponding to a prime ideal, plays exactly the role, in arithmetic, that the field of power series in the neighborhood of a point plays in the theory of functions: that is why one calls it a local field.”

André Weil (1906–1998) French mathematician

as translated by Martin H. Krieger "A 1940 letter of André Weil on analogy in mathematics." http://www.ams.org/notices/200503/fea-weil.pdf Notices of the AMS 52, no. 3 (2005) pp. 334–341, quote on p. 340

“After completing my work [his murals for the Jewish Theater in Moscow) I thought, as has been agreed, that it would be shown in public as a series of my latest things. The management will agree with me that I can find no inner peace as a painter until the 'masses' see my work etc. It turned out that the things [the murals] had been put into a 'cage', as it were, where they can be seen at the very best by (if you will forgive me for saying so) Jews at close quarters. I like the Jews a lot (there's enough 'proof' of that) but I like the Russians as well and some other nationalities, and I am used to painting serious things for many 'nationalities.”

Marc Chagall (1887–1985) French artist and painter

In a letter to the management of the State Jewish Kamerny Theater, 1921, as quoted in Marc Chagall - the Russian years 1906 – 1922, editor Christoph Vitali, exhibition catalogue, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, 1991, p. 89
1920's

Peace, Forgiveness, Painting

“Unless the world is substantially altered for the worst, the logical outcome of technology's influence on art before the end of this century should be a series of art forms that manifest true intelligence, but perhaps more meaningfully, with a capacity for reciprocal relationships with human beings.”

Jack Burnham (1931) American art historian

Cited in: Robert Horvitz, 'a node for jack burnham' https://horvitz.multiplace.org/burnham/homepage.html. Beyond Modern Sculpture, 1968

World, Art, Intelligence

“While we need to deprive the extremists of their safe spaces online, we must not forget about the safe spaces that continue to exist in the real world. Yes, that means taking military action to destroy Isis in Iraq and Syria. But it also means taking action here at home. While we have made significant progress in recent years, there is – to be frank – far too much tolerance of extremism in our country. So we need to become far more robust in identifying it and stamping it out across the public sector and across society. That will require some difficult, and often embarrassing, conversations. But the whole of our country needs to come together to take on this extremism, and we need to live our lives not in a series of separated, segregated communities, but as one truly United Kingdom.”

Theresa May (1956) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech after the London Bridge attack (4 June 2017)

World, Home, Communication, Country

“The Sioux had been forced to submit to a series of land grabs and to indignities that are almost unbelievable when read about today. …they were being systematically starved into submission—by the White Bureaucracy—on the little that was left of their reservation in South Dakota. …From Rosebud, the Ghost Dance spread like prairie fire to the Pine Ridge Sioux and finally to Sitting Bull's people at Standing Rock. The Sioux rebelled; the result was the death of Sitting Bull and the massacre of the Indians (despite their ghost shirts) at Wounded Knee in 1890.”

Peter Farb (1929–1980) American academic and writer

Man's Rise to Civilization (1968)

Death, People, Reading, Dance

“Much of the controversy and anxiety that has enveloped Darwin's idea … can be understood as a series of failed campaigns to contain Darwin; s idea within some acceptably "safe" and merely partial revolution. Cede some or all of modern biology to Darwin, perhaps, but hold the line there! Keep Darwinian thinking out of cosmology, out of psychology, out of human culture, out of ethics, politics, and religion! In these campaigns, many battles have been won by the forces of containment: flawed applications of Darwin's idea have been exposed and discredited, beaten back by the champions of the pre-Darwinian tradition. But new waves of Darwinian thinking keep coming.”

Daniel Dennett book Darwin's Dangerous Idea

Darwin's Dangerous Idea (1995)

Religion, Idea, Thinking

“From Richard McKeon and Robert Brumsbaugh I learned to view the history of philosophy as a series, not of alternative solutions to the same problems, but of quite different sets of problems. From Rudolph Carnap and Carl Hempel I learned how pseudo-problems could be revealed as such by restarting them in the formal mode of speech. From Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss I learned how they could be so revealed by being translated into Whiteheadian or Hegelian terms.”

Richard Rorty book Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature

Preface
Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979)

History, Problem, Learning

“Whereas reasons may, and usually do, figure among the proximate causes of belief, and thus play a part in both kinds of series (cognitive and causal), it is always possible to trace back the causal series to a point where every trace of rationality vanishes; where we are left face to face with conditions of beliefs social, physiological, and physical— which, considered in themselves, are quite a-logical in their character. /…/ on any merely naturalistic hypothesis, the rational elements in the causal series lie always on the surface. Penetrate but a short way down, and they are found no more.”

Arthur James Balfour (1848–1930) British Conservative politician and statesman

Theism and humanism

Lie, Way, Parting

“The bare bones of my life are almost unbearable. I was born during the First World War. I spent my adolescence in the Depression, and when I came of age, I was involved in the Second World War. That sounds a pretty horrible series of events. They seem perfectly natural to me. I prize the Depression, for instance, because I learned the value of things in the Depression that a way people who don't have to worry about such things never learned to prize it really, I believe. And the Second World War was a wonderful thing to be with. It's now called "the Good War." We usually referred to it as "this damned war."”

Shelby Foote (1916–2005) Novelist, historian

We didn't think of it as a good war. We did believe it was fought in a good cause.
Interview for the Academy of Achievement, 1999

Life, War, People, Age

“Contemporary capitalist production is characterized by a series of passages that name different faces of the same shift: from the hegemony of industrial labor to that of immaterial labor, from Fordism to post-Fordism, and from the modern to the postmodern.”

Antonio Negri book Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

“Now, such an enterprise as would be the drawing and printing [by lithography ] of a series of, for instance, thirty pages of types of workmen, a sower, a digger, a woodcutter, a plowman, a wash-woman, then also a child's cradle or a man from the almshouse - well, the whole immeasurable field lies open, there are plenty of beautiful subjects - I should think the following would be the best way: as it is useful and necessary that Dutch drawings are made, printed, and spread, destined for the houses of workmen, a few persons should unite in order to use their full strength for this end.”

Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890) Dutch post-Impressionist painter (1853-1890)

quote in his letter to brother Theo, from The Hague, The Netherlands in Autumn 1882; as quoted in Vincent van Gogh, edited by Alfred H. Barr; Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1935 https://www.moma.org/documents/moma_catalogue_1996_300061887.pdf, (letter 249), p. 20 1880s, 1882

Beauty, Way, Thinking, Drawing

“This somewhat unpleasant tale, published as a novelette in the "Smart Set" in July, 1920, relates a series of events which took place in the spring of the previous year. Each of the three events made a great impression upon me. In life they were unrelated, except by the general hysteria of that spring which inaugurated the Age of Jazz, but in my story I have tried, unsuccessfully I fear, to weave them into a pattern — a pattern which would give the effect of those months in New York as they appeared to at least one member of what was then the younger generation.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book May Day

On "May Day"
Quoted, Tales of the Jazz Age (1922)

Life, Age, Fear, Spring

“Terrorism' is a word that has become a plague on our vocabulary, the excuse and reason and moral permit for state-sponsored violence - our violence - which is now used on the innocent of the Middle East ever more outrageously and promiscuously. Terrorism, terrorism, terrorism. It has become a full stop, a punctuation mark, a phrase, a speech, a sermon, the be-all and end-all of everything that we must hate in order to ignore injustice and occupation and murder on a mass scale. Terror, terror, terror, terror. It is a sonata, a symphony, an orchestra tuned to every television and radio station and news agency report, the soap-opera of the Devil, served up on prime-time or distilled in wearyingly dull and mendacious form by the right-wing 'commentators' of the America east coast or the Jerusalem Post or the intellectuals of Europe. Strike against Terror. Victory over Terror. War on Terror. Everlasting War on Terror. Rarely in history have soldiers and journalists and presidents and kings aligned themselves in such thoughtless, unquestioning ranks. In August 1914, the soldiers thought they would be home by Christmas. Today, we are fighting for ever. The war is eternal. The enemy is eternal, his face changing on our screens. Once he lived in Cairo and sported a moustache and nationalised the Suez Canal. Then he lived in Tripoli and wore a ridiculous military uniform and helped the IRA and bombed American bars in Berlin. Then he wore a Muslim Imam's gown and ate yoghurt in Tehran and planned Islamic revolution. Then he wore a white gown and lived in a cave in Afghanistan and then he wore another silly moustache and resided in a series of palaces around Baghdad. Terror, terror, terror. Finally, he wore a kuffiah headdress and outdated Soviet-style military fatigues, his name was Yassir Arafat, and he was the master of world terror and then a super-statesman and then again, a master of terror, linked by Israeli enemies to the terror-Meister of them all, the one who lived in the Afghan cave.”

Robert Fisk (1946) English writer and journalist

The Great War for Civilization (2005)

Hate, War, World, Home

Quotes about series page 2

Quotes about series
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