Quotes about severity
page 19

“[P]rogress... enables me to define several... conceptions much more accurately than was possible in 1892, and to indicate, if only in vague outline, what a fascinating field is being here transferred from the synoptic to the precise division of science.”

Karl Pearson book The Grammar of Science

Preface to the Second Edition
The Grammar of Science (1900)

Science

“The best thing in the world that can happen to anyone is to lose everything. I know. It's happened to me on several occasions.”

Bessie Love (1898–1986) American actress (1898–1986)

On loss and failure, from [September 7, 1959, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 64, On Broadway, Dorothy, Kilgallen]

World

“In causes of life and death, judges ought (as far as the law permitteth) in justice to remember mercy; and to cast a severe eye upon the example, but a merciful eye upon the person.”

Francis Bacon (1561–1626) English philosopher, statesman, scientist, jurist, and author

The Essays Or Counsels, Civil And Moral, Of Francis Ld. Verulam Viscount St. Albans (1625), Of Judicature

Justice, Law, Personality, Life

“A severe action ensued from dawn to mid-day, when "the army of idolatry and damnation turned its back in flight from the line of battle.... fifty thousand infidels were despatched to hell by the sword... and from the heaps of the slain, the hills and the plains became of one level.”

Hasan Nizami Persian language poet and historian

Source: Elliot and Dowson, Vol 2. 230.

Hell

“Offences committed by people’s representatives should be severely and promptly punished. No one has the right to claim to be more inviolable than other citizens.”

Maximilien Robespierre (1758–1794) French revolutionary lawyer and politician

Original: (fr) XXXIII. Les délits des mandataires du peuple doivent être sévèrement et facilement punis. Nul n'a le droit de se prétendre plus inviolable que les autres citoyens.
Source: "Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, proposed by Maximilien Robespierre" (24 April, 1793)

People

“I don't know which way human psychology will go wrong. We have a world in which there is uncertainty. There are new technologies. And one of the problems is that we do things today with a thought to the future. Any purchase is one for the future. If you buy a refrigerator you are making a commitment to the future, so that you have food to eat for the next ten years. That's a simple theory, one of many simple theories -- theories that people agree on and that don't, in a fundamental way, change. But every once in a while there is unemployment, and wages will drop, and there will be several different interpretations.”

Kenneth Arrow (1921–2017) American economist

quoted in Conor Clarke, An Interview with Kenneth Arrow, Part One https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2009/07/an-interview-with-kenneth-arrow-part-one/22213/ (2009) New millennium

Food, Future, People, Problem

“But what has been the experience of the Russian socialist movement up to now? The most important and fruitful changes in its tactical policy during the last ten years have not been the inventions of several leaders and even less so of any central organizational organs. They have always been the spontaneous product of the movement in ferment.”

Rosa Luxemburg (1871–1919) Polish Marxist theorist, socialist philosopher, and revolutionary

Leninism or Marxism? (1904)

Change

“I am confident that the enactment of the right bill next year will in due course increase our gross national product by several times the amount of taxes actually cut. Profit margins will be improved and both the incentive to invest and the supply of internal funds for investment will be increased. There will be new interest in taking risks, in increasing productivity, in creating new jobs and new products for long-term economic growth. Other national problems, moreover, will be aided by full employment. It will encourage the location of new plants in areas of labor surplus and provide new jobs for workers that we are retraining and facilitate the adjustment which will be necessary under our new trade expansion bill and reduce a number of government expenditures.”

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

Source: 1962, Address and Question and Answer Period at the Economic Club of New York

Problem, Confidence, Time, Self-confidence

“[A] danger, in its ultimate results scarcely less disastrous than pestilence and famine...distracts that country [Ireland]. A portion of its population is attempting to sever the constitutional tie which unites it to Great Britain in that bond which has favoured the power and prosperity of both. It is to be hoped that all men of light and leading will resist this destructive doctrine. The strength of this nation depends on the unity of feeling which should pervade the United Kingdom and its widespread dependencies.”

Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881) British Conservative politician, writer, aristocrat and Prime Minister

Source: Election address; letter to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, the Duke of Marlborough (8 March 1880), quoted in The Times (9 March 1880), p. 8

Dependency, Country, Light, Hope

“With regard to domestic policy, the current burning issue is the racial question. Also in this field we will adopt the necessary solutions. Those who believe that we have obediently imitated anyone, or worse, acted on suggestions, are poor fools toward whom we do not know if we should direct our contempt or our pity. The racial problem did not suddenly burst out of nowhere, as those who are accustomed to brusque awakenings think — since they are used to long armchair naps. It is in relation to imperial conquest; because history teaches us that empires are conquered by arms but are held by prestige. And for prestige it is necessary to have a clear, severe racial consciousness, that establishes not only the differences, but also very clear superiorities.”

Benito Mussolini (1883–1945) Duce and President of the Council of Ministers of Italy. Leader of the National Fascist Party and subsequen…

Speech held in Trieste (September 18, 1938) Source: Il discorso di Trieste, archivioluce, 2021-01-04 https://www.archivioluce.com/2019/09/18/il-discorso-di-trieste/,

History, Question, Fools, Problem

“I think learning about women coders is absolutely important. It’s part of our history. There’s so much in this world that we don’t cover, and I think it’s so important to know that these amazing, incredible, intelligent women were severely over looked…because they were women.”

Chanelle Peloso (1994) Canadian actress

The Bletchley Circle : San Francisco | Interview with Chanelle Peloso as Hailey Yarner https://www.bradfordzone.co.uk/the-bletchley-circle-san-francisco-interview-with-chanelle-peloso-as-hailey-yarner/ (19 July 2018)

History, Intelligence, Learning, Women

“Despite all the difficulties and severe trials being experienced by the people, the democratic process in the country is acquiring an increasingly broad sweep and an irreversible character. The peoples of Russia are becoming masters of their destiny.”

Boris Yeltsin (1931–2007) 1st President of Russia and Chairman of the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR

Appeal to citizens of Russia http://soviethistory.msu.edu/1991-2/the-august-coup/the-august-coup-texts/eltsins-defiance/ to oppose the 1991 coup attempt against Mikhail Gorbachev. (19 August 1991) 1990s

People, Country

“If the soul, through attentiveness, reduces the blindness caused by the love of this world, it will consider its slightest faults to be very grave and will continually shed tears. ... But if the soul persists in its worldly disposition, even though it commits a murder or some other act deserving severe punishment, it takes little notice; and it is quite unable to discern its other faults, often considering them to be signs of progress, and in its wretchedness it is not ashamed to defend them heatedly.”

Diadochos of Photiki (400–486) Byzantine saint

§ 27
On Spiritual Knowledge and Discrimination (480 AD)

Soul, World, Love, Making love

“Governments are not at liberty to act solely from motives of generous sympathy for the sufferings of an oppressed people, they are bound by the severer rules of general principles, to respect rights which are inherent in other nations.”

Henry Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston (1784–1865) British politician

Letter to Viscount Granville on the Portuguese Civil War (10 August 1831), quoted in Jasper Ridley, Lord Palmerston (1970), p. 166
1830s

Motivation, Suffering, People

“The foreign policy of England should be to maintain peace, not only for herself but between the powers of the world. This should be her policy, not only because she can have no interest in a change of the state of possession of the several powers...but because she has the most extensive commercial relations depending upon peace with each and all the powers of the world, the interruption of which must be injurious to her prosperity.”

Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington (1769–1852) British soldier and statesman

Letter to John Wilson Croker (30 September 1833), quoted in L. J. Jennings (ed.), The Croker Papers: The Correspondence and Diaries of the Late Right Honourable John Wilson Croker, LL.D., F.R.S., Secretary to the Admiralty from 1809 to 1830, Vol. II (1884), p. 218

Peace, Dependency, Relation ships, World

“Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers. It may not be difficult to store up in the mind a vast quantity of facts within a comparatively short time, but the ability to form judgments requires the severe discipline of hard work and the tempering heat of experience and maturity.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

Time, Knowledge, Wisdom

“That servant who is claimant of Divine knowledge but seeks peace in other than God, is entrapped in severe affliction. But when comely he seeks forgiveness of the Almighty, his affliction is eliminated.”

Ibrahim Khawas Iranian scientist

Source: The Sayings and Teachings of the Great Mystics of Islam (2004), p. 59

Forgiveness, God, Peace, Affliction

“You might be surprised to find this out, but sweets were a big problem for me when I was younger. It didn't matter what it was, I couldn't walk past it without buying it. Now I've cut sweets out. It actually took me several years to get to this point. Now I don't really like sweets anymore.”

Robert Lewandowski (1988) Polish association football player

"Lewandowski exclusive, pt II: 'We're stronger now'" https://www.bundesliga.com/en/news/Bundesliga/noblmd09-fc-bayern-muenchen-robert-lewandowski-exclusive-interview.jsp (2016)

Past, Problem

“It's all about the balance of the team. That's the most important point, nothing else. For that reason, it's easy for me to adapt to several different styles of play. I know I have to adapt and play for the good of the team. For me, being a strong striker is not only about being a good goalscorer.”

Robert Lewandowski (1988) Polish association football player

Strong

“Identification with the body is a state that consciousness needs to experience for a while. But eventually, grace will compel consciousness to transcend this severe limitation and guide it home to its original nature.”

Mooji (1954) Jamaican spiritual teacher

Greater than Sky, Vaster than Space, (2018), Part I

Home, Nature

“The police... should never go on strike. Theirs was an essential service and they should render that service, irrespective of their pay. There were several other effective and honourable means of getting grievances redressed.”

Mahatma Gandhi (1869–1948) pre-eminent leader of Indian nationalism during British-ruled India

In response to representatives of policemen who met him during a police strike in Gaya on March 24, 1947, https://web.archive.org/web/20210807112446/https://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/no-fundamental-right-to-strike/article35732405.ece Posthumous publications (1950s and later)

“The methods of coping with crime have no doubt undergone several changes, but mainly in a theoretic sense. In practice, society has retained the primitive motive in dealing with the offender; that is, revenge.”

Emma Goldman book Anarchism and Other Essays

Anarchism and Other Essays (1910), Prisons: A Social Crime and Failure

Revenge, Motivation, Sense, Change

“'Europe' had been on the defensive for a millennium. Now, for half a millennium, it conquered the world. Both observations make it impossible to sever European history from world history.”

Eric Hobsbawm (1917–2012) British academic historian and Marxist historiographer

Chap. 17 : The Curious History of Europe
On History (1997)

History, World

“The absence of one we love is not solitude, it is severance.”

Menotti Lerro (1980) Italian poet

L’assenza di chi si ama non è solitudine è ablazione.

Solitude, Love

“He had been mistaken several times for Robert Redford, but on each occasion it was by a blind person.”

Woody Allen Without Feathers

"No Kaddish for Weinstein".
Without Feathers (1975)

Time, Personality

“There are several different meanings of the words "religion" and "spirituality", all of which are important. The whole point about an integral or comprehensive approach is that it must find a way to believably include all of those important meanings in a coherent whole.”

Ken Wilber (1949) American writer and public speaker

Source: Which Level of God Do You Believe In? (2004)

Religion, Way

“When several imperialist powers seek to plunder the weaker nations of the world, the result is an imperialist world war for the redistribution of colonies. And this crime, the most monstrous in world history, is committed by the bourgeoisie under the banner of “nationalism.””

Liu Shaoqi (1898–1969) 2nd President of the People's Republic of China (1898-1969)

Internationalism and Nationalism (1952) Source: "1.The Bourgeois-Nationalist Concept of the Nation" https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/liu-shaoqi/1952/internationalism_nationalism/ch01.htm

History, War, World

“See? Interstellar colonization is easy! You just need to devote a visible percentage of the resource of an entire interplanetary civilization to it for several hundred years, placing it in the tireless and efficient hands of robots ordered to strive for the goal for as long as it takes.”

Charles Stross Saturn's Children

Source: Saturn's Children (2008), Chapter 17, “Interview with the Domina” (p. 304)

“At the present time the issue is the self-interest of several immense nation-groups. The result is much as it would be if the four quarters of a person’s body were arrayed against each other, and the circulation impeded between them. Economical chaos and frustration is the result, on a world scale.”

Vera Stanley Alder (1898–1984) British artist

Source: Humanity Comes of Age, A study of Individual and World Fulfillment (1950), Introduction p. I - XII

Personality, World, Time

“It is important to launch core reforms in education and healthcare and boost production primarily through developing agriculture and IT sector. We see the latter as a potentially key sector for future development because there is a real need today for several thousand programmers.”

Ana Brnabić (1975) Prime Minister of Serbia

Source: "Serbia Would Look Very Different Without NALED" in CORD Magazine https://cordmagazine.com/interview/ana-brnabic-serbia-different-without-naled/ (17 June 2016)

Education, Future

“School friends don’t have to be people that you actually get on with, they’re just people that you bond with after sharing a traumatic situation for several years.”

Dan Howell (1991) British video blogger and radio personality

Source: Gay And Not Proud - Daniel Howell | YouTube Pride 2021 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifJYb2An7wE, 25 June 2019

School, People

“We are looking at a winter of severe illness and death for the unvaccinated.”

Joe Biden (1942) 47th Vice President of the United States (in office from 2009 to 2017)

2021, December 2021 Source: ' Omicron delivers another uncertain holiday season to pandemic-weary Americans https://www.investing.com/news/coronavirus/omicron-delivers-another-uncertain-holiday-season-to-pandemicweary-americans-2714453 (Dec 17, 2021 01:21AM ET)

Death, Winter

“The much bigger thing is that we as human beings shepherd and create our intellectual history as a civilization. And it is that intellectual history on the shelf that we can pull off the shelf to do stuff, and to avoid doing the dumb things again, because somebody already did the dumb thing and wrote about their experience and we don't need to do it again. There are several processes that are creating that record, and other processes where people are trying to destroy bits of that record, and others that are trying to prevent people from putting things into that record in the first place. We all live off that intellectual record. So what we want to do is get as much into the record, prevent as much as possible being deleted from the record, and then make the record as searchable as possible.”

Julian Assange book When Google Met Wikileaks

Source: Julian Assange, "When Google Met Wikileaks" (ORbooks, New York, 2014), p.124

History, People

“This is... a book about morality. By offering several perspectives... some rooted in philosophy, some... in science and technology, we may come to see new ways to understand...”

Laurence Tribe (1941) American lawyer and law school professor

Abortion: The Clash of Absolutes (1990), Approaching Abortion Anew

Understanding, Books, Way, Science

“We know that community testing helps us quickly identify new COVID cases, so we can isolate the virus. Please get tested. We know that vaccines and boosters are effective at preventing severe illness, hospitalizations and death. Please, go get vaccinated and go get boosted.”

Lou Leon Guerrero (1950) Guamanian politician

Source: Lou Leon Guerrero (2022) cited in: " Governor: 'I am not announcing any new restrictions at this time' https://www.guampdn.com/news/governor-i-am-not-announcing-any-new-restrictions-at-this-time/article_87485994-72b9-11ec-a0b6-271bc150ad80.html" in Pacific Daily News, 11 January 2022.

Communication, Help, Death

“He brought me his report card from the teacher and he said
He wasn't very proud of it and sadly bowed his head.
He was excellent in reading, but arithmetic, was fair,
And I noticed there were several "unsatisfactorys" there;
But one little bit of credit which was given brought me joy —
He was "excellent in effort," and I fairly hugged the boy.”

Edgar Guest (1881–1959) American writer

Source: All That Matters (1922), p.86 - Effort, stanza 1.

Boy, Teachers, Reading, Joy

“Language has become the universal evil. And we can certainly see why. What characterizes any word is its difference from the thing – the fact that, taken in itself, in its own reality, language contains nothing of the reality of the thing, none of its properties. This difference from the thing explains its indifference to the thing. Since a word has nothing in itself that is identical or similar to what is in the thing, it could as well be united with any other thing whatever. One could use the same name for two different things or else attribute several names to the same thing. But because, in and of itself, the word contains nothing that is real and ignores everything about that reality, it could just as well bring reality back to itself, identify with it, define it, in such a way that everything the word says becomes reality, and pretends to stand for it. Emerging from its own powerlessness, the power of language suddenly becomes frightening, shaking up reality, twisting it up in its frenzy.”

Michel Henry (1922–2002) French writer

Books on Religion and Christianity, I am the Truth. Toward a philosophy of Christianity (1996)
Source: Michel Henry, I am the Truth. Toward a Philosophy of Christianity, translated by Susan Emanuel, Stanford University Press, 2003, p. 9

Indifference, Reality, Universe, Evil

“Most physicists enjoy the outdoors. They are mushroom gatherers, bird watchers, hikers, amateur mountaineers whose idea of weekend relaxation is to climb a mountain. Several physics summer schools and research centers are located in or near mountainous areas. I have not seen such uniform recreational impulses in other professions, an observation which prompts speculation on the connection between the nature of inquiry in physics and mountain climbing.”

Heinz R. Pagels (1939–1988) American physicist

Source: The Cosmic Code (1982), p. 271

Mountain, Idea, Nature, Bird

“The hell you pass through is not as severe as the one you would create for yourself out of it.”

- Goa

Hell

“The claim that Darwin’s theories were at the core of eugenics, the racial science at the core of Nazism, are not new. They are not revisionist history made upon the revelations of the Death Camps. These claims precede The Holocaust by several decades. American and British icons of science, namely Darwin’s relatives and colleagues, were making this claim before Adolf Hitler was even born, and continued to do so on up through the end of WWII.”

A.E. Samaan

Source: H.H. LAUGHLIN: American Scientist. American Progressive. Nazi Collaborator.

History, Science, Death

“Wisdom is not just weighing what is good and what is bad. Wisdom also looks at the consequences of the decisions it makes. The more severe the consequences, the greater the demands on wisdom to make the right decision.”

Titon Rahmawan

Decision, Wisdom

“The most severe, audacious and effective revenge is eternal indifference.”

Prevale (1983) Italian DJ and producer

Original: La vendetta più severa, audace ed efficace è l’eterna indifferenza.
Source: prevale.net

Indifference, Revenge

“There are three categories of individuals: the false, the envious and the bad. The false, do not have the courage to show themselves and be themselves. The envious, they do not take advantage to learn something new and be able to do better. The villains, they willfully and severely harm the health of others.”

Prevale (1983) Italian DJ and producer

Original: Esistono tre categorie di individui: i falsi, gli invidiosi ed i cattivi. I falsi, non hanno il coraggio di mostrarsi ed essere se stessi. Gli invidiosi, non approfittano per imparare qualcosa di nuovo e poter fare di meglio. I cattivi, danneggiano volontariamente e gravemente la salute degli altri.
Source: prevale.net

Courage, Learning, Health, Falseness

Quotes about severity page 19

Quotes about severity
page 19