Quotes about simple
page 10

“Herbert Marcuse made a lengthy, impassioned response. What good was the Voting Rights Act accomplishing, he said, since the blacks were pursuing the tawdry values as their white fellow citizens? They were accepting the same capitalist values and aping the life-restricting respectability of the middle class. At a prolonged pause in his reply, just as he was getting his second wind, I rose and asked him a simple question: 'Which do you prefer, a situation in which the blacks had no freedom to vote or one in which they had the freedom to vote but chose wrongly?' Marcuse's response surprised the audience--and subsequently perhaps Marcuse himself: 'Since I have gone so far out on a limb, I may as well go all the way. I would prefer that they did not have the freedom to vote if they are going to make the wrong use of their freedom.”

Sidney Hook (1902–1989) American philosopher

For this and other reasons, I suspect, Marcuse never became the darling of the black American students.
Out of Step (1985)

Life, Way, Question, Freedom

“It is, I claim, nonsense to say that it does not matter which individual man acted as the nucleus for the change. It is precisely this that makes history unpredictable into the future. The Marxian error is a simple blunder in logical typing, a confusion of individual with class.”

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

Source: Mind and Nature, a necessary unity, 1988, p. 45

Error, History, Change, Future

“The future of mankind, for the socialist, is simple: pull down the existing order and allow the future to emerge.”

Roger Scruton (1944–2020) English philosopher

"Eliot and Conservatism" (p. 208)
A Political Philosophy (2006)

Future

“It is my belief that everyone is a stranger as an individual and since everyone is a stranger, that is precisely the reason we cannot question someone else’s strangeness or otherness. It is that simple. We ourselves are strangers. Often even to ourselves… And while people have some kind of desperate desire to belong somewhere, as I see it, many people also have a perpetual desire to be outsiders.”

András Petőcz (1959) Hungarian writer

"It is good to be a stranger" http://www.hungarianpresence.ca/Culture/Literature/varnai-interview-e.cfm. Interview

People, Question

“Muslim politicians do not recognize secular categories of life as the basis of their politics because to them it means the weakening of the community in its fight against the Hindus. The poor Muslims will not join the poor Hindus to get justice from the rich. Muslim tenants will not join Hindu tenants to prevent the tyranny of the landlord. Muslim labourers will not join Hindu labourers in the fight of labour against the capitalist. Why? The answer is simple. The poor Muslim sees that if he joins in the fight of the poor aginst the rich, he may be fighting against a rich Muslim. The Muslim labourer feels that if he joins in the onslaught of labour against capitalist he will be injuring a Muslim mill-owner. He is conscious that any injury to a rich Muslim, to a Muslim landlord or to a Muslim mill-owner, is a disservice to the Muslim community, for it is thereby weakened in its struggle against the Hindu community.”

Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (1891–1956) Father of republic India, champion of human rights, father of India's Constitution, polymath, revolutionary…

Source: Pakistan or The Partition of India (1946), p. 236

Life, Justice, Feeling, Communication

“After Moses Himself she is the most blissful sight. I relationship was then form
But hereof am I not learned to long to see her bodily presence while I am here, but the virtues of her blessed soul: her truth, her wisdom, her charity; whereby I may learn to know myself and reverently dread my God. And when our good Lord had shewed this and said this word: Wilt thou see her? I answered and said: Yea, good Lord, I thank Thee; yea, good Lord, if it be Thy will. Oftentimes I prayed this, and I weened to have seen her in bodily presence, but I saw her not so. And Jesus in that word shewed me ghostly sight of her: right as I had seen her afore little and simple, so He shewed her then high and noble and glorious, and pleasing to Him above all creatures.
And He willeth that it be known; that all those that please them in Him should please them in her, and in the pleasance that He hath in her and she in Him.”

Julian of Norwich (1342–1416) English theologian and anchoress

The Eleventh Revelation, Chapter 25

Wisdom, God, Truth, Soul

“How do wealth-income and capital-output ratios evolve in the long run, and why? Until recently it was difficult to properly address this question, for one simple reason: national accounts were mostly about ﬂows, not stocks. Economists had at their disposal a large body of historical series on ﬂows of output, income and consumption – but limited data on stocks of assets and liabilities. When needed, for example for growth accounting exercises, estimates of capital stocks were typically obtained by cumulating past ﬂows of saving and investment. This is ﬁne for some purposes, but severely limits the set of questions one can ask.”

Thomas Piketty (1971) French economist

Piketty, Thomas, and Gabriel Zucman. Capital is back: Wealth-income ratios in rich countries, 1700-2010 http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/PikettyZucman2013WP.pdf. Centre for Economic Policy Research, 2013.

Exercises, Question, Past, Wealth

“Sylvester: When was it that you first did a painting with one or two simple lines, horizontal or vertical, across the surface?
Newman: I would say that it began in '46— '47. In those years, whenever I did a painting with one or two elements in it, it did always have a sense of an atmospheric background, I suppose — with the exception of a painting which I called Euclidian Abyss, where the background is black and has some of the white coming through, but there's no true atmosphere.”

Barnett Newman (1905–1970) American artist

Source: 1960 - 1970, Interview with David Sylvester 2. Spring 1965, p. 255

Sense, Painting

“Without even saying anything, just his eyes… It’s not like he forces you to do it, but the power that he has, it’s something in his spirit. It’s almost like intangible and kind of magical. He has an energy that kind of lifts you. Any doubt that you had is just gone. You just do it – it’s really simple. It was so easy to work with him.”

Alison Lohman (1979) American actress

Of Ridley Scott.
Interview with Rebecca Murray

“One reason nature pleases us is its endless use of a few simple principles: the cube-square law; fractals; spirals; the way that waves, wheels, trig functions, and harmonic oscillators are alike; the importance of ratios between small primes; bilateral symmetry; Fibonacci series, golden sections, quantization, strange attractors, path-dependency, all the things that show up in places where you don’t expect them…these rules work with and against each other ceaselessly at all levels, so that out of their intrinsic simplicity comes the rich complexity of the world around us. That tension—between the simple rules that describe the world and the complex world we see—is itself both simple in execution and immensely complex in effect. Thus exactly the levels, mixtures, and relations of complexity that seem to be hardwired into the pleasure centers of the human brain—or are they, perhaps, intrinsic to intelligence and perception, pleasant to anything that can see, think, create?—are the ones found in the world around us.”

John Barnes book Mother of Storms

Source: Mother of Storms (1994), pp. 470-471

Pleasure, World, Law, Way

“September eleven was not a simple operation. Could it be planned and executed without coordination with intelligence and security services—or their extensive infiltration?”

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (1956) 6th President of the Islamic Republic of Iran

Paragraph 24
2006, Letter to George W. Bush, 2006

Intelligence

“I find it amazing now that my first economics class, taught by Alan Sweezy, used John Maynard Keynes’s General Theory of Income and Employment as the textbook. Although this book is one of the most influential works of the twentieth century, it makes a really lousy textbook. Moreover, since I now regard Keynes’s analysis as seriously flawed, it is surprising that I enjoyed the course so much. As a student, I appreciated the simple way that the Keynesian model explained the workings and failings of the overall economy. Especially appealing were the clever policy remedies, such as increased government spending and tax cuts, that Keynes recommended to combat unemployment. Too bad that I discovered later that the model was theoretically and empirically deficient!”

Robert Barro (1944) American classical macroeconomist

Source: Nothing Is Sacred (2002), p. xiii

Books, Way

“I’ve been vegan since 1988, and over that time, my relationship with cooking has ebbed and flowed. I am very happy to eat very simply; I love to be able to taste the incredible produce I find. I enjoy making simple harmonies from whatever is seasonal. When I have people over though, I love exploring spices. Just because a meal is plant-based doesn’t mean it can’t be a flavor power-house.”

Bellamy Young (1970) American artist

"Bellamy Young", interview with The New Potato (2 October 2013) http://www.thenewpotato.com/2013/10/02/bellamy-young-2015/2/.

Love, Happiness, People, Time

“Holists, either irredundant or redundant commit mistakes due to simple over-generalization (for example, that (β) always implies "Bushy Tail" which is true for only some subspecies) or systemic over-generalization to render the classification scheme more rational or symmetrical than it actually is (for example, falsely naming a subspecies "Bit QL" on the evidence that Q stands for "4-legged" and L stands for "Linear" together with the valid inference that a 4-legged linear creature exists.
A serialst is prone to list the subspecies by examining picture cards in Class A. If he is to be successful, he checks the relevance of the information entering his list by forming single predicate hypotheses.”

Gordon Pask (1928–1996) British psychologist

Source: Learning Strategies and Individual Competence (1972), p. 275.

Success, Falseness

“The concept of a system is not a simple or unique one. There are many different kinds of systems, and different systems may be organized and operated in different ways. As individuals we all belong to some social system, we participate in an economic system, we are the product of several educational systems, and we are members of one or more family systems. In a similar fashion, the equipment of which physical systems are made may be members of many other systems, such as electrical, mechanical, sensing, actuating, energy, materials, and/or information systems. One of the challenges to the person who engineers a system is to find the many alternative ways in which the function, the operation, and/or the equipment of concern and interest may be considered, understood, and made to perform most effectively.”

Harold Chestnut (1917–2001) American engineer

Source: Systems Engineering Tools, (1965), Systems Engineering Methods (1967), p. 1: First paragraph of Ch. 1. The Environment for System Engineering Methods

Education, Family, Way, Fashion

“Religious and medical propaganda to the contrary notwithstanding, I hold some simple truths to be self-evident. One of these truths is that just as the dead do not rise from the grave, so drugs do not commit crimes. The dead remain dead. Drugs are inert chemicals that have no effect on human beings who choose not to use them. No one has to smoke cigarettes, and no one has to shoot heroin. People smoke cigarettes because they want to, and they shoot heroin because they want to.”

Thomas Szasz (1920–2012) Hungarian psychiatrist

"The Protocols of the Learned Experts on Heroin" http://www.scribd.com/doc/120817550/The-Protocols-Of-The-Learned-Experts-On-Heroin-by-Thomas-Szasz in The Libertarian Review, July 1981, p. 14.

People, Truth, Dead

“The eulogy of the non-lover in the speech of Lysias … stresses the fact that the non-lover … does not commit extreme acts under the influence of passions. Since he acts from calculation, he never has occasion for remorse. … The non-lover demonstrates his superiority through prudence and objectivity. … We must now observe how these points of superiority correspond to those of “semantically purified” speech, … the kind of speech approaching pure notation in the respect that it communicates abstract intelligence without impulsion. It is a simple instrumentality, showing no affection for the object of its symbolizing and incapable of inducing bias in the hearer. In its ideal conception, it would have less power to move than 2 + 2 = 4, since it is generally admitted that mathematical equations may have the beauty of elegance, and hence are not above suspicion where beauty is suspect. But this neuter language will be an unqualified medium of transmission of meanings from mind to mind, and by virtue of it minds can remain in an unprejudiced relationship to the world and also to other minds. … Instead of passion, it offers the serviceability of objectivity … It distrusts any departure from the literal and prosaic.”

Richard M. Weaver (1910–1963) American scholar

“The Phaedrus and the Nature of Rhetoric,” pp. 6-7.
The Ethics of Rhetoric (1953)

World, Beauty, Intelligence, Communication

“It just seems silly to me that something so right and simple has to be fought for at all.”

Gregory Peck (1916–2003) American actor

Speaking at the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation awards, as quoted in "Majestic presence" in The Hindu (20 June 2003) http://www.hindu.com/thehindu/fr/2003/06/20/stories/2003062001400100.htm

“Stocks are a voting mechanism, pure and simple. They are a collective vote of expectations of each company's future fundamentals.”

Andy Kessler (1958) American writer

Part V, The Next Barrier, Do Stocks Talk?, p. 181.
Running Money (2004) First Edition

Future

“One simple word: ugh. Is something still considered a conspiracy if it's played out right under our noses?”

Moby (1965) Activist, American musician, DJ and photographer

"oil industry", journal entry (21 January 2003) at moby.com http://www.moby.com/journal/2003-01-21/oil_industry.html

“How all becomes clear and simple when one opens an eye on the within, having of course previously exposed it to the without, in order to benefit by the contrast.”

Samuel Beckett book The Unnamable

The Unnamable (1954)

“Among recent contributions we may refer in particular to Professor A. G. Greenhill's noteworthy papers… when one remembers that these complex curves reach only especially simple cases of gyroscope motion, one may get some notion of the difficulty of the problem involved.”

Carl Barus (1856–1935) U.S. physicist

Footnote: Greenhill: Applications of Elliptic Functions, Proc. Lond. Math. Soc., 1895, 1896; Engineering, July, 1896.
"The Mathematical Theory of the Top" (April 8, 1898)

Problem

“Not till we come to a simple reliance on the blood and mediation of the Saviour, shall we know what it is either to have trust in God, or know what it is to walk before Him without fear, in righteousness and true holiness.”

Thomas Chalmers (1780–1847) Scottish mathematician and a leader of the Free Church of Scotland

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 602.

God, Fear

“He considered recording it. His suit would be able to make a simple visual file and stream the data out in real time. But no. This was his moment. His and Julia’s. The rest of humanity could guess what it had been like if they cared.”

Daniel Abraham (1969) speculative fiction writer from the United States

Source: Leviathan Wakes (2011), Chapter 48 (p. 488)

Time

“… He is not very sharp in some ways; and in his simple view of the world, paederasts are dangerous only to powder-monkeys and choir boys, or to those epicene creatures that are to be found in Mediterranean brothels. I made circuitous attempt at enlightening him a little, but he looked very knowing and said, 'Don't tell me about rears and vices; I have been in the Navy all my life.'"
"Then surely he must be wanting a little in penetration?”

Patrick O'Brian book Master and Commander

"James, I trust there was no mens rea in that remark?"
Master and Commander (1970) ("rears and vices" is O'Brian's homage to Jane Austen's Mansfield Park)

Life, World, Way, Boy

“I think the truth is always simple. It has pretty much got to be. It needs to be simple enough for a child to understand. Otherwise it'd be too late. By the time you figured it out it would be too late.”

Cormac McCarthy book No Country for Old Men

No Country for Old Men (2005)

Truth, Understanding, Thinking, Time

“The poets are wrong of course. … But then poets are almost always wrong about facts. That's because they are not really interested in facts: only in truth: which is why the truth they speak is so true that even those who hate poets by simple and natural instinct are exalted and terrified by it.”

William Faulkner book The Town

Gavin Stevens in Ch. 5
The Town (1957)

Hate, Truth, Nature

“There is no feeling so simple that it is not immediately complicated and distorted by introspection.”

André Gide (1869–1951) French novelist and essayist

“An Unprejudiced Mind,” p. 317
Pretexts: Reflections on Literature and Morality (1964)

Feeling

“It is easy to create an interstellar radio message which can be recognized as emanating unambiguously from intelligent beings. A modulated signal (‘beep,’ ‘beep-beep,’. . . ) comprising the numbers 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23, 29, 31, for example, consists exclusively of the first 12 prime numbers—that is, numbers that can be divided only by 1, or by themselves. A signal of this kind, based on a simple mathematical concept, could only have a biological origin.. . . But by far the most promising method is to send pictures.”

Carl Sagan (1934–1996) American astrophysicist, cosmologist, author and science educator

Smithsonian magazine, May 1978, pp. 43, 44. Quoted in Awake! magazine, 1978, 8/22.

Intelligence, Mathematics

“Wisdom is not to be found in the art of oratory, or in great books, but in a withdrawal from these sensible things and in a turning to the most simple and infinite forms. You will learn how to receive it into a temple purged from all vice, and by fervent love to cling to it until you may taste it and see how sweet That is which is all sweetness. Once this has been tasted, all things which you now consider as important will appear as vile, and you will be so humbled that no arrogance or other vice will remain in you. Once having tasted this wisdom, you will inseparably adhere to it with a chaste and pure heart. You will choose rather to forsake this world and all else that is not of this wisdom, and living with unspeakable happiness you will die.”

Nicholas of Cusa book De Docta Ignorantia

De Docta Ignorantia (On Learned Ignorance) (1440)

Love, Wisdom, Happiness, Books

“Know that all the sophistications in the knowledge are mostly mistakes that should fall before the truth. Yet, the truth itself is simple, without any wit.”

Yehuda Ashlag (1886–1954) Orthodox Jewish Rabbi and Kabbalist

Selected Articles

Truth, Knowledge

“Beauty is a simple passion,
but, oh my friends, in the end
you will dance the fire dance in iron shoes.”

Anne Sexton (1928–1974) poet from the United States

"Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs"
Transformations (1971)

Beauty, Shoe, Passion, Dance

““Simple old-fashioned death, the kind that predated the singularity, used to be the inevitable halting state for all life-forms. Fairy tales about afterlives notwithstanding.” A dry chuckle: “I used to try to believe a different one before breakfast every day, you know, just in case Pascal’s wager was right—exploring the phase-space of all possible resurrections, you know? But I think at this point we can agree that Dawkins was right. Human consciousness is vulnerable to certain types of transmissible memetic virus, and religions that promise life beyond death are a particularly pernicious example because they exploit our natural aversion to halting states.””

Charles Stross book Accelerando

Source: Accelerando (2005), Chapter 9 (“Survivor”), pp. 396-397

Life, Death, Religion, Fashion

“What is the real issue at stake? Why this determination on the part of the South to maintain the color line and to fight back with all her strength against the combined efforts of certain groups in our Nation, white and black, to break down segregation and to destroy Southern ideals and customs? The answer is simple. The South stands for blood, for the preservation of the blood of the white race. To preserve her blood, the white South must absolutely deny social equality to the Negro regardless of what his individual accomplishments might be. This is the premise - openly and frankly stated - upon which Southern policy is based. This position is so thoroughly justified in the minds of white Southerners that it is sometimes difficult for them to comprehend the reasoning of those who seriously dispute it.”

Theodore G. Bilbo (1877–1947) American politician

Source: Take Your Choice, Separation or Mongrelization (1946), Chapter Four: Southern Segregation and the Color Line.

Color, Effort, Fight, Parting

“I was fired because that job had little to do with who I am, with my true nature and gifts, what I care and do not care about. My resort to adolescent rebellion reflected that simple fact. … I was laughing to keep myself sane. Perhaps the research I was doing was what a good sociologist “ought” to do, but it felt meaningless to me, and I felt fraudulent doing it. Those feelings were harbingers of things to come, things that eventually led me out of the profession altogether. Obviously I should have dealt with my feeling more directly and exercised more self-control. Either I should have quit that job under my own steam or settled in and done the work properly. But sometimes the "shoulds" do not work because the life one is living runs crosswise to the grain of one's soul. At that time of my life, I had no feeling for the grain of my soul and of which way was crosswise. Not knowing what was driving me, I behaved with blind but blissful unconsciousness—and reality responded by giving me a big and hard-to-take clue about who I am.”

Parker Palmer (1939) American theologian

Source: Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation (1999), pp. 40-41

Life, Way, Feeling, Exercises

“I think its time to get motivated folks. I don't know what you're doing, but it's time to get really moving. We are rapidly running out of time. What do we do? Number one, you need to realize that God is in control. Don't get nervous, get busy, but don't get nervous. For he's the potter, we're the clay. Do what he says, simple. We should be as wise as serpents and harmless as doves. Be careful for nothing, full of care. Don't get nervous, just get busy. We should pray for those in authority. If you were praying for your senators, you would know their names, wouldn't you? We're God's children. It's our job to obey him. Preach the Gospel. We're suppose to be the salt of the earth. Salt does a lot of interesting things. Salt preserves; you should be a preserving force in your community. Salt irritates. If nobody is irritated with you, you aren't a good Christian.”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Creation seminars (2003-2005), The dangers of evolution

God, Children, Communication, Motivation

“Given a man full of faith, you will have a man tenacious in purpose, absorbed in one grand object, simple in his motives, in whom selfishness has been driven out by the power of a mightier love, and indolence stirred into unwearied energy.”

Alexander Maclaren (1826–1910) British minister

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 220.

Love, Faith, Motivation, Selfishness

“We may need simple and heroic legends for that peculiar genre of literature known as the textbook. But historians must also labor to rescue human beings from their legends in science—if only so that we may understand the process of scientific thought aright.”

Stephen Jay Gould book The Flamingo's Smile

"Darwin at Sea—and the Virtues of Port", p. 348
The Flamingo's Smile (1985)

Literature, Understanding, Science

“The idea that God doesn't care about his children is rooted in a lie, plain and simple.”

Bill Hybels (1951) American writer

Too Busy Not to Pray (2008, InterVarsity Press)

God, Children, Lie, Idea

“A simple fact entered my head one day and put an end to my revolt against the Deity. It occurred to me that God was not engaged in corrupting the mind of man but in creating it. This may sound like no fact at all, or like the most childish of quibbles. But whatever it is, it brought me a sigh of relief, a slightly bitter sigh. I was relieved because instead of beholding a man as a finished and obviously worthless product, unable to bring sanity into human affairs, I looked on him (in my conversion) as a creature in the making. And lo, I was aware that like my stooped and furry brothers, the apes, I am God's incomplete child. My groping brain, no less than my little toe, is a mechanism in His evolution-busy hands.”

Ben Hecht (1894–1964) American screenwriter

Books

God, Business

“If you want to put a price on carbon, why not just do it with a simple tax?”

Tony Abbott (1957) Australian politician

Originally stated in an interview with Sky News and Subsequently quoted in " http://www.smh.com.au/environment/climate-change/abbott-dogged-by-old-carbon-comment-20110606-1fprb.html#ixzz47O9mBz9O on smh.com.au, July 15, 2009 2009

“You will come in any case — so why not now?
How long I wait and wait. The bad times fall.
I have put out the light and opened the door
for you, because you are simple and magical.
Assume, then, any form that suits your wish,
take aim, and blast at me with poisoned shot,
or strangle me like an efficient mugger,
or else infect me — typhus be my lot”

Anna Akhmatova (1889–1966) Russian modernist poet

Requiem; 1935-1940 (1963; 1987), To Death

Light, Time, Waiting

“Cubism, Futurism, Expressionism, abstract painting, are only names given to a change which our artistic thinking wants to make and is thinking. Nobody has ever painted fallen raindrops suspended in the air, they've always been depicted as streaks (even the cave-men drew herds of reindeer in the same way). Now people are painting cabs rattling, lights flickering, people dancing, all-in the same way (this is how we all see movement). That is thew whole frightfully simple secret of Futurism. Its very easy to prove its artistic feasibility, for all the philosophizing that has been raised against it. Space, surface and time are different things, which ought not to be mixed together, is the continuous cry. If only it were possible to separate them. I can't do it.”

August Macke (1887–1914) German painter of the expressionist group Der Blaue Reiter

in a letter to philosopher de:Eberhard Grisebach, March 1913; as quoted by de:Wolf-Dieter Dube, in Expressionism; Praeger Publishers, New York, 1973, pp. 144-45

Men, People, Secret, Way

“Please don't fall into the trap of believing that I am terribly dogmatic about [the go to statement]. I have the uncomfortable feeling that others are making a religion out of it, as if the conceptual problems of programming could be solved by a simple trick, by a simple form of coding discipline!”

Edsger W. Dijkstra (1930–2002) Dutch computer scientist

Dijkstra (1973) in personal communication to Donald Knuth, quoted in Knuth's "Structured Programming with go to Statements".
1970s

Religion, Feeling, Problem

“I wanted to go away, in the midst of something entirely different,
I had been there, in the house of torture,
I have seen people being kicked, men’s bodies scorched,
nails pulled out with pliers.
Armed with flame and cudgels, grinning men in shirt sleeves.
Where I could hear my friends being thrown headlong
down the stairs.
Night was as day, and long shrieks wounded me.
In vain I tried to think of wooded lanes and flowers,
a serene life and human words.
The thought seized up, it was as if a wound were opened up
again and again and endlessly searched.
From the mouth struck, teeth and blood came out,
and lamenting moans from the deep throat.
Away, away from that house, from that street and town,
from anything similar to it.
I must save myself, keep up my mind,
that I should not be led to madness by these memories.
Oh, if we could go back to a void, from which a new order,
a maternal opening could come forth,
if I hear a certain tone of voice even in jest, I shudder.
My unhappiness is that I avoid the sight of suffering,
hospitals and prisons.
I have yearned for high solitudes, lands of still sunshine
and sweet shadows,
but I would always be pursued by the ghosts of human beings.
All of a sudden I feel the need of distraction and play,
to lose myself in the noise of the fairground.
I remain with you, but forgive me
if you see me sometimes act like a madman.
I try to heal myself by myself, as an animal,
trusting that the wounds will close.
I stop to listen to the simple conversations of the women
in the marketplace, with their dialectical lilt.
I rejoice at the footsteps of running children,
their overpowering calls.
Because you do not know the absurdity of my dreams,
the fixed expressions, the incomprehensible gestures.
There is turmoil inside me, which seems to ridicule me.
And I cannot cry out, not to be like them.
Tomorrow I will go towards some music, now I am getting ready.”

Aldo Capitini (1899–1968) Italian philosopher and political activist

Life, Women, Men, Children

“These two characteristics make revenge the most suitable source for the formation of ressentiment. The nuances of language are precise. There is a progression of feeling which starts with revenge and runs via rancor, envy, and impulse to detract all the way to spite, coming close to ressentiment. Usually, revenge and envy still have specific objects. They do not arise without special reasons and are directed against definite objects, so that they do not outlast their motives. The desire for revenge disappears when vengeance has been taken, when the person against whom it was directed has been punished or has punished himself, or when one truly forgives him. In the same way, envy vanishes when the envied possession becomes ours. The impulse to detract, however, is not in the same sense tied to definite objects—it does not arise through specific causes with which it disappears. On the contrary, this affect seeks those objects, those aspects of men and things, from which it can draw gratification. It likes to disparage and to smash pedestals, to dwell on the negative aspects of excellent men and things, exulting in the fact that such faults are more perceptible through their contrast with the strongly positive qualities. Thus there is set a fixed pattern of experience which can accommodate the most diverse contents. This form or structure fashions each concrete experience of life and selects it from possible experiences. The impulse to detract, therefore, is no mere result of such an experience, and the experience will arise regardless of considerations whether its object could in any way, directly or indirectly, further or hamper the individual concerned. In “spite,” this impulse has become even more profound and deep-seated—it is, as it were, always ready to burst forth and to betray itself in an unbridled gesture, a way of smiling, etc. An analogous road leads from simple *Schadenfreude* to “malice.””

Max Scheler (1874–1928) German philosopher

The latter, more detached than the former from definite objects, tries to bring about ever new opportunities for *Schadenfreude*.
Das Ressentiment im Aufbau der Moralen (1912)

Life, Men, Smile, Way

“Books! Real books were Joneny’s delight. Heavy, cumbersome, difficult to store, they were the bane of most scholars. Joneny found them entrancing. He didn’t care what was in them. Any book today was so old that each word glittered to him like the facet of a lost gem. The whole conception of a book was so at odds with this compressed, crowded, breakneck era that he was put into ecstasy by the simple heft of the paper. His own collection, some seventy volumes, was considered a pretentious luxury by everyone at the University.”

Samuel R. Delany book The Ballad of Beta-2

The Ballad of Beta-2 (1965)

Books, Universe

“They don’t believe in liberty. They don’t believe in China before the Communists. There is only one simple, clear task: to protect their control, to maintain their governing. Which is such a pity.”

Ai Weiwei (1957) Chinese concept artist

Wines, Michael. “ China’s Impolitic Artist, Still Waiting to Be Silenced http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/28/world/asia/28weiwei.html?pagewanted=all.” New York Times, November 28, 2009. 2000-09, 2009

“Undoubtedly Wittgenstein did greatly need human warmth and affection and he was enormously appreciative of any simple kindness. But a friendly relationship with him was very exacting. He could rebuke a friend with extreme harshness. He had a tendency to be suspicious of motives and character.”

Norman Malcolm (1911–1990) American philosopher

Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir, 1958

Motivation

“I use emacs, which might be thought of as a thermonuclear word processor. It was created by Richard Stallman; enough said. It is written in Lisp, which is the only computer language that is beautiful. It is colossal, and yet it only edits straight ASCII text files, which is to say, no fonts, no boldface, no underlining. In other words, the engineer-hours that, in the case of Microsoft Word, were devoted to features like mail merge, and the ability to embed feature-length motion pictures in corporate memoranda, were, in the case of emacs, focused with maniacal intensity on the deceptively simple-seeming problem of editing text.”

Neal Stephenson (1959) American science fiction writer

"OS Shock"
In the Beginning... was the Command Line (1999)

Beauty, Problem

“To blame feminism for women's “lesser life” is to miss entirely the point of feminism, which is to win women a wider range of experience. Feminism remains a pretty simple concept, despite repeated — and enormously effective efforts to dress it up in greasepaint and turn its proponents into gargoyles. As Rebecca West wrote sardonically in 1913, “I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: l only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat."”

Susan Faludi book Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women

Backlash (1992)

Life, Women, People, Effort

“Ten years ago we had a very simple yet powerful idea—call many of the greatest thinkers in the world, ask them each to write a chapter sharing their vision for the future of leadership, and put together an edited book titled The Leader of the Future.”

Marshall Goldsmith (1949) American author of leadership and management literature

Source: The leader of the future 2, 2006, p. xi; Lead paragraph of preview

Books, World, Idea, Future

“If we knew all our need, what a large want book we should require! How comforting to know that Jesus has a supply book which exactly meets our want book. We want the vision of a calmer and simpler beauty, to tranquillize us in the midst of artificial tastes — we want the draught of a pure spring to cool the flame of our excited life; we want, in other words, the spirit of the life of Christ, simple, natural, with power to soothe and calm the feelings which it rouses; the fullness of the spirit which can never intoxicate.”

Frederick William Robertson (1816–1853) British writer and theologian

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 96.

Life, Books, Beauty, Feeling

“I must believe you doomed to eternal life, but also to eternal repetition! Your true doom is simple to me. You lack brains, Sir.”

Michael Moorcock book The City in the Autumn Stars

Source: The City in the Autumn Stars (1986), Chapter 14 (p. 376)

Life

“What I have now offered is meant merely for the sake of my country, for the simple question is: will you change your Ministers and keep the Empire, or keep your Ministers and lose the Kingdom?”

William Pitt the Younger (1759–1806) British politician

William Cobbett, "Parliamentary History".
Speech in the House of Commons, supporting a motion of censure on the government of Lord North, 15 March 1782.

Question, Change, Country

“Innumerable are the illusions and legerdemain-tricks of Custom: but of all these, perhaps the cleverest is her knack of persuading us that the Miraculous, by simple repetition, ceases to be Miraculous.”

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

Bk. III, ch. 8.
1830s, Sartor Resartus (1833–1834)

“Love one another and you will be happy. It’s as simple and difficult as that.”

Mignon McLaughlin (1913–1983) American journalist

The Complete Neurotic's Notebook (1981), Unclassified

Love, Happiness, Wedding, For Him

“The favourite volume whose reading we commend, is inevitably connected with ourselves — it must bring to our image those lonely hours when the recurrence of an image has such influence — it invests that image with the associations of poetry and fiction, and thus redeems it from the common-place of ordinary life. There is also the sympathy of taste — and how much may be inferred from a passage pencilled originally for no other eyes but our own. Then, too, a book is the prettiest stepping stone to a correspondence; it seems such a simple thing to write a note of thanks, and so natural to add some slight remark on the author; and how often is the criticism of an author's sentiments but the expression of our own!”

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

Literary Remains

Life, Books, Nature, Reading

“I must tell the House that the Falkland Islands and their dependencies remain British territory. No aggression and no invasion can alter that simple fact. It is the Government's objective to see that the islands are freed from occupation and are returned to British administration at the earliest possible moment…We cannot allow the democratic rights of the islanders to be denied by the territorial ambitions of Argentina.”

Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013) British stateswoman and politician

Speech in the House of Commons (3 April 1982) http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/104910 First term as Prime Minister

Housing, Dependency

“[The hardest thing about '90 Millas' was the concept of] combining the old and the new without losing the authenticity. The simple solution, of course, would have been to record covers. [But] emotionally it wouldn't have been the same We left Cuba as children: Gloria was 1, I was 14. So, there ia a part that does exist in nostalgia, but a the same [time] there is another part that is contemporary music that we've made all over the world.”

Gloria Estefan (1957) Cuban-American singer-songwriter, actress and divorciada

Emilio Estefan, Reuters (July 23, 2007)
2007, 2008

Children, World, Music, Nostalgia

“While it is possible to play a single game, unrelated to any other game events past or future, it is the campaign for which these rules are designed. It is relatively simple to set up a fantasy campaign, and better still, it will cost almost nothing. In fact you will not even need miniature figures, although their occasional employment is recommended for real spectacle when battles are fought. A quick glance at the Equipment section of this booklet will reveal just how little is required. The most extensive requirement is time. The campaign referee will have to have sufficient time to meet the demands of his players, he will have to devote a number of hours to laying out the maps of his "dungeons" and upper terrain before the affair begins.”

Gary Gygax (1938–2008) American writer and game designer

Preface of the Original Dungeons & Dragons, (1 November 1973)

Game, Time, Past, Future

“It is always the simple things that change our lives.”

Donald Miller book Blue Like Jazz: nonreligious thoughts on Christian spirituality

Blue Like Jazz (2003, Nelson Books)

Change

“The number of different optical phenomena has become in our time so great that caution must be taken so as to avoid being deceived, and also to refer the phenomena to the simple laws.”

Joseph von Fraunhofer (1787–1826) German optical physicist

In The Wave Theory, Light and Spectra. Prismatic and Diffraction Spectra. Memoirs by Joseph Von Fraunhofer (1981), p. 14 ISBN 0-405-13867-9

Law, Time

“The state-initiated referendum has always been a part of this [anti-democratic] logic. Stop the talk, we're going to decide, yes or no. At this point the citizen's role is to wave one flag or the other and cheer for one side of the simple question or the other. In other words, we're reduced to children.”

John Ralston Saul (1947) Canadian author and essayist

Reflections of a Siamese Twin (1997)

Children, Question, Parting

“No, the enjoyment of an idle life doesn't cost any money. The capacity for true enjoyment of idleness is lost in the moneyed class and can be found only among people who have a supreme contempt for wealth. It must come from an inner richness of the soul in a man who loves the simple ways of life and who is somewhat impatient with the business of making money.”

Lin Yutang book The Importance of Living

Source: The Importance of Living (1937), p. 155

Love, Life, Money, People

“Man's secret horror of his foot is one of the explanations for the tendency to conceal its length and form as much as possible. Heels of greater or lesser height, depending on the sex, distract from the foot's low and flat character. Besides the uneasiness is often confused with a sexual uneasiness; this is especially striking among the Chinese who, after having atrophied the feet of women, situate them at the most excessive point of deviance. The husband himself must not see the nude feet of his wife, and it is incorrect and immoral in general to look at the feet of women. Catholic confessors, adapting themselves to this aberration, ask their Chinese penitents "if they have not looked at women's feet.
The same aberration is found among the Turks (Volga Turks, Turks of Central Asia), who consider it immortal to show their nude feet and whoe ven go to bed in stockings.
Nothing similar can be cited from classical antiquity (apart from the use of very high soles in tragedies). The most prudish Roman matrons constantly allowed their nude toes to be seen. On the other hand, modesty concerning feet developed excessively in the modern ea and only started to disappear in the nineteenth century. M. Salomon Reinarch has studied this development in detail in the article entitled Pieds pudiques [Modest Feet], insisting on the role of Spain, where women's feet have been the object of most dreaded anxiety and thus were the cause of crimes. The simple fact of allowing the shod foot to be seen, jutting up from under a skirt, was regarded as indecent. Under no circumstances was it possible to touch the foot of a woman.”

Georges Bataille (1897–1962) French intellectual and literary figure

Source: Visions of Excess: Selected Writings 1927-1939, p.21-22

Women, Secret, Sex, Study

“Simple motion strikes us as banal. The time element must be eliminated. Yesterday and tomorrow as simultaneous. In music, polyphony helped to some extent to satisfy this need. A quintet as in 'Don Giovanni' is closer to us than the epic motion in 'Tristan [und Isolde]'. Mozart and Bach are more modern than the [music of the] nineteenth century.”

Paul Klee (1879–1940) German Swiss painter

Quote (July 1917), # 1081, in The Diaries of Paul Klee, translation: Pierre B. Schneider, R. Y. Zachary and Max Knight; publisher, University of California Press, 1964
1916 - 1920

Music, Time, Help

“Ere now a simple tiller of the soil
Hath spoken words of wisdom to mankind;
A cloak all tattered and besmirched with toil
Hath ofttimes clothed a man of prudent mind.”

Francesco Berni (1497–1535) Italian poet

Ha qualche volta un ortolan parlato
Cose molte a proposito a la gente;
E da un mantel rotto e sporco e stato
Molte volte coperto un uom prudente.
LVIII, 1
Rifacimento of Orlando Innamorato

Wisdom, Clothes

“If the Fascist ideology cannot be described as a simple response to Marxism, its origins, on the other hand, were the direct result of very specific revision of Marxism. It was a revision of Marxism and not a variety of Marxism or a consequence of Marxism…It was the French and Italian Sorelians, the theoreticians of revolutionary syndicalism who made this new and original revision of Marxism, and precisely this was their contribution to the birth of the Fascist ideology.”

Zeev Sternhell (1935) Israeli historian

Source: The Birth of Fascist Ideology: From Cultural Rebellion to Political Revolution, 1994, p. 5

Birth

“Then I gathered the éléments of what people call my symbolism. I do not understand anything about long words and theories. But I am willing to be a symbolist, if that defines the ideas that Michael Angelo gave me, namely that the essence of sculpture is the modelling, the general scheme which alone enables us to render the intensity, the supple variety of movement and character. If we can imagine the thought of God in creating the world, He thought first of the construction, which is the sole principle of nature, of living things and perhaps of the planets. Michael Angelo seems to me rather to derive from Donatello than from the ancients; Raphaël proceeds from them. He understood that an architecture can be built up with the human body, and that, in order to possess volume and harmony, a statue or a group ought to be contained in a cube, a pyramid or some simple figure. Let us look at a Dutch interior and at an interior painted by an artist of the present day. The latter no longer touches us, because it docs not possess the qualities of depth and volume, the science of distances. The artist who paints it does not know how to reproduce a cube. An interior by Van der Meer is a cubic painting. The atmosphere is in it and the exact volume of the objects; the place of these objects has been respected, the modem painter places them, arranges them as models. The Dutchmen did not touch them, but set themselves to render the distances that separated them, that is, the depth. And then, if I go so far as to say that cubic truth, not appearance, is the mistress of things, if I add that the sight of the plains and woods and country views gives me the principle of the plans that I employ on my statues, that I feel cubic truth everywhere, and that plan and volume appear to me as laws of all life and ail beauty, will it be said that I am a symbolist, that I generalise, that I am a metaphysician? It seems to me that I have remained a sculptor and a realist. Unity oppresses and haunts me.”

Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) French sculptor

Source: Auguste Rodin: The Man, His Ideas, His Works, 1905, p. 65-67

Life, God, People, Truth

“To have simple structures and organizations with minimal hierarchical levels, with human development and in house training of executive functions. To have flexibility and speed in making decisions. Operating with the advantages of the small business, which are what comprise big businesses.”

Carlos Slim Helú (1940) Mexican business magnate and investor

Secret Number One, The 10 Secrets of Slim, Interview with CNN Expansion, March 13, 2007, Translated by Kevin Andrew Woolsey.

Business, Decision, Housing, Speed

“C is not clean – the language has many gotchas and traps, and although its semantics are simple in some sense, it is not any cleaner than the assembly-language design it is based on.”

Erik Naggum (1965–2009) Norwegian computer programmer

Re: teaching and learning with LISP/Scheme http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/1c0fd1ffdb5d1b8b (Usenet article). Usenet articles

Sense

“I oppose Islam, for the simple reason that Islam opposes me and everything I believe in. I don't care how Muslims feel about that. I don't care how anyone feels about it, nor should I be required to. In my opinion, Islam's disgusting treatment of women is a crime against humanity, nothing less. It's a thousand percent wrong, there's no grey area, it's unconscionable and unforgivable, and it's poisoning the whole world. It's not different or relative, it's backward and uncivilised. There's no excuse for it, and no excuse for defending it.”

Pat Condell (1949) Stand-up comedian, writer, and Internet personality

"Free speech in Europe" (10 November 2010)
2010

Women, World, Feeling

“To keep it short and simple.... you take the subject, that is for example the wood, and the colour, the paint. You compose the subject, the realistic subject, you make a fantastic shape. For example, here, this is some wood, this is a table with a top and wooden flowers, you know, therefore I paint a [flowery] table, for example..”

Karel Appel (1921–2006) Dutch painter, sculptor, and poet

explaining his way of imagination
Karel Appel defines his painting', interview 1968

Flowers, Painting

“But the problem of a Chief of Staff in Washington is not that simple. In the military service, an officer is not hailed before an outside authority and therefore required to indicate the advice which he had originally given his commanding general and to explain his reasons therefore. This is the position of the Chief of Staff before a Congressional committee. No sooner has he read his prepared statement supporting the position of the Defense Department than he must face a battery of interrogators bent on bringing forth his original views and contrasting them with the ultimate position of the Secretary of Defense and of the President. Very shortly a Chief of Staff will find himself in the position either of appearing to oppose his civilian superiors or of withholding facts from the Congress. Personally, I have found no way of coping with the situation other than by replying frankly to questions and letting the chips fall where they may.”

Maxwell D. Taylor (1901–1987) United States general

Source: The Uncertain Trumpet (1960), p. 112-113

Way, Question, Support, Problem

“ […] we can strip off all grammatical clues to sentence structure, all affixes and prepositions, and yet still achieve communication. Thus restricted to nouns, simple "stories" can be told in word chains: Woman, street, crowd, traffic, noise, haste, thief, bag, loss, scream, police…. Again, the reader's past experience of his language is sufficient to restore the missing elements, sufficiently accurately for the purpose. But of course, not only does the reader have experience of sentence structure, enabling him to supply the missing syntactical elements, but also he has experience of typical contexts in which the various words are used; many words bear an aura about with them. It might be more difficult to tell a tale about a policeman who robbed a woman, for instance, with so little redundancy! ”

Colin Cherry (1914–1979) British scientist

Source: On Human Communication (1957), Words and Meaning: Semantics, p.122

Communication, Loss, Past

“The whole landscape lies behind the transparent gauze of the fog that now rises, drawn upwards by the sun, and as it rises, reveals the silver-spangled river, the fields, the cottages, the further scene. At last one can discern all that one could only guess at before... The sun is up! There is a peasant at the end of the field, with his wagon drawn by a yoke of oxen... Everything is bursting into life, sparkling in the full light – light, which as yet is still soft and golden. The background, simple in line and harmonious in colour, melts into the infinite expanse of sky, through the bluish, misty atmosphere. The flowers raise their heads the birds flutter hither and thither... The little rounded willows on the bank of the stream look like birds spreading their tails. It's adorable! And one paints! And paints!”

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (1796–1875) French landscape painter and printmaker in etching

Corot's description of a morning in Switzerland, Château de Gruyères, 1857, as quoted in Letters of the great artists – from Blake to Pollock, Richard Friedenthal, Thames and Hudson, London, 1963
1850s

Life, Flowers, Bird, Light

“The Amendment nullifies sophisticated as well as simple-minded modes of discrimination.”

Felix Frankfurter (1882–1965) American judge

On the Fifteenth Amendment; writing for the court, Lane v. Wilson, 307 U.S. 268, 275 (1939).
Judicial opinions

“It is hard to write a simple definition of something as varied as hacking, but I think what these activities have in common is playfulness, cleverness, and exploration. Thus, hacking means exploring the limits of what is possible, in a spirit of playful cleverness. Activities that display playful cleverness have "hack value."”

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

On Hacking (2002) http://stallman.org/articles/on-hacking.html 2000s

Thinking

“I do not have the courage to force myself to search out beautiful prayers in books. There are so many of them it really gives me a headache! and each prayer is more beautiful than the others. I cannot recite them all and not knowing which to choose, I do like children who do not know how to read, I say very simply to God what I wish to say, without composing beautiful sentences, and He always understands me. For me, prayer is an aspiration of the heart, it is a simple glance directed to heaven, it is a cry of gratitude and love in the midst of trial as well as joy; finally, it is something great, supernatural, which expands my soul and unites me to Jesus.”

Thérèse of Lisieux (1873–1897) French Discalced Carmelite nun

The words in italics were underlined by Thérèse. Source: Story of a Soul (1897), Ch. XI: Those Whom You Have Given Me, 1896–1897 As translated by Fr. John Clarke http://www.ewtn.com/therese/readings/readng6.htm (1976), p. 242.

Love, God, Children, Books

“Communist morals follow a simple formula. Anything which Promotes the communist cause is good; anything which hinders it is bad. Upon examination, that philosophy turns out to be a code of opportunism and expediency, or a code of no morals at all. Anyone who does not conform to the dictates of the Party as to what is good for Communism and what is not, is subjected to the most severe penalties under Articles 131 and 133 of the Soviet Constitution. Thus, the perfect example of "class" morality, which the Marxists attribute to the Judaic-Christian code, is to be found right in the Communist plan of action itself.”

W. Cleon Skousen book The Naked Communist

The Naked Communist (1958)

Penalty, Communication, Perfection

“The simple organization of a people into a national body, composite or otherwise, is of itself an impressive fact. As an original proceeding, it marks the point of departure of a people, from the darkness and chaos of unbridled barbarism, to the wholesome restraints of public law and society. It implies a willing surrender and subjection of individual aims and ends, often narrow and selfish, to the broader and better ones that arise out of society as a whole. It is both a sign and a result of civilization. A knowledge of the character, resources and proceedings of other nations, affords us the means of comparison and criticism, without which progress would be feeble, tardy, and perhaps, impossible. It is by comparing one nation with another, and one learning from another, each competing with all, and all competing with each, that hurtful errors are exposed, great social truths discovered, and the wheels of civilization whirled onward.”

Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman

1860s, Our Composite Nationality (1869)

People, Truth, Law, Error

“The finest pieces of software are those where one individual has a complete sense of exactly how the program works. To have that, you have to really love the program and concentrate on keeping it simple, to an incredible degree.”

Bill Gates (1955) American business magnate and philanthropist

Interview from Programmers at Work (1986)

Love, Sense

“Two of my favourite current management writers are Americans – Clayton Christensen and Peter Senge. My all-time favourite gurus are Peter Drucker, who became a greatly admired friend, and W. Edwards Deming. The thing that set these people apart from many other business commentators is that they didn’t propose any all - encompassing theories, they simply told it like it is.
The fact is that life cannot be summarised as a simple set of rules; it’s far too complicated for that and it’s always changing. Unfortunately, all-encompassing panaceas do seem to be popular and certainly sell books, which is why I so value the objectivity of thought that each of these people brought to the debate.”

Robert Heller (1932–2012) British magician

Interview: Robert Heller (2006)

Life, People, Books, Business

“I’m vegan in my fashion and vegetarian in my food. I don’t buy any leather goods or anything made from animal products – no down, nothing. It’s something people should be mindful of. … I think because I came to live in L. A. the transition was simple because vegetarianism is so common there. And I didn’t feel like I was missing that much by being a vegetarian. … I had a moment about 9 years ago. It was so odd. I was talking to my then-boyfriend and he was talking about a fishing trip and how he’d never had the experience of ‘killing’ his food. Even though I had fished my whole life, something just snapped in me and I said, I’m not eating this anymore. … Being vegan is more challenging, especially when it comes to going out to eat. But I found Chicago has great vegetarian and vegan restaurants. … Healthwise, I notice when I wasn’t eating meat anymore I felt so much lighter.”

Torrey DeVitto (1984) actress, model, violinist

"‘Chicago Med’ star Torrey DeVitto takes holistic approach to health, life" https://chicago.suntimes.com/entertainment/chicago-med-star-torrey-devitto-takes-holistic-approach-to-health-life/, interview with Chicago Sun-Times (24 January 2018).

Life, People, Food, Feeling

“The critical ingredient is getting off your butt and doing something. It's as simple as that. A lot of people have ideas, but there are few who decide to do something about them now. Not tomorrow. Not next week. But today. The true entrepreneur is a doer, not a dreamer.”

Nolan Bushnell (1943) American entrepreneur

attributed in Entrepreneurship - In Cup of Tea, 2004-12-12 http://www.buzzle.com/editorials/12-10-2004-62751.asp,; and in Decision and Action http://www.topachievement.com/chuckgallozzi.html by Chuck Gallozzi, but also attributed to Robert Browning in On business, brands and marketplace success http://www.acleareye.com/sandbox_wisdom/2005/01/robert_browning.html.

People, Idea

“Being Gentlemen and very far from the litigious humour of loving to wrangle about words or terms or notions as empty; they had before his coming in, readily agreed promiscuously to use when they pleased Elements and Principles as terms equivalent: and to understand both by the one and the other, those primitive and simple bodies of which the mixt ones are said to be composed, and into which they are ultimately resolved.”

Robert Boyle book The Sceptical Chymist

Physiological Considerations Part of the First Dialogue (16)
The Sceptical Chymist (1661)

Love, Understanding

“I am leaving in order to have peace and quiet, to be rid of the influence of civilization. I want only to do simple, very simple art, and to be able to do that, I have to immerse myself in virgin nature, see no one but savages, live their life, with no other thought in mind but to render, the way a child would, the concepts formed in my brain and to do this with the aid of nothing but the primitive means of art, the only means that are good and true.”

Paul Gauguin (1848–1903) French Post-Impressionist artist

Source: 1890s - 1910s, The Writings of a Savage (1996), p. 48: quoted in the interview 'Paul Gauguin Discussing His Paintings', Jules Huret, printed in L'Écho de Paris, (23 February 1891)

Life, Peace, Art, Way

“Something is beautiful if it is honest. If you do an engaged piece of work, which is sincere, the concept of beauty meets the concept of truth. So no illusive harmony. I try to reach people who strive for truth, for identity. Although these conceptions are incredibly warn out, one must try to find the way back to these simple conceptions.”

Jörg Immendorff (1945–2007) German artist

Heidrun Reshöft & Joachim Pente (Transl.) " Art : Interview; Jörg Immendorff http://bombmagazine.org/article/322/j-rg-immendorff" at BOMB Magazine, (7) Fall 1983.

People, Truth, Beauty, Way

“Dicko: There was something missing from that performance. It was the tick tick tick of your mind working. That was the first time we saw you sing without thinking about what you're doing. Now the trick is to follow along on that road. Simple melody sung beautifully - well done.”

Hayley Jensen (1983) Australian singer

Australian Idol, Final Performances, Final 7

Thinking, Singing, Time

“The traditional British view is that character is what matters in a general. They like a solid, simple man, with no newfangled nonsense about him. He should be preternaturally silent. If by chance he thinks at all he should not let this leak out, otherwise confidence would be destroyed.”

Winston S. Churchill book The Second World War

Today's Battles. Collier's, 7 October 1939.
Reproduced in The Collected Essays of Sir Winston Churchill, Vol I, Churchill at War, Centenary Edition (1976), Library of Imperial History, p. 487. ISBN 0903988429
The Second World War (1939–1945)

Confidence, Thinking, Chance

“Buying gold is just buying a put against the idiocy of the political cycle. It's that simple.”

Kyle Bass (1969) businessperson

BBC HARDTalk interview, 15 November 2011.

“To devise these living pictures with simple well-known flowers seems to me to be the best thing to do in gardening.”

Gertrude Jekyll (1843–1932) garden designer, artist

Colour in the Garden Country Life Library, George Newnes Ltd, London, 1908
Colour in the Garden

Flowers

“The movie industry is run by accountants in Hollywood and it's as simple as this; everyone has a number on their computer. They can look up Jeremy Irons and see what my last five movies have made. Say you want to make a $20m picture, which is relatively cheap. If Jeremy makes $9m, the director makes $5m, then you need a leading lady, and they just go through those figures - that's how casting happens. And none of my movies has made a lot of money.”

Jeremy Irons (1948) English actor

Lipworth, Elaine, "King of all his castles"

Money

“The fact that I myself, at the moment of painting, do not understand my own pictures, does not mean that these pictures have no meaning; on the contrary, their meaning is so profound, complex, coherent, and involuntary that it escapes the most simple analysis of logical intuition. To describe my pictures in everyday language, to explain them, it is necessary to submit them to special analyses and preferably with the most ambitiously objective scientific rigour possible. Then all explanation arises a posteriori; once the picture already exists as phenomenon.”

Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) Spanish artist

Source: Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1931 - 1940, My Pictorial Struggle', S. Dali, 1935, Chapter: 'My Pictorial Struggle', pp. 11-12

Understanding, Painting

“Politics should be as simple as possible; it should respond directly to the needs of the people, it should help to solve the problems for the people and this is what I want to do for Taiwan.”

Tsai Ing-wen (1956) President of the Republic of China

Tsai vows ‘new age’ at opening event, Taipei Times, 1, October 19, 2015, 19 October 2015 http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/front/archives/2015/10/19/2003630398,

People, Problem, Help

“In many cases it is a matter for decision and not a simple matter of fact whether x understands y; and so on.”

John Rogers Searle (1932) American philosopher

Minds, Brains and Programs (1980)

Understanding, Decision

“You also remember well who first burned the bridges of your railroad, who forced Union men to give up their slaves to work on the rebel forts at Bowling Green, who took wagons and horses and burned houses of persons differing with them honestly in opinion, when I would not let our men burn fence rails for fire or gather fruit or vegetables though hungry, and these were the property of outspoken rebels. We at that time were restrained, tied by a deep seated reverence for law and property. The rebels first introduced terror as a part of their system, and forced contributions to diminish their wagon trains and thereby increase the mobility and efficiency of their columns. When General Buell had to move at a snail's pace with his vast wagon trains, Bragg moved rapidly, living on the country. No military mind could endure this long, and we are forced in self defense to imitate their example. To me this whole matter seems simple. We must, to live and prosper, be governed by law, and as near that which we inherited as possible. Our hitherto political and private differences were settled by debate, or vote, or decree of a court. We are still willing to return to that system, but our adversaries say no, and appeal to war. They dared us to war, and you remember how tauntingly they defied us to the contest. We have accepted the issue and it must be fought out. You might as well reason with a thunder-storm.”

William T. Sherman (1820–1891) American General, businessman, educator, and author.

1860s, 1864, Letter to James Guthrie (August 1864)

Men, War, Law, Time

“Peace may sound simple — one beautiful word — but it requires everything we have, every quality, every strength, every dream, every high ideal.”

Yehudi Menuhin (1916–1999) American violinist and conductor

Source: U S Congress Congressional Record, V. 151, PT. 6, April 21, 2005 to May 5, 2005 http://books.google.co.in/books?id=feq-KS57zeUC&pg=PA7471, Government Printing Office, 2009 , p. 7471

Peace, Beauty, Dreams

“I refused this evening at Oxford University to debate with an Israeli, a supporter of the apartheid state of Israel. The reason is simple: no recognition, no normalisation. Just boycott, divestment and sanctions, until the apartheid state is defeated. I never debate with Israelis nor speak to their media. If they want to speak about Palestine – the address is the PLO.”

George Galloway (1954) British politician, broadcaster, and writer

The Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2013/feb/21/george-galloway-debate-israeli-oxford Oxford debate about Israel in the West Bank February 21,

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Quotes about simple page 10

Quotes about simple
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