Quotes about shape (1628 quotes, page 7)

“Received your letter and, almost at the same time, the long text at which I was overjoyed. You no doubt know that you are the only person in the world to have put together the gestation of the glass [ The Large Glass, circa 1923] in all its detail, including even the numerous intentions which were never executed [by Duchamp]. Your patient work has enabled me to relive a period of long years during which the notes were written for the 'Green Box' [the second of the three Boxes Duchamp created and this one was full of written notes] at the same time as the Glass [= The Large Glass] was taking shape. And I confess to you that, not having read these notes for a very long time, I had completely lost all recollection of numerous points not illustrated on the glass and which are a delight to me now”

Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) French painter and sculptor

c. 25 years later
Quote from Duchamp's letter to fr:Jean Suquet (art historian), New York 25 December 1949; as cited in The Duchamp Book, ed. Gavin Parkinson, Tate Publishing, London 2008 p. 163
1921 - 1950

World , Time , Reading , Personality

“Libraries, as spaces, need to continue to inspire the public to dream big and to think great thoughts. Cities, towns, and academic communities of all shapes and sizes need the free, open public spaces that libraries–and only libraries–provide.”

John Palfrey (1972) US law professor

§3 p. 83
BiblioTech (2015)

Dreams , Communication , Thinking

“Among all the disputes and uncertainties of the ethnographers about the races of Europe, one fact stands out clearly – namely, that we can distinguish a race of northerly distribution and origin, characterized physically by fair color of hair and skin and eyes, by tall stature and dolichocephaly (i. e. long shape of head), and mentally by great independence of character, individual initiative, and tenacity of will. Many names have been used to denote this type, …. It is also called the Nordic type.”

William McDougall (1871–1938) british psychologist

The Group Mind (p.159, Arno Press, 1973).

Color

“The essence of this conception is.. the idea of a community as governing itself by fostering the free expression of all political opinions that take shape within it, and finding some means of reducing this multiplicity of opinions to a unity.”

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

R. G. Collingwood (2005). "Man Goes Mad" in The Philosophy of Enchantment. Oxford University Press, 318.

Communication , Idea

“What people "want" is a function of what they learn is available. If you wish to sell something, you'd better understand that you can't give people what they want in the market today, because what they want today is what they can already get. You have to discover what they really want, and find some way to give that physical shape.”

Erik Naggum (1965–2009) Norwegian computer programmer

Re: creation of lisp machine/lispOS http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/c2fd86a7e43ac7aa (Usenet article).
Usenet articles, Miscellaneous

People , Way , Understanding , Learning

“There is a battle shaping up in the world – a battle between the forces of archy – of statism, of political rule and authority – and its only alternative – anarchy, the absence of political rule. This battle is the necessary and logical consequence of the battle between individualism and collectivism, between liberty and the state, between freedom and slavery.”

Roy A. Childs, Jr. (1949–1992) American libertarian essayist and critic

“Objectivism and the State: An Open Letter to Ayn Rand,” 1969

World , Freedom

“The picture rises before us vivid and bright: the finely carved, dragon-shaped prow; the high, curving stern; the long row of shields, black and yellow alternately, ranged along the sides; the gleam of steel; the scent of murder.”

Winston S. Churchill book A History of the English-Speaking Peoples

On the Viking Long Ships, Vol I; The Birth of Britain.
A History of the English-Speaking Peoples (1956–58)

“One might as well claim that the tide which rubs pebbles smooth on a beach is doing the pebbles a service because being round is prettier than being jagged. It's of no concern to a pebble what shape it is. But it's very important to a person.”

John Brunner The Shockwave Rider

Bk. 2, Ch. "Let's All Be Different Same As Me"
The Shockwave Rider (1975)

Personality

“In much of precolonial Nigeria, and indeed Africa, ethnic nations organized people within communities into peer groups and trained them, from babyhood to old age, to serve their communities. When successful, this system provided all members of a community not only with a sense of belonging but also with a vehicle for helping to shape the community's direction and pace of change. In this system, people knew they were entitled to help resolve any issue that affected the community.
This sense of entitlement grows out of a series of rituals that begin the day a child is born. When a baby is born, after the first few seconds, it lets out a yelp, which announces its arrival, and which is met by expressions of joy. Among the Yoruba, the arrival is acknowledged with a naming ceremony where parents give names that express rich meaning and hopes for the baby. When I arrived, my parents named me Hafsat Olaronke, which means the treasured one and honor is being cared for. For my parents, they saw in me one who would be cherished and who would bring honor to her community. Many in other parts of the world are impressed when they discover my name's meanings, but the truth is that most African names have beautiful meanings.”

Hafsat Abiola (1974) Nigerian human rights, civil rights and democracy activist

Architects of Peace (2000)

People , Truth , Age , World

“Whom neither shape of danger can dismay,
Nor thought of tender happiness betray.”

William Wordsworth (1770–1850) English Romantic poet

Source: Character of the Happy Warrior http://www.bartleby.com/145/ww302.html (1806), Line 72.

Happiness

“I had done this all by myself. No one had performed the magic for me. I and the shapes were alone together, revealing themselves in a silently respectful dialogue. Since I could bare lines into living reality, I was all powerful. I could read.”

Alberto Manguel (1948) writer

The Last Page, p. 6.
A History of Reading (1996)

Reality , Reading

“These things [cutting, cropping and shaping] always happen in strange ways. You can say after the fact what you're doing, but, believe me, you can't project it ahead. It has to be worked through before you can recognize what it was that you were looking for. It's a search; it's not like getting a brainstorm... It's work, yes; it comes out of the practice of painting, the practice of your art.”

Kenneth Noland (1924–2010) American artist

Source: Color, Format and Abstract Art' (1977), pp. 99 – 105

Art , Way , Search , Painting

“I met Sophie Taeuber in Zurich in 1915. Even then she already knew how to give direct and palpable shape to her inner reality. In those days this kind of art was called 'abstract art'. Now it is known as 'concrete art,' for nothing is more concrete than the psychic reality it expresses. Like music this art is tangible inner reality she was already dividing the surface of a watercolor into squares and rectangles which she juxtaposed horizontally and perpendicularly. She constructed her painting like a work of masonry. The colors are luminous, going from rawest yellow to deep red or…. blue.”

Hans Arp (1886–1966) Alsatian, sculptor, painter, poet and abstract artist

Arp's quote on his wife, in 'Sophie Taeuber-Arp', Hans Arp; in Arp on Arp: Poems, Essays, Memories, ed. Marcel Jean, transl. Joachim Neugroschel; Viking Press, New York 1972, p. 222
1910-20s

Art , Music , Color , Reality

“As I contemplated the host of deities that rose to me like a smoke cloud from the many worlds, a new image, a new symbol of the infinite spirit, took shape in my mind. Though born of my own cosmical imagination, it was begotten by a greater than I.”

Olaf Stapledon book Star Maker

Source: Star Maker (1937), Chapter XIII: The Beginning and the End; 3. The Supreme Moment and After (p. 161)

World , Imagination

“Yet, even did it be ever proved that Man once to be a fish, I to have no cause to abate the first part of mine argument; but to have the more need of the thought, that I gain power to accept the Fact; for I still then to have no occasion that I think Man to have been truly a Fish, or aught truly different from a Man; but only that he did be once Modified physically to his need, and to be still possessed of the Man-Spirit, though all lackt of development. Yet, truly, I to be less offend in my Reason, if that it be shown that Man did be ever somewise in his present shape, though mayhap so brutish as the Humpt Men; but yet I do be ready to consider all matters, and do build no Walls about my Reason. Yet, neither I to have an over-ready acceptance of aught, but to need that my Reason shall approve.”

William Hope Hodgson book The Night Land

Source: The Night Land (1912), Chapter 15

Men , Thinking , Fish , Parting

“Indeed all people of this country owe a vote of gratitude to the church for what it has done to this country in the course of our civilisation. I urge us to recognise this and offer our thanks to the church for its part in shaping the course of our history.”

Josefa Vosanibola Fijian politician

Speech to the House of Representatives, 12 August 2005

People , History , Parting , Country

“I don't see a great deal in editorial cartooning today, and neither do the editors. Damn few of them want cartoons that say something that should be said, politically, that is. As long as that continues, cartoonists are going to be in bad shape, but not as bad shape as the publishers and owners of the newspapers will be in when the people realize they're not reading anything.”

Paul Conrad (1924–2010) German theologian

As quoted in Pompilio, N. (2002). Not So Funny http://www.ajr.org/article_printable.asp?id=2651. American Journalism Review.

People , Reading

“You do believe it,' he said. 'You do believe everything. We all believe everything, even when we deny everything. The denyers believe. The unbelievers believe. Don't you feel in your heart that these contradictions do not really contradict: that there is a cosmos that contains them all? The soul goes round upon a wheel of stars and all things return; perhaps Strake and I have striven in many shapes, beast against beast and bird against bird, and perhaps we shall strive for ever. But since we seek and need each other, even that eternal hatred is an eternal love. Good and evil go round in a wheel that is one thing and not many. Do you not realize in your heart, do you not believe behind all your beliefs, that there is but one reality and we are its shadows; and that all things are but aspects of one thing: a centre where men melt into Man and Man into God?”

G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) English mystery novelist and Christian apologist

'No,' said Father Brown.
The Dagger with Wings (1926)

Love , Men , God , Feeling

“The so-called obscurity of modernist literature has, of course, a lot to do with the new stress on exegesis. When the overt meaning of a work can no longer be taken for granted, criticism is forced — or seems forced — to undertake the explication of the text of the work before doing anything else. But experience has shown us by now that the drift and shape of an "obscure" poem or novel can be grasped for the purposes of art without being "worked out." Part of the triumph of modernist poetry is, indeed, to have demonstrated the great extent to which verse can do without explicit meaning and yet not sacrifice anything essential to its effect as art. Here, as before, successful art can be depended upon to explain itself.”

Clement Greenberg (1909–1994) American writer and artist

"T.S. Eliot: A Book Review" (1950/1956), p. 244
1960s, Art and Culture: Critical Essays, (1961)

Art , Literature , Success , Parting

“Order is the shape upon which beauty depends.”

Pearl S. Buck (1892–1973) American writer

To My Daughters, With Love (1967)

Beauty , Dependency

“The Irish moved from semi-slavery in Ireland to freedom in America only a few years before the Negro gained emancipation. After a century and a quarter, or less, the Irish are a leading power in the United States, and the Negroes remain on the lowest strata. The basic difference between the Irish and the Negro has not been color: it has been character. The Negroes demand more aid, i. e., more slavery and slave-care, and dwell on their sufferings. The Irish have instead looked to the present and future and helped shape America. It is a significant difference that cannot be explained altogether by color or environment. The Chinese also came to the United States under very difficult circumstances and similarly overcame them.”

Rousas John Rushdoony (1916–2001) American theologian

Source: Writings, Politics of Guilt and Pity (1978), p. 19

Color , Freedom , Suffering , Future

“Forensic procedure is an art form, nothing less. No, I'll go further: it's higher, more refined, than any art form. Why? Because it's real. Take just one aspect of it—say the diagrams: with all their outlines, arrows and shaded blocks they look like abstract paintings, avant-garde ones from the last century—dances of shapes and flows as delicate and skilful as the markings on butterflies' wings. But they're not abstract at all. They're records of atrocities. Each line, each figure, every angle—the ink itself vibrates with an almost intolerable violence, darkly screaming from the silence of white paper: something has happened here, someone has died.”

Tom McCarthy (writer) book Déjà vu

Source: Remainder (2005), Ch. 11.

Art , Silence , Dance , Painting

“Clearly the present organization of the scientific community, cutting across the lines of nation states, bureaus, and almost all previously existing institutions, cannot be the result of conscious planning. There is, today, a good deal of organizational planning, but all of the instrumentalities which engage in this activity were founded after the development of science was well under way. Further, most of these organizations are parochial in nature, concerning themselves with only some special part of the scientific community like mathematical biophysics or Russian science. There is no general institution which has shaped or now can shape the development of science, only a mass of institutions which provide little more than liaison (and sometimes funds) for the scientific “producers.””

Gordon Tullock (1922–2014) American economist

The Organization of Inquiry (1966) Ch 1. The Social Organization of Science

Way , Communication , Mathematics , Nature

“The way in which the universe expands is determined by the variation of this [radius of curvature] R with the time. There are three types, or families, of non-static universes… the oscillating universes, and the expanding universes of the first and of the second kind. …each of these is a representative of a family, comprising an infinite number of members differing in size and shape. …In the expanding family of the first kind the radius is continually increasing from… zero… In the expanding series of the second type the radius has at the initial time a certain minimum value, different for the different members of the family. [Both kinds of expanding families] become infinite after an infinite time.”

Willem de Sitter (1872–1934) Dutch cosmologist

Kosmos (1932)

Family , Way , Universe , Time

“She is in other words a classic demagogue,” said von Bek…“It was Hitler’s secret that he could seem one thing to one group and an entirely different thing to another. That is how they rise so swiftly to power. These creatures are bizarre. They can virtually change shape and colour. They have an amophous quality and yet at the same time they have a will to dominate others which is unrelenting, almost their only consistent trait, their only reality.”

Michael Moorcock Erekosë

Book 2, Chapter 9 (p. 612)
Erekosë, The Dragon in the Sword (1986)

Secret , Reality , Change , Time

“The freedom secured by the Constitution consists, in one of its essential dimensions, of the right of the individual not to be injured by the unlawful exercise of governmental power. The mandate for segregated schools, Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U. S. 483 (1954); a wrongful invasion of the home, Silverman v. United States, 365 U. S. 505 (1961); or punishing a protester whose views offend others, Texas v. Johnson, 491 U. S. 397 (1989); and scores of other examples teach that individual liberty has constitutional protection, and that liberty’s full extent and meaning may remain yet to be discovered and affirmed. Yet freedom does not stop with individual rights. Our constitutional system embraces, too, the right of citizens to debate so they can learn and decide and then, through the political process, act in concert to try to shape the course of their own times and the course of a nation that must strive always to make freedom ever greater and more secure. Here Michigan voters acted in concert and statewide to seek consensus and adopt a policy on a difficult subject against a historical background of race in America that has been a source of tragedy and persisting injustice. That history demands that we continue to learn, to listen, and to remain open to new approaches if we are to aspire always to a constitutional order in which all persons are treated with fairness and equal dignity. Were the Court to rule that the question addressed by Michigan voters is too sensitive or complex to be within the grasp of the electorate; or that the policies at issue remain too delicate to be resolved save by university officials or faculties, acting at some remove from immediate public scru-tiny and control; or that these matters are so arcane that the electorate’s power must be limited because the people cannot prudently exercise that power even after a full debate, that holding would be an unprecedented restriction on the exercise of a fundamental right held not just by one person but by all in common. It is the right to speak and debate and learn and then, as a matter of political will, to act through a lawful electoral process.”

Anthony Kennedy (1936) Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, 572 U. S. ____, (2016), plurality opinion.

People , Education , School , Law

“Marital sex is kinda like ordering a Civil War chess set through the mail. You get one piece every four to six weeks, you don't know what kind of shape that piece is gonna be in when you get it, but you still gotta pay the handling charges.”

Bill Engvall (1957) American comedian and actor

Blue Collar Comedy Tour, Blue Collar Comedy Tour Rides Again (2004)

War , Sex

“Beauty, thou wild fantastic ape
Who dost in every country change thy shape!”

Abraham Cowley (1618–1667) British writer

"Beauty," complete poem in The Works of the English Poets, from Chaucer to Cowper, Samuel Johnson ed., vol. 7, p. 115.

Beauty , Change , Country

“I joined UKIP in 2003, when it was a party hardly anyone had heard of, but it was the start of an upward trend as we grew in importance and professionalism. In recent time I have watched the chaotic infighting and seen the growing frustration of members who feel their voices are once again being ignored as we embark on a new future for the United Kingdom. And it’s this future I want to help shape by leading the party which had such a significant impact on the political scene in this country, under the leadership of Nigel Farage. My message is clear: I'm offering a real alternative to the other options of EDL-lite or diet Labour.”

Jane Collins (1962) British politician

Ukip will die away if it decides to ape the EDL or Labour — I can save it http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/07/28/ukip-will-die-away-decides-ape-edl-labour-can-save/ (July 28, 2017)

Feeling , Time , Future , Help

“Every piece of data suggests that workplaces are in dire shape and there is low levels of trust in leaders. For instance, data on employee engagement from Gallup show that worldwide only about 13% of employees report being engaged with their work, and in the U. S., the number is barely higher at 20%. Job satisfaction has declined almost linearly since 1987 to the present. The Edelman Trust index indicates that the public at large has low trust in leaders, while other surveys show that employees do not expect their own leaders to make ethical decisions or to consistently tell them the truth about difficult situations.”

Jeffrey Pfeffer (1946) American academic

Jeffrey Pfeffer in: Dan Schawbel. " Jeffrey Pfeffer: What Most People Don't Know About Leadership http://www.forbes.com/sites/danschawbel/2015/09/15/jeffrey-pfeffer-what-most-people-dont-know-about-leadership," at Forbes.com, Sept. 15, 2015

Truth , Decision

“.. the personification of the close-up detail, the individualisation of the fragment, where the drama takes shape, moves and have it being. Film concurs with this aspect for life. The hand is a multiple, transformable object. Before I saw it in a film, I did not know what a hand was! The object in itself is capable of becoming an absolute, moving, tragic thing.”

Fernand Léger (1881–1955) French painter

Quote from: 'L'ésthetique de la Machine - l'Ordre Géometrique et le Vrai', in Propos d’Artistes, 1925
Quotes of Fernand Leger, 1920's

Life

“Since the design of the movement is paramount, shape, for me, should have no significance of itself; it merely makes movement evident. Therefore, the simplest, most customary, most unobtrusive forms suffice.”

George Rickey (1907–2002) American artist

Amerika-Haus Berlin, ‎George Rickey (1979). George Rickey: Skulpturen, Material, Technik. Nr. 1. p. 37

“One can imagine the future shape of companies by stretching them until they are pure network. It will be hard at times to tell who is working for whom.”

Kevin Kelly (1952) American author and editor

Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World (1995)

Imagination , Time , Future

“I think a producer should be like water, and whatever the shape of the glass is, he or she should fill that. If they need you to be the engineer guy--typically I have an engineer--I work at that stuff. If they need you to be a songwriting help guy, I work on that. If they need you to be a vocal melody guy, I work at that, etc. I kind of look at whatever a band needs out of me then I try to give it to them.”

Patrick Stump (1984) American musician

When asked "Are you very hands on when it comes to production or do you focus more on the larger vision of the song/album - the vibe/etc? "
AbsolutePunk.net, Patrick Stump, Part 2 - 10.13.08

Guy , Thinking , Water , Help

“Assume responsibility for outcomes as well as for the processes and people you work with. How you achieve results will shape the kind of person you become.”

C.K. Prahalad (1941–2010) Indian academic

C. K. Prahalad, cited in: Simone P. Joyaux (2011), Strategic Fund Development, p. 7

People , Personality

“Our visual discrimination is far better than our linguistic system at dealing with complex ratios and continuous variations in space, line, shape, and color.”

Jay Lemke (1946) American academic

Source: Textual politics: Discourse and social dynamics, 1995, p. 110

Color

“The Lion strode through the Halls of Hell;
Across his path grim shadows fell
Of many a mowing, nameless shape
Monsters with dripping jaws agape.
The darkness shuddered with scream and yell
When the Lion stalked through the Halls of Hell.”

Robert E. Howard (1906–1936) American author

"The Scarlet Citadel" (1933)

Hell

“The belief that torture is always wrong is a prejudice inherited from an obsolete philosophy. We need to shed the belief that human rights are violated when a terrorist is tortured. As Rawls and others have shown, basic freedoms must form a coherent whole. Self-evidently, there can be no right to attack basic human rights. Therefore, once the proper legal procedures are in place, torturing terrorists cannot violate their rights. In fact, in a truly liberal society, terrorists have an inalienable right to be tortured.This is what demonstrates the moral superiority of liberal societies over others, past and present. Other societies have degraded terrorists by subjecting them to lawless and unaccountable power. In the new world that is taking shape, terrorists, although they themselves degrade human rights by practising terrorism, will be afforded the full dignity of due legal process, even while being tortured.”

John Gray (1948) British philosopher

A Modest Proposal (2003)

World , Freedom , Past

“Ah, my friend, if you and I could only
Get out of the war alive and then
immortal and ageless all of our days,
I would never again fight among the foremost
Or send you into battle where men win glory.
But as it is, death is everywhere
In more shapes that we can count,
And since no mortal is immune or can escape,
Let's go forward, either to give glory
To another man, or get glory from him.”

Stanley Lombardo (1943) Philosopher, Classicist

Book XX, lines 333–342; Sarpedon to Glaucus.
Translations, Iliad (1997)

Death , Men , War , Fight

“Kunti and Draupadi are two women who shape the entire course of dynastic destiny in the Mahabharata. Kunti chooses the scion of Hastinapura, Pandu, to wed, and becomes the mother of the epic’s protagonists: the Pandavas.”

Kunti character from Indian epic Mahabharata

Five Holy Virgins, Five Sacred MythsOf Kunti and Satyawati Sexually Assertive Women of the Mahabharata

Women , Wedding

“To Donham, the case study stood squarely in the legal and cultural tradition of Anglo-American thought. Unlike French or Spanish law. Donham emphasized, English law was grounded on the doctrine of stare decisis, in which the written case decisions of the past shape, and instantiate, the law. Just as the recording of cases allowed English common law to break the arbitrariness of local law. Donham argued in 1925, business needed to universalize its procedures by itself adopting the case system. The chaos of local law that ruled in England before the common law. Donham contended, "is exactly the same situation that we have [in the world of business] where practically every large corporation is tightly hound by traditions which are precedents in its particular narrow field and narrow held only The recording of decisions from industry to industry [enables] us to start from facts and draw inferences from those facts; [it] will introduce principle… in the field of business to such an extent that it will control executive action in the field where executive action is haphazard or unprincipled or bound by narrow, instead of broad precedent and decision"”

Peter Galison (1955) American physicist

W. Donham, transcript of talk to the Association of Coll. School of Business Committee Reports and Other Literature, 5-7 May 1925. Harvard Business School, box 17, folder 10. 62
Source: Image and Logic, 1997, p. 57, footnote 66

World , School , Law , Literature

“There is a science of Dynamics in man's fortunes and nature, as well as of Mechanics. There is a science which treats of, and practically addresses, the primary, unmodified forces and energies of man, the mysterious springs of Love, and Fear, and Wonder, of Enthusiasm, Poetry, Religion, all which have a truly vital and infinite character; as well as a science which practically addresses the finite, modified developments of these, when they take the shape of immediate “motives,” as hope of reward, or as fear of punishment.
Now it is certain, that in former times the wise men, the enlightened lovers of their kind, who appeared generally as Moralists, Poets or Priests, did, without neglecting the Mechanical province, deal chiefly with the Dynamical; applying themselves chiefly to regulate, increase and purify the inward primary powers of man; and fancying that herein lay the main difficulty, and the best service they could undertake. But a wide difference is manifest in our age. For the wise men, who now appear as Political Philosophers, deal exclusively with the Mechanical province; and occupying themselves in counting-up and estimating men's motives, strive by curious checking and balancing, and other adjustments of Profit and Loss, to guide them to their true advantage”

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

1820s, Signs of the Times (1829)

Love , Men , Age , Fear

“No one thinks he will escape death, so there is no disappointment and, as long as we know neither the when nor the how, the mere fact that we shall one day have to go does not much affect us; we do not care, even though we know vaguely that we have not long to live. The serious trouble begins when death becomes definite in time and shape. It is in precise fore-knowledge, rather than in sin, that the sting of death is to be found; and such fore-knowledge is generally withheld; though, strangely enough, many would have it if they could.”

Samuel Butler (1835–1902) novelist

Fore-knowledge of Death
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part XXIII - Death

Death , Disappointment , Knowledge , Thinking

“Professor S. A. A. Rizvi gives some graphic details of this dream described by Shah Waliullah himself in his Fuyûd al-Harmayn which he wrote soon after his return to Indian in 1732: “In the same vision he saw that the king of the kafirs had seized Muslim towns, plundered their wealth and enslaved their children. Earlier the king had introduced infidelity amongst the faithful and banished Islamic practices. Such a situation infuriated Allah and made Him angry with His creatures. The Shah then witnessed the expression of His fury in the mala’ala (a realm where objects and events are shaped before appearing on earth) which in turn gave rise to Shah’s own wrath. Then the Shah found himself amongst a gathering of racial groups such as Turks, Uzbeks and Arabs, some riding camels, others horses. They seemed to him very like pilgrims in the Arafat. The Shah’s temper exasperated the pilgrims who began to question him about the nature of the divine command. This was the point, he answered, from which all worldly organizations would begin to disintegrate and revert to anarchy. When asked how long such a situation would last, Shah Wali-Allah’s reply was until Allah’s anger had subsided… Shah Wali-Allah and the pilgrims then travelled from town to town slaughtering the infidels. Ultimately they reached Ajmer, slaughtered the nonbelievers there, liberated the town and imprisoned the infidel king. Then the Shah saw the infidel king with the Muslim army, led by its king, who then ordered that the infidel monarch be killed. The bloody slaughter prompted the Shah to say that divine mercy was on the side of the Muslims.””

Shah Waliullah Dehlawi (1703–1762) Indian muslim scholar

S.A.A. Rizvi, Shah Wali-Allah and His Times, Canberra. 1980, p.218. Quoted from Goel, Sita Ram (1995). Muslim separatism: Causes and consequences. ISBN 9788185990262

Children , Faith , Dreams , Travel

“Metaphorically speaking, free African-American politicians and activists are boiling the bones of their enslaved ancestors to make soup. The suffering of slaves is being exploited posthumously to shape discourse in politically advantageous ways.”

Ilana Mercer South African writer

"What Cultural Marxist Would Say About Looting, http://www.wnd.com/2017/09/what-cultural-marxists-would-say-about-looting/" WND.COM, September 14, 2017
2010s, 2017

Way , Suffering

“I may remark that the curious transformations many formulae can undergo, the unsuspected and to a beginner apparently impossible identity of forms exceedingly dissimilar at first sight, is I think one of the chief difficulties in the early part of mathematical studies. I am often reminded of certain sprites and fairies one reads of, who are at one's elbows in one shape now, and the next minute in a form most dissimilar.”

Ada Lovelace (1815–1852) English mathematician, considered the first computer programmer

As quoted in Toole, Betty Alexandra (1998), Ada, the Enchantress of Numbers: Prophet of the Computer Age, Strawberry Press, ISBN 0912647183. p. 99

Mathematics , Thinking , Study , Reading

“As a working Sinologist, each time I look up a word in my Webster's or Kenkyusha's I experience a sharp pang of deprivation. Having slaved over Chinese dictionaries arranged in every imaginable order(by K'ang-hsi radical, left-top radical, bottom-right radical, left-right split, total stroke count, shape of successive stroke, four-corner, three corner, two-corner, Kuei-hsieh, ts'ang-chieh, telegraphic code, rhyme tables, phonetic keys, and so on ad nauseam), I have become deeply envious of specialists in those languages, such as Japanese, Indonesian, Hindi, Persian, Russian, Turkish, Korean, Vietnamese, and so forth, which possess alphabetically arranged dictionaries.”

Victor H. Mair (1943) American sinologist and linguist

The Need for an Alphabetically Arranged General Usage Dictionary of Mandarin Chinese (February 1986).

Imagination , Time , Success

“He [Tinky Winky] is purple—the gay-pride color, and his antenna is shaped like a triangle—the gay pride symbol.”

Jerry Falwell (1933–2007) American evangelical pastor, televangelist, and conservative political commentator

"Parents Alert: Tinky Winky Comes Out of the Closet" (February 1999), National Liberty Journal, quoted in [1999-02-15, Gay Tinky Winky bad for children, BBC News, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/276677.stm]
about Tinky Winky, a character on the children's program Teletubbies

Color

“Much as I admire Tolkien, and I do admire Tolkien — he’s been a huge influence on me, and his Lord of the Rings is the mountain that leans over every other fantasy written since and shaped all of modern fantasy — there are things about it, the whole concept of the Dark Lord, and good guys battling bad guys, Good versus Evil, while brilliantly handled in Tolkien, in the hands of many Tolkien successors, it has become kind of a cartoon. We don’t need any more Dark Lords, we don’t need any more, ‘Here are the good guys, they’re in white, there are the bad guys, they’re in black. And also, they’re really ugly, the bad guys. It is certainly a genuine, legitimate topic as the core of fantasy, but I think the battle between Good and Evil is waged within the individual human hearts. We all have good in us and we all have evil in us, and we may do a wonderful good act on Tuesday and a horrible, selfish, bad act on Wednesday, and to me, that’s the great human drama of fiction. I believe in gray characters, as I’ve said before. We all have good and evil in us and there are very few pure paragons and there are very few orcs. A villain is a hero of the other side, as someone said once, and I think there’s a great deal of truth to that, and that’s the interesting thing. In the case of war, that kind of situation, so I think some of that is definitely what I’m aiming at.”

George Raymond Richard Martin (1948) American writer, screenwriter and television producer

AssignmentX interview (June 2011) http://www.assignmentx.com/2011/interview-game-of-thrones-creator-george-r-r-martin-on-the-future-of-the-franchise-part-2/

War , Truth , Guy , Mountain

“When I looked at the science of engineering and saw that it had disappeared after its ancient heritage, that its masters have perished, and that their memories are now forgotten, I worked my wits and thoughts in secrecy about philosophical shapes and figures, which could move the mind, with effort, from nothingness to being and from idleness to motion. And I arranged these shapes one by one in drawings and explained them.”

Al-Muradi

Al-Muradi, The Book of Secrets in the Results of Ideas, 11th century; Translated and cited at leonardo3.net/bookofsecrets/index http://www.leonardo3.net/bookofsecrets/index_eng.html, 2015

Effort , Memory , Science , Drawing

“I think that this is Schumpeter’s main legacy to economics: the role of technological and organizational innovation in driving and shaping the growth trajectory of capitalist economies.”

Robert Solow (1924) American economist

"Heavy Thinker" (2007)

Thinking

“He was learning that power—the great power that shattered lives and twisted the course of nations—was like a fog over a meadow at evening. From any distance, it seemed to have a shape, a substance, a color, an edge, yet as you approached it, it seemed to recede before you. Finally, when common sense said you were at its very center, it still seemed just as far away, only by this time it was on all sides, obscuring any vision of the world beyond it.”

Samuel R. Delany book Tales of Nevèrÿon

Section 2 (p. 37)
Tales of Nevèrÿon (1979)

World , Color , Sense , Learning

“Every human being experiences risks; some of the risks are common to all humans, and some are unique to the life each of us has been given to live. But I know for certain that risk – both it's shadow and its reality – has shaped my life inside and out.”

Ben Carson (1951) 17th and current United States Secretary of Housing and Urban Development; American neurosurgeon

Source: Take The Risk (2008), p. 68

Life , Reality

“Hand in hand with freedom of speech goes the power to be heard, to share in the decisions of government which shape men's lives. Everything that makes man's life worthwhile — family, work, education, a place to rear one's children and a place to rest one's head — all this depends on the decisions of government; all can be swept away by a government which does not heed the demands of its people, and I mean all of its people. Therefore, the essential humanity of men can be protected and preserved only where government must answer — not just to the wealthy, not just to those of a particular religion, or a particular race, but to all its people.
And even government by the consent of the governed, as in our own Constitution, must be limited in its power to act against its people; so that there may be no interference with the right to worship, or with the security of the home; no arbitrary imposition of pains or penalties by officials high or low; no restrictions on the freedom of men to seek education or work or opportunity of any kind, so that each man may become all he is capable of becoming.
These are the sacred rights of Western society.”

Robert F. Kennedy (1925–1968) American politician and brother of John F. Kennedy

Day of Affirmation Address (1966)

Life , Men , Pain , Children

“Suddenly, immediately, things took a certain shape a very brilliant creation was worked out in extraordinary detail, with marvellous experiences, contact with divine beings, and all kinds of manifestations which are considered miraculous; … One day, I went as usual to relate to Sri Aurobindo what had been happening — we had come to something really very interesting, and perhaps I showed a little enthusiasm in my account of what had taken place — then Sri Aurobindo looked at me... and said: 'Yes, this is an Overmind creation. It is very interesting, very well done. You will perform miracles which will make you famous throughout the world, you will be able to turn events on earth topsy-turvy, indeed, … ' and then he smiled and said: 'It will be a great success. But it is an Overmind creation. And it is not success that we want; we want to establish the Supermind on earth. One must know how to renounce immediate success in order to create the new world, the supramental world in its integrality.”

The Mother (1878–1973) spiritual collaborator of Sri Aurobindo

Quoted in "Pondicherry", and also in The Mother: The Story of Her Life by Georges Van Vrekhem (2004) http://books.google.co.in/books?id=8hgG8aweqncC&pg=RA1-PT107, p. 107

World , Smile , Success

“Is it dangerous to claim that parents have no power at all (other than genetic) to shape their child's personality, intelligence, or the way he or she behaves outside the family home? … A confession: When I first made this proposal ten years ago, I didn't fully believe it myself. I took an extreme position, the null hypothesis of zero parental influence, for the sake of scientific clarity. … The establishment's failure to shoot me down has been nothing short of astonishing.”

Judith Rich Harris (1938–2018) psychology researcher

The Edge Annual Question — 2006: WHAT IS YOUR DANGEROUS IDEA? http://www.edge.org/q2006/q06_6.html#harris

Family , Way , Home , Intelligence

“But the projects with which the architects of Russian proletarian architecture present us are not only based on pure imagination, but their construction would, if they were fitted for realization, entail enormous waste of space and materials. The dwelling complex 'Wolkenbügel' [architecture, designed by Lissitzky, with the help of [ w:Emil Roth - Swiss architect, 1924] (assuming that one could live here without either freezing or melting!), shaped like a 4, stands in a very un-constructive way on three legs in which the elevators are located. The latter take up as much space as would one or more skyscrapers. And these 'architects' are to teach the West what architecture is!”

Theo van Doesburg (1883–1931) Dutch architect, painter, draughtsman and writer

Quote of Theo van Doesburg, in Architecture and revolution — Revolutionary architecture? Utopian designs by Tatlin, Lissitzky, and others, Theo van Doesburg, in 'Het Bouwbedrijf' (1928)
1926 – 1931

Way , Imagination , Help

“Brexit was a chilling example of how truly intolerant and despicable the left in this country are. I know people whose own parents almost disowned them because they voted leave. I have probably received in the region of 300 death threats – mainly from Muslims who want to prove Islam is a “religion of peace” by killing me, as well as Black Lives Matter supporters. I now really enjoy the death threats because I post them all on social media and they allow me to illustrate how we are stupidly shaping society to cater for the most aggressive, hateful, bigots imaginable. The left denounces people like me as bigots for standing up for true liberal principles which made Western civilisation great in the first place.”

Paul Joseph Watson (1982) English YouTuber, radio host, writer, editor, and conspiracy theorist

"An interview with Paul Joseph Watson", The Tab (7 November 2016)

Death , Hate , People , Peace

“What is a cave? A cave is a shape. It’s not the lump of mountain over it.”

Henry Moore (1898–1986) English artist

Quote from: 'Henry Moore's World', Carlton Lake, 'Atlantic Monthly' Bonston, Jan. 1962 p. 45
1955 - 1970

Mountain

“I remember one clear example of the problem of communicating what is to be learned. You may have heard of or gone through a similar experience with a student or your child. Years ago, the child of a friend whom I was visiting arrived home from his day at school, all excited about something he had learned. He was in the first grade and his teacher had started the class on reading lessons. The child, Gary, announced that he had learned a new word. "That's great, Gary," his mother said. "What is it?" He thought for a moment, then said, "I'll write it down for you." On a little chalkboard the child carefully printed, HOUSE. "That's fine, Gary," his mother said. "What does it say?" He looked at the word, then at his mother and said matter-of-factly, "I don't know."The child apparently had learned what the word looked like — he had learned the visual shape of the word perfectly. The teacher, however, was teaching another aspect of reading — what words mean, what words stand for or symbolize. As often happens, what the teacher had taught and what Gary had learned were strangely incongruent.As it turned out, my friend's son always learned visual material best and fastest, a mode of learning consistently preferred by a number of students. Unfortunately, the school world is mainly a verbal, symbolic world, and learners like Gary must adjust, that is, put aside their best way of learning and learn the way the school decrees. My friend's child, fortunately, was able to make this change, but how many other students are lost along the way?”

Betty Edwards (1926) American artist

Source: The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain (1979), p.237

World , School , Way , Home

“Shapes of all Sorts and Sizes, great and small,
That stood along the floor and by the wall;
And some loquacious Vessels were; and some
Listen'd perhaps, but never talk'd at all.”

Omar Khayyám (1048–1131) Persian poet, philosopher, mathematician, and astronomer

The Rubaiyat (1120)

“Llonio said life was a net for luck; to Hevydd the Smith life was a forge; and to Dwyvach the Weaver-Woman a loom. They spoke truly, for it is all of these. But you,” Taran said, his eyes meeting the potter’s, “you have shown me life is one thing more. It is clay to be shaped, as raw clay on a potter’s wheel.”

Lloyd Alexander The Chronicles of Prydain

Source: The Chronicles of Prydain (1964–1968), Book IV: Taran Wanderer (1967), Chapter 21

Life

“Alas, the Hero from of old has had to cramp himself into strange shapes: the world knows not well at any time what to do with him, so foreign is his aspect in the world!”

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

1840s, Heroes and Hero-Worship (1840), The Hero as Man of Letters

World , Time

“She is watching her country lose its evoked master shape watching it lose
And gain get back its houses and peoples watching it bring up
Its local lights single homes lamps on barn roofs.”

James Dickey (1923–1997) American writer

Falling (l. 66–68).
The Whole Motion; Collected Poems, 1945-1992 (1992)

People , Home , Light , Housing

“The natural hoof, like natural locomotion, is what nature has intended for the hooves of the modern horse. The natural shaped hoof found among wild horses in the outback is nothing less than a structural masterpiece; it has no rivals among domesticated horses anywhere.”

Jaime Jackson (1947) Horse hoof care professional

The Natural Horse (1997)

Nature , Horse

“The historian's special contribution is the discovery of the manifold shapes of time. The aim of the historian, regardless of his specialty in erudition, is to portray time. He is committed to the detection and description of the shape of time.”

George Kubler (1912–1996) American art historian

Source: The Shape of Time, 1982, p. 12

Time

“Annihilation means, with the Buddhistical philosophy, only a dispersion of matter, in whatever form or semblance of form it may be; for everything that bears a shape was created, and thus must sooner or later perish, i. e., change that shape; therefore, as something temporary, though seeming to be permanent, it is but an illusion, Maya; for, as eternity has neither beginning nor end, the more or less prolonged duration of some particular form passes, as it were, like an instantaneous flash of lightning. Before we have the time to realize that we have seen it, it is gone and passed away for ever; hence, even our astral bodies, pure ether, are but illusions of matter, so long as they retain their terrestrial outline. The latter changes, says the Buddhist, according to the merits or demerits of the person during his lifetime, and this is metempsychosis. When the spiritual entity breaks loose for ever from every particle of matter, then only it enters upon the eternal and unchangeable Nirvana. He exists in spirit, in nothing; as a form, a shape, a semblance, he is completely annihilated, and thus will die no more, for spirit alone is no Maya, but the only REALITY in an illusionary universe of ever-passing forms.”

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky book Isis Unveiled

Source: Isis Unveiled, Volume I, Chapter VII

Reality , Universe , Change , Time

“In the restaurant, eyes / above a soup bowl's rim / Is it she? / Changes shape, is and is not. / Now she's spat out a bit of bone, / I don't think it's her, / I'm leaving, I'm done eating. / This is a long and mad journey: / I see her on the faces of others, my own.”

Mirkka Rekola (1931–2014) Finnish writer

Thinking , Change , Madness

“I was 8 or 9 when I had a sighting of a disk-shaped craft that convinced me that it was certainly not an airplane or anything conventional.”

Steven M. Greer (1955) American ufologist

Source: Quoted in: Researcher's Close Encounters Convince Him Of Extraterrestrials The Virginian-Pilot, Roy A. Bahls, http://nl.newsbank.com/nl-search/we/Archives?p_product=VP&p_theme=vp&p_action=search&p_maxdocs=200&p_topdoc=1&p_text_direct-0=0EAFF84CB5EACDC1&p_field_direct-0=document_id&p_perpage=10&p_sort=YMD_date:D&s_trackval=GooglePM (22 March 1995)

“Yet today our military is still organized more for Cold War threats than for the challenges of a new century -- for industrial age operations, rather than for information age battles. There is almost no relationship between our budget priorities and a strategic vision. The last seven years have been wasted in inertia and idle talk. Now we must shape the future with new concepts, new strategies, new resolve.”

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

1990s, A Period of Consequences (September 1999)

War , Age , Future

“We love the imperfect shapes in nature and in the works of art, look for an intentional error as a sign of the golden key and sincerity found in true mastery.”

Dejan Stojanovic (1959) poet, writer, and businessman

Mastery http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/mastery-2/
From the poems written in English

Love , Art , Error , Nature

“In Mexico City they somehow wandered into an exhibition of paintings by the beautiful Spanish exile Remedios Varo: in the central painting of a triptych, titled “Bordando el Manto Terrestre,” were a number of frail girls with heart-shaped faces, huge eyes, spun-gold hair, prisoners in the top room of a circular tower, embroidering a kind of tapestry which spilled out the slit windows and into a void, seeking hopelessly to fill the void: for all the other buildings and creatures, all the waves, ships and forests of the earth were contained in the tapestry, and the tapestry was the world.”

Thomas Pynchon book The Crying of Lot 49

Source: The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), Chapter 1

World , Beauty , Girl , Heart

“I would be surprised… if someone at CBS wasn't thinking that eventually Johnny's gonna retire and if we have somebody in place, we'll be in good shape.”

Pat Sajak (1946) American television host

1980s-1990s
Source: Newsweek, Vol. 113 (1989), p. 138: Article states that "It's in the network's interest to get some kind of talk show going."

Thinking

“The problem that confronts most of us is whether the individual is merely the instrument of society or the end of society. Are you and I as individuals to be used, directed, educated, controlled, shaped to a certain pattern by society and government; or does society, the State, exist for the individual? Is the individual the end of society; or is he merely a puppet to be taught, exploited, butchered as an instrument of war? That is the problem that is confronting most of us. That is the problem of the world; whether the individual is a mere instrument of society, a plaything of influences to be moulded; or whether society exists for the individual.”

Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895–1986) Indian spiritual philosopher

1950s, The First and Last Freedom (1954)

War , World , Education , Problem

“Those who violate the rules of a language do not enter new territory; they leave the domain of meaningful discourse. Even facts in these circumstances dissolve, because they are shaped by the language and subjected to its limitations.”

Paul Karl Feyerabend (1924–1994) Austrian-born philosopher of science

Source: Conquest of Abundance (2001 [posthumous]), p. 20.

“The spiraling shapes, and the beautiful contrasts of yellow and blue, that are intuitively felt one evening while living the movements of a girl dancing may be found again later, through a process of plastic preferences or aversions, or through combination of both, in the concentric circling of an aeroplane or in the onrush of an express train”

Gino Severini (1883–1966) Italian painter

In his manifesto 'The Plastic Analogies of Dynamism', c. 1914; as quoted in Inventing Futurism: The Art and Politics of Artificial Optimism, by Christine Poggi, Princeton University Press, 2009, p. 218

Beauty , Girl , Dance , Training

“The moral and spiritual achievements of man do not depend on tricks or luck or on esoteric spells or on any purely external agency. One's spiritual condition depends on the "stuff" one has to begin with, on the amout and quality of study and good hard work one puts into "shaping" it. Spiritual nobility calls for persistence and effort. "First the difficult…" (6:20) "His burden is heavy and his course is long."”

Herbert Fingarette (1921–2018) Philosopher

8:7
Confucius: The Secular as Sacred (1998)

Effort , Study , Dependency

“All forms of tampering with human beings, getting at them, shaping them against their will to your own pattern, all thought control and conditioning is, therefore, a denial of that in men which makes them men and their values ultimate.”

Isaiah Berlin (1909–1997) Russo-British Jewish social and political theorist, philosopher and historian of ideas

Five Essays on Liberty (2002), Two Concepts of Liberty (1958)

Men

“What has once been settled by a precedent will not be unsettled overnight, for certainty and uniformity are gains not lightly sacrificed. Above all is this true when honest men have shaped their conduct on the faith of the pronouncement.”

Benjamin N. Cardozo (1870–1938) United States federal judge

Other writings, The Paradoxes of Legal Science (1928)

Men , Faith

“Hers was simply not a pew-shaped spine.
“I just never had a reason ever to sit in a church,” she had told people. She wasn’t vehement about it. She just walked around and lived and moved her hands that were pebble-smooth and pebble-small. Work had polished the nails of those hands with a polish you could never buy in a bottle. The touching of children had made them soft, and the raising of children had made them temperately stern, and the loving of a husband had made them gentle.”

Ray Bradbury book The Golden Apples of the Sun

Powerhouse (1948)
The Golden Apples of the Sun (1953)

Love , Children , People

“The corpses of water-dwelling animals often sink to the bottom and become covered with sediment. The sediment tends to protect the dead body and even at times retain an impression of its shape and external anatomical details. This environment then provides the means by which the bones of the skeleton are mineralized. …most land animals die and fall to the ground, without any chance of a freak flood casting them into an environment more favorable to fossilization.”

Jeffrey H. Schwartz (1948) American anthropologist

What the Bones Tell Us (1997)

Water , Chance , Time , Animals

“Both the old and new approaches share a scepticism toward rational-actor models of organisation, and each views institutionalisation as a state-dependent process that makes organisations less instrumentally rational by limiting the options they can pursue. Both emphasise the relationship between organisations and their environments, and both promise to reveal aspects of reality that are inconsistent with organisations’ formal accounts. Each approach stresses the role of culture in shaping organisational reality.”

Paul DiMaggio (1951) American sociologist

Source: Introduction to The New Institutionalism and Organizational Analysis, 1991, p. 12

Reality , Dependency

“Halfway up the slope, guarded by a group of tall, slim, cypress-trees, nestled a small strawberry-pink villa, like some exotic fruit lying in the greenery. The cypress-trees undulated gently in the breeze, as if they were busily painting the sky a still brighter blue for our arrival.
The villa was small and square, standing in its tiny garden with an air of pink-faced determination. Its shutters had been faded by the sun to a delicate creamy-green, cracked and bubbled in places. The garden, surrounded by tall fuschia hedges, had the flower beds worked in complicated geometrical patterns, marked with smooth white stones. The white cobbled paths, scarcely as wide as a rake's head, wound laboriously round beds hardly larger than a big straw hat, beds in the shape of stars, half-moons, triangles, and circles all overgrown with a shaggy tangle of flowers run wild. Roses dropped petals that seemed as big and smooth as saucers, flame-red, moon-white, glossy, and unwrinkled; marigolds like broods of shaggy suns stood watching their parent's progress through the sky. In the low growth the pansies pushed their velvety, innocent faces through the leaves, and the violets drooped sorrowfully under their heart-shaped leaves. The bougainvillaea that sprawled luxuriously over the tiny iron balcony was hung, as though for a carnival, with its lantern-shaped magenta flowers. In the darkness of the fuschia-hedge a thousand ballerina-like blooms quivered expectantly. The warm air was thick with the scent of a hundred dying flowers, and full of the gentle, soothing whisper and murmur of insects.”

Gerald Durrell book My Family and Other Animals

My Family and Other Animals (1956)

Star , Flowers , Lying , Parent

“For if our Trade may be taxed, why not our Lands? Why not the Produce of our Lands & everything we possess or make use of? This we apprehend annihilates our Charter Right to govern & tax ourselves. It strikes at our British privileges, which as we have never forfeited them, we hold in common with our Fellow Subjects who are Natives of Britain. If Taxes are laid upon us in any shape without our having a legal Representation where they are laid, are we not reduced from the Character of free Subjects to the miserable State of tributary Slaves?”

Samuel Adams (1722–1803) American statesman, Massachusetts governor, and political philosopher

As quoted in Radical Puritan, by Fowler, 51–52

“(mimicking a big fish talking to a little fish)
"Hey - Perch…"
(points at his eyes, then at the imaginary perch's)
"Look at me…"
(thinks, concedes, then points at the sides of his head where a fish's eyes would be)
"Look at me… Both eyes…" - oh, I've thought it all through - "if you ever see a worm… in the shape of a J… swim away. That's how we lost your Uncle Pike."”

Bill Engvall (1957) American comedian and actor

15° Off Cool (2007)

Thinking , Fish

“One reason for the primacy of the market in shaping the modern world is that it forces a reorganization of society in order to make the market work properly. When a market comes into existence, as Marx fully appreciated, it becomes a potent force driving social change.”

Robert Gilpin (1930–2018) Political scientist

Source: The Political Economy of International Relations (1987), Chapter One, Nature of Political Economy, p. 19

World , Change

“The US — its bankrupt mortgage institutions nationalised and its gigantic war machine effectively funded by foreign borrowing — is in steep decline. With its financial system in the worst mess since the 1930s, the west's ability to shape events is dwindling by the day. Sermonising about "law-based international relations" is laughable after Iraq, and at bottom not much more than nostalgia for a vanished hegemony.”

John Gray (1948) British philosopher

"Folly of the progressive fairytale," The Observer (2008-09-08)

War , Law , Nostalgia

“Contingency is rich and fascinating; it embodies an exquisite tension between the power of individuals to modify history and the intelligible limits set by laws of nature. The details of individual and species's lives are not mere frills, without power to shape the large-scale course of events, but particulars that can alter entire futures, profoundly and forever.”

Stephen Jay Gould book Eight Little Piggies

"Eight Little Piggies", p. 77
Eight Little Piggies (1993)

Law , History , Intelligence , Nature

“The total turtle count - two hundred and thirty species - doesn't seem like an irresistible horde compared to the several thousand mammals in today's global ecosystem. However, turtles have scored quite an impressive ecological triumph in one very important role, that of freshwater predator-omnivore… All through the Temperate Zone, otters delight the naturalist and the lay public. But how many other freshwater, semi-aquatic mammal predators can you name? Mink, of course. Relatives of otters on one hand, land weasels on the other, mink do hunt in streams. How many others? If you caught the excellent BBC series "Life on Earth", you saw footage of the swimming shrew, the Desman of the Pyrenees, a molelike furball that dives for aquatic worms and other freshwater small fry. Our own New England star-nosed mole goes hunting in water, using its starburst-shaped snout tip to feel out wriggling prey. Andean streams flowing through Preu are host to the fish-spearing mouse, Ichthyomys, that impales prey on its projecting front teeth. But if we go to a tropical lake or sluggish river, is it full of otters, mink, and paddling shrews? No, it is full of turtles.”

Robert T. Bakker book The Dinosaur Heresies

The Dinosaur Heresies: A Revolutionary View of Dinosaurs (1986), Longman Scientific & Technical, p. 57
The Dinosaur Heresies (1986)

Life , Feeling , Star , Fish

“Already, in the decades before Independence our people were giving thought to their vision of an Independent India. Pandit Motilal Nehru drafted the well-known Nehru Report on the Constitution of free India. The Karachi Session of the Indian National Congress held in March, 1931 adopted the famous Resolution moved by Mahatma Gandhi which contained our charter on Fundamental Rights. It is against this historical backdrop of a long and arduous struggle and the crystallization of our vision of a sovereign, democratic nation that the first session of the Constituent Assembly was held in 1946, when, as Panditji said, we embarked on `the high adventure of giving shape, in the printed and written word, to a nation's dream and aspiration.”

Shankar Dayal Sharma (1918–1999) Indian politician

Address By Dr. Shanker Dayal Sharma President Of India On The Occasion Of The 50th Anniversary Of The First Sitting Of The Constituent Assembly

People , Dreams

“The following general definition of an animal: a system of different organic molecules that have combined with one another, under the impulsion of a sensation similar to an obtuse and muffled sense of touch given to them by the creator of matter as a whole, until each one of them has found the most suitable position for it shape and comfort.”

Denis Diderot (1713–1784) French Enlightenment philosopher and encyclopædist

No. 51
On the Interpretation of Nature (1753)

Sense , Animals

“We hope the "real" person behind the words will be revealed as ignominiously as a shapeless snail without its shapely shell.”

John Updike (1932–2009) American novelist, poet, short story writer, art critic, and literary critic

On “consumeristic appetite for interviews,” New York Times (17 August 1986)

Hope , Personality

“Hindu society has grown and shaped itself in the vision of Vyasa and Valmiki, Manu and Yajnavalkya, Narada and Vasistha, and a hundred other exponents of Sanãtana Dharma in all its dimensions and dynamics. Hindu society has been inspired through the ages by such mighty šãtras as the Vedas, the Upanishads, the Gita, the Jainagama, the Tripitaka, the various Yogasastras, the Vani of Siddhas and Sants, and the devotional outpourings of Alvars and Nayanars. Hindu society has been defended, during its days of distress, by such high-souled heroes as Chandragupta, Skandagupta, Vikramaditya, Yasodharman, Bapa Rawal, Jayapala, Bhojadeva, Prithiviraj, Prataparudra, Vir Pandya, Harihara and Rana Sanga. Hindu society has fought a long-drawn-out struggle for freedom against Islamic invaders under the leadership of such veterans as Maharana Pratap, Shivaji, Maharaja Surajmal, Banda Bairagi, Lokmanya Tilak, Veer Savarkar, Mahatma Gandhi, and Sardar Patel.”

Sita Ram Goel (1921–2003) Indian activist

Defence of Hindu Society (1983)

Age , Soul , Freedom

“Remember the Italian steward who put on women's clothes and so filched a seat in a lifeboat? "A cur in human shape, certainly he was born and saved to set a new standard by which to judge infamy and shame.”

William S. Burroughs book The Western Lands

Source: The Western Lands (1987), p. 6

Women , Clothes

“In sum, social actors knowledgeably and actively use, interpret and implement rule systems. They also creatively reform and transform them. In such ways they bring about institutional innovation and transformation and shape the ‘deep structures’ of human history.”

Tom R. Burns (1937) American sociologist

Source: The shaping of social organization (1987), p. ix; as cited in: Simon Guy and John Henneberry (2000) " Understanding Urban Development Processes: Integrating the Economic and the Social in Property Research http://bentboolean.com/people/mm/private/SOA/548_DS/StrataProposal/research%20doct's/world_urban/UrbanDevtProperty.pdf," Urban Studies, Vol. 37, No. 13, 2399–2416, 2000.

Way , History , Knowledge

“From the end of World War I until the middle of the middle of the 1970s, French public life was shaped and misshaped by three overlapping and intersecting forms of collective and individual irresponsibility. The first of these was political. Reading the history of interwar France, one is struck again and again by the incompetence, the insouciance and the culpable negligence of the men who governed the country and represented its citizens. This is not a political observation, in the partisan sense, but rather a cultural one.”

Tony Judt (1948–2010) British historian

Introduction: The Misjudgment of Paris
The Burden of Responsibility: Blum, Camus, Aron, and the French Twentieth Century (1998)

Life , Men , War , World

“It is a curve each of them feels, unmistakably. It is the parabola. They must have guessed, once or twice — guessed and refused to believe — that everything, always, collectively, had been moving toward that purified shape latent in the sky, that shape of no surprise, no second chance, no return. Yet they do move forever under it, reserved for its own black-and-white bad news certainly as if it were the rainbow, and they its children….”

Thomas Pynchon book Gravity's Rainbow

Gravity's Rainbow (1973)

Children , Feeling , Chance

“The size of a firm influences its competitive policies in a number of ways. In the first place the scale of its purchases and sales relative to the total volume of transactions in the firm's market is one indication of the extent of its market control. Taken in conjunction with other data it may throw a good deal of light on price and production policies. Certain authorities, on the other hand, brush aside figures on the relative size of firms as irrelevant and emphasize the decisive importance of the elasticity of the firm's demand curve. 3 It would no doubt be extremely convenient if economists knew the shape of individual demand and cost curves and could proceed forthwith, by comparisons of price and marginal cost, to conclusions regarding the existing degree of monopoly power. The extent to which the monopoly theorists, however, refrain from an empirical application of their formulae is rather striking.”

Edward S. Mason (1899–1992) American economist

Source: "Price and production policies of large-scale enterprise," 1939, p. 62