Quotes about significance (1093 quotes, page 9)

“I am startled, occasionally, to find “intelligence” used as the antithesis of “feeling”, as though the two played against each other. Nothing could be further from the truth. No intelligent interpretation is lacking in emotional values. What this probably means is that, depending on gifts and degree of maturity, some natures emphasize brain over heart. Where such an imbalance occurs, it must be corrected by conscious and concentrated application to emotional content. If an interpretation is unduly cerebral, liveness and color can be infused into it by attention to whether the theme is now in the right hand, now in the left; whether it is supported by an accompaniment which has significance of its own, or merely hums along.”

Benno Moiseiwitsch (1890–1963) British musician

Playing in the Grand Style (1950)

Truth , Color , Feeling , Intelligence

“But my reasons for taking this less-traveled road were many. One is the inevitable thrill of discovery when you wander into new areas. More importantly, you also avoid the danger of being too comfortable in too narrow a niche. I truly believe the sayings that there is no hope for the satisfied man and that without fear there is no learning. Entering a new field with a degree in another is not unlike Lewis and Clark walking into the camp of the Mandans. You are not one of them. They distrust you. Your degree means nothing and your name is not recognized. You have to learn it all from scratch, earn their respect, and learn a lot on your own. But I also think that many of the most significant discoveries in science will be found not in but between the rigid boundaries of the disciplines: the terra incognita where much remains to be learned. It's not a place that's hidebound by practice and ritual. I have always tried to keep moving between fields of study and it shows up, I think, in my vitae.”

John A. Eddy (1931–2009) American astronomer

Fear , Hope , Travel , Thinking

“For even if the life of my own Earth and this other Earth on which I stood had started out identically (and they might well have started out identically) there still would be, along the way, millions of little deviations, no one of which, perhaps, by itself, would be significant, but the cumulative effects of all these deviations eventually would result in a life and culture that would bear no resemblance to any other Earth.”

Clifford D. Simak book All Flesh is Grass

Source: All Flesh is Grass (1965), Chapter 12 (p. 123)

Life , Way

“There is no such thing as a casual, non-significant sexual act; everyone knows this. Contrast sex with eating - you're strolling along a lane, you see a mushroom on a bank as you pass by, you know about mushrooms, you pick it and you eat it quite casually - sex is never like that. That's why virtue in connection with eating is basically a matter only of the pattern of one's eating habits. But virtue in sex - chastity - is not only a matter of such a pattern, that is of its role in a pair of lives. A single sexual action can be bad even without regard to its context, its further intentions and its motives.”

G. E. M. Anscombe (1919–2001) British analytic philosopher

Contraception and Chastity (1975)

Sex , Motivation

“A model is a qualitative or quantitative representation of a process or endeavor that shows the effects of those factors which are significant for the purposes being considered. A model may be pictorial, descriptive, qualitative, or generally approximate in nature; or it may be mathematical and quantitative in nature and reasonably precise. It is important that effective means for modeling be understood such as analog, stochastic, procedural, scheduling, flow chart, schematic, and block diagrams.”

Harold Chestnut (1917–2001) American engineer

Source: Systems Engineering Tools, (1965), p. 108; As cited in: Alberto Ortiz (1992) Systems engineering concept demonstration, process model http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a265469.pdf. p. 12

Mathematics , Nature

“Placebo effects (plural) are mostly reporting bias, regression to the mean, investment justification, researcher bias, and other sources of self-deception. They are transient, and significant only for subjective symptoms where reporting bias can play a major role. Studies have shown, in fact, that there is no significant "healing" that occurs due to placebo effects — no objective biological improvement.”

Steven Novella (1964) American neurologist, skepticist

NeuroLogica Blog, Can Thinking Change Reality Part II http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/can-thinking-change-reality-part-ii/ (March 11, 2014)

Study

“The French symbolists had a special term to express their love for things that had lost their objective significance, namely, ‘spleen.’ The conscious, challenging arbitrariness in the choice of objects, its ‘absurdity’ and ‘perverseness,’ as if by a silent gesture discloses the irrationality of utilitarian logic, which it then slaps in the face in order to demonstrate its inadequacy with regard to human experience. And while making it conscious, by this shock, of the fact that it forgets the subject, the gesture simultaneously expresses the subject’s sorrow over his inability to achieve an objective order. Twentieth-century society is not troubled by such inconsistencies. For it, meaning can be achieved in only one way—service for a purpose.”

Max Horkheimer book Eclipse of Reason

Source: Eclipse of Reason (1947), p. 38.

Love , Way , Forgetting

“The idea of knowledge as an improbable structure is still a good place to start. Knowledge, however, has a dimension which goes beyond that of mere information or improbability. This is a dimension of significance which is very hard to reduce to quantitative form. Two knowledge structures might be equally improbable but one might be much more significant than the other.”

Kenneth E. Boulding (1910–1993) British-American economist

Source: 1960s, Beyond Economics: Essays on Society, 1968, p. 142

Idea , Knowledge

“Total actions are a further development of the happening and combine the elements of all art forms, painting music, literature, film, theatre, which have been so infected by the progressive process of cretinisation in our society that any examination of reality has become impossible using these means alone. Total actions are the unprejudiced examination of all the materials that make up reality. Total actions take place in a consciously delineated area of reality with deliberately selected materials. They are partial, dynamic occurrences in which the most varied materials and elements of reality are linked, swapped over, turn on their heads and destroyed. This procedure creates the occurrence. The actual nature of the occurrence depends on the composition of the material and actors′ unconscious tendencies. Anything may constitute the material: people, animals, plants, food, space, movement, noise, smells, light, fire, coldness, warmth, wind, dust, steam, gas, events, sport, all art forms and all art products. All the possibilities of the material are ruthlessly exhausted. As a result of the incalculable possibilities for choices that the material presents to the actor, he plunges into a concentrated whirl of action finds himself suddenly in a reality without barriers, performs actions resembling those of a madman, and avails himself of a fool′s privileges, which is probably not without significance for sensible people. Old art forms seek to reconstruct reality, total actions unfold within reality itself. Total actions are direct occurrences(direct art), not the repetition of an occurrence, a direct encounter between unconscious elements and reality(material). The actor performs and himself becomes material: stuttering, stammering, burbling, groaning, choking, shouting, screeching, laughing, spitting, biting, creeping, rolling about in the material.”

Günter Brus (1938) Austrian artist

Source: Nervous Stillness on the Horizon (2006), P. 166 (1966/1972)

People , Food , Fools , Art

“The modern scientific worldview with all its hope for clarity and precision, has a "flipside," a complementary set of views which it generates as its train. And this is its misology, sophistry, its abandonment of rationality in the world of human significance. There is thus a quite literal type of schizophrenia in the world bequeathed to us by the Cartesians. It is, on the one hand, hyper-rational; it seeks to extend the purview of mathematical physics throughout the universe. On the other hand, it relegates the world in which the physicist himself dwells, the unique world of humanity and its communities, to the junkpile of the irrational. We who know so much are prohibited from knowing ourselves.”

David Roochnik (1951) American philosopher

The Tragedy of Reason: Toward a Platonic Conception of Logos (Routledge: 1991), p. 74.

World , Hope , Communication , Mathematics

“It is well to start by distinguishing the few really great – the major novelists who count in the same way as the major poets, in the sense that they not only change the possibilities of the art for practitioners and readers, but that they are significant in terms of the human awareness they promote; awareness of the possibilities of life.”

F. R. Leavis book The Great Tradition

The Great Tradition: George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad (London: Chatto & Windus, 1948) p. 2

Life , Art , Way , Sense

“Yet more complex are the environments we have called turbulent fields. In these, dynamic processes, which create significant variances for the component organizations, arise from the field itself.”

Fred Emery (1925–1997) Australian psychologist

Source: The Causal Texture of Organizational Environments (1963), p. 30.

“To put it very simply, anyone can become an American, but only a Chinese can be Chinese - and that places an additional and significant barrier in the way of any essentially national global hegemony.”

Zbigniew Brzeziński book The Grand Chessboard

Conclusion, p. 210.
The Grand Chessboard (1997)

Way

“.. Since I myself needed a year to discover the significance of this strange work, many of the texts and tunes, particularly in the first paintings, elude my memory and must - like the creation as a whole so it seems to me - remain shrouded in darkness.”

Charlotte Salomon (1917–1943) German painter

Charlotte's 4th introduction page, related to image JHM no. 4155-4 https://charlotte.jck.nl/detail/M004155-d: 'What is man, that thou art mindful..', p. 44
the quote is written in brush, combined with one rough painted figure
Charlotte Salomon - Life? or Theater?

Memory , Painting

“The misconception that costs determined prices prevented economists for a long time from recognizing that it was prices which operated as the indispensable signals telling producers what costs it was worth expending on the production of the various commodities and services, and not the other way around. It was the costs which they had expended which determined the prices of things produced.It was this crucial insight which finally broke through and established itself about a hundred years ago through the so-called marginal revolution in economics.The chief insight gained by modern economists is that the market is essentially an ordering mechanism, growing up without anybody wholly understanding it, that enables us to utilize widely dispersed information about the significance of circumstances of which we are mostly ignorant. However, the various planners (and not only the planners in the socialist camp) and dirigists have still not yet grasped this.”

Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992) Austrian and British economist and Nobel Prize for Economics laureate

1980s and later, Knowledge, Evolution and Society (1983), "Coping with Ignorance"
Source: http://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/coping-with-ignorance/

Understanding , Time , Way

“If we then make the obvious assumption that the content of a map is appropriate to its purpose, there yet remains the equally significant evaluation of the visual methods employed to convey that content.”

Arthur H. Robinson (1915–2004) American geographer

Source: The Look of Maps (1952), p. 15

“Of all the developed nations throughout Christendom, only the United States has a significant number of creationists, and they’re the minority even here! Every other predominantly-Christian country tends to regard creationism as an incredulous, (if not insane) radical fringe movement which is an almost exclusively American phenomenon, and not taken seriously anywhere else. Poll after poll continues to reveal that, around the world, most “evolutionists” are Christian, and most Christians are evolutionists. So evolution is not synonymous with atheism, and creationism isn’t synonymous with Christianity either. Most creationists aren’t even Christians! There are millions more Muslim and Hindu creationists than Christian ones.”

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

"1st Foundational Falsehood of Creationism" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KnJX68ELbAY, Youtube (November 11, 2007)
Youtube, Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism

World , Country

“Young Prokofiev was attentive to new musical trends. We can find traces of various influences in his early compositions. Some of the piano works from the set Visions fugitives, op. 22 (1915–17), are reminiscent of Debussy; the Andante assai section of the First Piano Concerto, op. 10 (1911–12), sounds like Rachmaninov; and the harmonies of the symphonic poem Osen neye(Autumnor Autumnal Sketch), op. 8 (1910), harken back to Scriabin. These, however, were rather passing influences. Others proved to be more enduring.
One of them was the fairy-tale streak in Russian music. Russians have always been fond of fairy tales, which to this day continue to be an important part of every child’s upbringing. …
Another significant influence was the Classical style.”

Boris Berman (1948) Russian/American musician

Prokofiev’s piano sonatas : a guide for the listener and the performer (2008), Prokofiev: His Life and the Evolution of His Musical Language

Music , Autumn , Parting

“I … thought about societies where exceptional fortunes are built up in industries with very little connection to out sincere and significant needs, industries where it is difficult to escape from the disparity between a seriousness of means and a triviality of ends.”

Alain de Botton (1969) Swiss writer

p 102-103.
The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work (2009)

Sincerity

“Suggestion can shape dreams, and the dreams themselves then operate as action. A strong dream can be a more significant psychic action than any physical experience, and it can change the course of the personality completely.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Session 28
The Early Sessions: Sessions 1-42, 1997, The Early Sessions: Book 1

Dreams , Strong , Change , Personality

“The software architecture of a system or a family of systems has one of the most significant impacts on the quality of an organization's enterprise architecture. While the design of software systems concentrates on satisfying the functional requirements for a system, the design of the software architecture for systems concentrates on the nonfunctional or quality requirements for systems. These quality requirements are concerns at the enterprise level. The better an organization specifies and characterizes the software architecture for its systems, the better it can characterize and manage its enterprise architecture. By explicitly defining the systems software architectures, an organization will be better able to reflect the priorities and trade-offs that are important to the organization in the software that it builds.”

Scott W. Ambler (1966) Canadian software engineer/consultant/author

James McGovern, Scott W. Ambler and M. E Stevens (2004) A Practical Guide to Enterprise Architecture. p. 35

Family

““…My name…is Mahalingam…. is Sanskrit for ‘large or great or mighty generative organ’ - this, of course, having more a religious (through associations of religion and fertility) significance than an anatomical one. Though anatomically and…socially the name has not proved inept.”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Fiction, Devil of a State (1961)

Religion

“The significance of a work of art is determined then by the quality of its growth. This involves intangible forces inherent in the process of development. Although these forces are surreal (that is, their nature is something beyond physical reality), they, nevertheless, depend on a physical carrier. The physical carrier (commonly painting or sculpture) is the medium of expression of the Surreal. Thus, an idea is communicable only when the surreal is converted into material terms. The artist’s technical problem is how to transform the material with which he works back into the sphere of the spirit.”

Hans Hofmann (1880–1966) American artist

'Search for the Real in the Visual Arts', p. 40
Search for the Real and Other Essays (1948)

Art , Idea , Nature , Problem

“The extraordinary significance that music holds for Delacroix, and which contributes most to his admiration for Chopin, is a symptom of the new hierarchy of the arts and the prominent position which music occupies in it. It is the romantic art par excellence and Chopin the most romantic of all the romantics. In his relation to Chopin, Delacroix’s intimate connection with romanticism is brought most clearly to light.”

Arnold Hauser (1892–1978) Hungarian art historian

Source: The Social History of Art, Volume III. Rococo, Classicism and Romanticism, 1999, Chapter 6. German and Western Romanticism

Art , Music , Light

“They will ask, "Can the time of Maitreya create a New Era?" Answer, "If the Crusades brought a new age, then truly the Era of Maitreya is a thousandfold more significant."”

Nicholas Roerich (1874–1947) Russian painter, writer, archaeologist, theosophist, enlightener, philosopher

In such consciousness should one proceed.
§ 1
Agni Yoga (1929)

Age , Time

“In our private conversations, Judge Cedarbaum has pointed out to me that seminal decisions in race and sex discrimination cases have come from Supreme Courts composed exclusively of white males. I agree that this is significant but I also choose to emphasize that the people who argued those cases before the Supreme Court which changed the legal landscape ultimately were largely people of color and women.”

Sonia Sotomayor (1954) U.S. Supreme Court Justice

Address to the Raising the Bar symposium (2001)

Women , People , Sex , Color

“All purposeful manifestations of life, including their very purposiveness, in the final analysis have their end not in life but in the expression of its nature, in the representation of its significance.”

Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) German literary critic, philosopher and social critic (1892-1940)

Alle zweckmäßigen Lebenserscheinungen wie ihre Zweckmäßigkeit überhaupt sind letzten Endes zweckmäßig nicht für das Leben, sondern für den Ausdruck seines Wesens, für die Darstellung seiner Bedeutung.
The Task of the Translator (1920)

Life , Nature

“The demand for a Constituent Assembly was intrinsically linked to our larger goal of Freedom and Independence. The resolution for Purna Swaraj in 1929 had aroused great nationalist fervour and galvanized the people to take part with renewed vigour in the Freedom Movement. The clear and unambiguous articulation of this deep-rooted longing of the people of India to be in control of their own destiny contained within itself the idea of a democratic Constitution which would provide a framework for the governance of independent India by the Indian people. Clearly, such a Constitution could only be drawn up by the elected representatives of the people of India. It was from this unassailable logic that the demand for a Constituent Assembly was articulated by Panditji. The proposal was accepted by the Indian National Congress in 1934, whereafter it became a significant part of the nationalist agenda for Independent India.”

Shankar Dayal Sharma (1918–1999) Indian politician

Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru has compelled me to study, among other things, the implications of a Constituent Assembly. When he first introduced it in the Congress resolutions, I reconciled myself to it because of my belief in his superior knowledge of the technicalities of democracy. But I was not free from skepticism. Hard facts have, however, made me a convert and, for that reason perhaps, more enthusiastic than Jawaharlal himself.
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 , Idea , Freedom , Parting

“A work of art must carry in itself its complete significance and impose it upon the beholder even before he can identify the subject-matter. When I see the Giotto frescoes at Padua I do not trouble to recognize which scene of the life of Christ I have before me, but I perceive instantly the sentiment which radiates from it and which is instinct in the composition in every line and color.”

Henri Matisse (1869–1954) French artist

Source: 1900s, Notes d'un Peintre (Notes of a Painter) (1908), p. 413

Life , Art , Color , Christ

“When looking at any significant work of art, remember that a more significant one probably has had to be sacrificed.”

Paul Klee (1879–1940) German Swiss painter

Diary entry (December 1904), # 583, in The Diaries of Paul Klee, 1898-1918; University of California Press, 1968
1903 - 1910

Art

“Inextricably intertwined in the question was slavery, and it only became the more so in the years that followed. Socially and culturally the North and South were not much different. They prayed to the same deity, spoke the same language, shared the same ancestry, sang the same songs. National triumphs and catastrophes were shared by both. For all the myths they would create to the contrary, the only significant and defining difference between them was slavery, where it existed and where it did not, for by 1804 it had virtually ceased to exist north of Maryland. Slavery demarked not just their labor and economic situations, but power itself in the new republic.”

William C. Davis (1946) American historian

Source: Look Away!: A History of the Confederate States of America (2002), p. 9

Question

“This chapter [of the destruction of temples], however, though significant, was only a part of the Muslim behaviour-pattern as recorded by Muslim historians of medieval India. The other parts were:
1) mass slaughter of people not only during war but also after the armies of Islam had emerged victorious;
2) capture of large numbers of non-combatant men, women and children as booty and their sale as slaves all over the Islamic world;
3) forcible conversion to Islam of people who were in no position to resist;
4) reduction to the status of zimmis or non-citizens of all those who could not be converted and imposition of inhuman disabilities on them;
5) emasculation of the zimmis by preventing them from possessing arms;
6) impoverishment of the zimmis through heavy discriminatory taxes and misappropriation of a major part of what the peasants produced;
7) ruination of the native and national culture of the zimmis by suppressing and holding in contempt all its institutions and expressions.”

Sita Ram Goel (1921–2003) Indian activist

Hindu Temples – What Happened to Them, Volume I (1990)

Women , Men , War , Children

“Like the intricately rational web of theology woven around the irrational mysteries of faith, the sober explanations of institutions for hoarding literary relics seem like elegant post-factum justifications for what is essentially a sense of sacred awe. An institution of learning seeks significant manuscripts because they possess qualities that scholarship cannot entirely reproduce — an authentic, holistic connection with the great writers of the past. It is not the intellectual content of the manuscript that is important but its material presence — ink spots, tobacco stains, pinworm holes, and foxing included.”

Dana Gioia (1950) American writer

"The Magical Value of Manuscripts," http://www.danagioia.net/essays/ehop.htm The Hudson Review (Spring 1996); later published as an introduction to The Hand of the Poet: Poems and Papers in Manuscript, ed. Rodney Phillips (1997)
Essays

Faith , Sense , Learning , Past

“As some of us noted before Saddam Hussein’s 2003 fall, banning the Ba’ath as such was a mistake – for, in a sense, the Ba’ath had also been a victim of Saddam’s savage rule. The Ba’ath, modeled on European fascist parties, was never a democratic movement. Yet, before Saddam turned it into an empty shell to be filled with his personality cult, it had been a genuine political movement, representing a significant segment of Iraqi opinion. It had started as a predominantly Shiite party seeking to downplay sectarianism by promoting pan-Arab ideas. Saddam turned it into a sectarian party, first dominated by the Arab Sunni minority and eventually by his Tikriti clan. The wisest course would’ve been to let those Ba’athists who had been purged, imprisoned and exiled under Saddam to reclaim their party and rebuild it with full respect for Iraq’s new democratic and pluralist political system. Those Ba’athists who committed crimes were known to all and could’ve been blacklisted and tried as individuals. The blanket ban suddenly transformed some 1.4 million civil servants, including tens of thousands of teachers and medical doctors and some half a million military personnel, into pariahs simply because they’d been nominal Ba’ath members. Yet most had joined simply to protect their careers under a brutal regime.”

Amir Taheri (1942) Iranian journalist

"Iraq: Reconciling with the Ba'ath" http://nypost.com/2008/01/16/iraq-reconciling-with-the-baath/, New York Post (January 16, 2008).
New York Post

Idea , Sense , Teachers , Personality

“He is Shiro’s significant other,
They weren’t married yet, but that’s the road they were going down
Him being gay was just something that we had always wanted to do with him from early on.”

Lauren Montgomery (1980) artist

9 August 2018 article on Entertainment Weekly https://ew.com/tv/2018/08/09/voltron-legendary-defender-shiro-gay/

“Hindus suffered such attempted extermination in East Bengal in 1971, when the Pakistani Army killed 1 to 3 million people, with Hindus as their most wanted target. This fact is strictly ignored in most writing about Hindu-Muslim relations, in spite (or rather because) of its serious implication that even the lowest estimate of the Hindu death toll in 1971 makes Hindus by far the most numerous victims of Hindu-Muslim violence in the post-colonial period. It is significant that no serious count or religion-wise breakdown of the death toll has been attempted: the Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi ruling classes all agree that this would feed Hindu grievances against Muslims…. Even apart from the 1971 genocide, "ordinary" pogroms in East Pakistan in 1950 alone killed more Hindus than the total number of riot victims in India since 1948.”

Koenraad Elst (1959) orientalist, writer

Koenraad Elst, "Was There an Islamic "Genocide" of Hindus?" http://www.academia.edu/16578319/Was_There_an_Islamic_Genocide_of_Hindus
2000s

Death , People , Religion , Suffering

“The rudest heathen that worshipped Canopus, or the Caabah Black-Stone, he, as we saw, was superior to the horse that worshipped nothing at all! Nay there was a kind of lasting merit in that poor act of his; analogous to what is still meritorious in Poets: recognition of a certain endless divine beauty and significance in stars and all natural objects whatsoever.”

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

1840s, Heroes and Hero-Worship (1840), The Hero as Priest

Beauty , Star , Nature , Horse

“When the characters of epic and heroic saga are on significant missions, they are led divinely.”

Cyrus H. Gordon (1908–2001) American linguist

Source: The Common Background of Greek and Hebrew Civilizations (1965 [1962]), Ch.VII Further Observations on Homer

“Over the past two years of my presidency, we have made significant achievements concerning our foreign policy. And yes we are prepared to consider targeted action against individuals if further progress isn't made. Former President Nasheed has been imprisoned without due process. And that is an injustice that must be addressed soon.”

Abdulla Yameen (1959) Maldivian politician, 6th president of the Maldives

Abdulla Yameen, the 6th pesident and current president of the Maldives, Haveeru (February 4, 2016), "Maldives pres pledges closer global ties, insists no place for interference" http://www.haveeru.com.mv/news/66150?e=en_ht

Past

“Cartography as a discipline has a significant stake in the evolving role of maps within systems for scientific visualization, within spatial decision support systems, within hypermedia information access systems, and within virtual reality environments.”

Alan MacEachren (1952) American geographer

Source: Exploratory cartographic visualization: advancing the agenda (1997), p. 1

Support , Reality , Decision

“Many of the core ideas of cybernetics have been assimilated by other disciplines, where they continue to influence scientific developments. Other important cybernetic principles seem to have been forgotten, though, only to be periodically rediscovered or reinvented in different domains. Some examples are the rebirth of neural networks, first invented by cyberneticists in the 1940's, in the late 1960's and again in the late 1980's; the rediscovery of the importance of autonomous interaction by robotics and AI in the 1990's; and the significance of positive feedback effects in complex systems, rediscovered by economists in the 1990's. Perhaps the most significant recent development is the growth of the complex adaptive systems movement, which, in the work of authors such as John Holland, Stuart Kauffman and Brian Arthur and the subfield of artificial life, has used the power of modern computers to simulate and thus experiment with and develop many of the ideas of cybernetics. It thus seems to have taken over the cybernetics banner in its mathematical modelling of complex systems across disciplinary boundaries, however, while largely ignoring the issues of goal-directedness and control.”

Francis Heylighen (1960) Belgian cyberneticist

Source: Cybernetics and Second-Order Cybernetics (2001), p.5 : About the state of the art of contemporary cybenetics

Mathematics , Idea

“Traditional Chinese characters carry both cultural significance and artistic values and promoting these characters has nothing to do with any political stance. It's very important for us not to sacrifice the characters for tourism.”

Ma Ying-jeou (1950) Taiwanese politician, president of the Republic of China

Ma Ying-jeou (2014) cited in: " No plans to promote use of simplified characters: Ma http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/taiwan/archives/2014/01/02/2003580339" in Taipei Times, 2 January 2014.
Statement made during a calligraphy activity in Grand Hotel in Taipei, 1 January 2014.
Other topics

“Minimal art went nowhere. Conceptual art became the liberating idea that gave the art of the next 40 years its real impetus. All of the significant art of today stems from Conceptual art. This includes the art of installation, political, feminist and socially directed art. The other great development has been in photography, but that too was influenced by Conceptual art.”

Sol LeWitt (1928–2007) American artist

Quotes of Sol Lewitt, "Sol LeWitt by Saul Ostrow," 2003

Art , Idea

“Men, unacquainted with Vedanta, do not see that all things and all individual selves have Brahman as their self. They think that all terms exhaust their significance by signifying the various objects by themselves, which objects are in reality a part and not the whole of the meaning of terms. Now by the study of Vedanta, they understand that all such objects are the effects of Brahman, that Brahman is the inner ruler of them all and that they are animated by Brahman as their very soul. Therefore they come to understand that all terms signify Brahman itself having as its modes the entities, to which latter alone the terms are applied in common usage.”

Ramanuja (1017–1137) Hindu philosopher, exegete of Vishishtadvaita Vedanta school

Source: Vedartha Sangraham, 11th century, p. 14.

Men , Soul , Understanding , Thinking

“In the judgment of the most competent living mathematicians, Fräulein Noether was the most significant creative mathematical genius thus far produced since the higher education of women began.”

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

1930s, Obituary for Emmy Noether (1935)

Women , Education , Mathematics

“For Muslims the Quran is the Word of God; it is sacred scripture, not a work of "literature," a manual of law, or a text of theology, philosophy or history although it is of incomparable literary quality, contains many injunctions about a Sacred Law, is replete with verses of metaphysical, theological, and philosophical significance, and contains many accounts of sacred history. The unique structure of the Quran and the flow of its content constitute a particular challenge to most modern readers. For traditional Muslims the Quran is not a typical "read" or manual to be studied. For most of them, the most fruitful way of interacting with the Quran is not to sit down and read the Sacred Tex from cover to cover (although there are exceptions, such as completing the whole text during Ramadan). it is, rather, to recite a section with full awareness of it as the Word of God and to meditate upon it as one whose soul is being directly addressed, as the Prophet's soul was addressed during its revelation. … In this context it must be remembered that the Quran itself speaks constantly of the Origin and the Return, of all things coming from God and returning to Him, who himself has no origin or end. As the Word of god, the Quran also seems to have no beginning and no end. Certain turns of phrase and teachings about the Divine Reality, the human condition, the life of this world, and the Hereafter are often repeated, but they are not mere repetitions. Rather each iteration of a particular word, phrase, or verse opens the door of a hidden passage to other parts of the Quran. Each coda is always a prelude to an as yet undiscovered truth.”

Seyyed Hossein Nasr book The Study Quran

The Study Quran: A New Translation and Commentary https://books.google.com/books?id=GVSzBgAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover (2015)

Life , God , Truth , World

“To all my friends, colleagues and family: I send you love. Please support me in my passage to a new life. I have no other way to thank you than this. You have all played a significant part in my development of loving. As a result, my life has been rich and full, so I leave feeling very grateful.”

Virginia Satir (1916–1988) American psychologist

Brief biography at Avanta.net (1999)

Love , Life , Family , Way

“Just as our tools evolved culturally to fit our hands, so too our social roles evolved culturally to fit persisting aspects of the human mind. Roles that jar too violently with human nature are unlikely to persist for long, at least without the application of significant social force. If this is correct, it raises the possibility that some social roles might have evolved culturally to fit traits that, although found in both sexes, are more common in one than the other. This is emphatically not to say that there are some male roles and some female roles. But it is to suggest that there might be some social roles that suit more men than women, and others that suit more women than men — not just because of evolved physical differences but because of evolved psychological differences as well.”

Steve Stewart-Williams (1971)

Source: The Ape that Kicked the Hornet's Nest (2013), p. 261

Women , Men , Sex , Nature

“What is it that separates human beings from the so called lower animals? Well as I see it, it's exactly one half dozen significant things: Humor, Imagination, Eroticism — as opposed to the mindless, instinctive mating of glow-worms or raccoons — Spirituality, Rebelliousness, and Aesthetics, an appreciation of beauty for its own sake. Now, since those are the features that define a human being, it follows that the extent to which someone is lacking in those qualities is the extent to which he or she is less than human. Capisce?”

Tom Robbins Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates

Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates (2000)

Beauty , Imagination , Animals

“My labor had not been easy nor light; our Masonry had spun a most intricate net of anti-religious activity; it dominated the currents of thought; it exercised its influence over publishing houses, over teaching, over the administration of justice and even over certain dominant sections of the armed forces. To give an idea of how far things had gone, this significant example is sufficient. When, in parliament, I delivered my first speech of November 16, 1922, after the Fascist revolution, I concluded by invoking the assistance of God in my difficult task. Well, this sentence of mine seemed to be out of place! In the Italian parliament, a field of action for Italian Masonry, the name of God had been banned for a long time. Not even the Popular party — the so-called Catholic party — had ever thought of speaking of God. In Italy, a political man did not even turn his thoughts to the Divinity. And, even if he had ever thought of doing so, political opportunism and cowardice would have deterred him, particularly in a legislative assembly. It remained for me to make this bold innovation! And in an intense period of revolution! What is the truth! It is that a faith openly professed is a sign of strength. I have seen the religious spirit bloom again; churches once more are crowded, the ministers of God are themselves invested with new respect. Fascism has done and is doing its duty.”

Benito Mussolini book My Autobiography

1920s
Source: My Autobiography (1928)

God , Truth , Faith , Justice

“Religious intuition is a unique form of experience. Religious intuition is more than simply the confluence of the cognitive, aesthetic, and ethical sides of life. However vital and significant these sides of life may be, they are but partial and fragmented constituents of a greater whole, a whole which is experienced in its fullness and immediacy in religious intuition.”

Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan (1888–1975) Indian philosopher and statesman who was the first Vice President and the second President of India

Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Life

“Journalism is a character defect. I think most non-journalists would agree with this. It is life lived at a safe remove: standing off to one side of the parade as it passes, noting its flaws, offering glib and unworkable suggestions for its improvement. Every journalist must know that this is not, really, how a serious-minded person would choose to spend his days. Serious-minded people do things; a journalist chatters about the things serious-minded people do, and so, not coincidentally, avoids having to do them himself. A significant body of research indicates that non-journalists find us insufferable, perhaps for this reason.”

Andrew Ferguson (1956) American journalist

"Scotty: All the news that's fit to schmooze" http://www.weeklystandard.com/Utilities/printer_preview.asp?idArticle=2248&R=ECC0849, The Weekly Standard, 24 February 2003

Life , People , Thinking , Personality

“William Lloyd Garrison took part in a discussion on the means of suppressing war in the Society for the Establishment of Peace among Men, which existed in 1838 in America. He came to the conclusion that the establishment of universal peace can only be founded on the open profession of the doctrine of non-resistance to evil by violence (Matt. v. 39), in its full significance, as understood by the Quakers, with whom Garrison happened to be on friendly relations. Having come to this conclusion, Garrison thereupon composed and laid before the society a declaration, which was signed at the time — in 1838 — by many members.”

Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) Russian writer

The Kingdom of God is Within You (1894)

Men , War , Peace , Universe

“Windelband, the historian of philosophy, in his essay on the meaning of philosophy (Was ist Philosophie? in the first volume of his Präludien) tells us that "the history of the word 'philosophy' is the history of the cultural significance of science." He continues: "When scientific thought attains an independent existence as a desire for knowledge, it takes the name of philosophy; when subsequently knowledge as a whole divides into its various branches, philosophy is the general knowledge of the world that embraces all other knowledge. As soon as scientific thought stoops again to becoming a means to ethics or religious contemplation, philosophy is transformed into an art of life or into a formulation of religious beliefs. And when afterwards the scientific life regains its liberty, philosophy acquires once again its character as an independent knowledge of the world, and in so far as it abandons the attempt to solve this problem, it is changed into a theory of knowledge itself." Here you have a brief recapitulation of the history of philosophy from Thales to Kant, including the medieval scholasticism upon which it endeavored to establish religious beliefs. But has philosophy no other office to perform, and may not its office be to reflect upon the tragic sense of life itself, such as we have been studying it, to formulate this conflict between reason and faith, between science and religion, and deliberately to perpetuate this conflict?”

Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936) 19th-20th century Spanish writer and philosopher

The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), Conclusion : Don Quixote in the Contemporary European Tragi-Comedy

Life , World , Faith , Religion

“I know that the Crusaders of Majorca put to death, in a single night, all the prisoners who were huddled in the Catalonian trenches. They took the whole herd down to the shore and shot them, one beast at a time - they were quite leisurely about it. The Lord High Archbishop of Palma arranged to be represented at the ceremony, by a certain number of his priests. You can picture the scene can't you? 'Come on, father, isn't that one ready?' - 'Just a moment captain, I'm handing him over to you at once.' When the job was finished, the Crusaders piled their cattle in two heaps - those who'd been given absolution and those who hadn't- then sprinkled petrol over them. It is quite likely that this purification by fire may then have taken on, by reason of the presence of priests officiating a liturgical significance. Unfortunately I only saw these blackened, shiny creatures two days after that, contorted by the flames, some of them counterfeiting obscene poses in death, which must have been very distressing for the ladies of Palma and for their eminent confessors. A reeking tar oozed out of them…”

Georges Bernanos book Les grands cimetières sous la lune

Source: Les grands cimetieres sous la lune (A Diary of My Times) 1938, p.153-154

Death , Time , Night

“First, there is really no sign at all of any significant reduction in unemployment without a major change in policy…Unemployment has probably levelled out but at a totally unacceptable figure. Secondly, contrary to what the Secretary of State said, the post-oil surplus prospect—not merely the post-oil prospect, because the oil will take a long time to go, but the surplus, the big balance of payments surplus, which is beginning to decline quite quickly—still looks devastating…our balance of payments is now overwhelmingly dependent on this highly temporary and massive oil surplus. Our manufacturing industry is shrunken and what remains is uncompetitive…We have a manufacturing trade deficit of approximately £11 billion, all of which has built up in the past three to four years. This is containable by oil and by nothing else. Invisibles can take care of about £4 billion or £5 billion but they cannot do the whole job. As soon as oil goes into a neutral position we are in deep trouble. Should it go into a negative position, the situation would be catastrophic…To sell off a chunk of capital assets and to use the proceeds for capital investment in the rest of the public sector might just be acceptable. However, that is not what is proposed, and what is proposed cannot be justified on any reputable theory of public finance; and when it is accompanied by a Minister using the oil—which might itself be regarded as a capital asset; certainly it is not renewable—almost entirely for current purposes, it amounts to improvident finance on a scale that makes the Prime Minister's old friend General Galtieri almost Gladstonian.”

Roy Jenkins (1920–2003) British politician, historian and writer

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1985/nov/12/industry-and-employment in the House of Commons (12 November 1985).
1980s

Change , Time , Past , Dependency

“They [Apple] have hired people we've fired. We always jokingly call Apple the "Tesla Graveyard." If you don't make it at Tesla, you go work at Apple. I'm not kidding…. cars are very complex compared to phones or smartwatches. You can't just go to a supplier like Foxconn and say: Build me a car. But for Apple, the car is the next logical thing to finally offer a significant innovation. A new pencil or a bigger iPad alone were not relevant enough.”

Elon Musk (1971) South African-born American entrepreneur

All Charged Up in Berlin http://global.handelsblatt.com/edition/271/ressort/companies-markets/article/all-charged-up-in-berlin in Handelsblatt (25 September 2015)

People , Cars

“The responsibility of the writer as a moral agent is to try to bring the truth about matters of human significance to an audience that can do something about them.”

Noam Chomsky (1928) american linguist, philosopher and activist

Source: Quotes 1990s, 1995-1999, Powers and Prospects (1996), p. 56.

Truth

“Islam and Christianity do not contradict each other, but they meet in high values to achieve significant benefits for the world.”

Youssef Bey Karam (1823–1889) Lebanese rebel

Youssef Bey Karam Foundation

World

“The word hypothesis has now a somewhat different significance from that given it by Newton. We are now accustomed to understand by hypothesis all thoughts connected with the phenomena.
Newton was far from the crude thought that explanation of phenomena could be attained by abstraction.”

Bernhard Riemann (1826–1866) German mathematician

Causality
Gesammelte Mathematische Werke (1876)

Understanding

“The utmost possible regarding an individual is a statement as to some order of probability about the future. Heisenberg's principle has been seized upon as a basis for wild statements to the effect that the doctrine of arbitrary free will and totally uncaused activity are now scientifically substantiated. Its actual force and significance is generalization of the idea that the individual is a temporal career whose future cannot logically be deduced from its past.”

John Dewey (1859–1952) American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer

Time and Individuality (1940)

Idea , Past , Future

“There's no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance.”

Steve Ballmer (1956) American businessman who was the chief executive officer of Microsoft

CEO Forum: Microsoft's Ballmer having a 'great time', 2007-04-30, USA TODAY http://www.usatoday.com/money/companies/management/2007-04-29-ballmer-ceo-forum-usat_N.htm,
2000s

Chance

“…education is a spiritual revaluation of human life. Its task is to reorient the individual, to enable him to take a richer and more significant view of his experiences, to place him above and not within the system of his beliefs and ideals. If education is not liberalizing, it is not education in the sense of the title of this book.”

Everett Dean Martin (1880–1941)

Preface p. viii
The Meaning of a Liberal Education (1926)

Life , Books , Education , Sense

“Drunkards and sensualists have become heroes and saints; but sluggards have never risen to the significance and worth of human beings. Sloth enfeebles the root of life, and degrades more surely, if less swiftly, than the sins of passion.”

John Lancaster Spalding (1840–1916) Catholic bishop

Source: Aphorisms and Reflections (1901), p. 26

Life , Passion

“Because these two judges showed to their generation of justices, and the generation after that, as to how to approach cases that came before the highest court. It is because judges with a political or social agenda are so few in number that they are long remembered. I have always considered it significant and beneficial for the development of the law in India that judges-without-an-agenda have been the more numerous.”

Fali Sam Nariman (1929) Indian politician

On the role of judges
Fali Sam Nariman: An Interview

Justice , Law

“The above interpretation has been introduced, not on account of its immediate value in the present system, but as an illustration of a significant fact in the philosophy of the intellectual powers, viz., that what has commonly been regarded as the fundamental axiom of metaphysics is but the consequence of a law of thought, mathematical in its form.”

George Boole (1815–1864) English mathematician, philosopher and logician

Source: 1850s, An Investigation of the Laws of Thought (1854), p. 50

Law , Mathematics

“The relevant fact about the history of the British Isles and above all of England is its separateness in a political sense from the history of continental Europe. The English have never belonged to it and have always known that they did not belong. The assertion contains no element of paradox. The Angevin Empire contradicts it as little as the English claim to the throne of France; neither the possession of Gascony nor the inheritance of Hanover made Edward I or George III anything but English sovereigns. When Henry VIII declared that 'this realm of England is an empire (imperium) of itself', he was making not a new claim but a very old one; but he was making it at a very significant point of time. He meant—as Edward I had meant, when he said the same over two hundred years before—that there is an imperium on the continent, but that England is another imperium outside its orbit and is endowed with the plenitude of its own sovereignty. The moment at which Henry VIII repeated this assertion was that of what is misleadingly called 'the reformation'—misleadingly, because it was, and is, essentially a political and not a religious event. The whole subsequent history of Britain and the political character of the British people have taken their colour and trace their unique quality from that moment and that assertion. It was the final decision that no authority, no law, no court outside the realm would be recognised within the realm. When Cardinal Wolsey fell, the last attempt had failed to bring or keep the English nation within the ambit of any external jurisdiction or political power: since then no law has been made for England outside England, and no taxation has been levied in England by or for an authority outside England—or not at least until the proposition that Britain should accede to the Common Market.”

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

Speech to The Lions' Club, Brussels (24 January 1972), from The Common Market: Renegotiate or Come Out (Elliot Right Way Books, 1973), pp. 49-50
1970s

People , Law , History , Decision

“Ignorance or disregard of our evolutionary heritage, and of the fundamental biological, emotional, cognitive, and social similarities on which much in everyday human life and thought depend, can lead to speculative philosophies and empirical programs that misconstrue the natural scope and limits of our species-specific abilities and competencies. The intellectual and moral consequences of this misconstrual have varying significance, both for ourselves and for others, for example, in the ways relativism informs currently popular notions of "separate but equal" cultural worlds whose peoples are in some sense incommensurably different from ourselves and from one another. Relativism aspires directly to mutual tolerance of irreducible differences. Naturalism-the evolutionary-based biological and cognitive understanding of our common nature and humanity-aims first to render cultural diversity comprehensible. If anything, evolution teaches us that from one or a few forms wondrously many kinds will arise.”

Scott Atran (1952) Anthropologist

Introduction: an evolutionary riddle, p. 17
In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion (2002)

Life , People , World , Way

“Of the contemporaries of Newton one of the most prominent was John Wallis. …Wallis was a voluminous writer, and not only are his writings erudite, but they show a genius in mathematics… He was one of the first to recognize the significance of the generalization of exponents to include negative and fractional as well as positive and integral numbers. He recognized also the importance of Cavalieri's method of indivisibles, and employed it in the quadrature of such curves as y=xn, y=x1/n, and y=x0 + x1 + x2 +… He failed in his attempts at the approximate quadrature of the circle by means of series because he was not in possession of the general form of the binomial theorem. He reached the result, however, by another method. He also obtained the equivalent of ds = \! dx \sqrt{1+(\frac{dy}{dx})^2} for the length of an element of a curve, thus connecting the problem of rectification with that of quadrature.”

David Eugene Smith (1860–1944) American mathematician

History of Mathematics (1923) Vol.1

Mathematics , Problem

“A remarkable challenge to Milosevic unfolded in the street of Belgrade in December [1996], led by three politicians who banded together in a movement called Zajedno, or the Together Movement. For weeks, hundreds of thousands of Belgrade citizens braved subfreezing weather to call for democracy. But Washington missed a chance to affect events; except for one ineffectual trip to Washington, Zajedno had no contact with senior American government officials, and the Administrations sent no senior officials to Belgrade for fear that their visits would be used by Milosevic to show support. For the first time in eighteen months, Milosevic felt no significant American pressure, and turned back towards the extreme nationalists, including Karadzic, for support. His tactical skills saved him again, and within weeks, the Together Movement was together no more, as its leaders split among themselves.”

Richard Holbrooke (1941–2010) American diplomat

Source: 1990s, To End a War (1998), p. 345

Fear , Democracy , Support , Chance

“The progress of the colored people on this continent is one of the marvels of modern history. We are perhaps even yet too near to this phenomenon to be able fully to appreciate its significance. That can be impressed on us only as we study and contrast the rapid advancement of the colored people in America with the slow and painful upward movement of humanity as a whole throughout the long human story.”

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

1920s, The Progress of a People (1924)

Pain , People , Color , History

“In man, social intercourse has centred mainly on the process of absorbing fluid into the organism, but in the domestic dog and to a lesser extent among all wild canine species, the act charged with most social significance is the excretion of fluid.”

Olaf Stapledon book Sirius

Source: Sirius (1944), Chapter VIII Sirius at Cambridge (a passage supposedly written by Sirius)

Dogs

“The great generalities of the constitution have a content and a significance that vary from age to age.”

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

Page 17
Other writings, The Nature of the Judicial Process (1921)

Age

“The policy that we have been pursuing has already brought economic success. This country is now experiencing an economic miracle, comparable in significance to that previously enjoyed by West Germany and still enjoyed by Japan.”

Nigel Lawson (1932) British Conservative politician and journalist

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1988/mar/21/budget-resolutions-and-economic-situation in the House of Commons (21 March 1988)

Success , Country

“Stupefied parents must be persuaded that by not vaccinating their children they harm these children and the enitre society. Because, as a significant part of society will not become resistant to a given pathogen, there is a chance that an epidemic will occur. Now, for example, measles returns. Completely harmless in childhood (in my time all children went through it and nothing bad happened), can lead to very serious complications in adult patients.”

Włodzimierz Ptak (1928–2019) immunologist

Mazurek, Maria (7 July 2017): Cudowna armia, która broni naszego ciała http://plus.gazetakrakowska.pl/magazyn/a/cudowna-armia-ktora-broni-naszego-ciala,12271571. Gazeta Krakowska (in Polish), pp. 18–19.

Children , Parent , Chance , Time

“The change toward larger Gestalten and the necessity of this change for both humanistic and formal reasons can be illustrated by considering Sullivan's emphasis upon the phenomena of interaction. This emphasis is very clearly part of a defense of man against the older, more mechanistic thinking which saw him so heavily determined by his internal psychological structure that he could easily be manipulated by pressing the appropriate buttons — a doctrine which made the therapeutic interview into a one-way process with the patient in a relatively passive role. The Sullivanian doctrine places the therapeutic interview on a human level, defining it as a significant meeting between two human beings. The role of the therapist is no longer to be dehumanized in terms of definable purposes which he can plan, and the role of the patient is no longer dehumanized into that of an object of manipulation”

Gregory Bateson (1904–1980) English anthropologist, social scientist, linguist, visual anthropologist, semiotician and cyberneticist

Source: Communication: The Social Matrix of Psychiatry, 1951, p. 263 partly cited in: Cecil Holden Patterson (1958) Counseling the emotionally disturbed. p. 197

Way , Thinking , Change , Parting

“The famous MacGuffin, the Hitchockian object, the pure pretext whose sole role is to set the story in motion but which is in itself nothing at all - the only significance of the MacGuffin lies in the fact that it has some significance for the characters - that it must seem to be of vital importance to them… - that's a MacGuffin, a pure nothing which is non the less efficient… what Lacan calls object petit a: a pure void which functions as the object cause of desire.”

Slavoj Žižek book The Sublime Object of Ideology

183
The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989)

“Many companies are not driving significant business value from the digitized platforms they build as part of their enterprise architecture initiatives. Our 2011 survey of 146 senior IT leaders found that the companies that benefit from their platforms' efforts are consistently relying on four architecture-related practices that encourage organizational learning about the value of enterprise architecture: 1) making IT costs transparent, 2) debating architectural exceptions, 3) performing post-implementation reviews, and 4) making IT investments with enterprise architecture in mind.”

Jeanne W. Ross (1958) American computer scientist

Jeanne W. Ross & Anne Quaadgras (2012) " Enterprise Architecture Is Not Just for Architects http://cisr.mit.edu/blog/documents/2012/09/19/2012_0901_architecturelearning_rossquaadgras.pdf/," Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Vol. XII, No. 9, September 2012

Business , Effort , Learning , Parting

“But is not an event in fact more significant and noteworthy the greater the number of fortuities necessary to bring it about?”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

pg 46
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), Part Two: Soul and Body

“What Phædrus thought and said is significant. But no one was listening at that time and they only thought him eccentric at first, then undesirable, then slightly mad, and then genuinely insane. There seems little doubt that he was insane, but much of his writing at the time indicates that what was driving him insane was this hostile opinion of him. Unusual behavior tends to produce estrangement in others which tends to further the unusual behavior and thus the estrangement in self-stoking cycles until some sort of climax is reached. In Phædrus' case there was a court-ordered police arrest and permanent removal from society.”

Robert M. Pirsig book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Source: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), Ch. 6

Hostility , Behavior , Time , Madness

“The significant problems of living organisms are seldom those in which one can rigidly maintain constant all but two variables. Living things are more likely to present situations in which a half-dozen, or even several dozen quantities are all varying simultaneously, and in subtly interconnected ways. Often they present situations in which the essentially important quantities are either non-quantitative, or have at any rate eluded identification or measurement up to the moment. Thus biological and medical problems often involve the consideration of a most complexly organized whole.”

Warren Weaver (1894–1978) American mathematician

Source: Science and Complexity, 1948, p. 536

Way , Problem

“The idea of the paranoid style as a force in politics would have little contemporary relevance or historical value if it were applied only to men with profoundly disturbed minds. It is the use of paranoid modes of expression by more or less normal people that makes the phenomenon significant.”

Richard Hofstadter The Paranoid Style in American Politics

The Paranoid Style in American Politics (1964)

Men , People , Idea

“I know I cannot paint a flower. I can not paint the sun on the desert on a bright summer morning but maybe in terms of paint color I can convey to you my experience of the flower or the experience that makes the flower of significance to me at that particular time.”

Georgia O'Keeffe (1887–1986) American artist

In a letter to William Milliken (1930), quoted in Portrait of an Artist: A Biography of Georgia O'Keeffe, Laurie Lisle (1981), p. 128
1930s

Color , Flowers , Time , Sun

“[This] was not someone who made one accidental statement. This was three days of significant portions of his three-hour show. He insulted me and the women of Georgetown who have received no apology. He insulted us over 53 times.”

Sandra Fluke (1981) American women's rights activist and lawyer

The View. March 5, 2012.
Media interviews

Women , Time

“By the time Henry II Plantagenet (r. 1154–89) was crowned king of England in 1154, baronial castles outnumbered royal castles. A tough, dynamic ruler, Henry began to rectify the situation at once. In the north, King Malcolm of Scotland surrendered to him, giving Henry significant castles in Scotland and in the border territory. Many older castles like Windsor were strengthened. At Dover the masonry great tower and fore building were built in the 1180s, and concentric walls with half-round towers were added by Richard the Lion Hearted seventeen years later.”

Marilyn Stokstad (1929–2016) art historian

Source: Medieval castles (2005), Ch. 1 : The Great Tower : Norman and Early Plantagenet Castles

Time , Heart

“Life is more than thought: what a man feels, and what his senses awaken in him, are more indispensable to his life’s fullness than subsequent reflection on their significance. Both Stirner and Nietzsche have elaborated Faust’s opening speech in which he bemoans his wasted years in academia: this speech is Goethe’s own impeachment of Kant and Hegel. Philosophy proceeds always under the risk of making a fetish of thinking.”

John Carroll (1944) Australian professor and author

Source: Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974), p. 105

Life , Feeling , Thinking , Sense

“What was most significant about the lunar voyage was not that men set foot on the moon but that they set eye on the earth.”

Norman Cousins (1915–1990) American journalist

Reader’s Digest (September 1980).

Men

“In every human being one or the other of these two instincts is predominant: the active or positive instinct to offer hospitality, the negative or passive instinct to accept it. And either of these instincts is so significant of character that one might as well say that mankind is divisible into two great classes: hosts and guests.”

Max Beerbohm (1872–1956) English writer

Hosts and Guests (1918), Harper's Monthly ( August 1919 http://books.google.com/books?id=H2Q2AQAAMAAJ&q=%22Mankind+is+divisible+into+two+great+classes+hosts+and+guests%22&pg=PA425#v=onepage)
And Even Now http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext99/evnow10.txt (1920)

“I find it difficult to take these psycho-analysts at all seriously when they try to scrutinise spiritual experience by the flicker of their torch-lights,'yet perhaps one ought to, for half-knowledge is a powerful thing and can be a great obstacle to the coming in front of the true Truth. This new psychology looks to me very much like children learning some summary and not very adequate alphabet, exulting in putting their a-b-c-d of the subconscient and the mysterious underground super-ego together and imagining that their first book of obscure beginnings (c-a-t cat, t-r-e-e tree) is the very heart of the real knowledge. They look from down up and explain the higher lights by the lower obscurities; but the foundation of these things is above and not below, upari budhna esam [Rig-Veda, 1.24.7]. The superconscient, not the subconscient, is the true foundation of things. The significance of the lotus is not to be found by analysing the secrets of the mud from which it grows here; its secret is to be found in the heavenly archetype of the lotus that blooms for ever in the Light above. The self-chosen field of these psychologists is besides poor, dark and limited; you must know the whole before you can know the part and the highest before you can truly understand the lowest. That is the promise of the greater psychology awaiting its hour before which these poor gropings will disappear and come to nothing…. Wanton waste, careless spoiling of physical things in an incredibly short time, loose disorder, misuse of service and materials due either to vital grasping or to tamasic inertia are baneful to prosperity and tend to drive away or discourage the Wealth-Power. These things have long been rampant in the society and, if that continues, an increase in our means might well mean a proportionate increase in the wastage and disorder and neutralise the material advantage. This must be remedied if there is to be any sound progress…. Asceticism for its own sake is not the ideal of this yoga, but self-control in the vital and right order in the material are a very important part of it… and even an ascetic discipline is better for our purpose than a loose absence of true control. Mastery of the material does not mean having plenty and profusely throwing it out or spoiling it as fast as it comes or faster. Mastery implies in it the right and careful utilisation of things and also a self-control in their use…. There is a consciousness in [things], a life which is not the life and consciousness of man and animal which we know, but still secret and real. That is why we must have a respect for physical things and use them rightly, not misuse and waste, ill-treat or handle with a careless roughness. This feeling of all being consciousness or alive comes when our own physical consciousness'and not the mind only'awakes out of its obscurity and becomes aware of the One in all things, the Divine everywhere.”

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

Undated
India's Rebirth

Life , Children , Truth , Secret

“Whereas some consequences of our actions occur as planned, others are unanticipated; social actions are not context-free but are constrained, and their outcomes are shaped by the setting in which they occur. Especially significant are the constraints on action that arise from commitments enforced by institutionalization. Because organizations are social systems, goals and procedures tend to achieve an established, value impregnated status. We say that they become institutionalized.”

Philip Selznick (1919–2010) American sociologist

Source: TVA and the grass roots : a study in the sociology of formal organization, 1949, pp. 256-257

“For the development of nationhood from one or more ethnicities, by far the most important and widely present factor is that of an extensively used vernacular literature. A long struggle against an external threat may also have a significant effect as, in some circumstances, does state formation, though the latter may well have no national effect whatever elsewhere. A nation may precede or follow a state of its own but it is certainly assisted by it to a greater self-consciousness. Most such developments are stimulated by the ideal of a nation-state and of the world as a society of nations originally 'imagined', if you like the word, through the mirror of the Bible, Europe's primary textbook, but turned into a formal political philosophy no earlier than the nineteenth century and then next to canonised by President Woodrow Wilson and the Versailles peace settlement of 1920.”

Adrian Hastings (1929–2001) Roman Catholic priest, historian and author

Source: The construction of nationhood: ethnicity, religion, and nationalism (1997), p. 2; As cited in: nationalismproject.org http://www.nationalismproject.org/what/hastings.htm by Eric G.E. Zuelow, 1999-2007.

World , Peace , Imagination , Literature

“The world's energy consumption is bound to vastly increase over the next two or three decades. Estimates by the U. S. Department of Energy anticipate that world demand will rise by more than 50 percent between 1993 and 2015, with the most significant increase in consumption occurring in the Far East. The momentum of Asia's economic development is already generating massive pressures for the exploration and exploitation of new sources of energy and the Central Asian region and the Caspian Sea basin are known to contain reserves of natural gas and oil that dwarf those of Kuwait, the Gulf of Mexico, or the North Sea.”

Zbigniew Brzeziński book The Grand Chessboard

Source: The Grand Chessboard (1997), Chapter 5, The Eurasian Balkans, p. 125.

World , Nature , Sea

“Although control principles are not customarily associated with international relations, there may be some significant advantages in seeing how international relations may benefit by suitable use of control concepts and methods. Over the years, control engineers and scientists have learned how to use information processing and equipment, along with energy and materials to improve the performance of various systems.”

Harold Chestnut (1917–2001) American engineer

Harold Chestnut (1986) " Applications of Control Principles to International Relations http://www.ieeecss.org/CSM/library/1986/dec1986/w13-14.pdf" In: IEEE Control Systems Magazine, Vol.6, No. 6, Dec. 1986. pp. 13-14

Learning

“The sudden change [Wotruba and his wife returned to Vienna in December 1945, at the end of the war; there he started to direct a class for advanced students on the Akademie der Bildenden Künste of Vienna] has had a shock effect on me and on my work. The almost sensual excitement caused by the destruction around me wears off rather quickly. It is not my duty to give this past [of Nazism and the war-years, fh] more significance than it has already been given in literature, on the stage and in the cinema. I am concerned with the figure, with the statuary, i. e., with statics, measurement, equilibrium, and with unity.”

Fritz Wotruba (1907–1975) Austrian sculptor (23 April 1907, Vienna – 28 August 1975, Vienna)

Source: The Human Form: Sculpture, Prints, and Drawings, 1977, p. 22.

War , Literature , Change , Past