Quotes about set
page 32

“There is a distinction between belief in a set of propositions and a faith which enables us to put our trust in them.”

A History of God (1993)

“Goodbye England's rose,
May you ever grow in our hearts.
You were the grace that placed itself
Where lives were torn apart.You called out to our country,
And you whispered to those in pain.
Now you belong to Heaven,
And the stars spell out your name.And it seems to me you lived your life
Like a candle in the wind,
Never fading with the sunset,
When the rain set in.”

Elton John (1947) English rock singer-songwriter, composer and pianist

Candle in the Wind 1997, written in tribute upon the death of Diana (1997)
Song lyrics, Singles

Life, Pain, Star, Heart

“We all know, in fact, that the insane.... derive a great deal of comfort and consolation from their imagination, that they enjoy their madness sufficiently to endure the thought that its validity does not extend beyond themselves. And, indeed, hallucinations, illusions, etc., are not a source of trifling pleasure… These people are honest to a fault, and their 'naiveté' has no peer but my own. Christopher Columbus should have set out to discover America with a boatload of madmen. And note how this madness has taken shape, and endured.”

André Breton (1896–1966) French writer

Le Manifeste du Surréalisme, Andre Breton (Manifesto of Surrealism; 1924)

People, Pleasure, Imagination, Madness

“He had sworn on his father's honour, his mother's life, his brother's masculinity, his sister's purity and his prophet's beard that he would never set foot there again. God, knowing people, thinks little of honour or purity or even life, but vows made on his prophet he loves to confound.”

Ian McDonald book The Dervish House

Source: The Dervish House (2010), Ch. 5, §6 (p. 178)

Love, Life, God, People

“Albert Camus wrote that the only serious question is whether to kill yourself or not. Tom Robbins wrote that the only serious question is whether time has a beginning or an end. Camus clearly got up on the wrong side of the bed, and Robbins must have forgotten to set the alarm. There is only one serious question. And that question is: "Who knows how to make love stay?"”

Tom Robbins book Still Life with Woodpecker

Still Life with Woodpecker (1980)

Love, Making love, Question, Time

“The oxide superconductors, particularly those recently discovered that are based on La2CuO4, have a set of peculiarities that suggest a common, unique mechanism: they tend in every case to occur near a metal-insulator transition into an odd-electron insulator with peculiar magnetic properties. This insulating phase is proposed to be the long-sought "resonating-valence-bond" state or "quantum spin liquid" hypothesized in 1973. This insulating magnetic phase is favored by low spin, low dimensionality, and magnetic frustration. The preexisting magnetic singlet pairs of the insulating state become charged superconducting pairs when the insulator is doped sufficiently strongly.”

Philip Warren Anderson (1923) American physicist

[The Resonating Valence Bond State in La2CuO4 and Superconductivity, Science, 6 Mar 1987, 235, 4793, 1196–1198, 10.1126/science.235.4793.1196]

“We need a renewed emphasis on civic learning in schools. And our young people need positive role models. Bullying and prejudice in our public life sets a national tone, provides permission for cruelty and bigotry, and compromises the moral education of children. The only way to pass along civic values is to first live up to them.”

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

2010s, 2017, Speech at "Spirit of Liberty: At Home, In the World" event (2017)

Life, Children, People, Education

“We were all at one time in darkness and we sought the eternal light and the enlightened ones among us got that light. The light that we got is not merely the light of intellectual illumination that Diogenes referred to, but also the light of ethical perfection, a better set of morals, a higher code of ethics and better living standards based on charity, helpfulness and sympathy.”

Jayachamarajendra Wadiyar (1919–1974) Indian writer

In his address to the members of the Masonic Fraternity on the occassion of his joining as member of the Masonic Lodge. quoted in "Article # 14 Initiate responds to his Toast R.W.Bro. Jaya Chamaraja Wadeyar".

Light, Time, Help, Perfection

“The major difference between the left and the right when it comes to any movement dedicated to overthrowing the free-market order—corporatist, authoritarian, etc.—is which groups will be the winners and which groups will be the losers. A left-wing system might empower labor leaders, government bureaucrats, progressive intellectuals, universities, certain minority groups, and one set of industries. A right-wing system might reward a different set of industries as well as traditional religious groups and their leaders, an ethnic majority, aristocrats, or perhaps rural interests. But both systems would be reactionary in the sense that they rejected the legacy of the Lockean revolution…”

Jonah Goldberg (1969) American political writer and pundit

2010s, 2018, Socialism is So Hot Right Now (2018)

Sense, Universe

“To keep our eyes open longer were but to set our Antipodes. The Huntsmen are up in America, and they are already past their first sleep in Persia. But who can be drowsy at that hour which freed us from everlasting sleep? or have slumbering thoughts at that time, when sleep itself must end, and as some conjecture all shall awake again?”

Thomas Browne book The Garden of Cyrus

Source: The Garden of Cyrus (1658), Ch. 5

Sleep, Time, Past

“A book unwritten is a delightful universe of infinite possibilities. Set down one word, however, and immediately it becomes earthbound. Set down one sentence and its halfway to being just like every other bloody book that's ever been written. But the best must never be allowed to drive out the good. In the absence of genius there is always craftsmanship. One can at least try to write something that will arrest the readers' attention, that will encourage them, after reading the first paragraph, to take a look at the second, and then the third.”

Robert Harris book The Ghost

Source: The Ghost (2007), Ch. 9.

Books, Universe, Reading

“With experience it seems to be possible to control the flow of paint, to a great extent, and I don't use – I don't use the accident – 'cause I deny the accident.... it's quite different from working, say, from a still life where you set up objects and work directly from them. I do have a general notion of what I'm about and what the results will be. I approach painting in the same sense as one approaches drawing, that is, it's direct.”

Jackson Pollock (1912–1956) American artist

Source: 1950's, Interview by William Wright, Summer 1950, p. 144

Life, Sense, Drawing, Painting

“The task of instilling pathos into a creature that was, after all, an innocent victim of circumstances was something I had set myself from the outset, although I was restrained by the script… The Beast is a poor lost soul brought back to life by man and then destroyed by man. If it sounds familiar, it is. King Kong was a huge influence, as he would be in all the other creatures I would be father to.”

Ray Harryhausen (1920–2013) American animator

Source: An Animated Life (2003), p. 57

Life, Soul

“It was because of my faith and my pro-life conviction, but ultimately, it was because of my kids, I want to not just talk about my faith, but I want to live it out too. And a few years ago, some of the older ones [were] aware of Planned Parenthood and what occurs there, and so, I wanted to set the example for them and be a dad that they could be proud of”

Matt Birk (1976) Player of American football

Pro-life NFL star Matt Birk reveals real reason he skipped meeting with Obama https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/exclusive-video-nfl-star-matt-birk-reveals-real-reason-he-skipped-meeting-w (April 15, 2016)

Life, Faith

“The drafts from the regiments at Ticonderoga are a miserable set; indeed the men on board the fleet, in general, are not equal to half their number of good men.”

Benedict Arnold (1741–1801) Continental and later British Army general during the American Revolutionary War

Letter to General Gates (21 September 1776), in Battle of Valcour on Lake Champlain, October 11th, 1776 by Peter Sailly Palmer(1876) p. 5

Men

“Duce, the Führer has sent me to set you free!”

Otto Skorzeny (1908–1975) Austrian SS-Standartenführer (colonel) in the German Waffen-SS

To Benito Mussolini, upon rescuing him from after his overthrow, as quoted in Hitler's Raid to Save Mussolini (2005) by Greg A. Annussek, p. 228.

“I would not want you to suppose that my rejection of Allen Forte's theory of pitch-class sets implies a rejection of the notion that there can be such a thing as a pitch-class set. It is only when one defines everything in terms of pitch-class sets that the concept becomes meaningless.”

George Perle (1915–2009) American composer

Page 67
See: Allen Forte
The Listening Composer

“One day I walked into an operating room, to just be an observant, which we would do generally, as a medical resident. They were performing this hysterectomy, which was a caesarean section. And they lifted out a fetus that weighted approximately 2 pounds, and it was breathing and crying. And it was put in a bucket and set in the corner of the room, and everybody in the room just pretended that they didn't hear it. And the baby died. And I walked out of that room a different person… Roe v. Wade is a reflection of the moral climate of the country, because the law was being defied, and then the law was changed, the law sort of caught up with the culture. So even though we work in the legal area, and work politically, ultimately I believe it's an issue of personal morality, and is a reflection of the country, more so than just the lack of laws. Just changing the laws won't be enough, we will ultimately have to have a society that's moral enough, where the fetus deserves legal protection.”

Ron Paul (1935) American politician and physician

National Right to Life Convention, Kansas City, Missouri, June 15, 2007 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXZpuIXEzWk 2000s, 2006-2009

Law, Change, Baby, Personality

“Woodrow Wilson's New Freedom promised our nation a new political and economic framework. Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal promised security and succor to those in need. But the New Frontier of which I speak is not a set of promises — it is a set of challenges. It sums up not what I intend to offer the American people, but what I intend to ask of them. It appeals to their pride, not to their pocketbook — it holds out the promise of more sacrifice instead of more security.”

John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) 35th president of the United States of America

1960, The New Frontier

People, Freedom

“The deepest problems of modern life derive from the claim of the individual to preserve the autonomy and individuality of his existence in the face of overwhelming social forces, of historical heritage, of external culture, and of the technique of life. The fight with nature which primitive man has to wage for his bodily existence attains in this modern form its latest transformation. The eighteenth century called upon man to free himself of all the historical bonds in the state and in religion, in morals and in economics. Man’s nature, originally good and common to all, should develop unhampered. In addition to more liberty, the nineteenth century demanded the functional specialization of man and his work; this specialization makes one individual incomparable to another, and each of them indispensable to the highest possible extent. However, this specialization makes each man the more directly dependent upon the supplementary activities of all others. Nietzsche sees the full development of the individual conditioned by the most ruthless struggle of individuals; socialism believes in the suppression of all competition for the same reason. Be that as it may, in all these positions the same basic motive is at work: the person resists to being leveled down and worn out by a social technological mechanism. An inquiry into the inner meaning of specifically modern life and its products, into the soul of the cultural body, so to speak, must seek to solve the equation which structures like the metropolis set up between the individual and the super-individual contents of life. Such an inquiry must answer the question of how the personality accommodates itself in the adjustments to external forces.”

Georg Simmel (1858–1918) German sociologist, philosopher, and critic

Source: The Metropolis and Modern Life (1903), p. 409

Life, Religion, Soul, Motivation

“Myth does not set out to give lessons in natural science any more than in morals or sociology.”

François-Bernard Mâche (1935) French composer

Mâche, François-Bernard (1983, 1992). Music, Myth and Nature, or The Dolphins of Arion (Musique, mythe, nature, ou les Dauphins d'Arion, trans. Susan Delaney). Harwood Academic Publishers. ISBN 3718653214.

Nature, Science

“Except for Marxian theories, nearly all modern theories of the business cycle have essential elements that trace back to Knut Wicksell's turn-of-the-century writings on interest and prices. Austrians, New Classicists, Monetarists, and even Keynesians can legitimately claim a kinship on this basis. Accordingly, the recognition, that both the Austrians and the New Classicists have a Swedish ancestry does not translate into a meaningful claim that the two schools are essentially similar. To the contrary, identifying their particular relationships to Wicksellian ideas, like comparing the two formally similar business-cycle theories themselves, reveals more differences than similarities. … [T]o establish the essential difference between the Austrians and the New Classicists, it needs to be added that the focus of the Austrian theory is on the actual market process that translates the monetary cause into the real phenomena and hence on the institutional setting in which this process plays itself out.The New Classicists deliberately abstract from institutional considerations and specifically deny, on the basis of empirical evidence, that the interest rate plays a significant role in cyclical fluctuations (Lucas 1981, p. 237 151–1). Thus, Wicksell's Interest and Prices is at best only half relevant to EBCT. … Taking the Wicksellian metaphor as their cue, the New Classicists are led away from the pre-eminent Austrian concern about the actual market process that transforms cause into effect and towards the belief that a full specification of the economy's structure, which is possible only in the context of an artificial economy, can shed light on an effect whose nature is fundamentally independent of the cause.”

Roger Garrison (1944) American economist

Pages 98–99.
"New Classical and Old Austrian Economics", 1991

School, Idea, Business, Nature

“The Republican Party is part of a larger American discussion about the tension between equality of opportunity and protection of property, which is sort of the point of the book, that this is a much larger American discussion, and Republicans began under Lincoln with the attempt to turn the discrepancy between the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution into, at the time, a modern-day political solution. The Republican Party would manage, they hoped, to turn the principle of the Declaration of Independence, that everybody should have equality of opportunity, into a political reality. The Declaration of Independence was, of course, a set of principles; it wasn't any kind of law or codification of those principles. The Constitution went ahead and codified that the central idea of America was the protection of property, so the Republicans began with the idea that they would be the political arm of the Declaration of Independence's equality of opportunity. Throughout their history, three times now, they have swung from that pole through a sort of racist and xenophobic backlash against that principle, tied themselves to big business, and come out protecting the other American principle, which is the protection of property. That tension between equality of opportunity and the protection of property, both of which are central tenets of America, played out in the Republican Party.”

Heather Cox Richardson American historian

as quoted in "'Not the true Republican Party': How the party of Lincoln ended up with Ted Cruz" http://www.salon.com/2014/09/29/not_the_true_republican_party_how_the_party_of_lincoln_ended_up_with_ted_cruz/ (29 September 2014), by Elias Isquith, Salon

Books, Law, Hope, History

“Conventional politicians almost never think their philosophy through and set it down for everyone to examine. In most cases, they don't dare. Republicans would soon discover that they're actually socialists. Democrats would discover that they're actually fascists.”

L. Neil Smith (1946) American writer

(with Rylla Cathryn Smith) What Libertarians Believe, "Introduction: The Zero Aggression Principle".

Thinking

“You know that it would be untrue
You know that I would be a liar
If I was to say to you
Girl, we couldn't get much higher.
Come on baby, light my fire —
Come on baby, light my fire —
Try to set the night on fire.”

Robby Krieger (1946) American rock guitarist and songwriter

"Light My Fire" (1967); because Jim Morrison sang this as The Doors first hit, and he was the group's primary songwriter, this is often mistakenly thought by many to have been written by Morrison.

Girl, Light, Baby, Night

“To hold the same views at forty as we held at twenty is to have been stupefied for a score of years, and take rank, not as a prophet, but as an unteachable brat, well birched and none the wiser. It is as if a ship captain should sail to India from the Port of London; and having brought a chart of the Thames on deck at his first setting out, should obstinately use no other for the whole voyage.”

Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894) Scottish novelist, poet, essayist, and travel writer

Crabbed Age and Youth.
Virginibus Puerisque and Other Papers (1881)

“Certainly everywhere in the church there are examples of the rich who give up all things, who become poor for God. They did exist. But in doing this, they either chose the hermit life and withdrew from the life of the church, or they were canonized and held up as miraculous instances of sanctity, that is, they were excluded from the concrete life of the church, set outside the church as “saints” whom, of course, there was no question of ordinary people ever imitating.”

Jacques Ellul (1912–1994) French sociologist, technology critic, and Christian anarchist

Source: The Subversion of Christianity (1984), p. 32

Life, God, People, Question

“Imagining the flower-pot attacked it
The kitten flung the violets near and far
And yet, who knows? This morning, as I backed it,
My car was set upon by a parked car.”

Vikram Seth (1952) Indian writer

Malefic Things from All You Who Sleep Tonight (Viking/Penguin India, 1990).

Cars, Imagination, Flowers

“It just seems to me that we either have an irrational need to believe or we have a desire to understand and to improve that understanding. For those of the latter set, accuracy and accountability are paramount, but for creationists, those things don’t even matter.”

Aron Ra (1962) Aron Ra is an atheist activist and the host of the Ra-Men Podcast

Patheos, Correspondence with a Creationist http://www.patheos.com/blogs/reasonadvocates/2017/06/06/correspondence-with-a-creationist/ (June 6, 2017)

Understanding

“I was talking to a friend about it recently and I told him that the thing about making that film that upset me most was how cruel Lars is to the woman he is working with. Not that I can't take it, because I'm pretty tough and completely capable of defending myself, but because my ideals of the ultimate creator were shattered. And my friend said "What did you expect? All major directors are "sexist", a maker is not necessarily an expert in human rights or female/male equality!
My answer was that you can take quite sexist film directors like Woody Allen or Stanley Kubrick and still they are the one that provide the soul to their movies. In Lars von Trier's case it is not so and he knows it. He needs a female to provide his work soul. And he envies them and hates them for it. So he has to destroy them during the filming. And hide the evidence. What saves him as an artist, though, is that he is so painfully honest that even though he will manage to cover up his crime in the "real" world (he is a genius to set things up that everybody thinks it is just his female-actress-at-the-moment imagination, that she is just hysterical or pre-menstrual), his films become a documentation of this "soul-robbery.”

Björk (1965) Icelandic singer-songwriter

Breaking the Waves is the clearest example of that. bjork." From the www.bjork.com http://www.bjork.com 4um, posted by Björk in response to a question about her conflict with director Lars von Trier during the production of Dancer in the Dark. Other quotes

Hate, World, Soul, Imagination

“With two men on base I was more concerned with driving in a run than getting No. 2,000. I set a goal of 100 RBIs and 25 home runs at the start of the season. Usually I'm not a home run hitter but I've been swinging more for home runs this season then ever before.”

Roberto Clemente (1934–1972) Puerto Rican baseball player

Speaking with reporters after simultaneously reaching several milestones with one swing of the batː 2,000 career hits, 23 home runs (matching his previous high in 1961), and, for the first time in his career, 100 RBIs or more for a season; as quoted in "Clemente's 2,000th Puts Bucs On Top" https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=kbIiAAAAIBAJ&sjid=ZbMFAAAAIBAJ&dq=men-base-concerned-driving-run-getting-no&pg=755%2C515794 by Jeff Meyers (UPI), in The Beaver County Times (Saturday, September 3, 1966), p. C-1 Baseball-related, <big><big>1960s</big></big>, <big>1966</big>

Men, Home, Season

“Our bugles sang truce, for the night-cloud had lower'd,
And the sentinel stars set their watch in the sky;
And thousands had sunk on the ground overpower'd,
The weary to sleep, and the wounded to die.”

Thomas Campbell (1777–1844) British writer

The Soldier's Dream http://www.bartleby.com/106/267.html

Star, Sleep, Night

“Notice the sleight of hand. The repair of temples is allowed! Temples can be constructed in villages! Temples can be constructed ‘within the privacy of homes’! Thus ‘liberal policy’ is the norm which is departed from only in times of war! And the ones who are fought and destroyed at such times are in any case ‘the enemies of Islam’! In times of peace, which are the times that prevailed normally, the norm prevails – that is, ‘the Hindus practice their religion openly and ostentatiously!’ Each of these assertions is a blatant falsehood. But these historians, having, through their control of institutions, set the standards of intellectual correctness, the one who questions the falsehoods, even though he does so by citing the writings of the best known Islamic historians of those very times, he is the one who is in the wrong.”

Arun Shourie (1941) Indian journalist and politician

Eminent Historians: Their Technology, Their Line, Their Fraud

War, Peace, Religion, Home

“I met him Cummingham around 1953 after a performance I saw. He was teaching and making dances for his company and was already working with John Cage. What interested me initially wasn't just the movement but also the music he worked with, which was unfamiliar to me... Later Bob Rauschenberg had been doing sets and costumes for the Cunningham Company... I can't say exactly how, but for a period of time, Cage, Cunningham, Rauschenberg, and I saw each other frequently and exchanged ideas. John [Cage] was very interested in presenting his ideas to other people, so it was impossible to be around and not to learn... He could apply his ideas on space and time to painting, or music or architecture... I don't have a clear sense of cause and effect in my painting, but it is probably there.”

Jasper Johns (1930) American artist

Jasper Johns, by Bryan Robertson and Tim Marlow, Tate, in 'The Art Magazine', London, Winter 1993, pp. 40, 47
1990s

People, Music, Idea, Sense

“Never, at any price, should we have put our money on France and against the peoples subjected to her yoke. On the contrary, we should have helped them to achieve their liberty and, if necessary, should have goaded them into doing so. There was nothing to stop us in 1940 from making a gesture of this sort in the Near East and in North Africa. In actual fact our diplomats instead set about the task of consolidating French power, not only in Syria, but in Tunis, in Algeria and Morocco as well. Our 'gentlemen' obviously preferred to maintain cordial relations with distinguished Frenchmen, rather than with a lot of hirsute revolutionaries, with a chorus of musical comedy officers, whose one idea was to cheat us, rather than with the Arabs, who would have been loyal partners for us.”

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

14 February 1945.
Disputed, The Testament of Adolf Hitler (1945)

Money, People, Music, Idea

“What bustle and confusion, as one set of actors exits and another enters,
Each taking the illusory for the real.”

Wang Chi-chen (1899–2001)

Source: Dream of the Red Chamber (1958), p. 15

“For his purposes (and mine), scientific medicine is defined as the set of practices which submit themselves to the ordeal of being tested. Alternative medicine is defined as that set of practices which cannot be tested, refuse to be tested, or consistently fail tests. If a healing technique is demonstrated to have curative properties in properly controlled double-blind trials, it ceases to be alternative. It simply, as Diamond explains, becomes medicine. Conversely, if a technique devised by the President of the Royal College of Physicians consistently fails in double-blind trials, it will cease to be a part of 'orthodox' medicine. Whether it will then become 'alternative' will depend upon whether it is adopted by a sufficiently ambitious quack”

Richard Dawkins (1941) English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author

there are always sufficiently gullible patients
Foreword to Snake Oil and Other Preoccupations by John Diamond, Vintage, 2001.
Forewords

Parting, Dependency

“Whatever we experience in our day, whatever we hope to learn, whatever we most desire, whatever we set out to find, we see that the Greeks have been there before us, and we meet them on their way back.”

Thomas Cahill (1940) American scholar and writer

Source: Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter (2003), Ch.VII The Way They Went: Greco-Roman Meets Judeo-Christian

Hope, Way, Learning

“For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception. When my perceptions are remov’d for any time, as by sound sleep; so long am I insensible of myself, and may truly be said not to exist. And were all my perceptions remov’d by death, and cou’d I neither think, nor feel, nor see, nor love, nor hate after the dissolution of my body, I shou’d be entirely annihilated, nor do I conceive what is farther requisite to make me a perfect non-entity. If any one upon serious and unprejudic’d reflexion, thinks he has a different notion of himself, I must confess I can reason no longer with him. All I can allow him is, that he may be in the right as well as I, and that we are essentially different in this particular. He may, perhaps, perceive something simple and continu’d, which he calls himself; tho’ I am certain there is no such principle in me… But setting aside some metaphysicians of this kind, I may venture to affirm of the rest of mankind, that they are nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement.”

David Hume book A Treatise of Human Nature

Part 4, Section 6
A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40), Book 1: Of the understanding

Love, Death, Pain, Hate

“To dwell upon the possibility of illness or disaster is equally poor policy, for you set up negative webs of probabilities that need not occur. You can theoretically alter your own past as YOU have known it, for time is no more something divorced from you than probabilities are. The past existed in multitudinous ways. You only experienced one probable past. By changing this past in your mind, now, in your present, you can change not only its nature but its effect, and not only upon yourself but upon others.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Session 566
Seth Speaks (1972)

Way, Nature, Change, Time

“Why not to set free these forms? Why not trying to uncover the infinite meaning of absolute space, the meaning of pure and absolute light? [Manzoni is referriung to the colourless, but still matter-made art paintings, made by Zero artists, around 1950-60]”

Piero Manzoni (1933–1963) Italian artist

Source: De Tweede Helft', Ad de Visser, 1998, p. 159

Art, Light, Painting

“Pooh! Pooh! Nonsense!' was the reply, 'that's all very well in theory, but it doesn't work so. The returning of slaves amounts to nothing in fact. All that is obsolete. And why make all this row? Can't you hush? We've nothing to do with slavery, we tell you. We can't touch it; and if you persist in this agitation about a mere form and theory, why, you're a set of pestilent fanatics and traitors; and if you get your noisy heads broken, you get just what you deserve'. And they quoted in the faces of the abolitionists the words of Governor Edward Everett, who was not an authority with them, in that fatal inaugural address, 'The patriotism of all classes of citizens must be invited to abstain from a discussion which, by exasperating the master, can have no other effect than to render more oppressive the condition of the slave'. It was as if some kindly Pharisee had said to Christ, 'Don't try to cast out that evil spirit; it may rend the body on departing'. Was it not as if some timid citizen had said, 'Don't say hard things of intemperance lest the dram-shops, to spite us, should give away the rum'? And so the battle raged. The abolitionists dashed against slavery with passionate eloquence like a hail of hissing fire. They lashed its supporters with the scorpion whip of their invective. Ambition, reputation, ortune, ease, life itself they threw upon the consuming altar of their cause. Not since those earlier fanatics of freedom, Patrick Henry and James Otis, has the master chord of human nature, the love of liberty, been struck with such resounding power. It seemed in vain, so slowly their numbers increased, so totally were they outlawed from social and political and ecclesiastical recognition. The merchants of Boston mobbed an editor for virtually repeating the Declaration of Independence. The city of New York looked on and smiled while the present United States marshal insulted a woman as noble and womanly and humane as Florence Nightingale. In other free States men were flying for their lives; were mobbed, seized, imprisoned, maimed, murdered; but still as, in the bitter days of Puritan persecution in Scotland, the undaunted voices of the Covenanters were heard singing the solemn songs of God that echoed and re-echoed from peak to peak of the barren mountains, until the great dumb wilderness was vocal with praise — so in little towns and great cities were heard the uncompromising voices of these men sternly intoning the majestic words of the Golden Rule and the Declaration of Independence, which echoed from solitary heart to heart until the whole land rang with the litany of liberty.”

George William Curtis (1824–1892) American writer

1850s, The Present Aspect of the Slavery Question (1859)

Love, Life, Men, God

“God is my mentor. He has given me all that I have … the passion, perseverance and patience to endure the challenges set before me. I know as long as I keep the faith, He will look out for my best interests.”

Iris Kyle (1974) American bodybuilder

2008-04-08
Iris Kyle, Ms. Olympia
IFBBPRO.com
Internet
http://www.ifbbpro.com/features/iris-kyle-ms-olympia/
Sourced quotes, 2008

God, Faith, Passion, Patience

“I was all for setting up a separate Jewish state in Madagascar or Palestine or someplace, but not to exterminate them. Besides, by exterminating 4 million Jews - they say 5 or 6 million at this trial, but that is all propaganda, I am sure it wasn't more than 4.5 million - they have made martyrs out of those Jews. For example, because of the extermination of these Jews, anti-Semitism has been set back many years in certain foreign countries where it had been making good progress.”

Julius Streicher (1885–1946) German politician

To Leon Goldensohn, April 6, 1946, from "The Nuremberg Interviews" by Leon Goldensohn, Robert Gellately - History - 2004

Country

“It is cowardise and lack of hartes and corage that kepeth the Frenchmen from rysyng, and not povertye; which corage no Frenche man hath like to the English man. It hath ben often seen in Englond that iij or iv thefes, for povertie, hath set upon vij or viij true men, at robbyd them al. But it had not been seen in Fraunce, that vij or viij thefes have ben hardy to robbe iij or iv true men. Wherefor it is right seid that few Frenchmen be hanged for robbery, for that they have no hertys to do so terryble an acte. There be therefor mo men hangyd in Eglnd, in a yere, for robberye and manslaughter, than ther be hangid in Fraunce for such cause of crime in vij yers.”

John Fortescue (1394–1476) Chief Justice of the King's Bench of England

History of the English Speaking Peoples by Winston Churchill at p.377 vol I

Men

“By public administration is meant, in common usage, the activities of the executive branches of national, state, and local governments; independent boards and commissions set up by the congress and state legislatures; government corporations, and certain agencies of a specialized character. Specifically excluded are judicial and legislative agencies within the government and nongovernmental administration.”

Herbert A. Simon (1916–2001) American political scientist, economist, sociologist, and psychologist

Source: 1940s-1950s, Public administration, 1950, p. 7

“Your Excellency's favor of the 24th I had the honor of receiving last evening. I dined yesterday with the Minister of France, and find him still deter mined to set out for camp to-morrow. He sets out at seven in the morning, and intends lodging at Trenton. On Wednesday, he will be in camp, if no accident attends him; but at what hour, cannot be ascertained, as the place he dines at is not yet determined on. I intend to wait upon him some time this morning, and learn more particularly his stages. Don Juan accompanies him.”

Nathanael Greene (1742–1786) American general in the American Revolutionary War

Letter to George Washington (26 April 1779)

Learning, Time, Waiting

“After your first job, is anyone asking you what your GPA was? No, they don't care. They ask you: Are you a good leader? Do people follow you? Do you have integrity? Are you innovative? Do you solve problems? Somebody's got to do that homework and redesign the educational system so that it can actually train people to be successful in life.I think the greatest teachers are not the ones that are best trained at educational tactics. I don't know a person who's ever said, "Boy, that teacher is so good! The teacher gives such good exams. That teacher gives such good homework sets!"”

Neil deGrasse Tyson (1958) American astrophysicist and science communicator

No one has said that about a great teacher. That's not what people remember about the great teachers they've had.
2000s, Global Ideas from Pluto's Challenger (May 21, 2009)

People, Education, Boy, Problem

“If the Europeans are telling the truth in their claim that they have killed six million Jews in the Holocaust during the World War II - which seems they are right in their claim because they insist on it and arrest and imprison those who oppose it, why should the Palestinian nation pay for the crime. Why have they come to the very heart of the Islamic world and are committing crimes against the dear Palestine using their bombs, rockets, missiles and sanctions. […] The same European countries have imposed the illegally-established Zionist regime on the oppressed nation of Palestine. If you have committed the crimes so give a piece of your land somewhere in Europe or America and Canada or Alaska to them to set up their own state there. Then the Iranian nation will have no objections, will stage no rallies on the Qods Day and will support your decision.”

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (1956) 6th President of the Islamic Republic of Iran

Translation by Islamic Republic News Agency, Dec 2005
2005, The World without Zionism, 2005

War, Truth, World, Support

“Information engineering has been defined with the reference to automated techniques as follows: An interlocking set of automated techniques in which enterprise models, data models and process models are built up in a comprehensive knowledge-base and are used to create and maintain data-processing systems.”

James Martin (author) (1933–2013) British information technology consultant and writer

Source: Information Engineering (1989), p. viii

Knowledge

“Money alone sets all the world in motion.”

Publilio Siro Latin writer

Maxim 656
Sentences, The Moral Sayings of Publius Syrus, a Roman Slave

Money, World

“Riding the crest, I diversified, exploiting a highly marketable capacity to fart at will… By mastering this skill I set myself on a par with those court jesters of old who could wow the monarch and all his retinue with a simultaneous leap, whistle and fart. Unable to extend my neo-Homeric story-telling activities from the playground to the classroom, I could nevertheless continue to hog the limelight by interpolating a gaseous running commentary while the teacher addressed himself to the blackboard.”

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

Source: Memoirs, Unreliable Memoirs (1980), p. 105

Teachers

“The top of modern American society is increasingly unified and often seems wilfully co-ordinated: at the top there has emerged an elite of power. The middle levels are a drifting set of stalemated balancing forces: the middle does not link the bottom with the top. The bottom of this society is fragmented, and even as a passive fact, increasingly powerless:at the bottom there is emerging a mass society.”

C. Wright Mills book The Power Elite

The Power Elite (1956)

“In the desperate situation of Britain today, our party needs the support of all who value the traditional ideals of Toryism: compassion, and concern for the individual and his freedom; opposition to excessive State power; the right of the enterprising, the hard-working and the thrifty to succeed and to reap the rewards of success and pass some of them on to their children; encouragement of that infinite diversity of choice that is an essential of freedom; the defence of widely-distributed private property against the Socialist State; the right of a man to work without oppression by either employer or trade union boss. There is a widespread feeling in the country that the Conservative party has not defended these ideals explicitly and toughly enough, so that Britain is set on a course towards inevitable Socialist mediocrity. That course must not only be halted, it must be reversed.”

Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013) British stateswoman and politician

Speech in Finchley (31 January 1975) http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/102605 Shadow Secretary for Environment

Children, Feeling, Support, Freedom

“Marina was about eight years older than my sister Tencha, so this made her about eighteen years older than me. She was presently a reporter for the New York Times. When she was in high school, she’d won the Underwood Typewriter typing contest, doing well over a hundred words a minute without a single mistake, setting a national record. She attributed her fast hands to her cotton-picking days as a young girl in Scottsdale, Arizona.”

Victor Villaseñor (1940) American writer

Crazy Loco Love: A Memoir (2008)

School, Girl, Sister, Time

“Systems Are Seductive. They promise to do a hard job faster, better, and more easily than you could do it by yourself. But if you set up a system, you are likely to find your time and effort now being consumed in the care and feeding of the system itself. New problems are created by its very presence. Once set up, it won't go away, it grows and encroaches. It begins to do strange and wonderful things. Breaks down in ways you never thought possible. It kicks back, gets in the way, and opposes its own proper function. Your own perspective becomes distorted by being in the system. You become anxious and push on it to make it work. Eventually you come to believe that the misbegotten product it so grudgingly delivers is what you really wanted all the time. At that point encroachment has become complete. You have become absorbed. You are now a systems person.”

John Gall (1925–2014) American physician

Source: General systemantics, an essay on how systems work, and especially how they fail..., 1975, p. 90 as cited in: Robert B. Seidensticker (2006) Future Hype: The Myths of Technology Change. p. 45

Way, Problem, Effort, Time

“The overall agenda here is quite simply the ruling classes, or the classes of Europe intend to stride on to the world stage as a powerful economic entity. And they want to be as powerful as the US, meaning they want a stronger foreign policy and a military wing to back them up. But I can assure the Government that the debate will be a very intensive debate, a very vigorous debate and I think the benefit perhaps this time is that certain distractions that were raised the last time would be set aside, and therefore we can concentrate on the more fundamental issues. […] Take for example this notion that Irish youth would be conscripted into an army. The only people I heard that from was Government ministers in the course of the campaign who said this is being said. Nobody here raised any such red herring. These were the so-called concerns that were being addressed. But the major concerns as to what the Treaty was really about has not been changed one iota.”

Joe Higgins (1949) Irish socialist politician

breakingnews.ie http://www.breakingnews.ie/ireland/eykfojojqlkf/

People, Youth, World, Thinking

“The repose of sleep refreshes only the body. It rarely sets the soul at rest. The repose of the night does not belong to us. It is not the possession of our being. Sleep opens within us an inn for phantoms. In the morning we must sweep out the shadows.”

Gaston Bachelard (1884–1962) French writer and philosopher

Source: La poétique de la rêverie (The Poetics of Reverie) (1960), Ch. 2, sect. 3

Soul, Sleep, Night

“We don't propose to sit here in our rocking chair with our hands folded and let the Communists set up any government in the Western Hemisphere.”

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

Remarks to the 10th National Legislative Conference, Building and Construction Trades Department, AFL-CIO (May 3, 1965); reported in Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Lyndon B. Johnson, 1965, book 1, p. 480.
1960s

“A conflict arises when a religious community insists on the absolute truthfulness of all statements recorded in the Bible. This means an intervention on the part of religion into the sphere of science; this is where the struggle of the Church against the doctrines of Galileo and Darwin belongs. On the other hand, representatives of science have often made an attempt to arrive at fundamental judgments with respect to values and ends on the basis of scientific method, and in this way have set themselves in opposition to religion. These conflicts have all sprung from fatal errors.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

1940s, Science and Religion (1941)

Truth, Religion, Way, Error

“Most of the constantly rising burden of paperwork exists to give an illusion of transparency and control to a bureaucracy that is out of touch with the actual production process. Every new layer of paperwork is added to address the perceived problem that stuff still isn’t getting done the way management wants, despite the proliferation of paperwork saying everything has being done exactly according to orders. In a hierarchy, managers are forced to regulate a process which is necessarily opaque to them because they are not directly engaged in it. They’re forced to carry out the impossible task of developing accurate metrics to evaluate the behavior of subordinates, based on the self-reporting of people with whom they have a fundamental conflict of interest. The paperwork burden that management imposes on workers reflects an attempt to render legible a set of social relationships that by its nature must be opaque and closed to them, because they are outside of it. Each new form is intended to remedy the heretofore imperfect self-reporting of subordinates. The need for new paperwork is predicated on the assumption that compliance must be verified because those being monitored have a fundamental conflict of interest with those making the policy, and hence cannot be trusted; but at the same time, the paperwork itself relies on their self-reporting as the main source of information. Every time new evidence is presented that this or that task isn’t being performed to management’s satisfaction, or this or that policy isn’t being followed, despite the existing reams of paperwork, management’s response is to design yet another—and equally useless—form.”

Kevin Carson (1963) American academic

The Desktop Regulatory State (2016), Chapter 2
The Desktop Regulatory State (2016)

People, Way, Behavior, Nature

“Of all natures that He hath set in diverse creatures by part, in man is all the whole; in fulness and in virtue, in fairness and in goodness, in royalty and nobleness, in all manner of majesty, of preciousness and worship. Here may we see that we are all beholden to God for nature, and we are all beholden to God for grace.”

Julian of Norwich (1342–1416) English theologian and anchoress

Summations, Chapter 62

God, Nature, Parting

“The rhetoric of to-day, the rhetoric we have to consider, is the rhetoric of the "Bulging corn bins." I suppose that this gift has been responsible for more bloodshed on this earth than all the guns and explosives that have ever been invented. If we look back only over the last century, was there anything more responsible for the French Revolution than the literary rhetoric of Rousseau, fanned by the verbal rhetoric of Robespierre and others, just as the Russian Revolution was due to the rhetoric of Kerensky— flatulent rhetoric which filled the bellies of his people with the east wind? That appalling twopenny-ha'penny gift of fluency, with the addition of a certain amount of training and of imagination in word-spinning, is the kind of rhetoric which stirs the emotions of the ignorant mob and sets it moving. It is because such forces can be set in motion by rhetoric that I have no regard for it, but a positive horror.”

Stanley Baldwin (1867–1947) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech at the Cambridge Union (March 1924), quoted in On England, and Other Addresses (1926), pp. 95-96.
1924

People, Imagination, Training

“It is God’s will that we set the point of our thought in this blissful beholding as often as we may, — and as long time keep us therein with His grace; for this is a blessed contemplation to the soul that is led of God, and full greatly to His worship, for the time that it lasteth.”

Julian of Norwich (1342–1416) English theologian and anchoress

The Fifteenth Revelation, Chapter 63

God, Soul, Time

“We learned about dignity and decency – that how hard you work matters more than how much you make…that helping others means more than just getting ahead yourself. We learned about honesty and integrity – that the truth matters, that you don't take shortcuts or play by your own set of rules, and success doesn't count unless you earn it fair and square. We learned about gratitude and humility – that so many people had a hand in our success, from the teachers who inspired us to the janitors who kept our school clean, and we were taught to value everyone's contribution and treat everyone with respect.”

Michelle Obama (1964) lawyer, writer, wife of Barack Obama and former First Lady of the United States

2010s, Democratic National Convention speech (2012)

People, Truth, School, Learning

“One of Collingwood's earliest attempts to define the aesthetic essence of art. His aim, he writes in the preface, is to state a general conception of art and develop its consequences. His conception is one already familiar through the writings of others -- "that art is as bottom neither more nor less than imagination" -- but from his observation he goes on to outline the various distinctions between subordinate conceptions of art, and to attempt to demonstrate their place in the general conception, and the place of both in life. He urges that the meaningfulness of art cannot be torn from the imaginative setting in which it is embedded, and that we must attempt to explain the process by which an artist reaches a particular point of view on reality.”

R. G. Collingwood (1889–1943) British historian and philosopher

Abstract
Outlines of a Philosophy of Art, 1925

Life, Art, Imagination, Reality

“Achievement: Believe in yourself, plan wisely to set attainable goals, move forward courageously, solve the problems effectively and achievement will be yours.”

Thich Nhat Tu (1969) Vietnamese philosopher

Inner Freedom: A Spiritual Journey for Prison Inmates (2008)

Courage, Problem

“Day after day gasped away, slowly seep hours when fettered or immured, only at times does imagination scale the palisades that the spirit of chaos and confusion, the spirit of reactionary bombast, has set up around us - dreams, dreams of endless, destructive hate! Mists of hate, beclouding the burning brain!”

George Grosz (1893–1959) German artist

Letter to Otto Schmalhausen, 4 April, 1917 (Briefe, p. 49); as quoted in 'Portfolios', Alexander Dückers; in German Expressionist Prints and Drawings - Essays Vol 1.; published by Museum Associates, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California & Prestel-Verlag, Germany, 1986, p. 89 - note 62
George Grosz was early January 1917 recalled into the German army, only to be transferred shortly afterward to Gorden mental hospital near Brandenburg. From there he wrote this letter. At the end of April 1917 he was sent home, and on 20 May he was discharged on grounds of 'permanent unfitness for duty'

Hate, Dreams, Imagination, Time

“He [the artist in general] ought to have 'these powerful organs of expression' — colour and chiaroscuro — entirely at his command, that he may use them in every possible form, as well as that he may do with the most perfect freedom; therefore, whether he wishes to make the subject of a joyous, solemn, or meditative character, by flinging over it the cheerful aspect which the sun bestows, by a proper disposition of shade, or by the appearances that beautify its arising or its setting, a true "General Effect" should never be lost sight of.”

John Constable (1776–1837) English Romantic painter

Text for the 'Old Sarum', print in 'English Landscape' 1835/36, as quoted in Leslie Parris and Ian Fleming-Williams, Constable (Tate Gallery Publications, London, 1993), p. 380
1830s

Freedom, Appearance, Sun, Perfection

“I had at one point this rather depressing image of some alien culture seeing the death of this planet - coming down in their spaceships and sniffing around; finding all our skeletons sitting around our TV sets and trying to work out why our end came before its time and they come to the conclusion that we amused ourselves to death..”

Roger Waters (1943) English songwriter, bassist, and lyricist of Pink Floyd

Amused to Death syndicate Radio Premiere, 1992
Music

Death, Time

“Men without their choice derive benefits from that association; without their choice they are subjected to duties in consequence of these benefits; and without their choice they enter into a virtual obligation as binding as any that is actual. Look through the whole of life and the whole system of duties. Much the strongest moral obligations are such as were never the results of our option. I allow, that if no supreme ruler exists, wise to form, and potent to enforce, the moral law, there is no sanction to any contract, virtual or even actual, against the will of prevalent power. On that hypothesis, let any set of men be strong enough to set their duties at defiance, and they cease to be duties any longer.”

Edmund Burke book An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs

Source: An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs (1791), p. 442

Life, Men, Law, Strong

“Cold, delicately as the dark snow,
A fox's nose touches twig, leaf;
Two eyes serve a movement, that now
And again now, and now, and now
Sets neat prints into the snow.”

Ted Hughes book The Hawk in the Rain

"The Thought-Fox", line 10
The Hawk in the Rain (1957)

“Such strains as would have won the ear
Of Pluto, to have quite set free
His half-regained Eurydice.
These delights, if thou canst give,
Mirth, with thee, I mean to live.”

John Milton (1608–1674) English epic poet

Source: L'Allegro (1631), Line 148

“Once the truth is denied to human beings, it is pure illusion to try to set them free. Truth and freedom either go together hand in hand or together they perish in misery.”

Pope John Paul II (1920–2005) 264th Pope of the Catholic Church, saint

Encyclical Fides et Ratio, 14 September 1998 Source: www.vatican.va http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_14091998_fides-et-ratio_en.html

Truth, Freedom

“They had done him the honor to take him for a madman, but had set him free on discovering that he was only a poet.”

Victor Hugo book The Man Who Laughs

The Man Who Laughs (1869)

“This cold weather has set all the young Folks to providing Bedfellows. I have signed two or three Licences every Day [as a Fairfax Justice of the Peace] since I have been at Home. I wish I knew where to get a good one myself; for I find cold Sheets extremely disagreeable.”

George Mason (1725–1792) American delegate from Virginia to the U.S. Constitutional Convention

Letter to his cousin, James Mercer (5 February 2780)

Peace, Justice, Home, Weather

“Music is one of the very few things left in this world, which has an amazing power of healing. I really hope that these songs will set your imagination free, enrich your emotions and help your heart and mind feel happier.”

Edyta Górniak (1972) Polish singer

Invisible (cd), 2002

World, Hope, Music, Feeling

“The “animal rights movement” … is at once colossally powerful but ultimately hobbled by a weak spot both miniscule and fatal. … That colossal power emanates from hundreds of thousands of everyday activists who justifiably believe that conscientious consumers can, through a wide variety of measures, take gradual steps toward removing animal products from their diet. These true believers do the grunt work of activism: they hand out pamphlets, write books, blog, make documentaries, start campus veg societies, publish vegan recipes, open vegan food carts, work for animal sanctuaries, run veganic farms, and do basically anything they can to encourage consumers to contemplate the face on their plate. I consider myself a member of this noble tribe. The heel of the movement, by contrast, consists of a handful of radicals, mostly academics, who do little more than set an unrealistic benchmark of success … First, it seeks to eliminate all animal exploitation, in every realm of life, immediately, and without compromise or strategic capitulation; and second, it aims to eliminate all forms of oppression … The heel does not want the good, or even the better. It wants perfection.”

James E. McWilliams (1968) American historian

"Radical Activism and the Future of Animal Rights", in Pacific Standard (3 July 2013) https://psmag.com/social-justice/radical-activism-and-the-future-of-animal-rights-61789.

Life, Books, Food, Success

“Nothing is less forgiven than setting Patterns Men have no mind to follow.”

George Savile, 1st Marquess of Halifax (1633–1695) English politician

Princes (their Rewards of Servants).
Political, Moral, and Miscellaneous Reflections (1750), Political Thoughts and Reflections

Men

“What I mean by the "pursuit of learning" is not the ability to read classical texts and study ancient history, but to be fully acquainted with conditions all over the world and to have a keen awareness of what is going on abroad and around us. Now from what I can see world trends and conditions are still unsettled, and as long as they remain unsettled there is still a chance that something can be done. First, therefore, we must rectify conditions in our own domain, after which conditions in other domains can be rectified. This having been done, conditions at court can be rectified and finally conditions throughout the whole world can be rectified. First one must set an example oneself and then it can be extended progressively to others. This is what I mean by the "pursuit of learning."”

Yoshida Shoin (1830–1859) Japanese politician

Vol. IV.
Yoshida Shoin Zenshu

World, History, Study, Learning

“I feel that, you know, the enormous luck I've had in being able to make a living, and to never have had to have written one word that I didn't want to write, to be able to have satisfied that dictum I set for myself, which was not to work for pay, but to be paid for my work — just to be able to satisfy those standards that I set for myself has been an enormous privilege.”

Leonard Cohen (1934–2016) Canadian poet and singer-songwriter

Interview with BBC Radio 1FM (1994)

Feeling

“Now the salient characteristic of the decision tools employed in management science is that they have to be capable of actually making or recommending decisions, taking as their inputs the kinds of empirical data that are available in the real world, and performing only such computations as can reasonably be performed by existing desk calculators or, a little later electronic computers. For these domains, idealized models of optimizing entrepreneurs, equipped with complete certainty about the world - or, a worst, having full probability distributions for uncertain events - are of little use. Models have to be fashioned with an eye to practical computability, no matter how severe the approximations and simplifications that are thereby imposed on them…
The first is to retain optimization, but to simplify sufficiently so that the optimum (in the simplified world!) is computable. The second is to construct satisficing models that provide good enough decisions with reasonable costs of computation. By giving up optimization, a richer set of properties of the real world can be retained in the models… Neither approach, in general, dominates the other, and both have continued to co-exist in the world of management science.”

Herbert A. Simon (1916–2001) American political scientist, economist, sociologist, and psychologist

Source: 1960s-1970s, "Rational decision making in business organizations", Nobel Memorial Lecture 1978, p. 498; As cited in: Arjang A. Assad, ‎Saul I. Gass (2011) Profiles in Operations Research: Pioneers and Innovators. p. 260-1.

World, Fashion, Optimism, Decision

“A man who is spiritually more developed than others is in a difficult situation, unless he is protected by his position and the fear that position instills. Such a man becomes a loner : his standards are different, useless to others, but they still set him apart.”

Meša Selimović book Death and the Dervish

Death and the Dervish (Derviš i smrt), Part II, page. 245.
Death and the Dervish (1966)

Fear

“It cannot be said that at the time these inscriptions were set up at ANhilwãD Pãtan, Prabhas Patan, Khambat, Junagadh and other places, the Hindus of Gujarat had had no taste of what Islam had in store for them, their women, their children, their cities, their temples, their idols, their priests, and their properties. The invasion of Ulugh Khãn that was to subjugate Gujarat to a long spell of Muslim rule, was the eighth in a series which started within a few years after the Prophet’s death at Medina in AD 632. Five Islamic invasions had been mounted on Gujarat before Siddharãja JayasiMha ascended the throne of that kingdom in AD 1094 - first in AD 636 on Broach by sea; second in AD 732-35 by land; third and fourth in AD 756 and 776 by sea; and fifth by Mahmûd of Ghazni in AD 1026. Two others had materialised by the time the Muslim ship-owner set up his inscription in AD 1264 on a mosque at Prabhas Patan. The sixth invasion was by Muhammad Ghûrî in AD 1178, and the seventh was by Qutbu’d-Dîn Aibak in AD 1197. The only conclusion that can be drawn from the evidence is that either the Hindus of Gujarat had a very short memory or that they did not understand at all the inspiration at the back of these invasions. The temple of Somnath which stood, after the invasion of Mahmûd of Ghazni in AD 1026, as a grim reminder of the character of Islam, had also failed to teach them any worthwhile lesson. Nor did they visualize that the Muslim settlements in their midst could play a role other than that of carrying on trade and commerce.”

Sita Ram Goel (1921–2003) Indian activist

Hindu Temples – What Happened to Them, Volume II (1993)

Death, Women, Children, Understanding

“If a young mother has a job as a secretary in a company trying to cut expenses, where they start giving her the work of two secretaries and making extra demands on her, she will do all she can to please her employers. In fact, they are causing her to worry, hurry to work and rush home late to her expectant family. Thus, pressure and demands in a business setting lead to anxiety and tension at home. This is what begins to happen in our civilization when we put profit before people, and getting work done before the feelings of those we work with.”

Michael Elmore-Meegan (1959) British humanitarian

All shall be well (2014)

People, Family, Feeling, Home

“Shah Alamgir, that high and mighty king,
Pride and renown of Gurgan Timur’s line,
In whom Islam attained a loftier fame
And wider honour graced the Prophet’s Law,
He the last arrow to our quiver left
In the affray of Faith with Unbelief;
When that the impious seed of heresy,
By Akbar nourished, sprang and sprouted fresh
In Dara’s soul, the candle of the heart
Was dimmed in every breast, no more secure
Against corruption our Community
Continued; then God chose from India
That humble-minded warrior, Alamgir,
Religion to revive, faith to renew.
The lightning of his sword set all ablaze
The harvest of impiety; faith’s torch
Once more its radiance o’er our counsels shed.”

Muhammad Iqbál (1877–1938) Urdu poet and leader of the Pakistan Movement

The Secrets of Selflessness, Emperor Alamgir and the Tiger

God, Faith, Religion, Law

“My concern tonight is the following: Why is it that here in the United States we have such difficulty even imagining a different sort of society from the one whose dysfunctions and inequalities trouble us so? We appear to have lost the capacity to question the present, much less offer alternatives to it. Why is it so beyond us to conceive of a different set of arrangements to our common advantage?”

Tony Judt (1948–2010) British historian

" What Is Living and What Is Dead in Social Democracy? http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2009/12/17/what-is-living-and-what-is-dead-in-social-democrac/" (2009)

Imagination, Question, Appearance

“Most of us know, now, that Rousseau was wrong: that man, when you knock his chains off, sets up the death camps. Soon we shall know everything the eighteenth century didn't know, and nothing it did, and it will be hard to live with us.”

Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) poet, critic, novelist, essayist

"On the Underside of the Stone," The New York Times Book Review (1953-08-23) [p. 177]
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

Death

“And now the sagacious reader, who is capable of reading into these lines what does not stand written in them, but is nevertheless implied, will be able to form some conception of the serious feelings with which I then set foot in Emmendingen.”

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) German writer, artist, and politician

Autobiography: Truth and Poetry Book xviii. London 1884 p. 115 books.google.de http://books.google.de/books?id=ff-TMQCqkPQC&pg=PA115

Feeling, Reading

“But now I see I was not plucked for naught,
And after in life's vase
Of glass set while I might survive,
But by a kind hand brought
Alive
To a strange place.”

Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) 1817-1862 American poet, essayist, naturalist, and abolitionist

"I am a parcel of vain strivings tied", st. 6 (1841)

Life

“Trying to eliminate Saddam, extending the ground war into an occupation of Iraq, would have violated our guideline about not changing objectives in midstream, engaging in "mission creep", and would have incurred incalculable human and political costs. Apprehending him was probably impossible. We had been unable to find Noriega in Panama, which we knew intimately. We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq. The coalition would instantly have collapsed, the Arabs deserting it in anger and other allies pulling out as well. Under those circumstances, furthermore, we had been self-consciously trying to set a pattern for handling aggression in the post-cold war world. Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the U. N.'s mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the U. S. could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land. It would have been a dramatically different — and perhaps barren — outcome.”

George H. W. Bush book A World Transformed

A World Transformed (1998) by George H.W. Bush and Brent Scowcroft; also as an excerpt http://www.thememoryhole.org/mil/bushsr-iraq.htm in Time Magazine in 1998.

Hostility, War, World, Hope

“Obey your bishop! “Obey those set over you [Heb 13:17],” the teachers of the Church…. I remind you, my dear friends, of what I said when I was with you: do not receive any outside or unknown preacher, unless he be sent by your bishop or preaches with the permission of the pope. For “how shall they preach unless they are sent [Rom 10:15]?””

Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153) French abbot, theologian

Bernard of Clairvaux on the Life of the Mind, John R. Sommerfeldt, Newman Press (2004) ISBN 0809142031 ISBN 9780809142033, p. 67

Teachers

“The EU's single market is a single regulatory regime. Membership of it doesn’t mean that you can sell your products into it: pretty much the whole world can do that. Membership means, rather, that you accept a common set of technical standards, and that you submit yourself to the ultimate jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice.”

Daniel Hannan (1971) British politician

https://capx.co/remain-campaign-is-misleading-voters-on-the-single-market/

World, Justice

“Every second, ten stars set behind the black water in the west.”

Paul Bowles book Points in Time

Source: Points in Time (1982), p. 28

Star, Water

“I set out to destroy socialism because I felt it was at odds with the character of the people. We were the first country in the world to roll back the frontiers of socialism, then roll forward the frontiers of freedom. We reclaimed our heritage; we are renewing it and carrying it forward.”

Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013) British stateswoman and politician

Quoted from Margaret Thatcher, Article for Newsweek “Don’t undo my work” (27 April 1992).
Post-Prime Ministerial

People, World, Freedom, Country

“In view of the dramatic effects that alternative representations may produce on search and recognition processes, it may seem surprising that the differential effects on inference appear less strong. Inference is largely independent of representation if the information content of the two sets of inference rules [one operating on diagrams and the other operating on verbal statements] is equivalent—i. e. the two sets are isomorphs as they are in our examples”

Herbert A. Simon (1916–2001) American political scientist, economist, sociologist, and psychologist

Source: 1980s and later, "Why a diagram is (sometimes) worth ten thousand words," (1987), p. 71, as cited in: Bauer, Malcolm I., and Philip N. Johnson-Laird. " How diagrams can improve reasoning http://mentalmodels.princeton.edu/papers/1993diags%26reasoning.pdf." Psychological Science 4.6 (1993): 372-378.

Search, Strong, Appearance

“I would say, on the basis of having observe a thousand people in the experiment and having my own intuition shaped and informed by these experiments, that if a system of death camps were set up in the United States of the sort we had seen in Nazi Germany, one would find sufficient personnel for those camps in any medium-sized American town.”

Stanley Milgram (1933–1984) Social psychologist

Interview on Sixty Minutes (31 March 1979)
Actual quote, which can be heard in Discovery Channel's Curiosity: How Evil Are You?: I would say -- on the basis of having observed a thousand people in the experiment, and having my own intuition shaped and informed by these experiments -- that if a system of death camps were set up in the United States of the sort we had seen in Nazi Germany, one would be able to find sufficient personnel for those camps in any medium-sized American town.

Death, People