Quotes about similarity
page 6

“There can be no question but that Christianity was originally a Jewish promotion, and it is noteworthy that the Christians who try to make their cult respectable in the Third Century claim that they repudiate the Jews. One of the earliest to do this was Tertullian, a Carthaginian shyster, whose Apologeticum, a defense of Christianity, was written at the very beginning of the Third Century. He asserts that Christianity is not a conspiracy of revolutionaries and degenerates, as was commonly believed, and claims that it is an association of loving brothers who have preserved the faith that the Jews forsook – which has been the common story ever since. Our holy men salvage Tertullian by claiming that he was "orthodox" in his early writings, but then, alas! became a Montanist heretic, poor fellow. Tertullian is the author of the famous dictum that he believes the impossible because it is absurd (credo quia absurdum), so he is naturally dear to the heart of the pious. How much Jerome and other saints have tampered with the facts to make Tertullian seem "orthodox" in his early works has been most fully shown by Timothy Barnes in his Tertullian (Oxford, 1971), but even he spends a hundred pages pawing over chronological difficulties that can be reconciled by what seems to me the simple and obvious solution: Tertullian, who was evidently a pettifogging lawyer before he got into the Gospel-business, had sense enough to eliminate from his brief for the Christians facts that would have displeased the pagans whom he was trying to convince that Christians represented no threat to civilized society; he accordingly concealed in his apologetic works the peculiar doctrines of the Christian sect to which he had been originally "converted," but he naturally expounded those doctrines in writings intended, not for the eyes of wicked pagans, but for other brands of Christians, whom he wished to convert to his own sect, which was that of Montanus, a very Holy Prophet (divinely inspired, of course) who was a Phrygian, not a Jew, and who had learned from chats with God that since the Jews had muffed their big opportunity at the time of the Crucifixion, Jesus, when he returned next year or the year after that, was going to set up his New Jerusalem in Phrygia after he had raised hell with the pagans and tormented and butchered them in all of the delightful ways so lovingly described in the Apocalypse, the Hymn of Hate that still soothes the souls of "fundamentalist" Christians today. If, in his Apologeticum and similar works, Tertullian had told the stupid pagans that they were going to be tortured and exterminated in a year or two, they might have doubted that Christians were the innocent little lambs that Tertullian claimed they were.”

Revilo P. Oliver (1908–1994) American philologist

The Jewish Strategy, Chapter 12 "Christianity"
1990s, The Jewish Strategy (2001)

Love, Men, God, Hate

“Man's general way of thinking of the totality, i. e. his general world view, is crucial for overall order of the human mind itself. If he thinks of the totality as constituted of independent fragments, then that is how his mind will tend to operate, but if he can include everything coherently and harmoniously in an overall whole that is undivided, unbroken and without border (for every border is a division or break) then his mind will tend to move in a similar way, and from this will flow an orderly action within the whole.”

David Bohm book Wholeness and the Implicate Order

Wholeness and the Implicate Order (1980)

World, Way, Thinking

“The biblical system of punishment is just perfect. It's perfect and we are doing nothing similar to the biblical system.”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

-Edited Version- Pastor Steve Anderson interviews Dr Kent Hovind (Re-upload) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4y4J7o62-w8, Youtube (January 22, 2015)

Perfection

“Another school opposed this dream with its summons to military adventure in Anatolia, and took its blueprint from a Western reading of classical antiquity. While conceding the demographic break with the ancient Greek world, the westernized intelligentsia claimed a continuing spiritual affinity between modem Western, secular ideals and those of classical Athens. Locating the modern Greeks through their cultural heritage of classical antiquity along an cast—west axis that stretched from Paris and London to Athens and Constantinople, the ‘Hellenic’ map differed profoundly from the ‘Byzantine’ one; for the Latter had a north—south axis from Moscow to Constantinople and Egypt, which aligned a re-nascent Byzantine Greece with Orthodox Russia as the protector of Eastern Christianity. There was a similar contrast in ethnic moralities. While the Byzantine conception of Greek revival envisaged a renewal of the Orthodox Christian virtues and ecclesiastical controls, the secular Hellenic vision advocated a ‘return’ to the qualities of rational enquiry, self-control and reflective choice which seemed to sum up the ethical message of ancient Greece.”

Anthony D. Smith (1939–2016) British academic

Source: The Ethnic Origins of Nations (1987), p. 203.

World, School, Dreams, Reading

“The tension felt in the modern world between those who look at the confluence of neuroscientific data, historical data, and other information illuminating our past and those who simply accept received wisdom as their guide in life is real and profound. Yet it may not be as divisive as one would think. It appears that all of us share the same moral networks and systems, and we all respond in similar ways to similar issues. The only thing different, then, is not our behavior but our theories about why we respond the way we do. It seems to me that understanding that our theories are the source of all our conflicts would go a long way in helping people with different belief systems to get along.”

Michael S. Gazzaniga (1939) American neuroscientist

The Ethical Brain (2005)

Life, Wisdom, People, World

“In many ways art is similar to religion. Its development consists not in new discoveries which invalidate the old truths (as is obviously the case in science). Its development consists in sudden illuminations, similar to lightning, in explosions, which burst in the sky like fireworks.... this illumination shows with blinding light new perspectives, new truths, which are basically nothing but the organic development, the further organic growth of the earlier wisdom... Was the New Testament possible without the Old? Could our time, that of the threshold of the 'third' revelation, be thinkable without the second?”

Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944) Russian painter

Source: 1916 -1920, Autobiography', 1918, p. 33

Wisdom, Truth, Religion, Art

“Developing prayer fitness is similar to developing physical fitness: we must follow a pattern in order to stay balanced.”

Bill Hybels (1951) American writer

Too Busy Not to Pray (2008, InterVarsity Press)

“He who confuses political liberty with freedom and political equality with similarity has never thought for five minutes about either.”

George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) Irish playwright

#23
1900s, Maxims for Revolutionists (1903)

Freedom

“Each of these smaller corporations… to which an Athenian citizen belonged, had… business of its own—money to spend, officers to appoint, rules to make—very similar to that which the state transacted on a larger scale. And it is not to be supposed that Athenians were at all ashamed to take part in such minor business, as English gentlemen are to sit on a vestry or a town council. On the contrary, a large part of the population left their private affairs for slaves to manage, and devoted themselves entirely to their public duties.”

James Gow (scholar) (1854–1923) scholar

p, 125
A Companion to School Classics (1888)

Money, Business, Parting

“Contrary to generations of western progressives, it was not Russian backwardness or mistakes in applying Marxian theory that produced the society that Lyons observed. Similar regimes came into being wherever the communist project was attempted. Lenin’s Russia, Mao’s China, Ceausescu’s Romania and many more were variants of a single dictatorial model. From being a movement aiming for universal freedom, communism turned into a system of universal despotism. That is the logic of utopia. If 1984 is such a powerful myth, one reason is that it captures this truth. Yet there is a flaw in Orwell’s story, which emerges in his picture of the all-powerful interrogator. The dystopia of perpetual power is a fantasy, and so is O’Brien. Soviet torturers were sweating functionaries living in constant fear. Like their victims, they knew that they were resources that would be used up in the service of power. There was no inner-party elite safe from the contingencies of history.”

John Gray (1948) British philosopher

An Old Chaos: Two Times Two Equals Five (p. 52)
The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths (2013)

Truth, Fear, History, Communication

Curtis White (1951) American academic

"The spirit of disobedience: an invitation to resistance"

Money, People, Error, Solitude

“The bond between a man and his profession is similar to that which ties him to his country; it is just as complex, often ambivalent, and in general it is understood completely only when it is broken: by exile or emigration in the case of one’s country, by retirement in the case of a trade or profession.”

Primo Levi book Other People's Trades

"Ex-Chemist"
Other People's Trades (1985)

Country

“Never could I interest myself in a book if it were not the exact diet my mind required at the time, or in the very immediate future. The mind asked, received, and digested. So much was assimilated, so much expelled; then, after a season, similar demands were made, the same processes were repeated out of sight, below consciousness, as is the case in a well-ordered stomach.”

George Moore (novelist) (1852–1933) Irish novelist, short-story writer, poet, art critic, memoirist and dramatist

Source: Confessions of a Young Man http://www.gutenberg.org/files/12278/12278-h/12278-h.htm (1886), Ch. 2.

Books, Time, Future, Season

“An object which is used to create instances, i. e., a template, description, pattern, or "blueprint" of a category or collection of very similar items. Among other things, a class describes the interface the these items will present to the outside world, i. e., the available and appropriate methods, constants, and exceptions. A class represents an abstraction of the items. A class may itself be parameterized (i. e., it actually represents a family of very closely related classes), in which case we refer to it as a parameterized class. Class is a recursive concept. Specifically, we may define classes as being composed of other classes (i. e., heterogeneous composite classes and homogeneous composite classes), in terms of itself (a recursively defined class), as inheriting characteristics from one or more other classes (i. e., the superclasses of the class), and as providing characteristics to other classes (i. e., the subclasses of the class). In some places, classes are defined as "the set of all instances of a type," and the term "type" is given the above definition for class.”

Edward V. Berard

Source: Essays on object-oriented software engineering (1993), p. 328

World, Family

“Patton looked like his father and had similar mannerisms. Their speech was somewhat alike as well. It was pretty evident that young Patton was the son of the old man. However, the impressive thing about George is that he didn't concern himself with his last name. He went out and made a career, earning everything on his own… He did a very good job in command of the 11th ACR and handled himself professionally. It's quite a burden the son of a senior officer has to carry and I must say, to his credit, he did it well. Because down through history, when you look at the sons of famous people, they were not all winners.”

William Westmoreland (1914–2005) United States Army general

On George S. Patton, IV, son of the famous World War II American general. As quoted in The Fighting Pattons (1997) by Brian M. Sobel, p. 129-130

People, History

“They left no stone unturned in de-Hinduizing or denationalizing the Hindus, in effect de-Indianizing the Indians, in various ways. It is preposterous to question their credentials as true Muslims. Their 'Ulama' exhorted them off and on to make the best of their sword to root out the Hindus and convert India into a full-fledged Dar al-lslam. Sayyid Nur ad-Din Mubarak Ghaznawi Suhrawardi, at once a leading Sufi, a leading Muslim divine, and the Shaykh al-lslam of Sultan Iltutmish. led a deputation of Ulama to the Sultan and advised him to give an ultimatum to the Hindus to embrace Islam or face death. The Sultan’s prime minister pleaded powerlessness on his behalf to do so." Then the Shaykh offered an alternative suggestion: ’… the king should at least strive to disgrace, dishonour, and defame the Mushrik and idol- worshipping Hindus…. The sign of the kings being protectors of the faith is this: When they see a Hindu, their faces turn red and they wish to swallow him alive….' A similar suggestion was made to Jalal ad-Din Khalji, who returned ruefully: 'Don’t you see that Hindus, who are the worst enemies of God and of Islam, pass daily below my royal palace to the Jamuna beating drums and playing flutes, and practise before our eyes the worship of the idols with all the rituals? Fie on us unworthy leaders who declare ourselves Muslim kings!… Had I been a Muslim ruler, a real king, or a prince and felt myself strong and powerful enough to protect Islam, any enemy of God and the faith of the Prophet of Islam would not have been allowed to chew betels in a care-free manner and put on a clean garment or live in peace. Qadi Mughis ad- Din’s advice to Sultan Ala' d-Din Khaiji was on similer lines, and the Sultan confessed that he had humiliated and pauperized the Hindus to his utmost even though without caring to know the provisions of the Shari'ah on the subject.”

Harsh Narain (1921–1995) Indian writer

Myths of Composite Culture and Equality of Religions (1990)

Death, God, Peace, Faith

“It all began with my painting a picture of an American flag. Using this design took care of a great deal for me because I didn't have to design it. So I want on to similar things like the targets things the mind already knows. That gave me room to work on other levels. For instance, I've always thought of a painting as a surface; painting it in one color made this very clear... A picture ought to be looked at the same way you look at a radiator.”

Jasper Johns (1930) American artist

His heart belong to DADA, Time 73, 4 May, 1959: 58; as quoted in Jasper Johns, Writings, sketchbook Notes, Interviews, ed. Kirk Varnedoe, Moma New York, 1996, p. 82
1950s

Color, Way, Painting

“The bureaucratic, though capitalistic, spirit of our governments tends towards a state socialism which, in fact, is only state capitalism, but which is dazzling and misleading for those who are easily deceived by external similarities and catch words. The German, or more accurately the Prussian, state socialism whose ideal is a military, landlord and police state, hates democracy above everything else. … It is to them something inherently political. But all politics is diametrically opposed to what is socialist. So by this trick logic we arrive at the conclusion which has gained footing here and there, even in social democratic circles, that democracy as savoring of politics has nothing in common with socialism, but on the contrary is opposed to it. … But the truth is that democracy is not a thing that is specifically political, and we must never forget that we are not merely a socialist party, but a social democratic party because we have perceived that socialism and democracy are inseparable.”

Wilhelm Liebknecht (1826–1900) German socialist politician

No Compromise – No Political Trading (1899)

Hate, Truth, Democracy, Forgetting

“If A is A, a philosopher should equal a philosopher. But that's not the way the cosmos works. Similar things set themselves apart from one another. …What's more, opposites are joined at the hip. Einstein says that most creative acts come from opposition. They come from pitting yourself against someone with another point of view. They come from the law of differentiation. And that was true of Aristotle and his law of identity, his law of noncontradiction, his construction for the base for A is A. Aristotle came up with his idea… to fling a finger in the face of another philosopher [Heraclitus]…”

Howard Bloom (1943) American publicist and author

When a Frog is a River? Aristotle Wrestles Heraclitus
The God Problem: How a Godless Cosmos Creates (2012)

Law, Way, Idea

“As is used in connection with systems engineering, 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. Modeling is the process of making a model. Although the model may not represent the actual phenomenon in all respects, it does describe the essential inputs, outputs, and internal characteristics, as well as provide an indication of environmental conditions similar to those of actual equipment.”

Harold Chestnut (1917–2001) American engineer

Source: Systems Engineering Tools, (1965), p. 108; As cited in: Alberto Ortiz (1992, p. 13)

“For example, in 2007, one woman received two parking tickets that – together – totaled $152. To date, she has paid $550 in fines and fees to the city of Ferguson. She’s been arrested twice for having unpaid tickets, and spent six days in jail. Yet she still – inexplicably – owes Ferguson $541. And her story is only one of dozens of similar accounts that our investigation uncovered.”

Eric Holder (1951) 82nd Attorney General of the United States

2010s, Update on Investigations in Ferguson (2015)

“Correct me if I'm wrong here, but truth is something that arises out of the relationship between language and the world. If I look at a picture alone, it tells me nothing. In the previous incarnation of this lecture, I was going to put a picture of the Titanic and the Lusitania up on the screen. They look very, very similar - four smokestacks. They look almost identical. You look at either picture, true or false? Neither. Put a caption at the bottom of one of them, that changes everything. If you put in the caption, "This is the Lusitania," and the picture is a picture of the Lusitania, then the caption is true. However, the picture itself is neither true nor false. It's just a picture.”

Errol Morris (1948) American filmmaker and writer

Source: The Anti-Post-Modern Post-Modernist http://errolmorris.com/content/lecture/theantipost.html

Truth, World, Change, Falseness

“We intuit also that something similar is possible collectively.”

Charles Eisenstein (1967) American writer

The Ascent of Humanity
The Ascent of Humanity (2007)

“These individual actions are really trans-actions instead of either individual behavior or the "exchange" of commodities. It is this shift from commodities and individuals to transactions and working rules of collective action that marks the transition from the classical and hedonic schools to the institutional schools of economic thinking. The shift is a change in the ultimate unit of economic investigation. The classic and hedonic economists, with their communistic and anarchistic offshoots, founded their theories on the relation of man to nature, but institutionalism is a relation of man to man. The smallest unit of the classic economists was a commodity produced by labor. The smallest unit of the hedonic economists was the same or similar commodity enjoyed by ultimate consumers. One was the objective side, the other the subjective side, of the same relation between the individual and the forces of nature. The outcome, in either case, was the materialistic metaphor of an automatic equilibrium, analogous to the waves of the ocean, but personified as "seeking their level." But the smallest unit of the institutional economists is a unit of activity -- a transaction, with its participants. Transactions intervene between the labor of the classic economists and the pleasures of the hedonic economists, simply because it is society that controls access to the forces of nature, and transactions are, not the "exchange of commodities," but the alienation and acquisition, between individuals, of the rights of property and liberty created by society, which must therefore be negotiated between the parties concerned before labor can produce, or consumers can consume, or commodities be physically exchanged.”

John R. Commons (1862–1945) United States institutional economist and labor historian

"Institutional Economics," 1931

Pleasure, School, Behavior, Nature

“Most of Clinton's policies are very similar to most of mine.”

Rudy Giuliani (1944–2001) American businessperson and politician, former mayor of New York City

1996 statement to Jack Newfield, as quoted by Newfield in the New York Post (8 June 1999)

“When I was eight years old, I played a story game with my younger brother and sister to help them fall asleep. The 'word-story game' was where they would choose a word and I would create a story. Acting and directing are similar to this game, where I am given the words then I fill in the life of the characters.”

Carson Grant (1950) American actor

Kaminsky, Denise, Sept 2007, "Carson Grant directs Romeo and Juliet", Associated Content.
About his thoughts on directing and acting, from article on Associated Content.

Life, Game, Sister, Help

“In 1957, James Vicary, a market researcher, conducted a six week test in a New Jersey movie theatre. A high-speed projector repeatedly and subliminally flashed the slogans ‘drink Coke’ and ‘eat popcorn’ over the film. I thought I’d make my own cinema ad to try something similar. According to Vicary, popcorn sales went up by 57.5% and Coke sales by 18.1%… Whether Vicary’s results were due to the subliminals can never be shown and the experiment has become shrouded in urban myth. This is the Genesis Cinema in East London, which kindly agreed to include our ad amongst the trailers for a screening of Ocean's Twelve, a carefully chosen film which, if the ad works, the audience will not be able to remember. Not a bad thing.”

Derren Brown (1971) British illusionist

TV Series and Specials (Includes DVDs), Trick of the Mind (2004–2006)

Drink, Speed

“Gamal 'Abd al-Nasir and later Yasir Arafat were subjected to similar slander because, like Husayni, they opposed Zionist colonialism.”

Joseph Massad (1963) Associate Professor of Arab Studies

Ibid.
On the Mufti of Jerusalem

“Traditional measures of relatedness provide an incomplete and potentially inaccurate picture of the scope of exploit interrelationships between its SBUs. This is because traditional measures look at relatedness only at the industry or market level. But as we explain below, the relatedness that really matters is that between 'strategic assets' (i. e., those that cannot be accessed quickly and cheaply by nondiversified competitors.) Therefore, to accurately measure whether two businesses are related, we need to go beyond broad definitions of relatedness that focus on market similarity; we need to look at the similarities between the underlying strategic assets of the various businesses that a company is operating in.”

Constantinos C. Markides (1960) Cypriot business theorist

Source: "Related diversification, core competences and corporate performance", 1994, p. 150

Business

“Spherical space is not very easy to imagine. We have to think of the properties of the surface of a sphere—the two-dimensional case—and try to conceive something similar applied to three-dimensional space. Stationing ourselves at a point let us draw a series of spheres of successively greater radii. The surface of a sphere of radius r should be proportional to r2; but in spherical space the areas of the more distant spheres begin to fall below the proper proportion. There is not so much room out there as we expected to find. Ultimately we reach a sphere of biggest possible area, and beyond it the areas begin to decrease. The last sphere of all shrinks to a point—our antipodes. Is there nothing beyond this? Is there a kind of boundary there? There is nothing beyond and yet there is no boundary. On the earth's surface there is nothing beyond our own antipodes but there is no boundary there.”

Arthur Stanley Eddington (1882–1944) British astrophysicist

p, 125
Space, Time and Gravitation (1920)

Imagination, Thinking, Distant, Success

“When you are put into a big city jail, you will probably be frightened, lonely, humiliated, and completely drained of any spirit. This is normal. Talk to the fellow prisoners, write, play cards, read, doodle, do anything to keep your mind occupied, but above all do not verbalize your misfortune to your fellow prisoners. Each one of them has had similar situations, and is sick of thinking about it.”

William Powell (author) book The Anarchist Cookbook

"Postscript", p. 157.
The Anarchist Cookbook (1971)

Thinking, Reading

“Do they lie? Fervently. Do they steal? Only silver and gold. Do they remember? I am in constant touch. Hardly a day passes. The children. Some can’t spell, still. Took a walk in the light-manufacturing district, where everything’s been converted. Lots of little shops, wine bars. Saw some strange things. Saw a group of square steel plates arranged on a floor. Very interesting. Saw a Man Mountain Dean dressed in heavenly blue. Wild, chewing children. They were small. Petite. Out of scale. They came and went. Doors banging. They were of different sexes but wore similar clothes. Wandered away, then they wandered back. They’re vague, you know, they tell you things in a vague way. Asked me to leave, said they’d had enough. Enough what? I asked. Enough of my lip, they said. Although the truth was that I had visited upon them only the palest of apothegms—the one about the salt losing its savor, the one about the fowls of the air.”

Donald Barthelme book Sixty Stories

“Aria”.
Sixty Stories (1981)

Children, Truth, Lie, Sex

“Palestinians and Arabs were not the only ones cast as Nazis. Israel was also accused — by Israelis as well as by Palestinians — of Nazi-style crimes. In the context of Israeli massacres of Palestinians in 1948, a number of Israeli ministers referred to the actions of Israeli soldiers as "Nazi actions," prompting Benny Marshak, the education officer of the Palmach, to ask them to stop using the term. Indeed, after the massacre at al-Dawayima, Agriculture Minister Aharon Zisling asserted in a cabinet meeting that he "couldn't sleep all night… Jews too have committed Nazi acts." Similar language was used after the Israeli army gunned down forty-seven Israeli Palestinian men, women, and children at Kafr Qasim in 1956. While most Israeli newspapers at the time played down the massacre, a rabbi rote that "we must demand of the entire nation a sense of shame and humiliation… that soon we will be like Nazias and the perpetrators of pogroms." The Palestinians were soon to level the same accusation against the Israelis. Such accusations increased during the intifada. One of the communiqués issued by the Unified National Leadership of the Uprising defined the intifada as consisting of "the children and young men of the stones and Molotov cocktails, the thousands of women who miscarried as a result of poison gas and tear gas grenades, and those women whose sons and husbands were thrown in the Nazi prisons." The Israelis were always outraged by such accusations, even when the similarities were stark. When the board of Yad Vashem, for example, was asked to condemn the act of an Israeli army officer who instructed his soldiers to inscribe numbers on the arms of Palestinians, board chairman Gideon Hausner "squelched the initiative, ruling that it had no relevance to the Holocaust."”

Joseph Massad (1963) Associate Professor of Arab Studies

Massad, in Palestinian and Jewish History: Recognition or Submission? in the Autumn 2000 issue of the Journal of Palestine Studies.
On Comparisons of Israel to Nazi Germany

Women, Men, Children, Education

“Attack of the Clones displays some similarities to The Empire Strikes Back, but, overall, it is not as effective a piece of cinema (although the 2002 era special effects make it far more pleasing to the eye). Both films contain romantic subplots and are darker in tone than their predecessors. Both develop a number of unresolved plot elements. And both end on a note that incorporates hope with ambiguity. There is, however, one major difference. The Empire Strikes Back includes a shocking revelation. Nothing of that sort is present in Attack of the Clones. In terms of its plotting, this film is relatively straightforward. There's nothing wrong with that — in fact, it works. In a time when, more often than not, sequels disappoint, it's refreshing to uncover something this high-profile that fulfills the promise of its name and adds another title to a storied legacy.”

James Berardinelli (1967) American film critic

Review http://www.reelviews.net/movies/s/sw2002.html of Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones (2002). Three-and-a-half star reviews

Hope, Disappointment, Time

“Every time we witness an injustice and do not act, we train our character to be passive in its presence and thereby eventually lose all ability to defend ourselves and those we love. In a modern economy it is impossible to seal oneself off from injustice. If we have brains or courage, then we are blessed and called on not to frit these qualities away, standing agape at the ideas of others, winning pissing contests, improving the efficiencies of the neocorporate state, or immersing ourselves in obscuranta, but rather to prove the vigor of our talents against the strongest opponents of love we can find. If we can only live once, then let it be a daring adventure that draws on all our powers. Let it be with similar types whos hearts and heads we may be proud of. Let our grandchildren delight to find the start of our stories in their ears but the endings all around in their wandering eyes. The whole universe or the structure that perceives it is a worthy opponent, but try as I may I can not escape the sound of suffering. Perhaps as an old man I will take great comfort in pottering around in a lab and gently talking to students in the summer evening and will accept suffering with insouciance. But not now; men in their prime, if they have convictions are tasked to act on them.”

Julian Assange (1971) Australian editor, activist, publisher and journalist

[Witnessing, 2007-01-03, 2012-08-16, http://web.archive.org/web/20071020051936/http://iq.org/#Witnessing]

Love, Men, Idea, Courage

“The War of the Roses in England and the Civil War in America were both intestinal conflicts arising out of similar ideas. In the first the clash was between feudalism and the new economic order; in the second, between an agricultural society and a new industrial one. Both led to similar ends; the first to the founding of the English nation, and the second to the founding of the American. Both were strangely interlinked; for it was men of the old military and not of the new economic mind—men, such as Sir Humphrey Gilbert and Sir Walter Raleigh — who founded the English colonies in America.”

J. F. C. Fuller (1878–1966) British Army general

Grant and Lee: A Study in Personality and Generalship, ch. 1 (1957).

Men, War, Idea

“We reject attempts to create a similarity between the Holocaust and the Armenian allegations. Nothing similar to the Holocaust occurred. It is a tragedy what the Armenians went through but not a genocide […] Israel should not determine a historical or philosophical position on the Armenian issue. If we have to determine a position, it should be done with great care not to distort the historical realities.”

Shimon Peres (1923–2016) Israeli politician, 8th prime minister and 9th president of Israel

As quoted in "The Holocaust and Armenian Case: Highlighting the Main Differences" by Ibrahim Kaya http://www.turkishweekly.net/articles.php?id=61, in Turkish Weekly (10 April 2001)

Reality

“In Luther's writings concerning Law and Gospel, he had already observed concerning the phrase, "I am Yahweh your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.." "This is purest Gospel." In other words, the structure of the Christian faith is identical to that of the original biblical covenant, and both are similar to the ways of thinking in ecumenical world politics at the time of Moses: that obedience to a set of stipulations is the required result of gratitude for benefits that have already been received. It is a matter of cause and effect, not simply an arbitrary command.This is the structure of the original Old Testament and of New Testament religious ethics. This contrasts in the sharpest possible way to the attitudes and tactics of far too many religious zealots of the present world, who are determined to use the force of law to compel people to act in accordance with their concept of divine commands. This in turn is one of the major causes of the widespread antipathy to religion that is growing in the modern world, and of the desecration of the name of God.Thus, the misunderstanding of ancient covenants has led to the distortion of the ten commitments of faith into commandments, usually of some human authority.”

George E. Mendenhall (1916–2016) American academic

Our Misunderstood Bible (2006)

God, People, World, Faith

“We want to find [life]. Absolutely. And even now it's really disappointing when you think that, if there is extraterrestrial life, it’s probably bacteria and microbial life. Because you want Star Wars. I want to meet Spock. I think that, as intellectual beings, we fantasize about meeting other intellects similar to our own. It's just a basic human desire.”

Claudia Alexander (1959–2015) American geophysicist and planetary scientist

Life, War, Disappointment, Star

“Another explanation for the persistence of the paranormal, I submit, is due to the transcendental temptation. In my book by that name, I present the thesis that paranormal and religious phenomena have similar functions in human experience; they are expressions of a tendency to accept magical thinking. This temptation has such profound roots within human experience and culture that it constantly reasserts itself.”

Paul Kurtz (1925–2012) American professor of philosophy

Source: The Skeptical Inquirer, Vol. 25, (2001), p. 47

Books, Thinking

“The recent flourishing of New Classical economics, and especially its Equilibrium Business Cycle Theory (EBCT), has given a fresh hearing to the Old—but still developing—Austrian Business Cycle Theory (ABCT). While the New and the Old differ radically in both substance and methods, they exhibit a certain formal congruency that has captured the attention of both schools. The formal similarities between EBCT and ABCT invites a point-by-point comparison, but the comparison itself dramatizes differences between the two views in a way that adds to the integrity and plausibility of the Austrian theory.”

Roger Garrison (1944) American economist

Page 91.
"New Classical and Old Austrian Economics", 1991

School, Way, Business

“There has always been in our national experience a type of mind which elevates hatred to a kind of creed; for this mind, group hatreds take a place in politics similar to the class struggle in some other modern societies.”

Richard Hofstadter (1916–1970) American historian

Source: Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1974), p. 37

“No sooner were the merits of Mr. Arkwright’s inventions fully understood, from the great increase of materials produced in a given time, and the superior quality of the goods manufactured; no sooner was it known, that his assiduity and great mechanical abilities were rewarded with success; than the very men, who had before treated him with contempt and derision, began to devise means to rob him of his inventions, and profit by his ingenuity. Every attempt that cunning could suggest for this purpose was made; by the seduction of his servants and workmen, (whom he had with great labour taught the business) a knowledge of his machinery and inventions was fully gained. From that time many persons began to pilfer something from him; and then by adding something else of their own, and by calling similar productions and machines by other names, they hoped to screen themselves from punishment. So many of these artful and designing individuals had at length infringed on his patent right, that he found it necessary to prosecute several: but it was not without great difficulty, and considerable expence, that he was able to make any proof against them; conscious that their conduct was unjustifiable, their proceedings were conducted with the utmost caution and secresy. Many of the persons employed by them were sworn to secresy, and their buildings and workshops were kept locked up, or otherwise secured. This necessary proceeding of Mr. Arkwright, occasioned, as in the case of poor Hargrave, an association against him, of the very persons whom he had served and obliged. Formidable, however, as it was, Mr. Arkwright persevered, trusting that he should obtain in the event, that satisfaction which he appeared to be justly entitled to.”

Richard Arkwright (1732–1792) textile entrepreneur; developer of the cotton mill

Source: The Case of Mr. Richard Arkwright and Co., 1781, p. 23-24

Men, Hope, Art, Business

“The first machine of Papin was very similar to the gunpowder-engine… of Huyghens. In place of gunpowder, a small quantity of water is placed at the bottom of the cylinder, A; a fire is built beneath it, "the bottom being made of very thin metal," and the steam formed soon raises the piston, B, to the top where a latch, E, engaging a notch in latch engaging the piston rod, H, holds it up until it is desired that it shall drop. The fire being removed, the steam condenses, and a vacuum is formed below the piston, and the latch, E, being disengaged, the piston is driven down by the superincumbent atmosphere and raises the weight which has been, meantime, attached to a rope… passing from the piston rod over pulleys… The machine had a cylinder two and a half inches in diameter, and raised 60 pounds once a minute; and Papin calculated that a machine of a little more than two feet diameter of cylinder and of four feet stroke would raise 8,000 pounds four feet per minute—i. e., that it would yield about one horse-power.”

Robert Henry Thurston (1839–1903) mechanical engineer

Robert Henry Thurston, A History of the Growth of the Steam-engine https://books.google.com/books?id=VDgOAAAAYAAJ (1878) Parts 1-2, pp. 50-51

Water, Horse

“Biases are either “hot” (that is, produced by the agent’s motivational system) or “cold” (more similar to optical illusions).”

Jon Elster (1940) Norwegian academic

Reason and Rationality (2009)

Motivation

Firuz Shah Tughlaq (1309–1388) Tughluq sultan

Shams Siraj Afif quoted in Lal, K. S. (1994). Muslim slave system in medieval India. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan. Chapter 5

Age

“And second, medical space research may revolutionize the technology and the techniques of modern medicine. Whatever new devices are created, for example, to monitor our astronauts, to measure their heart activity, their breathing, their brain waves, their eye motion, at great distances and under difficult conditions, will also represent a major advance in general medical instrumentation. Heart patients may even be able to wear a light monitor which will sound a warning if their activity exceeds certain limits. An instrument recently developed to record automatically the impact of acceleration upon an astronaut's eyes will also be of help to small children who are suffering miserably from eye defects, but are unable to describe their impairment. And also by the use of instruments similar to those used in Project Mercury, this Nation's private as well as public nursing services are being improved, enabling one nurse now to give more critically ill patients greater attention than they ever could in the past.”

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

1963, President John F. Kennedy's last formal speech and public words

Children, Light, Suffering, Past

“It pains to see that some investors are importing raw commodities, although just on their door steps, similar produces are left to decay.”

Ali Mohamed Shein (1948) President of Zanzibar

Insisting investors to give local produce first priority. 2007-11-14 http://www.ippmedia.com/ipp/guardian/2007/11/14/102447.html

Pain

“[Doc Dubois] had been focusing all of his attention in the other direction, on Peach Pit and its iron-rich “children,” PP1, PP2, and PP3, nailing down their exact orbital parameters, taking high-res photographs.
PP3 was especially interesting. It was a congealed glob of mostly iron, similar in composition to Amalthea. It was some fifty kilometers in diameter. And it had a deep cleft on one side, comparable in size to the Grand Canyon, apparently formed by a collision that had rent its outer skin while it was partly congealed. Doob had begun calling PP3 Cleft.”

Neal Stephenson book Seveneves

"Day 700"
Seveneves (2015), Part Two

Children

“And some sad news… the first lesbian couple to legally get married in the state of Massachusetts has split up. They cited irreconcilable similarities.”

Jay Leno (1950) American comedian, actor, writer, producer, voice actor and television host

Monologue, 24 July 2006
The Tonight Show

Sadness

“Twenty-six days after 9/11, Americans were in Afghanistan; 40 hours after a similar al Qaeda attack, the Spanish electorate voted in Socialists on the promise that they would get out of Iraq pronto. Our population may seem soft and flabby on university campuses and think tanks, but the sort of Americans I see out here in rural central California like to fight, work to exhaustion and, for the most part, worry more about what we are going to do to our enemies in the Middle East, rather than they to us.”

Victor Davis Hanson (1953) American military historian, essayist, university professor

2000s, The Power to Do Good (2004)

Thinking, Universe, Fight, Parting

“I am absolutely for the possibility of a happy relationship between adults, regardless of gender, and I think that they can not be denied the right to life worthy. I am also in favor of equal treatment of married couples and cohabiting couples. I did not marry myself. In Poland, the wedding is considered to be a sanctity, and in fact has primarily legal consequences: it guarantees the right to inheritance, to adoption, to visit the hospital in the most dramatic moments. The alcoholic's husband can go ambulance to the hospital with a battered wife, while the cohabitant with a loved and loving concubine cannot. In the Netherlands, spouses and cohabitants have similar rights.”

Tomasz Vetulani (1965) Polish artist

Tomasz Vetulani o Holandii, niskim kraju http://www.nto.pl/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20110605/REPORTAZ01/762330357, nto.pl, 5 June 2011 (in Polish)

Love, Life, Alcohol, Thinking

“Into that world comes a young William Wilberforce — a young Parliamentarian — who saw this and said this is evil, this is wrong, I will do what I can to fight it. In some ways, it's very similar to our situation here with regard to abortion because that's a multi-million dollar industry. You know the money that even our own Congress gives to Planned Parenthood is reminiscent of the evil that was expressed in that day because other Parliament members didn't want to touch that very lucrative business. And so here you've got Wilberforce standing up and saying "this is wrong" and he was vilified and attacked and discredited and marginalized. It sounds kind of familiar to what happens to pro-life people today.”

James Dobson (1936) Evangelical Christian psychologist, author, and radio broadcaster.

William Wilberforce’s Courageous Stand for Life
2011-02-28
11:09
Family Talk with Dr. James Dobson
http://www.myfamilytalk.com/Broadcasts/Broadcast?i=17c6be97-7215-48c4-8168-6de584cc1da1
2011-08-06
Comparing abortion to the slave trade
2011

Life, Money, People, World

“Classical poetry counts on people's similarity. It regards idea associations as unequivocal. This is a mistake. In any case, it rests on a fulcrum of idea associations: 'Above the peaks is peace.'... The poet counts on poetic feelings. And what is a poetic feeling? The whole poetry of peace / quiet stands or falls on the reader's ability to feel. Words are not judged here.”

Kurt Schwitters (1887–1948) German artist

1920s
Source: 'Consistent Poetry Art', Schwitters' contribution to 'Magazine G', No. 3, 1924, ed. Hans Richter; as quoted in I is Style, ed. Siegfried Gohr & Gunda Luyken, (commissioned by Rudi Fuchs, director of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam), NAI Publishers, Rotterdam 2000, p. 151.

People, Peace, Feeling, Idea

“Democracy is incapable of perseverance. Since it is shared by political parties that rule for one, two, or three years, it is unable to conceive and carry out plans of longer duration. One party annuls the plans and efforts of the other. What is conceived and built by one party today is destroyed by another tomorrow. In a country in which much has to be built, in which building is indeed the primary historical requirement, this disadvantage of democracy constitutes a true danger. It is a situation similar to that which prevails in an establishment where masters are changed every year, each new master bringing in his own plans, ruining what was done by some, and starting new things, which will in turn be destroyed by tomorrow's masters.”

Corneliu Zelea Codreanu (1899–1938) Romanian politician

For My Legionaries: The Iron Guard (1936), Politics

Democracy, Effort, Change, Perseverance

“In any epidemic… let us suppose five hundred of the sick, taken indiscriminately, to be subjected to one kind of treatment, and five hundred others, taken in the same manner, to be treated in a different mode; if the mortality is greater among the first, than among the second, must we not conclude that the treatment was less appropriate, or less efficacious in the first class, than in the second? It is unavoidable; for among so large a collection, similarities of condition will necessarily be met with, and all things being equal, except the treatment, the conclusion will be rigorous.”

Pierre Charles Alexandre Louis (1787–1872) French physician

p, 125
Researches on the effects of bloodletting... (1836)

“The whole subject-matter of exact science consists of pointer readings and similar indications.”

Arthur Stanley Eddington (1882–1944) British astrophysicist

Source: The Nature of the Physical World (1928), Ch. 10 The New Quantum Theory

Science, Reading

“Modern civilization, characterized by an enormous increase in the output of mechanized knowledge with the newspaper, the book, the radio and the cinema, has produced a state of numbness, pleasure and self-complacency perhaps only equalled by laughing-gas. In the words of Oscar Wilde we have sold our birthright for a mess of facts. The demands of the machine are insatiable. The danger of shaking men out of the soporific results of mechanized knowledge is similar to that of attempting to arouse a drunken man or one who has taken an overdose of sleeping tablets. The necessary violent measures will be disliked. We have had university professors threatened with the loss of their positions for less than this.”

Harold Innis (1894–1952) Canadian professor of political economy

Source: Essays in Canadian Economic History (1956), p. 383 (originally from an essay entitled The Church in Canada first published in 1947).

Men, Pleasure, Books, Knowledge

“Things started to go downhill. Instead of singing about taking tea with Mary Jane and boppin' your dingus on ol' Sweet Slit Annie it was Help me God I don't know the meaning of life or I believe that love is gonna cure the world of psoriasis and cancer both and I'm gonna tell the people all about it 285 different ways whether you like it or not. And Why is there war well go ask the children they know everything we need to know, and Gee I sure like black folks even if my own folks don't and endless vinyl floods of drivel in similar veins. At that point I started to pack in and resort back to my good old ' 66 goof squat rock. I got out records like 96 Tears by Question Mark and the Mysterians, who were mysterious indeed, and re-whooped to jungle juju cackles like "Wooly Bully," which is indescribable and was recorded by a bunch of guys who drove around in a hearse wearing turbans.”

Lester Bangs (1948–1982) American music critic and journalist

"Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung: A Tales of These Times" (June 1971), p. 9
Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung (1988)

Love, Life, God, War

“At first I thought the exhaustive, nonstop coverage of the O. J. Simpson trial was just an unfortunate excess — an unwelcome departure from the normal good sense and judgment of our television news media. Now we know that it was merely an early example of a new pattern of serial obsessions that periodically take over the airwaves for weeks at a time: the Michael Jackson trial and the Robert Blake trial, the Laci Peterson tragedy and the Chandra Levy tragedy, Britney and KFed, Lindsay and Paris and Nicole.
While American television watchers were collectively devoting 100 million hours of their lives each week to these and other similar stories, our nation was in the process of more quietly making what future historians will certainly describe as a series of catastrophically mistaken decisions on issues of war and peace, the global climate and human survival, freedom and barbarity, justice and fairness. For example, hardly anyone now disagrees that the choice to invade Iraq was a grievous mistake. Yet, incredibly, all of the evidence and arguments necessary to have made the right decision were available at the time and in hindsight are glaringly obvious.”

Al Gore (1948) 45th Vice President of the United States

Quotes, The Assault on Reason (2007)

War, Peace, Justice, Departure

“It is a dreadful picture—this picture of Italy under the rule of the oligarchy. There was nothing to bridge over or soften the fatal contrast between the world of the beggars and the world of the rich. The more clearly and painfully this contrast was felt on both sides—the giddier the height to which riches rose, the deeper the abyss of poverty yawned—the more frequently, amidst that changeful world of speculation and playing at hazard, were individuals tossed from the bottom to the top and again from the top to the bottom. The wider the chasm by which the two worlds were externally divided, the more completely they coincided in the like annihilation of family life—which is yet the germ and core of all nationality—in the like laziness and luxury, the like unsubstantial economy, the like unmanly dependence, the like corruption differing only in its tariff, the like criminal demoralization, the like longing to begin the war with property. Riches and misery in close league drove the Italians out of Italy, and filled the peninsula partly with swarms of slaves, partly with awful silence. It is a terrible picture, but not one peculiar to Italy; wherever the government of capitalists in a slave-state has fully developed itself, it has desolated God's fair world in the same way as rivers glisten in different colours, but a common sewer everywhere looks like itself, so the Italy of the Ciceronian epoch resembles substantially the Hellas of Polybius and still more decidedly the Carthage of Hannibal's time, where in exactly similar fashion the all-powerful rule of capital ruined the middle class, raised trade and estate-farming to the highest prosperity, and ultimately led to a— hypocritically whitewashed—moral and political corruption of the nation. All the arrant sins that capital has been guilty of against nation and civilization in the modern world, remain as far inferior to the abominations of the ancient capitalist-states as the free man, be he ever so poor, remains superior to the slave; and not until the dragon-seed of North America ripens, will the world have again similar fruits to reap.”

Theodor Mommsen (1817–1903) German classical scholar, historian, jurist, journalist, politician, archaeologist and writer

Italy under the Oligarchy
The History of Rome - Volume 4: Part 2

Life, God, War, World

“All acts of reasoning seem to me to be different cases of one uniform process which may perhaps be best described as the substitution of similars… The chief difficulty consists in showing that all the forms of the old logic, as well as the fundamental rules of mathematical reasoning, may be explained upon the same principle; and it is to this difficult task I have devoted the most attention.”

William Stanley Jevons (1835–1882) English economist and logician

Preface
The Substitution of Similars, The True Principles of Reasoning (1869)

Mathematics

“They were brought out of Africa and into chains in America. Or they were born into slavery here. Yes, I am talking about the first African-Americans to reach these shores, but I am also describing the animals now enslaved in circuses. The species and continents are different, but the stories are tragically similar. The animals in circuses are held against their will by chains and domination. They are forced to perform a series of acts by coercion and violence because they would never normally do these things on their own. They can never choose their own partners, their own homes, their own food or have control over any aspect of their lives. I don't care how this is dressed up by promoters with music and lights, it is still slavery.”

Richard Pryor (1940–2005) American stand-up comedian, actor, social critic, writer, and MC

Wrote in November 2005, criticizing a black-owned circus; as quoted in "Pryor Fought Animal Abuse" by Lisa Lange, in Albuquerque Journal (15 December 2005) https://www.newspapers.com/newspage/206590625/

Food, Music, Home, Light

“Control every single moment of a slaves life, every minute of their day; it would tell them where to go, what to wear, where to sleep, when to work, when to eat, what to eat, when to speak, when to be silent. This is probably the biggest form of government that human beings have ever invented in the whole of history. I vigorously support Abraham Lincoln’s federal takeover of the southern states, and his highly commendable commitment to human rights. Lincoln viewed secession as an attempt to expand slavery. The Confederacy was based on the glorification of inequality and tyranny. The southern leaders clearly spelled out their views. Their motivation was not to be left alone, it was to enshrine slavery. CSA President Jefferson Davis said all black people are 'not fit to govern themselves', and they should be treated in a manner similar to 'lunatics, criminals and children.”

Jefferson Davis (1808–1889) President of the Confederate States of America

Joshua Felipe, as quoted in "The Libertarian Attack on Abraham Lincoln" https://diplomatdc.wordpress.com/2010/06/05/the-libertarian-attack-on-abraham-lincoln-by-gregory-hilton/ (5 June 2010), by Gregory Hilton, The DC World Affairs Blog, WordPress

Life, Children, People, History

“We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native language. The categories and types that we isolate from the world of phenomena we do not find there because they stare every observer in the face; on the contrary, the world is presented in a kaleidoscope flux of impressions which has to be organized by our minds—and this means largely by the linguistic systems of our minds. We cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe significances as we do, largely because we are parties to an agreement to organize it in this way—an agreement that holds throughout our speech community and is codified in the patterns of our language. The agreement is of course, an implicit and unstated one, but its terms are absolutely obligatory; we cannot talk at all except by subscribing to the organization and classification of data that the agreement decrees. We are thus introduced to a new principle of relativity, which holds that all observers are not led by the same physical evidence to the same picture of the universe, unless their linguistic backgrounds are similar, or can in some way be calibrated”

Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897–1941) American linguist

Whorf (1940) "Science and linguistics" in: MIT Technology Review Vol 42. p. 229-31.

World, Way, Communication, Nature

“Gravitation is not only similar to inertia in its generality, it is also measured by the same number… the mass. The inertial mass is what Newton calls the "quantity of matter": it is a measure for the resistance offered by a body to a force trying to alter its state of motion. It might be called the "passive mass." The gravitational mass, on the other hand, is a measure of the force exerted by the body in attracting other bodies. We might call it the "active" mass. The equality of active and passive, or gravitational and inertial, mass was in Newton's system a most remarkable accidental co-incidence, something like a miracle. Newton himself decidedly felt it as such, and made experiments to verify it, by swinging a pendulum with a hollow bob which could be filled with different materials. The force acting on the pendulum is proportional to its gravitational mass, the inertia to its inertial mass: the period of its swing thus depends on the ratio between these two masses. The fact that the period is always the same therefore proves that the gravitational and inertial masses are equal.”

Willem de Sitter (1872–1934) Dutch cosmologist

Kosmos (1932), Above is Beginning Quote of the Last Chapter: Relativity and Modern Theories of the Universe -->

Dependency

“To begin again at the beginning in a proper philosophical manner, one person is a unity, and somehow, after the long complex process, a work of art is a similar unity. But the person is fairly unintelligible and the art is intelligible. Primarily what is intelligible is the nature of the artist, either of the past or now. The interests, thought and quality of the artist make the final total quality of the work.”

Donald Judd (1928–1994) artist

Donald Judd (1983) in: Donald Judd (1987) Complete writings, 1975-1986. p. 28 ; Quoted in: " Archives http://www.juddfoundation.org/archives" at juddfoundation.org, 2014 1980

Art, Intelligence, Nature, Past

“I have always felt that humor was a wonderful vehicle to let us become connected with each other and ourselves… I try to portray the similarities and polarities in men and women, so that we can acknowledge and embrace our collective consciousness.”

Lily Tomlin (1939) American actress, comedian, writer, and producer

As quoted in Variety magazine (2003)

Women, Men

“When the time-table is so arranged as to call for speed nearly equal to the full capacity of the engine, it is very obvious that the risks of failure in making time, must be much greater than at reduced rates, and when they do occur, the efforts made to gain time must be correspondingly greater and uncertain. A train whose prescribed rate of speed is thirty miles per hour, having lost five minutes of time, and being required to gain it, in order to meet and pass an opposing train at a station ten miles distant, must necessarily increase its speed to forty miles an hour; and a train whose rate of speed is 40 miles per hour, under similar circumstances, must increase its speed to 60 miles per hour.”

Daniel McCallum (1815–1878) Canadian engineer and early organizational theorist

Source: Report of the Superintendent of the New York and Erie Railroad to the Stockholders (1856), p. 42; Cited in: Scientific American April 19, 1856. p. 254 ( online http://books.google.com/books?id=tuw8AQAAIAAJ&pg=PA254#v=onepage&q&f=false); and Vose (1857, p. 429)

Failure, Effort, Distant, Time

“So-called professional mathematicians have, in their reliance on the relative incapacity of the rest of mankind, acquired for themselves a reputation for profundity very similar to the reputation for sanctity possessed by theologians.”

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–1799) German scientist, satirist

K 52
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook K (1789-1793)

“A specimen of research that is to be examined with the help of a microscope has first to be carefully prepared, cleaned, freed from extraneous matter, and firmly kept under the lens. In a similar way, the “bare object” to be examined by wisdom, is prepared by Bare Attention. It cleans the object of investigation from the impurities of prejudice and passion; it frees it from alien admixtures and from points of view not pertaining to it; it holds it firmly before the Eye of Wisdom, by slowing down the transition from the receptive to the active phase of the perceptual or cognitive process, thus giving a vastly improved chance for close and dispassionate investigation.”

Nyanaponika Thera (1901–1994) German Buddhist monk

Source: The Heart of Buddhist Meditation (1965), pp. 34-35

Wisdom, Way, Passion, Chance

“Many of our services cost more than do similar services in Europe, because, although we have a substantial quantitative deficiency of public services, the decision-takers and policy-makers, both inside and outside Government as I have said before today, being themselves from the better-off (to use a popular euphemism) sectors of our society, not only demand the highest standards of provision of public services to meet what they consider their own essential needs (for example, in public car parks); but also find it difficult to think of provision for the rest of the population in terms of standards relative to our real total resources.”

John James Cowperthwaite (1915–2006) British colonial administrator

February 24, 1966, page 72.
Official Report of Proceedings of the Hong Kong Legislative Council

Cars, Thinking, Decision

“It is all very well for intellectuals in their air-conditioned offices to bemoan the unbelievable impact of either mean-spirited or silly rumours in the genesis of communal riots among the common folk. But in this instance, in their own reports on and analysis of communal violence, factual data were just as shamelessly replaced with invention, rumours and conspiracy theories. In this respect, religious extremists such as the Shahi Imam have behaved themselves better than the secularist campaigners who pose as the guardians of modernity and the scientific temper. Arundhati Roy risked the international fame she so clearly cherishes by going public with blatant lies about atrocities against named Gujarati Muslim women who turned out to be either non-existent or abroad at the time of the riots. Perhaps a fiction writer can afford this, but the news media with their deontology of accuracy and objectivity made themselves guilty of similar howlers. Internationally influential media like the Washington Post copied from an Islamist website rumours about Hindu provocations behind the Godhra carnage, falsely claiming a Gujarati journalist as source, and never publishing a correction when the journalist in question denied ever having put out such a story. With such media, who needs rumors?”

Koenraad Elst (1959) orientalist, writer

2000s, Gujarat after Godhra: Real violence, selective outrage (2003)

Women, Communication, Question, Time

“I give you three examples: first, medical space research may open up new understanding of man's relation to his environment. Examinations of the astronaut's physical, and mental, and emotional reactions can teach us more about the differences between normal and abnormal, about the causes and effects of disorientation, about changes in metabolism which could result in extending the life span. When you study the effects on our astronauts of exhaust gases which can contaminate their environment, and you seek ways to alter these gases so as to reduce their toxicity, you are working on problems similar to those in our great urban centers which themselves are being corrupted by gases and which must be clear.”

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

1963, President John F. Kennedy's last formal speech and public words

Life, Way, Understanding, Problem

“Computing spread out much, much faster than educating unsophisticated people can happen. In the last 25 years or so, we actually got something like a pop culture, similar to what happened when television came on the scene and some of its inventors thought it would be a way of getting Shakespeare to the masses. But they forgot that you have to be more sophisticated and have more perspective to understand Shakespeare. What television was able to do was to capture people as they were. So I think the lack of a real computer science today, and the lack of real software engineering today, is partly due to this pop culture.”

Alan Kay (1940) computer scientist

ACM Queue A Conversation with Alan Kay Vol. 2, No. 9 - Dec/Jan 2004-2005 http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1039523 2000s, A Conversation with Alan Kay, 2004–05

People, Education, Way, Understanding

“Another influence of that period was the philosophy of Idealistic Positivism of Hans Vaihinger. Von Bertalanffy met Vaihinger in Vienna and for a time, as a student, lived in his house.10 According to the philosophy of Idealistic Positivism absolute truths and ideal norms of human conduct did not exist, rather man created them as fictions important for the individual and social survival. The idea of relativity of truths and norms postulated by Vainhinger bore a similarity to the relativism of different points of view and categories of thinking postulated by Nicholas of Cusa. The philosophies of Cusanus and Vaihinger were undoubtedly instrumental in shaping von Bertalanffy's 'perspectivist' epistemology and his idea of relativity of categories.”

Thaddus E. Weckowicz (1919–2000) Canadian psychologist

Source: Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1901-1972) (1989), p. 5

Truth, Idea, Thinking, Time

“French spoliation claims. During the last session of the Congress legislation was introduced looking to the payment of the remaining claims generally referred to as the French spoliation claims. The Congress has provided for the payment of many similar claims. Those that remain unpaid have been long pending. The beneficiaries thereunder have every reason to expect payment. These claims have been examined by the Court of Claims and their validity and amount determined. The United States ought to pay its debts. I recommend action by the Congress which will permit of the payment of these remaining claims.”

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

1920s, Second State of the Union Address (1924)

“Some of the beliefs and legends bequethed to us by Antquity are so universally and firmly established that we have become accustomed to consider them as being almost as ancient as humanity itself. Nevertheless we are tempted to inquire how far the fact that some of these beliefs and legends have so many features in common is due to chance, and wether the similarity between them may not point to the exestience of an ancient, totally unknown and unsuspected civilization of which all other traces have disappeared.”

Frederick Soddy (1877–1956) chemist and physicist from England

As quoted in Morning of the Magicians (1963) by Louis Pauwels and Jacques Berger, p. 181

Universe, Chance

“The term "chorus form" is often used to denote a type of performance - typically in jazz or rhythm 'n' blues, but also sometimes in country music and rock 'n' roll - where a given structural unit is repeated an indefinite number of times. The unit itself may be sectionally elaborate, as in the case of most Tin Pan Alley ballads. It may be twelve-bar blues, or something similar, as in the case of many R&B and rock 'n' roll numbers: here, a three-line AAB lyric, set to a three-phrase melody, is underpinned by a single gestural sweep in the harmony. Occasionally - as in some funk, dub reggae, and hip-hop, for example - it may approach the status of open-ended process.”

Richard Middleton British musicologist

[Key Terms in Popular Music and Culture, ISBN 0631212639, Middleton, Richard, 1999]

Music, Time, Country

“Take a moment to remember the times on your own spiritual quest when you felt most enthusiastic. We want to pinpoint the times in which we felt more God conscious and devotional than ever before. Conversely, look at the times when you felt unenthused and do a similar analysis. These questions might help stimulate your thought process: Are you enthusiastic about your existence as a servant of the Lord? Are you enthusiastic to follow the basic principles that will help elevate your consciousness? Are you enthusiastic in the association of saintly people? Are you enthusiastic about what you can experience in your purest state? We must examine our spiritual life on a daily, weekly, and even yearly basis. This examination will help us recognize how various activities and thoughts affect us. We should note how the quality of our experiences varies according to our absorption in the process of bhakti.”

Bhakti Tirtha Swami (1950–2005) American Hindu writer

Source: Books, Spiritual Warrior V: Making the Mind Your Best Friend (Hari-Nama Press, 2003), Chapter 4 - The Necessity of Enthusiasm

Life, God, People, Question

“Everyone thinks chemistry and alchemy are so similar, but they’re really not. They’re not even related. They just happen to live in the same house.”

Patrick Rothfuss book The Name of the Wind

Source: The Name of the Wind (2007), Chapter 44, “The Burning Glass” (p. 328)

Thinking, Housing

“I’m quite certain that we’ll have such [lunar] bases in our lifetime, somewhat like the Antarctic stations and similar scientific outposts, continually manned.”

Neil Armstrong (1930–2012) American astronaut; first person to walk on the moon

BBC interview (1970) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PtdcdxvNI1o

“I urge the Commission on Elections to ditch its plan to use a combination of manual and computerized elections next year and exert all efforts instead to ensure that the 2016 national polls will still be fully automated. Returning to manual polls is a cause for serious concern due to its dangerous implications on the country’s electoral process and a step backwards after having fully automated the elections previously. The proposed "hybrid polls" raises the chilling prospect of a wide-scale electoral cheating similar to what happened during the 2004 presidential elections and brings back memories of "Hello Garci."”

Francis Escudero (1969) Filipino politician

Escudero, F. [Francis]. (2015, July 7). Retrieved from Official Facebook Page of Francis Escudero https://www.facebook.com/senchizescudero/posts/10153411040670610/ 2015, Facebook

Effort, Memory, Cheating, Country

“The human understanding is moved by those things most which strike and enter the mind simultaneously and suddenly, and so fill the imagination; and then it feigns and supposes all other things to be somehow, though it cannot see how, similar to those few things by which it is surrounded.”

Francis Bacon book Novum Organum

Aphorism 47
Novum Organum (1620), Book I

Imagination, Understanding

“Each state pursues its own interest's, however defined, in ways it judges best. Force is a means of achieving the external ends of states because there exists no consistent, reliable process of reconciling the conflicts of interest that inevitably arise among similar units in a condition of anarchy.”

Kenneth N. Waltz book Man, the State, and War

Source: Man, the State, and War (1959), Chapter VIII, Conclusion, p. 238

Way

“I collaborated on a brain imaging study in 2010, and the overwhelming conclusion we reached is that the neural patterns were very similar for true and false memories. We are a long way away from being able to look at somebody's brain activity and reliably classify an authentic memory versus one that arose through some other process.”

Elizabeth Loftus (1944) American cognitive psychologist

I could have sworn...Why you can’t trust your memory https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21929310-400-i-could-have-sworn-why-you-cant-trust-your-memory/ (8/21/2013)

Way, Study, Memory, Falseness

“Always to me any aroused group was a good group, and therefore I accepted an invitation to talk to the women's branch of the Ku Klux Klan at Silver Lake, New Jersey, one of the weirdest experiences I had in lecturing. […] Never before had I looked into a sea of faces like these. I was sure that if I uttered one word, such as abortion, outside the usual vocabulary of these women they would go off into hysteria. And so my address that night had to be in the most elementary terms, as though I were trying to make children understand. In the end, through simple illustrations I believed I had accomplished my purpose. A dozen invitations to speak to similar groups were proffered. The conversation went on and on, and when we were finally through it was too late to return to New York.”

Margaret Sanger (1879–1966) American birth control activist, educator and nurse

Source: Margaret Sanger: An Autobiography (1938), Chapter 29, "While the Doctors Consult", p. 366.

Women, Children, Understanding, Sea

“The subject of a gestalt demonstration knows that his perception has shifted because he can make it shift back and forth repeatedly while he holds the same book or piece of paper in his hands. Aware that nothing in his environment has changed, he directs his attention increasingly not to the figure (duck or rabbit) but to the lines of the paper he is looking at. Ultimately he may even learn to see those lines without seeing either of the figures, and he may then say (what he could not legitimately have said earlier) that it is these lines that he really sees but that he sees them alternately as a duck and as a rabbit. …As in all similar psychological experiments, the effectiveness of the demonstration depends upon its being analyzable in this way. Unless there were an external standard with respect to which a switch of vision could be demonstrated, no conclusion about alternate perceptual possibilities could be drawn.”

Thomas Kuhn book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

Source: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), X. Revolutions as Changes of World View, p. 114 (3rd edn.)

Books, Way, Learning, Change

“There is no rivalry, no competition to get employment among slaves, as among free laborers. Nor is there a war between master and slave… His feeling for his slave never permits him to stint him in old age. The slaves are all well fed, well clad, have plenty of fuel, and are happy. They have no dread of the future—no fear of want. A state of dependence is the only condition in which reciprocal affection can exist among human beings—the only situation in which the war of competition ceases, and peace, amity and good will arise. A state of independence always begets more or less of jealous rivalry and hostility. A man loves his children because they are weak, helpless and dependent; he loves his wife for similar reasons.”

George Fitzhugh (1806–1881) American activist

Source: Sociology For The South: Or The Failure Of A Free Society (1854), pp. 246-247

Love, Hostility, War, Children

“Magic and art tend to share a lot of the same language. They both talk about evocation, invocation, and conjuring. If you’re trying to conjure a character, then maybe you should treat that with the respect that you would if you were trying to conjure a demon. Because if an image of a god is a god, then in some sense the image of a demon is a demon. I’m thinking of people like Malcolm Lowry, the exquisite author of Under the Volcano. There are kabbalistic demons that are lurking all the way through Under the Volcano, and I assume they were probably similar forces to the ones that eventually overwhelmed Lowry’s life, such as the drinking and the madness. When I hear alcoholics talk about having their demons, I think that they’re probably absolutely literally correct.”

Alan Moore (1953) English writer primarily known for his work in comic books

The Believer interview (2013)

Life, God, People, Alcohol

“I love Blackpool. We're very similar. We both look better in the dark.”

Ian Holloway (1963) English association football player and manager

Reported on The Football League Show, BBC 1, 26 September 2009. Gordon Strachan v Ian Holloway: Sportsmail picks their top 10 funny quotes ahead of Middlesbrough's showdown with Blackpool, 2009-12-08, Mail Online, 2011-04-29 http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/football/article-1234084/Gordon-Strachan-v-Ian-Holloway-Sportsmail-picks-10-funny-quotes-ahead-Middlesbroughs-showdown-Blackpool.html, Sourced quotes

Love

“There isn't a single person in Israel who wants to destroy or harm Egypt. In contrast, there's a whole country that openly wants to destroy Israel, and that's Iran. That is the difference between ours and Egypt's security problems. Egypt is not threatened by anyone. Israel is threatened by the second circle. Israel has never been and will never be a danger to Egypt. […] Israel is not threatening Iran, Iran is threatening Israel. The situation is not similar.”

Shimon Peres (1923–2016) Israeli politician, 8th prime minister and 9th president of Israel

ArabYnet online chat (6 February 2006) http://www.ynet.co.il/articles/0,7340,L-3041619,00.html

Problem, Personality, Country

“… it is certainly wrong to condemn poor old Homo Sapiens as the only species to kill his own kind, the only inheritor of the mark of Cain, and similar melodramatic charges.”

Richard Dawkins book The Selfish Gene

Source: The Selfish Gene (1976, 1989), Ch. 5. Aggression: stability and the selfish machine

“The Samaritans (whose beginnings were pre-Josianic) have a Pentateuch quite similar to the familiar Jewish Pentateuch. …our Pentateuchal text was fairly well established before the rift between the Samaritans and Judeans.”

Cyrus H. Gordon (1908–2001) American linguist

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

“The comprehensive picture drawn here of Vyasa in the MBh includes his functions as seer, priest, ascetic, and spiritual preceptor. Of all the epic’s, Vyasa is the one who most closely corresponds to the idea of brahminhood promulgated by the dharma literature and the MBh’s Shanti Parvan- The section of the epic having the greater similarity to the dharma literature.”

Vyasa central and revered figure in most Hindu traditions

In pp.50-51.
Sources, Seer of the Fifth Veda: Kr̥ṣṇa Dvaipāyana Vyāsa in the Mahābhārata

Literature, Idea

“Well! according to the sketch your picture [which Whistler sent him in a letter] seems well-composed, the lines of sky, sea, the position of the figures all that seems very, very well done[, ] on opening the letter it struck me immediately, an impression of decorative ornamentation which makes a good picture appeal to the eye as well - upside down and any other way up. Arrangement, layout, composition. etc - mysterious words harmonious laws - in no way conventional - needs of the Artist glory of the Raphael's Michelangelo's etc etc - for me a repetition a hesitation, a matter of feeling - which should also be a law, a mathematical thing, like form, like light, colour[. ] I find similarities with the colour method which works by opposing colours to arrive at a harmony that is to say to make a canvas a complete whole, to put into a small space an image with all the forces all the principles of nature - [instead of showing a part of it]..”

Henri Fantin-Latour (1836–1904) painter from France

quote from a letter of Fantin-Latour, Paris 7-14 October 1862 to James Whistler; from The Correspondence of James McNeill Whistler - Repository: Glasgow University Library http://www.whistler.arts.gla.ac.uk/correspondence/people/display/?cid=1075&nameid=Manet_E&sr=0&surname=&firstname=&rs=1 - System Number: 01075; Call Number: MS Whistler F 6.

Law, Way, Feeling, Mathematics

“The expression on his features was one of a pained disapproval, similar to that of a gentleman of the cloth when observing the young folks behaving like young folks.”

Lin Carter book The Wizard of Zao

Source: The Wizard of Zao (1978), Chapter 5 (p. 69)

Pain, Clothes

“By organizational field, we mean those organizations that, in the aggregate, constitute a recognized area of institutional life: key suppliers, resource and product consumers, regulatory agencies, and other organizations that produce similar services or products.”

Paul DiMaggio (1951) American sociologist

Source: "The iron cage revisited: Institutional isomorphism and collective rationality in organizational fields," 1983, p. 148

Life

“The method of successive approximations is often applied to proving existence of solutions to various classes of functional equations; moreover, the proof of convergence of these approximations leans on the fact that the equation under study may be majorised by another equation of a simple kind. Similar proofs may be encountered in the theory of infinitely many simultaneous linear equations and in the theory of integral and differential equations. Consideration ofjkbni semiordered spaces and operations between them enables us to easily develop a complete theory of such functional equations in abstract form.”

Leonid Kantorovich (1912–1986) Russian mathematician

"On one class of functional equations" (1936), as cited in: O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F., " Leonid Kantorovich http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Kantorovich.html", MacTutor History of Mathematics archive, University of St Andrews

Study, Success

“In contrast to the ultimate realization that he was dealing with a formidable enemy in the east, Hitler clung to the end to his preconceived opinion that the troops of the Western countries were poor fighting material. Even the Allied successes in Africa and Italy could not shake his belief that these soldiers would run away at the first serious onslaught. He was convinced that these soldiers would run away from the first serious onslaught. He was convinced that democracy enfeebled a nation. As late as the summer of 1944 he held to his theory that all the ground that had been lost in the West would be quickly reconquered. His opinions on the Western statesmen had a similar bias. He considered Churchill, as he often stated during the situation conferences, an incompetent, alcoholic demagogue. And he asserted in all seriousness that Roosevelt was not a victim of infantile paralysis but of syphilitic paralysis and was therefore mentally unsound. These opinions, too, were indications, of his flight from reality in the last years of his life.”

Albert Speer (1905–1981) German architect, Minister of Armaments and War Production for Nazi Germany

Source: Inside the Third Reich: Memoirs (1970), p. 306-307

Life, Alcohol, Democracy, Reality

Quotes about similarity page 6

Quotes about similarity
page 6