Quotes about sign (1724 quotes, page 13)

“When we speak of the early history of algebra it is necessary to consider… the meaning of the term. If… we mean the science that allows us to solve the equation ax^2 + bx + c = 0, expressed in these symbols, then the history begins in the 17th century; if we remove the restriction as to these particular signs, and allow for other and less convenient symbols, we might properly begin the history in the 3rd century; if we allow for the solution of the above equation by geometric methods, without algebraic symbols of any kind, we might say that algebra begins with the Alexandrian School or a little earlier; and if we say that we should class as algebra any problem that we should now solve with algebra (even though it was as first solved by mere guessing or by some cumbersome arithmetic process), the the science was known about 1800 B. C., and probably still earlier.<”

David Eugene Smith (1860–1944) American mathematician

Source: History of Mathematics (1925) Vol.2, Ch. 6: Algebra, p. 378

History , Problem , Science

“The concept of ideographic writing is a most seductive notion. There is great appeal in the concept of written symbols conveying their message directly to our minds, thus bypassing the restrictive intermediary of speech. And it seems so plausible. Surely ideas immediately pop into our minds when we see a road sign, a death's head label on a bottle of medicine, a number on a clock. Aren't Chinese characters a sophisticated system of symbols that similarly convey meaning without regard to sound? Aren't they an ideographic system of writing? The answer to these questions is no. Chinese characters are a phonetic, not an ideographic, system of writing… Here I would go further: There never has been, and never can be, such a thing as an ideographic system of writing.”

John DeFrancis book The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy

The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy (1984, p. 133) http://www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/ideographic_myth.html
The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy (1984)

Death , Idea , Question

“Could the Aboriginal and the British cultures have been reconciled when they first met? The prevailing view is that they could have signed a treaty and found a way of living together in relative harmony. I am not persuaded. The two confronting cultures, whether first living side by side at Sydney in 1788 or at Perth in 1829, had little in common except that they were the product of human beings. Their languages and religions differed. Their attitude to marriage, family, property and individual wealth, their economic and political systems, their way of fighting, and their thoughts about life and death, were far apart. In the world today no two cultures are so far apart as those that lived side by side in many Australian regions after 1788. Mecca and Washington today have far more in common than did the paternal Governor Phillip and the Aborigines whom he met in Sydney in 1788.”

Geoffrey Blainey (1930) Australian historian

"Geoffrey Blainey: I can see parts of our history with fresh eyes," The Australian (February 21, 2015)

Life , Death , Marriage , World

“Up to eight feet long and as heavy as a lioness, the adult Komodo dragon brandishes steak-knifelike teeth - sharp, recurved blades with serrated cutting edges. Showing the same sagacity found in veteran Nile crocodiles, fully adult dragons know their hunting territory from years of experience. They know where to lie along hilly game trails, awaiting the light footsteps of a deer. Attacks are instant successes or failures because the ora has no stamina, and if it misses on the first short rush, it has little sustained speed for a long pursuit. When an attack succeeds, the cruel rows of slashing teeth cut fearful wounds on the rump and thigh of ambushed animals and the stricken prey may die of massive infection days later even if it manages to break free from the dragon's mouth. Tethered livestock suffer truly terrible cuts across the legs when an ora slinks into the compound under cover of the warm Indonesian nights. Several humans, both native and European visitors, have died in savage daylight attacks. The victims simply had no warning sign that the ora was waiting patiently a few feet from the trail's edge.”

Robert T. Bakker book The Dinosaur Heresies

The Dinosaur Heresies: A Revolutionary View of Dinosaurs (1986), Longman Scientific & Technical, p. 62-63
The Dinosaur Heresies (1986)

Lie , Fear , Game , Failure

“There's nothing like the waiting room of any office of the governmentor its allies to remind you of how lucky you are. You enter a nonplace, nontime. You sit on battered chairs in murky blues and greens that nobody ever names as their favorite color. You stare at the signs that have no bearing on you, nonspecific communiqués from the land that punctuation forgot. You wait until the waiting loses all sense of direction or purpose, until you become like a stone deposited in a field millenia ago by a careless glacier. You are here. This is all you have ever known. In the meantime you are stripped of any sense of individuality, of the idea that you might be different from anyone else in the room except by virtue of your particular problem; and so you become the problem, defensively, accepting it as identity, until it swells and suppurates and becomes all you are. As a species we'll tolerate being close to others, but not so close, and not in those circumstances and when we feel so small: we become rows of dry, fretting eyes, hating everyone around us and sincerely wishing our neighbor dead so we can move up one place in the line.Or maybe it was just me.”

Michael Marshall Smith (1965) British novelist, screenwriter and short story writer

Source: The Lonely Dead (2004), Ch. 5

Hate , Color , Feeling , Idea

“During the recent centennial of our National Park Service, I found myself at the ceremony at Yellowstone National Park, our first National Park established by Congress and signed into law by President Ulysses S. Grant on March 1, 1872. As I enjoyed the celebration under the famous Roosevelt arch, I could not help but notice the words etched in the stone at the top of the arch “For the benefit and enjoyment of the people.” And, on the side of the right pillar was a plaque with the words “Created by Act of Congress.””

Ryan Zinke (1961) 52nd and current United States Secretary of the Interior and former Congressman from Montana

I thought “What a perfect symbol’ of what our land policy in a Nation as great as ours should be.
Before the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources https://www.energy.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/files/serve?File_id=383FE96D-4714-4769-BF7E-089C40FB4C63 (January 17, 2017)

People , Law , Help , Perfection

“Finally, in the dim region where art, magic, and religion meet and overlap, human beings have evolved the “metaphor that is meant,” the flag which men will die to save, and the sacrament that is felt to be more than “an outward and visible sign, given unto us.” Here we can recognize an attempt to deny the difference between map and territory, and to get back to the absolute innocence of communication by means of pure mood-signs.”

Gregory Bateson book Steps to an Ecology of Mind

From Part 4, section 2: A Theory of Play and Fantasy
Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972)

Men , Religion , Art , Communication

“Hey, does anybody notice this crazy thing that we're on the road to socialism? I'm just saying. Wow. We got — we got the SCHIPs thing going for us. That's great. There is the change that we were all hoping for, really, seriously. Hey, I got an idea. If we're going down the road to socialism, I mean, why not really go for it, huh? Comrades, good news from the western front, our glorious revolution is starting to take hold. Oh, the revolution of change. Our fearless leader has just signed in SCHIPs, and earlier today, he spoke out against capitalism. Listen up.”

Glenn Beck (1964) U.S. talk radio and television host

Glenn Beck
Television
Fox News
2009-02-05
Glenn Beck : The Road To Socialism
2009-02-05
MonkeyCrash
http://monkeycrash.com/2009/02/05/glenn-beck-the-road-to-socialism/
on the State Children's Health Insurance Program bill signed by President Obama on 2009-02-04
2000s, 2009

Hope , Idea , Change

“(1) If a convicted man has the money to pay the docket fee and for a transcript of the proceedings at his trial, the upper federal court, by at least reading the transcript, will ascertain whether or not there was reversible error at the trial, or whether or not there was such a lack of evidence that the defendant is entitled to a new trial or a dismissal of the indictment.
(2) If, however, the defendant is so destitute that he cannot pay the docket fee, and if the trial judge has signed a certificate of 'bad faith,' then although a reading of the transcript shows clear reversible errors, the federal appellate court is powerless to hear the appeal and thus to rectify the errors; and even if the defendant has money enough to pay the docket fee but not enough for a transcript, the upper court usually has no way of determining whether there were such errors, must therefore assume there were none, and must accordingly refuse to consider his appeal. As a consequence, a poor man erroneously convicted-- e. g., where there was insufficient proof of his guilt--must go to prison and stay there. In such a situation-- i. e., where the upper court, if it had the transcript before it, would surely reverse for insufficiency of the evidence or on some other ground, but cannot do so solely because the defendant cannot pay for a transcript-- the result is this: He is punished because he is guilty of the crime of being poor”

Jerome Frank (1889–1957) American jurist

more or less on the principle, openly avowed in Erewhon only, that one who suffers misfortunes deserves criminal punishment
United States v. Johnson, 238 F.2d 565, 568 (1956) (dissenting).

Money , Faith , Way , Error

“Say: All matters must be referred to the Book of God; I am indeed the First to believe in God and in His signs; I am the One Who divulgeth and proclaimeth the Truth and I have been invested with every excellent title of God, the Mighty, the Incomparable. Verily I have attained the Day of the First Manifestation and by the bidding of the Lord and as a token of His grace, I shall attain the Day of the Latter Manifestation”

Báb (1819–1850) Iranian prophet; founder of the religion Bábism; venerated in the Bahá'í Faith

Tablet to the First Letter of the Living

God , Truth , Books

“Wolf was in Israel, because that's where Wolf belongs, with Ariel Sharon about to croak. … Wolf is an old friend of Ariel's. Wolf - remember - was the Washington Bureau Chief of the Jerusalem Post, before he signed on with CNN to work 80 hours a day. Ummm… I'm so sick of his face, I could just scream. You know, people e-mail me and say "What do you mean, he's a former German U-Boat commander?" Look - if you don't get it, you don't get it. But every movie made in the 40's about the German U-Boats had a guy who looked just like Wolf Blitzer. And his name is, um… German.”

Mike Malloy (1942) American radio broadcaster

http://server7.whiterosesociety.org/content/malloy/MalloyShow-(09-01-2006).mp3
Beginning of the show
On Wolf Blitzer

People , Guy , Wolf

“I had offers from Dodgers, Giants and Braves. Braves offer same amount as Dodgers but I have many friends on Brooklyn team. I feel more at home there and I sign.”

Roberto Clemente (1934–1972) Puerto Rican baseball player

As quoted in "The Scoreboard" by Les Biederman, in The Pittsburgh Press (Tuesday, May 10, 1955), p. 31
Baseball-related, <big><big>1950s</big></big>

Feeling , Home

“[Dubuffet marvels at the desert as a chaotic palimpsest, filled with marks and signs].. like an immense notebook of disorganization, a notebook of improvisation.... an elementary school blackboard full of scribbles..”

Jean Dubuffet (1901–1985) sculptor from France

Quote of Dubuffet, in a letter to Jacques Berne mailed from Algeria, late 1940's; (Lettres à J.B., p. 35.); as cited in 'Dubuffet, Lévi-Strauss, and the Idea of Art Brut', Kent Minturn http://www.columbia.edu/cu/arthistory/faculty/Minturn/Dubuffet-Levi-Strauss.pdf, from RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, No. 46, Polemical Objects (Autumn, 2004), pp. 247-258, p. 250
1940's

School

“By 1700 all of the familiar members of the [number] system… were known. However, opposition to the newer types of numbers was expressed throughout the century. Typical are the objections of… Baron Francis Masères… in 1759 his Dissertation on the Use of the Negative Sign in Algebra… shows how to avoid negative numbers… and especially negative roots, by carefully segregating the types of quadratic equations so that those with negative roots are considered separately; and… the negative roots are to be rejected.”

Morris Kline (1908–1992) American mathematician

Source: Mathematical Thought from Ancient to Modern Times (1972), p. 592.

“The more one has suffered, the less one demands. To protest is a sign one has traversed no hell.”

Emil M. Cioran (1911–1995) Romanian philosopher and essayist

Anathemas and Admirations (1987)

Hell , Suffering

“Well, our forefathers abolished this system [of monopolies]; at a time, too, mark you, when the sign manual of the sovereign had somewhat of a divine sanction and challenged superstitious reverence in the minds of the people. And shall we, the descendants of those men, be found so degenerate, so unworthy of the blood that flows in our veins, so recreant to the very name 'Englishman,' as not to shake off this incubus, laid on as it is by a body of our fellow-citizens? … We advocate the abolition of the Corn Law because we believe that to be the foster-parent of all other monopolies; and if we destroy that—the parent, the monster monopoly—it will save us the trouble of devouring the rest.”

Richard Cobden (1804–1865) English manufacturer and Radical and Liberal statesman

Speech in London (8 February 1844), quoted in John Bright and J. E. Thorold Rogers (eds.), Speeches on Questions of Public Policy by Richard Cobden, M.P. Volume I (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1908), p. 59.
1840s

Men , People , Law , Parent

“His work is full of the signs of those two cardinal sins from which (as Kafka pointed out) all the others spring: impatience and laziness. The work of every artist is conditioned by the way in which he resists or yields to these temptations.”

Patrick Swift (1927–1983) British artist

Some Notes on Caravaggio (1956)

Way , Spring

“The most manifest sign of wisdom is a continual cheerfulness; her state is like that in the regions above the moon, always clear and serene.”

Michel De Montaigne (1533–1592) (1533-1592) French-Occitan author, humanistic philosopher, statesman

Book I, Ch. 26
Attributed
Variant: The most certain sign of wisdom is cheerfulness.

Wisdom

“In April 1946, when I came to Hughes Aircraft to institute high-technology research and development, it was far from the place it was to become. Howard Hughes, I was informed, rarely came around. When he did show up, it was to take up one or another trivial issue. He would toss off detailed directions, for instance, on what to do next about a few old airplanes decaying out in the yard or what kind of seat covers to buy for the company-owned Chevrolets, or he would say he wanted some pictures of clouds taken from an airplane. An accountant from Hughes Tool Co. ((started by Howard's father)) had the title of general manager but was there only to sign checks. A few of Howard's flying buddies were on the payroll, using assorted fanciful titles like some in Gilbert and Sullivan's Mikado, but apparently did next to nothing. A lawyer was on hand to process contracts, but there were practically none. In addition to the Spruce Goose flying freighter, a mammoth eight-engine plywood seaplane that barely managed to fly even once, there was an experimental Navy reconnaissance plane under development (which, with Hughes at the controls, later crashed, almost killing him). The contracts for both planes had been canceled. Perhaps, I said to myself, this is one of those unforeseeable lucky opportunities. Why not use Hughes Aircraft as a base to create a new and needed defense electronics supplier?”

Simon Ramo (1913–2016) Father of the ICBM

MEMOIRS OF AN ICBM PIONEER Simon Ramo broke with Howard Hughes, then built TRW, the company that developed the U.S. missile. He says what went right then would go wrong today. http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/1988/04/25/70453/index.htm in FORTUNE Magazine, April 25, 1988

Flying

“Submission to Allah's Will is the best companion; wisdom is the noblest heritage; theoretical and practical knowledge are the best signs of distinction; deep thinking will present the clearest picture of every problem.”

Ali book Nahj al-Balagha

Nahj al-Balagha

Wisdom , Knowledge , Problem , Thinking

“Let us recall that formerly, and at no remote epoch… all the unusual phenomena were regarded as so many signs of celestial wrath.”

Pierre-Simon Laplace book Philosophical Essay on Probabilities

p, 125
Philosophical Essay on Probabilities (1902)

“I am sort of a modern monk. My wife and I have a collection of cabins in the middle of nowhere, and we stay out of everything. We don’t go to dinners. We don’t go to cocktails. We don’t go to movies. We don’t watch TV. I don’t use my energy on other people. I just work and read. I live with myself in front of my white page. Of course, for much of the year I have to travel, speak to journalists, engineers, things like that, and it’s the worst. But from the 15th of June to the 15th of September, I live completely secluded, locked in one of my houses, working from 8 in the morning to 8 at night, or making my own biorhythm: work three hours, sleep 45 minutes, work three hours, sleep 45 minutes, for 24 hours, without eating. It’s a little sick. But I’m like Dr. Faust. I signed a contract with the devil to sell my life for creativity.”

Philippe Starck (1949) French architect and industrial designer

Starck answer to the question: "What’s the secret to working so quickly and productively?"
Life’s Work: Philippe Starck (2013)

Life , People , Travel , Sleep

“It is a charmed ring—this emerald stone
Will be a sign, when thou art from me gone.
Mark if it changes; if a spot be seen
On the now spotless ground of lighted green,
Danger is round me; haste thou then to me,
Thou know'st how fearless is my trust in thee.”

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

The Golden Violet - The Child of the Sea
The Golden Violet (1827)

Art , Light , Change

“The anti‐Semite understands nothing about modern society. He would be incapable of conceiving of a constructive plan; his action cannot reach the level of the methodical; it remains on the ground of passion. To a long‐term enterprise he prefers an explosion of rage analogous to the running amuck of the Malays. His intellectual activity is confined to interpretation; he seeks in historical events the signs of the presence of an evil power. Out of this spring those childish and elaborate fabrications which give him his resemblance to the extreme paranoiacs. In addition, anti‐Semitism channels evolutionary drives toward the destruction of certain men, not of institutions. An anti‐Semitic mob will consider it has done enough when it has massacred some Jews and burned a few synagogues. It represents, therefore, a safety valve for the owning classes, who encourage it and thus substitute for a dangerous hate against their regime a beneficent hate against particular people. Above all this naive dualism is eminently reassuring to he anti‐Semite himself. If all he has to do is to remove Evil, that means that the Good is already given. He has no need to seek it in anguish, to invent it, to scrutinize it patiently when he has found it, to prove it in action, to verify it by its consequences, or, finally, to shoulder he responsibilities of the moral choice be has made. It is not by chance that the great outbursts of anti‐Semitic rage conceal a basic optimism. The anti‐Semite as cast his lot for Evil so as not to have to cast his lot for Good. The more one is absorbed in fighting Evil, he less one is tempted to place the Good in question. One does not need to talk about it, yet it is always understood in the discourse of the anti‐Semite and it remains understood in his thought. When he has fulfilled his mission as holy destroyer, the Lost Paradise will reconstitute itself. For the moment so many tasks confront the anti‐Semite that he does not have time to think about it. He is in the breach, fighting, and each of his outbursts of rage is a pretext to avoid the anguished search for the Good.”

Jean Paul Sartre book Anti-Semite and Jew

Pages 31-32
Anti-Semite and Jew (1945)

Men , Hate , People , Search

“Summertime, 1950, I recognized Isherwood browsing in a Santa Monica bookstore. My book had just come out, so I grabbed a copy off the shelf, signed it and gave it to him. His face fell and my heart sank, but two days later he called and said, "Do you know what you've done?" I asked, "What?" And he simply told me to read his review in the Times. His rave turned my life around; the book immediately made the best-seller lists and has been in print ever since.
He was very kind in introducing me to various people he thought I should know, like Aldous Huxley, who had been my literary hero since Brave New World came out.”

Ray Bradbury (1920–2012) American writer

On the chance meeting with Christopher Isherwood just after publication of The Martian Chronicles which led to fame and acclaim outside of SF fandom.
Playboy interview (1996)

Life , People , Books , World

“The historical associations of the word algebra almost substantiate the sordid character of the subject. The word comes from the title of a book written by… Al Khowarizmi. In this title, al-jebr w' almuqabala, the word al-jebr meant transposing a quantity from one side of an equation to another and muqabala meant simplification of the resulting expressions. Figuratively, al-jebr meant restoring the balance of an equation… When the Moors reached Spain… algebrista… came to mean a bonesetter… and signs reading Algebrista y Sangrador (bonesetter and bloodletter) were found over Spanish barber shops. Thus it might be said that there is a good historical basis for the fact that the word algebra stirs up disagreeable thoughts.”

Morris Kline (1908–1992) American mathematician

Source: Mathematics and the Physical World (1959), p. 69

Books , Reading

“Give us the ballot, and we will no longer have to worry the federal government about our basic rights.
Give us the ballot and we will no longer plead to the federal government for passage of an anti-lynching law; we will by the power of our vote write the law on the statute books of the South and bring an end to the dastardly acts of the hooded perpetrators of violence.
Give us the ballot, and we will transform the salient misdeeds of bloodthirsty mobs into the calculated good deeds of orderly citizens.
Give us the ballot, and we will fill our legislative halls with men of goodwill and send to the sacred halls of Congress men who will not sign a "Southern Manifesto" because of their devotion to the manifesto of justice.
Give us the ballot, and we will place judges on the benches of the south who will do justly and love mercy, and we will place at the head of the southern states governors who have felt not only the tang of the human, but the glow of the Divine.
Give us the ballot, and we will quietly and nonviolently, without rancor or bitterness, implement the Supreme Court's decision of May seventeenth, 1954.”

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

1950s, Give Us the Ballot (1957)

Love , Men , Books , Justice

“Unstable condition
A symptom of life
In mental and environmental change
Atmospheric disturbance
The feverish flux
Of human interface and interchange
-- Vital Signs (1981)”

Neil Peart (1952–2020) Canadian-American drummer , lyricist, and author

Rush Lyrics

Life , Change

“We have 50 million Muslims in Europe. There are signs that Allah will grant Islam victory in Europe—without swords, without guns, without conquest—will turn it into a Muslim continent within a few decades.”

Muammar Gaddafi (1942–2011) Libyan revolutionary, politician and political theorist

Speech (10 April 2006), quoted in New York Sun (6 September 2009) "Terrorists Promise More Attacks Like 9/11" by Steven Stalinsky
Speeches

Victory

“Speaking much also is a sign of vanity; for he that is lavish in words is a niggard in deeds.”

Walter Raleigh (1554–1618) English aristocrat, writer, poet, soldier, courtier, spy, and explorer

Source: Instructions to his Son and to Posterity (published 1632), Chapter IV

“I never fail to be mystified by those who regard the revision of a former opinion as a sign of weakness.”

Don Paterson (1963) Poet

Aphorisms in Poetry, vol. 187, n. 1, October 2005

“The farther West we drove [to California, Fall of 1963, with Gerard Malanga, Wynn Chamberlain, and Taylor Mead for an opening of Warhol's 'Liz & Elvis paintings' at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles], the more Pop everything looked on the highways. Suddenly we all felt like insiders because even though Pop was everywhere – that was the thing about it, most people still took it for granted, whereas we were dazzled by it – to us, it was the new Art. Once you 'got' Pop, you could never see a sign the same way again. And once you thought Pop, you could never see America the same way again. The moment you label something, you take a step – I mean, you can never go back again to seeing it unlabeled. We were seeing the future and we knew it for sure.... the mystery was gone, but the amazement was just starting.”

Andy Warhol (1928–1987) American artist

quote in 1963
Quote in Warhol in his own words – Untitled Statements ( 1963 – 1987), selected by Neil Printz; as quoted in Andy Warhol, retrospective, Art and Bullfinch Press / Little Brown, 1989, pp. 457 – 467
1963 - 1967

People , Art , Angels , Way

“When two people decide to get a divorce, it isn't a sign that they "don't understand" one another, but a sign that they have, at last, begun to.”

Helen Rowland (1875–1950) American journalist

Divorces
A Guide to Men (1922)

People , Understanding

“Who ever comes to shroud me, do not harm
Nor question much
That subtle wreth of hair, which crowns my arm;
The mystery, the sign you must not touch,
For 'tis my outward soul,
Viceroy to that, which then to heaven being gone,
Will leave this to control,
And keep these limbs, her provinces, from dissolution.”

John Donne The Funeral

The Funeral, stanza 1

Soul , Question

“Chance is perhaps the pseudonym of God when He did not want to sign.”

Anatole France (1844–1924) French writer

Le hasard, c'est peut-être le pseudonyme de Dieu, quand il ne veut pas signer. — Théophile Gautier, La Croix de Berny (1845), letter III: Edgard Meilhan au Prince de Monbert http://books.google.com/books?id=3TEtAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA29&dq=%22le+pseudonyme+de+Dieu,+quand+il+ne+veut+pas+signer%22&ei=twPuR9TxGYXaygSI-5mYDg
Misattributed

God , Chance

“The structure of cities, the architecture of houses, squares, gardens, public walks, gateways, railway stations, etc – all these provide us with the basic principles of a great Metaphysical aesthetic... We, who live under the sign of the Metaphysical alphabet, we know the joy and sorrows to be found in a gateway, a street corner, a room, on the surface of a table, between the sides of a box…”

Giorgio de Chirico (1888–1978) Italian artist

as quoted in Letters of the great artists – from Ghiberti to Gainsborough, Richard Friedenthal, Thames and Hudson, London, 1963, p. 233
De Chirico's statement on Metaphysical aesthetic in painting motifs like houses, architecture, railway stations
1908 - 1920, On Mystery and Creation, Paris 1913

Joy , Housing , Box

“According to mead, the primary phenomenon out of which language in the full human sense emerges is the gesture, especially the vocal gesture. The gesture sign (such as a dog's snarl) differs from such a nongestural sign as thunder in the fact that the sign vehicle is an early phase of a social act and the designatum a later phase of this act (in this case the attack by the dog). Here one organism prepares itself for what another organism - the dog - is to do by responding to certain acts of the latter organism as signs; in the case in question the snarl is the sign, the attack is the designatum, the animal being attacked is the interpreter, and the preparatory response of the interpreter is the interpretant.”

Charles W. Morris (1903–1979) American philosopher

Source: "Foundations of the Theory of Signs," 1938, p. 36

Dogs , Question , Sense , Animals

“So long as there is desire or want, it is a sure sign that there is imperfection. A perfect, free being cannot have any desire.”

Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902) Indian Hindu monk and phylosopher

Pearls of Wisdom

Perfection

“All complex organizations use people to pursue their tasks, but people-changing organizations work not only with or through people but also on them. People constitute the raison d'etre of these organizations, and, and, as our label suggests, the desired product is a new or altered person. People-changing organizations can be contrasted with organizations that produce, distribute, or service inanimate objects or symbols. The latter may have important consequences for their members' statuses, role-orientations, identities, and personalities, but these alterations are usually incidental, personal, or instrumental. In people-changing organizations the alterations re the primary end. Conceived in this way, the term "people-changing" encompasses a broad variety of organizations, ranging from the monastery (which cleanses the soul while teaching the outward signs of grace) to Menninger's (which restructures the personality), and even to the House of Venus”

Charles Perrow (1925–2019) American sociologist

which reshapes buttocks and identity simultaneously
Source: 1960s, Organization for treatment, 1966, p. 3

People , Way , Soul , Change

“Why is McDonald's still counting? How insecure is this company? 40 million, 80 billion million jillion killion tillion…who cares? Is anyone really impressed by that any more? "Ooh, 89 billion sold? All right, I'll have one! I'm satisfied!" I'd like to tell the CEO of McDonald's, "Look. We all get it, okay? You've sold a lot of hamburgers. Whatever the number is, just put up a sign, 'McDonald's: We're Doing Very Well.'”

Jerry Seinfeld (1954) American comedian and actor

We are tired of hearing about every goddamn one of them."
I'm Telling You for the Last Time (1998)

“Autumn was falling, but the pine
Seem'd as it mock'd all change; no sign
Of season on its leaf was seen,
The same dark gloom of changeless green.
But like the gorgeous Persian bands
'Mid the stern race of northern lands,
The chesnut boughs were bright with all
That gilds and mocks the autumn's fall.”

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

Canto II
The Troubadour (1825)

Autumn , Change , Season

“Clarity of text is the sole incontrovertible sign of the maturity of an idea.”

Nicolás Gómez Dávila (1913–1994) Colombian writer and philosopher

Sucesivos Escolios a un Texto Implícito (1992)

Idea

“The mis-perception is gangster 50. That's the biggest misconception. Because, I can be those things that people – I have a reputation. My past is my shadow, it follows me everywhere I go. Well, all those things come from when I had no other choice. They put my back against the wall. I do what I gotta do. Because hip-hop has no requirements, you deal with people that have the least intelligence on the planet. Some of the people that compare themselves to me, compare themselves to me because they rap and I rap. They can't even read the contracts that they sign to be a rapper, to do the deal.”

50 Cent (1975) American rapper, actor, businessman, investor and television producer

Interview: 50 Cent http://au.movies.ign.com/articles/647/647683p1.html. IGN. 6 September 2005.

People , Intelligence , Reading , Past

“Executive Order 9066 ceased to be effective at the end of World War II. Because there was no formal statement of its termination, there remains some concern among Japanese-Americans that there yet may be some life in that obsolete document. The proclamation [4417] that I am signing here today should remove all doubt on that matter.”

Gerald Ford (1913–2006) American politician, 38th President of the United States (in office from 1974 to 1977)

1970s, Proclamation 4417 (1976), Remarks

Life , War , World

“Jeff's, Larry's, and Ron's Heres Your Sign.”

Bill Engvall (1957) American comedian and actor

Blue Collar Comedy Tour: The Movie (2003)
Here's Your Sign

“Yesterday, on the 17th of May, we Norwegians celebrated our constitution day to mark the signing of Norway's constitution in 1814. Maybe it is because we are a small country: In Norway this is an important day. All over Norway children have paraded in their best clothes to the music of thousands of marching bands, and countless speeches have been made to remind each others, as fellow Norwegians, that freedom should never be taken for granted.”

Andreas Heldal-Lund (1964) Norwegian activist

Award Winner's Speech http://www.leipzig-award.org/englisch/rede_preistraeger_2003.htm, Leipzig Human Rights Award, 2003 Leipzig Human Rights Award of the European-American Citizens Committee for Human Rights and Religious Freedom in the USA, (May 18, 2003).

Children , Music , Freedom , Clothes

“When he let Kennedy use his column to send signals to Nikita Khrushchev, or lent his skill to Vandenberg to reinforce the anti-Soviet consensus in American diplomacy, he wasn't acting as a reporter but as a patriot. This urge may be a dereliction of duty in the journalist, but it is a sign of decency in the man. That the two impulses in journalism should so often be at odds — duty versus decency — tells us more about the trade than most of us care to know.”

Andrew Ferguson (1956) American journalist

"Scotty: All the news that's fit to schmooze," The Weekly Standard, 24 February 2003

“God’s signs are not always the ones we look for, yet the private prayers of people, whether in our homes or in this place, are known, heard, and understood. There are prayers that help us last through the day, or endure the night. There are prayers of friends and strangers that give us strength for the journey. And there are prayers that yield our will to a will greater than our own.”

Josefa Iloilo (1920–2011) President of Fiji

Opening address to the National Day of Prayer in Suva, 15 May 2005 (excerpts) http://www.fiji.gov.fj/publish/page_4607.shtml

God , People , Home , Help

“Vincent Lingiari, I solemnly hand to you these deeds as proof, in Australian law, that these lands belong to the Gurindji people and I put into your hands part of the earth itself as a sign that this land will be the possession of you and your children forever.”

Gough Whitlam (1916–2014) Australian politician, 21st Prime Minister of Australia

Gurindji Land Ceremony Speech http://www.abc.net.au/rural/telegraph/speeches/whitlam.htm, 16 August 1975

Children , People , Law , Parting

“Language death is like no other form of disappearance. When people die, they leave signs of their presence in the world, in the form of their dwelling places, burial mounds, and artefacts - in a word, their archaeology. But spoken language leaves no archaeology. When a language dies, which has never been recorded, it is as if it has never been.”

David Crystal (1941) British linguist and writer

Source: How Language Works, 2007, p. 342

Death , People , World

“He [somebody at Carnegie Mellon University] had betrayed us. But he didn't just do it to us. Chances are he did it to you too. [Pointing at member of audience. ] And I think, mostly likely, he did it to you too. [Pointing at another member of audience. ][Laughter] And he probably did it to you as well. [Pointing to third member of audience. ] He probably did it to most of the people here in this room — except a few, maybe, who weren't born yet in 1980. Because he had promised to refuse to cooperate with just about the entire population of the Planet Earth. He had signed a non-disclosure agreement.”

Richard Stallman (1953) American software freedom activist, short story writer and computer programmer, founder of the GNU project

2000s, Free Software: Freedom and Cooperation (2001)

People , Thinking , Laughter , Universe

“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

“I like an escalator, because an escalator can never break, it can only become stairs. You would never see an "Escalator Temporarily Out Of Order" sign, just an, "Escalator Temporarily Stairs. Sorry for the convenience. We apologize for the fact that you can still get up there."”

Mitch Hedberg (1968–2005) American stand-up comedian

Mitch All Together (2003)

“Soon to die
yet showing no sign
the cicada's voice”

Bashō Matsuo (1644–1694) Japanese poet

やがてしぬ
けしきはみえず
蝉の声
https://haikutopics.blogspot.ca/2006/07/voice-of-animal-xx-no-koe.html https://www.tofugu.com/japan/japanese-poetry-crash-course/
Individual poems

“I swear by God, the Peerless, the Incomparable, the True One: for no other reason hath He — the supreme Testimony of God — invested Me with clear signs and tokens than that all men may be enabled to submit to His Cause.”

Báb (1819–1850) Iranian prophet; founder of the religion Bábism; venerated in the Bahá'í Faith

Epistle to Muhammad Sháh

Men , God

“There are a thousand fanciful things
Linked round the young heart's imaginings.
In its first love-dream, a leaf or a flower
Is gifted then with a spell and a power:
A shade is an omen, a dream is a sign,
From which the maiden can well divine
Passion's whole history.”

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

Title Poem
The Improvisatrice (1824)

Love , Dreams , Imagination , History

“The city itself swung slowly toward us silent as a dream. No sign of life but puffs of steam from skyscraper chimneys, the motion of the traffic. The mighty towers stood like tombstones in a graveyard, leaning against the sky and waiting for -- for what? Someday we'll know.”

Edward Abbey (1927–1989) American author and essayist

"Manhattan Twilight, Hoboken Night", p. 98
The Journey Home (1977)

Life , Dreams , Waiting

“[.. how the] landlord has had my room cleaned by Snow White and the squirrel has whitewashed the walls with his tail [signed:] - "Sleepy."”

Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) Peintre Néerlandais

1930's

“Language became a colorless and as indistinct as the business suit which is now worm by everyone, by the scholar, by the businessman, by the professional killer. Being accustomed to a dry and dreary norm and sees in it an obvious sign of arrogance and aggression; viewing authority with almost religious awe he gets into a frenzy when he sees someone pluck the beard of his favorite prophet.”

Paul Karl Feyerabend book Science in a Free Society

Paul Karl Feyerabend Science in a Free Society (1978), pg. 150.
Science in a Free Society (1978)

Business

“Recently, I was evicted of contempt of court over my online editorial about (bleep). I was sentenced to pay a $100,000 fine, or go to jail for 50 days. I believe this was the highest personal fine ever issued in Australia. Other websites, newspapers, and radio stations were not charged for similar or even more controversial material. Yet the judge attacked me for portraying myself as a scapegoat — a whipping boy — and he punished me accordingly. Now it is true, I have prior convictions. In 1987, I was fined $15,000 and jailed for exposing a paedophile priest Michael Glennon. Glennon had already been to jail for raping a 10-year-old girl, but was still running a camp for kids in country Victoria. And he was still a Catholic priest. He eventually went to jail, and he died behind bars several weeks ago. And to be honest, I feel good about that — he was an evil, evil man. I also spent five months under house arrest in 2011 for breaching court suppression orders, revealing the names of two serial sex offenders at a rally outside Victoria's Parliament House. About 4000 other people also shouted their names. That one cost me my radio job at 3AW. And I was fined and did 250 hours of community service for naming a judge who ruled that a man could not be charged for raping his wife under a 300-year-old British law. In Victoria, that law has since been changed. Now, here we go again. I have made a decision not taken lightly. On principle, I will not pay the $100,000 fine, which was due today. Instead, I'll go to jail. I'll go to jail for 50 days; to draw attention to all the suspended sentences for crimes of violence and child pornography; for the obscenely short sentences given to king hit killers; to draw attention to my campaign for a national register of convicted sex offenders. Already, 30,000 of you have signed up. I'm happy to serve just 50 days of the many years that the convicted paedophile ex-magistrate should be serving. That pervert, Simon Cooper, wasn't even put on the sex offenders register. If my going to jail draws attention to the judges and magistrates, out of touch with community expectations and your safety, then every one of my 50 days behind bars will be worth it. And so I'll go to jail.”

Derryn Hinch (1944) New Zealand–Australian media personality

Today Tonight, 16 January 2014.

People , Law , Sex , Feeling

“America should have minded her own business and stayed out of the World War. If you hadn't entered the war the Allies would have made peace with Germany in the Spring of 1917. Had we made peace then there would have been no collapse in Russia followed by Communism, no breakdown in Italy followed by Fascism, and Germany would not have signed the Versailles Treaty, which has enthroned Nazism in Germany. If America had stayed out of the war, all these 'isms' wouldn't today be sweeping the continent of Europe and breaking down parliamentary government — and if England had made peace early in 1917, it would have saved over one million British, French, American, and other lives.”

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

Published as having been made in an (August 1936) interview http://www.greatwar.nl/frames/default-churchill.html with William Griffin, editor of the New York Enquirer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Enquirer, who was indicted for sedition http://www.time.com/time/magazine/printout/0,8816,773366,00.html by F.D.R.'s http://www.whitehouse.gov/history/presidents/fr32.html Attorney General Francis Biddle http://www.usdoj.gov/osg/aboutosg/biddlebio.htm in 1942. In a sworn statement before Congress in 1939 Griffin affirmed Churchill had said this; Congressional Record (1939-10-21), vol. 84, p. 686. In 1942, Churchill admitted having had the 1936 interview but disavowed having made the statement (The New York Times, 1942-10-22, p. 13).
In his article "The Hidden Tyranny," Benjamin Freedman attributed this quotation to an article in the isolationist http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,795133,00.html publication Scribner's Commentator in 1936. However, that magazine did not exist until 1939. He may have gotten the date wrong or might have been referring to one of its predecessors, Scribner's Monthly http://cdl.library.cornell.edu/moa/browse.journals/scmo.html or Payson Publishing's The Commentator http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,765655,00.html.
Disputed

War , World , Peace , Spring

“The sure sign of a weak man who ascends to glory is that he can't tolerate having strong men around him.”

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

Source: Memoirs, North Face of Soho (2006), p. 126

Men , Strong

“Hatred is the sign of a secret attraction that is eager to flee from itself and furious to deny its own existence. That too is God's play in His creature.”

Sri Aurobindo (1872–1950) Indian nationalist, freedom fighter, philosopher, yogi, guru and poet

Thoughts and Aphorisms (1913), Jnana

God , Secret

“Talking to yourself is a sign of madness. Talking to yourself, dead, is class.”

Tom Holt book Paint Your Dragon

c. 12
Paint Your Dragon (1996)

Madness , Dead

“Critics of visual arts and of music describe in words — that is to say, a system of signs other than those made by brushes on canvas or chisels into stone or notes of music — those characteristics of painting or sculpture or music which can be described or analysed. Visual artists and composers can disregard critics on the ground that the medium of verbal criticism bears so indirect a relation to the medium in which they make something. Poets are in a different situation. With the development of so-called scientific methods of criticism they are made ever conscious that criticism of poetry is in the same medium of work as the art which they practise. “Close analysis” is useful to critics and readers. But for the poet there is the danger of disintegration of poetry into paraphrase, examination of technique, influences, all analysed in the language of criticism.”

Stephen Spender (1909–1995) English poet and man of letters

"Tradition-Bound Literature and Traditionless Painting"
The Struggle of the Modern (1963)

Art , Music , Painting

“We seek an amicable divorce from the European Union and its replacement with a genuine free-trade agreement, which is what my parents' generation thought we’d signed up for in the first place.”

Nigel Farage (1964) British politician and former commodity broker

In UKIP news (issue 56), July 2004.
2004

Parent

“Refinement is a sign of a deficient vitality, in art, in love, and in everything.”

Emil M. Cioran (1911–1995) Romanian philosopher and essayist

The New Gods (1969)

Love , Art

“The piety that sees a sign of divine favor in escape from a sudden danger which destroys other lives, is a spurious and egotistic travesty of the faith that knows that ‘God spared not His own Son, but freely gave Him up for us all.’ The true Christian will ask for no immunity from the common lot, for no freedom from the hardships of experience, for no miraculous deliverance from impending calamity, but he will ask for the power to overcome the world in a spirit that is courageous as well as meek, militant against all forms of evil while profoundly thankful for what seems good in his life.”

Leslie Weatherhead (1893–1976) English theologian

Source: The Christian Agnostic (1965), p.207, (Dr. E. Griffith Jones: Providence, Divine and Human. 1925. Hodder and Stoughton. p107

Life , God , World , Faith

“The more I thought about it, the better I liked the idea. The corps de ballet were already calling me "the Phantom of the Opera," an intriguing sobriquet which appealed to me very strongly, until I realized that it would mean signing my ransom notes P. T. O. One did not wish to descend to the ridiculous!
O. G. I became and O. G. I have remained.
But I still liked to think of myself as the Phantom.”

Susan Kay Phantom

Erik (p. 360)
Phantom (1990)

Idea , Thinking

“The more jealousy one has in his nature the more critical he is of those who have accomplished things.
If you are critical and mouthing negativisms it could be that your own failures are caused by a mixed-up, hate-filled mind. A sign of mental health is to be glad when others achieve, and to rejoice with them. Never compare yourself or your achievements with others, but make your comparisons only with yourself. Maintain a constant competition with yourself This will force you to attain higher standards and achievements. do not defeat yourself by holding spiteful or jealous thoughts. Think straight, with love, hope and optimism and you will attain victory in life.”

Norman Vincent Peale (1898–1993) American writer

Stay Alive All Your Life (1957)

Love , Life , Hate , Health

“Since then, much has changed. We do not care for Raphael, and are less enthusiastic about the statues of the so-called golden age of Greece. Our predecessors’ ideals are not ours. Works signed by great names over the centuries appeal to us less. In the hurry and bustle of their times, worldly-wise artists created works for Popes and palaces. It is the ordinary people who laboured in their workshops and of whose lives scarcely anything is now known, whose very names have not come down to us, that we love and respect today in their plain, large-scale carvings in the cathedrals of Naumburg, Magdeburg and Bamberg.”

Emil Nolde (1867–1956) German artist

2.
1900 - 1920, On Primitive Art – Emil Nolde, 1912

Love , People , Age , Change

“Bill and his brother-in-law had shot a deer and drove it in to get processed. At a rest stop, a woman stops at the truck
Woman: Did y'all shoot this deer?!
Bill's Brother-in-law: No, ma'am, we did not shoot this deer. It was the saddest thing. We were just driving down the road, the deer got into the back of our truck at a stop sign, handed us a note and then shot himself! Here's your sign.”

Bill Engvall (1957) American comedian and actor

15 Degrees Off Cool (2007)
Here's Your Sign

Law

“The most alarming sign of the state of our society now is that our leaders have the courage to sacrifice the lives of young people in war, but have not the courage to tell us that we must be less greedy and less wasteful.”

Wendell Berry (1934) author

"Peaceableness Toward Enemies".
Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community (1993)

War , People , Courage

“A cross could be a shape for expressing something spacious; such as the coordinators of space. That could be called its first significance or its first relevance. A cross could equally stand for crossing something out. It could also be a sign of obstruction. An overturned cross, an X so to speak, could be the symbol of mystery, something for the other side. Then I could paint a cross in such a way that a connection is made between two bars, and in doing so convert it into a symbol of the unlimited. So, many different crosses and X symbols occur in my works.”

Antoni Tàpies (1923–2012) Catalan painter, sculptor and art theorist

quote from 1988
1981 - 1990
Source: Tàpies, Werke auf Papier 1943 – 2003, Achim Sommer, Kunsthalle Emden, Altana 2004, p. 27

Way , Quotes , Painting

“In both quantum theory and general relativity, we encounter predictions of physically sensible quantities becoming infinite. This is likely the way that nature punishes impudent theorists who dare to break her unity. …If infinities are signs of missing unification, a unified theory will have none. It will be what we call a finite theory.”

Lee Smolin (1955) American cosmologist

The Trouble With Physics: The Rise of String Theory, The Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next (2007)

Way , Nature

“The hungry judges soon the sentence sign,
And wretches hang that jurymen may dine.”

Alexander Pope The Rape of the Lock

Canto III, line 21.
The Rape of the Lock (1712, revised 1714 and 1717)

“…the bathroom which Crabbe visited showed signs that Moneypenny now regarded even a lavatory as supererogatory.”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Fiction, Beds in the East (1959)

“It is true – is it not – that even Ingres [French classical painter, famous for his line] had to revise – yes, the surface of the painting is smooth, finished and incorruptible as a diamond, but under the accomplished surface are pentimenti – see there at the shoulder, how the line of the black dress was lowered qua fraction and the hand was extended to give greater elegance... Are these not signs of the patient revision that even a genius has to make.”

Arshile Gorky (1904–1948) Armenian-American painter

Source: 1942 - 1948, Arshile Gorky, – Goats on the roof' (2009), p. 358: in: 'A visit to the Metropolitan Museum with Gorky', Ethel Schwabacher, 1947

Painting

“I guess the clarification I should make here is that Japan is as potentially racist as anywhere else, but for a developed country, the legal and social protections and recourses afforded to people of differences are lacking comparatively. Racial discrimination is still not illegal in Japan, and this is something the Japanese government promised to fix when it signed the UN Convention on it in 1995. In short, Japan is not an outlier in terms of racism, but it is in terms of protections against it.”

Debito Arudou (1965) Author/activist with Japanese citizenship born in the USA

Interview, JapanReview.Net (2001-11-17)

People , Country

“The crisis has not been overcome, but there are many encouraging signs. The economy is recovering in many countries, the imbalances in European trade are declining and the budget deficits in the monetary union are falling.”

Mario Draghi (1947) Italian banker and economist

spiegel.de http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/spiegel-interview-with-ecb-president-mario-draghi-a-941489.html.

Country

“Ye lightnings, the dread arrows of the clouds!
Ye signs and wonders of the element!
Utter forth ' God,' and fill the hills with praise!”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) English poet, literary critic and philosopher

"Hymn in the Vale of Chamouni" (1802)

God

“When o'er the green undeluged earth
Heaven's covenant thou didst shine,
How came the world's grey fathers forth
To watch thy sacred sign.

And when its yellow lustre smiled
O'er mountains yet untrod,
Each mother held aloft her child
To bless the bow of God.”

Thomas Campbell (1777–1844) British writer

Theodric : A Domestic Tale; and Other Poems (1825), To the Rainbow

God , World , Smile , Mountain

“What the Big Bang theory tells us, is that at least our region of the universe 13.82 years ago, was an extremely hot, dense uniform soup of particles which in the conventional standard Big Bang model filled literally all of space—and now we certainly believe that it filled essentially all of the space that we have access to—uniformly. …This is contrary to a popular cartoon image of the Big Bang, which is just plain wrong. The cartoon image of the Big Bang is the image of a small egg of highly dense matter that then exploded and spewed out into empty space. That is not the scientific picture of the Big Bang. …If there was a small egg that exploded into empty space, you would certainly expect that today you would see something different if you were looking towards where the egg was, versus looking the opposite direction, but we don't see any effect like that. When we look around the sky the universe looks completely uniform, on average, in all directions, to a very high degree of accuracy… So we don't see a sign of an egg having happened anywhere. Rather, the Big Bang seems to have happened everywhere, uniformly.”

Alan Guth (1947) American theoretical physicist and cosmologist

Lecture 1: Inflationary Cosmology: Is Our Universe Part of a Multiverse? Part I.
The Early Universe (2012)

Universe

“(Sign) Mid-year resolutions of the barely under-control. (Woman at desk) I will try to be more understanding of others. I will try to be more patient when dealing with the incompetent people that surround me. I will not slap anyone first thing in the morning. (Sign on desk) The buck stops before it gets here.”

Nicole Hollander (1939) Cartoonist

Source: Sylvia cartoon strip, p. 78

People , Understanding

“And the eyes of all look upward seeing sign-word drawing nigh,
The stony wings of Egypt coming back across the sky;

We hear the clinking tamborine of Miriam anew;
We believe in every miracle since Lindbergh flew the blue —

The wonder of the long draw when the bowstring is a thread —
The beauty of a courage that can raise the wings of lead.”

Nathalia Crane (1913–1998) American writer

Venus Invisible and Other Poems (1928), The Wings of Lead

Beauty , Courage , Drawing

“When you're on your own
I'll send you a sign
Just so you know
I am me, the universe and you.”

KT Tunstall (1975) Scottish singer-songwriter and guitarist

"Universe & U".
Eye to the Telescope (2004)

Universe

“I’d sign him right here and now, and I’d go wherever it takes to land a player like that, he’s a "Crack" (a "match changing" player) player and I’m a fan of everything that he does, and what’s more now is the prefect time to sign him as he’s got a wealth of experience and has reached full maturity.”

Raúl González (1977) Spanish footballer

Ottmar Hitzfeld 2007 http://www.soccer.com/blog/2007/02/hitzfeld_its_the_perfect_time.blog
About

Change , Time , Wealth

“Futurism and Cubism are comparable in importance tot the invention of perspective, for which they substituted a new concept op space. All subsequent movements were latent in them or brought about by them.... the two movements cannot be regarded as in opposition to each other, even though they started from opposite points; I maintain (an idea approved by Apollinaire and later by Matisse) that they are two extremes of the same sign, tending to coincide at certain points which only the poetic instinct of the painter can discover: poetry being the content and raison d'être of art.”

Gino Severini (1883–1966) Italian painter

Source: The Life of a Painter - autobiography', 1946, Letters of the great artists', 1963, p. 248-249

Art , Idea , Future

“Perhaps it is a sign of civilizational progress that the very idea of threatening a nuclear first strike today seems borderline silly or morally obscene.”

Nick Bostrom book Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies

Source: Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (2014), Ch. 5

Idea

“[T]he sciences that are expressed by numbers or by other small signs, are easily learned; and… this facility rather than its demonstrability is what has made the fortune of algebra.”

Julien Offray de La Mettrie book Man a Machine

p, 125
Man a Machine (1747)

Learning , Science

“His explanation for the "signs"
I just hate stupid people. They should have to wear signs that say "I'm Stupid". That way you wouldn't rely on them, and you wouldn't ask them for nothing.”

Bill Engvall (1957) American comedian and actor

Here's Your Sign (1996)
Here's Your Sign

Hate , People , Stupidity , Way

“ Language performs an essentially social function; it helps us to get along together, to communicate and achieve a great measure of concerted action. Words are signs which have significance by convention, and those people who do not adopt the conventions simply fail to communicate. They do not "get along" and a social force arises which encourages them to achieve the correct associations. ”

Colin Cherry (1914–1979) British scientist

Source: On Human Communication (1957), Language: Science and Aesthetics, p.69

People , Communication , Help

“The distinction between "language" and "speech" rests on easily observable facts. The theoretical aspect of the issue has been raised in contemporary literature only by de Saussure, although in the terminological sense all the languages (I refer here to our cultural circle and its traditions), beginning with the distinction … lingua and sermo in Latin, accept the difference between "language" as a system of linguistic facts and "speech" as the name of a type of action. Following de Saussure, that theoretical distinction has been adopted in all contemporary linguistics. Gardiner distinguishes between speech as an activity with clearly utilitarian ends in view, and language as a precise knowledge pertaining to communication by means of verbal signs'*. The differentiation has been adopted in the Marxist literature of the subject, linguistic, psychological, etc. In his Psychology (in Russian) S. L. Rubinshtein defines speech as language functioning in the context of individual consciousness, and compares the difference between speech and language to the difference between individual and social consciousness.”

Adam Schaff (1913–2006) Polish Marxist philosopher and theorist

Source: Introduction to semantics, 1962, p. 316

Communication , Literature , Knowledge , Sense

“Whitehead and Russell… translate \vdash p imples q into the words 'it is asserted that p implies q'. But the phrase 'it is asserted' suggests an impersonal happening of assertions: 'it is asserted' as 'it is raining' or 'it happens'. The value of the assertion sign is lost if we allow ourselves to revert in our verbal translation of it to the muddle of a declaratory sentence which asserts itself or is impersonally asserted by nobody in particular.”

Michael Polanyi (1891–1976) Hungarian-British polymath

Source: Personal Knowledge (1958), p. 28

“[Fascism] is not a sign-post which would direct us here, for I firmly believe that our long experienced democracy will be able to preserve a parliamentary system of government with whatever modifications may be necessary from both extremes of arbitrary rule.”

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

Speech to the Anti-Socialist and Anti-Communist Union (17 February 1933), quoted in Martin Gilbert, Prophet of Truth: Winston S. Churchill, 1922–1939 (London: Minerva, 1990), p. 457
The 1930s

Democracy

“Greed for results, for something dramatic, undermines practice completely. The effects of meditation are subtle and take time to mature. When we are constantly looking for some kind of sign or attainment from our practice, we are essentially looking outside ourselves.”

Ken McLeod (1948) Canadian lama

Six Ways Not to Approach Meditation http://www.unfetteredmind.org/meditation-six-realm/0. Unfettered Mind http://www.unfetteredmind.org. (Topic: Practice)

Time

“at the Engvalls' home, Travis is about to play on the piano.
Engvall's son, Travis: I'm going to play you a song from Harry Potter.
Engvall: Oh, the movie?
Travis: No, the book. Here's your sign.
When telling the joke on Here's Your Sign: Live! (2004), he stops his son before he says "sign."”

Bill Engvall (1957) American comedian and actor

Here's Your Sign, "Here's <i>MY</i> Sign..."

Books , Home

“Really, one of us ought to have the courage to call the experiment off and shoulder the responsibility for the decision, but the majority reckons that that kind of courage would be a sign of cowardice, and the first step in a retreat. They think it would mean an undignified surrender for mankind — as if there was any dignity in floundering and drowning in what we don't understand and never will.”

Stanisław Lem book Solaris

Source: Solaris (1961), Ch. 11: "The Thinkers", p. 158

Courage , Understanding , Thinking , Decision

“Saying ‘I don’t know’ takes guts but it’s an immensely positive reaction and a clear sign that you don’t take yourself too seriously.”

Nigel Cumberland (1967) British author and leadership coach

Your Job-Hunt Ltd – Advice from an Award-Winning Asian Headhunter (2003), Successful Recruitment in a Week (2012) https://books.google.ae/books?idp24GkAsgjGEC&printsecfrontcover&dqnigel+cumberland&hlen&saX&ved0ahUKEwjF75Xw0IHNAhULLcAKHazACBMQ6AEIGjAA#vonepage&qnigel%20cumberland&ffalse, 100 Things Successful People Do: Little Exercises for Successful Living (2016) https://books.google.ae/books?idnu0lCwAAQBAJ&dqnigel+cumberland&hlen&saX&ved0ahUKEwjF75Xw0IHNAhULLcAKHazACBMQ6AEIMjAE

“Have you heard about the kid who lost his head at Six Flags? The first time I read it, I thought, "Oh my God…How can I make this funny for everybody?"…Here goes. What happened was, he was in a church youth group and he lost his hat during the roller coaster. Afterwards, he was like, "I'm going to go get my hat." And there was a big fence with signs that said, "Hey, cut your losses." And he was like, "What? Have you SEEN me in that hat? Not today, fence!" So, he climbed that fence, and then there was another fence with a sign that probably said, "Hey, come on, knock it off." He was like, "You can't tell me how to live, signs!" And he climbed over that fence and there, the story ends. Did he get the hat? I'd like to think he did. That small silver lining, "Hey, I got my hat!"”

Daniel Tosh (1975) American stand-up comedian

Then whack, right then! And I know he was on a church youth group and they don't believe in evolution, but that kid was going to get picked off sooner or later.
Happy Thoughts (2011)

God , Youth , Thinking , Loss

Quotes about sign page 13

Quotes about sign
page 13