Quotes about something (10000 quotes, page 55)

“I had long known that there was something about me that was either violent or frightening for some reason. In certain three-sided clothing store images I had for some years come upon myself, with shock and disbelief, regret, and shame, disappointment and despair, for I am indeed clearly violent, mad, and ugly, all because of intensity of some kind, a tension, an obsession with getting everything that there was to be got, a passion, an insanity.”

William Saroyan (1908–1981) American writer

Sons Come and Go, Mothers Hang in Forever (1976)

Disappointment , Passion , Madness , Despair

“I’m a big fan of the Creature from the Black Lagoon. I love them all, and the Wolf Man would be my second favorite. I really love them all but there’s something so unique about the Creature and I just love him. You know, I think they made a mistake in the third part of the trilogy when they converted him into a land beast because it really limited him. You’ll notice that was the end of the story of the Creature, ironically enough. I keep hearing they are looking to remake the film, but I hope they are planning on keeping him as he was- keep him in the lagoon!”

Rich Koz (1952) American actor and comedian

A Chicago legend: My interview with Rich Koz- Svengoolie! https://mangledmatters.wordpress.com/2015/10/19/a-chicago-legend-my-interview-with-rich-koz-svengoolie/ (October 19, 2015)

Love , Hope , Thinking , Wolf

“…the miserable specimens who call themselves 'liberals' are really conservatives: they're desperately — even hysterically — defending a welfare-warfare kleptocracy that is now at least four generations old, against growing numbers of us (unlike Republicans, who seem to become more ignorant with every passing year) who have actually managed to learn something from history and are struggling to dismantle said kleptocracy.”

L. Neil Smith (1946) American writer

"A Matter of Definition," http://www.ncc-1776.org/tle2010/tle582-20100808-02.html 8 August 2010.

History , Learning

“In a media-based society (and of course there is no such thing as a non-media-based society consisting of more than one person) it is the signs and significants, the meanings and habits and conventions of speaking and thinking, the images and stereotypes which control everything. It is important to analyze how it is represented and of course what is not represented or how it lacks representation. It's not so much Rupert Murdoch – whose assholeness I will not dispute – that we should attack, but rather something I would call the cultural grammar of the public space. Power is formed within such a grammar. Access and non-access to each and every thing is regulated in its realm. Meanings are negotiated there.”

Johannes Grenzfurthner (1975) Austrian artist, writer, curator, and theatre and film director

talking about Guerilla Communication strategies in "Urban Hacking" http://www.transcript-verlag.de/ts1536/ts1536.php, transkript, p. 98

Thinking , Personality

“Beyond the discrepant local sympathies of these careers – with their splay of temporary identities: Conservative, Zionist, Nazi, Old Whig – they reflected a common theoretical calling. […] In Schmitt’s own writing, the obscure figure assumes various – typically oblique – historical guises, as political or juridical restrainer in different epochs. But the Stygian cap fits the collective effort of this cluster of thinkers. For these were indeed constructions designed to hold something back. What they all in the end sought to restrain was the risks of democracy – seen and feared through the prisms of their theories of law, as the abyss of its absence: to misterion tes anomias, the mystery of lawlessness.”

Perry Anderson (1938) British historian

Source: Spectrum: From Right to Left in the World of Ideas (2005), Ch. 1. "The Intransigent Right, Michael Oakeshott, Leo Strauss, Carl Schmitt, Friedrich von Hayek" (1992), p. 26

Fear , Law , Democracy , Effort

“Focused, hard work is the real key to success. Keep your eyes on the goal, and just keep taking the next step towards completing it. If you aren't sure which way to do something, do it both ways and see which works better.”

John D. Carmack (1970) American computer programmer, engineer, and businessman

Quoted in "The Rise and Fall of Ion Storm" http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=25551&cid=2775698 Slashdot (2002-01-02)

Way , Success

“The grand design of nature perceived broadly in four dimensions, including the forces that move the universe and created man, with special focus on evolution in our own biosphere, is something intrinsically good that it is right to preserve and enhance, and wrong to destroy and degrade.”

Roger Wolcott Sperry (1913–1994) American neuroscientist

Source: Science and the Problem of Values (1972), p. 127

Nature , Universe

“Before one blames, one should always find out whether one cannot excuse. To discover little faults has been always the particularity of such brains that are a little or not at all above the average. The superior ones keep quiet or say something against the whole and the great minds transform without blaming.”

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

K 39
Variant translation: Before we blame we should first see whether we cannot excuse.
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook K (1789-1793)

“She seemed to say "Look at me. I have done my share. I am beautiful. It is something quite out of the ordinary, this beauty of mine. I am made for delight. But what do I get out of it? Where is my reward?"”

Evelyn Waugh book Brideshead Revisited

Part 3, Chapter 4
Brideshead Revisited (1945)

Beauty

“When in the course of human events somebody does something that puts somebody else to the trouble of adjusting the numb routine of his life, the adjustee is resentful. The richer he is and the more satisfactory he considers his life, the more resentful he is at any change, however minute. And of all the changes which offend people, changes which require them to think are most disliked.”

Murray Leinster book The Pirates of Zan

Source: The Pirates of Zan (1959), Chapter 1

Life , People , Thinking , Change

“A lifetime career goal for me has always been wanting to lift up little girls. I feel like society has contempt for girls and little girl things. When athletes are performing badly their coaches call them ladies, or when somebody is being weak they say they're crying like a little girl, that's contempt. When somebody's trying to describe something as stupid or lame they say it's for little girls or only a little girl would like that, or when something is pink or full of rainbows and hearts people jump to the immediate conclusion that it's dumb, and if adult men are liking that sort of thing there's something wrong with them, because there's something contemptuous and unworthy about girl things and being a girl.”

Lauren Faust (1974) American animator and writer

Men , People , Stupidity , Feeling

“She came from the shower wrapped in a towel and she sat on the bed and took his hand and looked down at him. I cannot do what you ask, she said. I love you. But I cannot. He saw very clearly how all his life led only to this moment and all after led nowhere at all. He felt something cold and soulless enter him like another being and he imagined that it smiled malignly and he had no reason to believe that it would ever leave.”

Cormac McCarthy book All the Pretty Horses

All the Pretty Horses (1992)

Love , Life , Smile , Imagination

“I'd like to name my kid a whole phrase. You know, something like "Ladies and Gentlemen". That'll be a cool name for a kid. "This is my son, Ladies and Gentlemen!" Then, when he gets out of hand, I get to go, "Ladies and Gentlemen, please!"”

Louis C.K. (1967) American comedian and actor

http://youtube.com/watch?v=4u2ZsoYWwJA

“Certainly everyone, in order to protect love,
Certainly wishes to believe in something”

Ayumi Hamasaki (1978) Japanese recording artist, lyricist, model, and actress

Forgiveness
Lyrics, Memorial Address

Love

“Whenever I refused to follow my fate, something very hard to bear would happen in my life.”

Paulo Coelho book Aleph

Aleph (2011)

Life , Fate

“When presented with a few options for how to accomplish something, pick the awesome one. Pick the one that makes your story more entertaining. Pick the one that you are the most excited to write about, because when an author is having fun writing it, that’ll come through the page and the readers will feel that excitement. It’s all about contagious enthusiasm.”

Larry Correia (1977) American fantasy writer

"Ask Correia 18: World Building", Monster Hunter Nation http://monsterhunternation.com/2017/04/27/ask-correia-18-world-building/, 2017-04-27

Feeling

“If I don't get a chance to play with my son in the morning, I feel like I missed something that I'll never get back. It's such a joy to wake up and be in the mindset of a five-year-old before transitioning into the role of "executive."”

Biz Stone (1974) American blogger; co-founder of Twitter

"The co-founder of Twitter plays with his son for an hour every morning—here's why" https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/22/twitter-co-founder-biz-stone-starts-each-morning-playing-with-his-son.html, in CNBC.com (22 May 2018).

Feeling , Chance , Joy

“What if HAARP (High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program) technology (or something similar) is developed to the point where holograms can be projected into the sky and even made to speak? How many would be deceived and “fall away” if a fake Jesus (or Buddha, or Allah, or Muhammad, or Virgin Mary…) spoke to them from the sky like the Wizard of OZ speaking in the smoke complete with background thunder and smoke and lights flashing? Ya think Satan would stoop that low? Ahhhh…Yep!”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Source: What On Earth Is About To Happen… For Heaven’s Sake? (2013), p. 128

Thinking , Light

“I'm not concerned about avoiding anything that happened three years ago or worried about letdowns or things of that nature. When you use the term 'letdown' you proceed with the assumption that this is a continuation of something that happened in the past.”

Mike Tomlin (1972) head coach of the National Football League's Pittsburgh Steelers

Referring to the Steelers' poor start in 2006 following their Super Bowl win, as quoted in "Tomlin looks ahead" by Ed Bouchette, in The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (1 August 2009) http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/09213/987980-66.stm

Nature , Past

“If you didn't get angry and mad and frustrated, that means you don't care about the end result, and are doing something wrong.”

Greg Kroah-Hartman Linux kernel developer

Comment posted on Reddit (1 December 2014) https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/2ny1lz/im_greg_kroahhartman_linux_kernel_developer_ama/cmhysmb

Madness

“Since the war began the Government have received countless inquiries from all over the Kingdom from men of all ages who are for one reason or another not at present engaged in military service, and who wish to do something for the defence of the country. Now is your opportunity. We want large numbers of such men in Great Britain who are British subjects, between the ages of 17 and 65, to come forward now and offer their service in order to make assurance doubly sure. The name of the new force which is now to be raised will be the "Local Defence Volunteers."”

Anthony Eden (1897–1977) British Conservative politician, prime minister

Broadcast (14 May 1940), quoted in The Times (15 May 1940), p. 3. On 22 July the LDV was renamed the Home Guard.

Men , War , Age , Country

“If any spiritualistic medium can do stunts, there is no more need for special conditions than there is for a chemist to turn down lights, start operations with a hymn, and ask whether there's any chemical present that has affinity with something named Hydrogen.”

Charles Fort book Lo!

Pt 1, Ch. 5 http://www.resologist.net/lo105.htm
Lo! (1931)

Light

“It was neither healthy nor good when public stock exchanges introduced order types and speed advantages that high-frequency traders could use to exploit everyone else. This sort of inefficiency didn't vanish the moment it was spotted and acted upon. It was like a broken slot machine in the casino that pays off every time. It would keep paying off until someone said something about it; but no one who played the slot machine had any interest in pointing out that it was broken.”

Michael Lewis book Flash Boys

Source: Flash Boys (2014), p. 233

Time , Speed

“Everything that happens in the Old Testament is a "type" or adumbration of something that happens in the New Testament, and the whole subject is therefore called typology, though it is a typology in a special sense.”

Northrop Frye (1912–1991) Canadian literary critic and literary theorist

Source: "Quotes", The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (1982), Chapter Four, p. 79

Sense

“At moments of great enthusiasm it seems to me that no one in the world has ever made something this beautiful and important.”

M. C. Escher (1898–1972) Dutch graphic artist

undated quotes, M.C. Escher Foundation

World , Beauty

“I take very good care of myself. Growing up as a dancer, you know your body so well, you know what to do to overcome something. … I was raised really, really healthy, pretty much vegetarian and a very clean lifestyle, I don't smoke, I don't drink. I'm more addicted to the things that make me feel good — endorphins after working out.”

Elizabeth Berkley (1972) American actress

"Elizabeth Berkley joins TV's ballroom blitz", interview with the Los Angeles Times (6 April 2008) http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/la-ca-conversation6apr06-story.html.

Feeling , Drink

“Accustom your soul after (it has conceived all that is great of ) divinity, to conceive something great of itself.”

Quintus Sextius Roman philosopher

Sentences of Sextus

Soul

“I don’t see what alternate reality was possible other than the one’s we lived through. So I think people are really wistfully hoping for something that was never going to be.”

Julia Gillard (1961) Australian politician and lawyer, 27th Prime Minister of Australia

In response to suggestions that Rudd and Gillard were better as a team, as opposed to rivals.
The Killing Season, Episode three: The Long Shadow (2010–13)

People , Hope , Thinking , Reality

“Little sister, do you know why humanity passes down
ancient tales, from hand to hand, from generation to generation?
It is so that each generation can add something that was not there yesterday.
…The miracle of today is in the hands of those who go unshod, their hearts bare.”

Chế Lan Viên (1920–1989) Vietnamese writer

As quoted in Translation as Transhumance by Mireille Gansel (Feminist Press, 2017), ISBN 978-1936932085

Sister , Heart

““I learned a great deal,” said Beran. “And then I lost all heart for further learning.”
Palafox’s eyes glinted. “Education is not achieved through the heart—it is a systematization of the mental processes.”
“But I am something other than a mental process,” said Beran. “I am a man. I must reckon with the whole of myself.””

Jack Vance book The Languages of Pao

Source: The Languages of Pao (1958), Chapter 13 (p. 133)

Education , Learning , Heart

“No wonder a few people in Cross Plains don’t like him. They don’t understand him. His preoccupation with history and with writing instead of the price of corn and cotton is something they could not understand Could I? I liked to talk about books... History... Writing. Well, this was an opportunity to listen to a very interesting storyteller!”

Robert E. Howard (1906–1936) American author

~ Novalyne Price Ellis, One Who Walked Alone, p. 64, ISBN 093798678X
About

People , Books , History , Understanding

“If you focus your mind on the freedom and community that you can build by staying firm, you will find the strength to do it. "Stand for something, or you will fall for nothing."
And if cynics ridicule freedom, ridicule community… if "hard nosed realists" say that profit is the only ideal… just ignore them, and use copyleft all the same.”

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

1990s, Copyleft: Pragmatic Idealism (1998)

Communication , Freedom

“It is the slow, but steady movement of the lower classes along the scale of the class system. But it has been very very slow. It took 2000 years. But it is something which is going on, and something which is almost spectacular in certain sectors today -assertion of the backward classes, of scheduled castes, of women.”

K. R. Narayanan (1920–2005) 9th Vice President and the 10th President of India

Shri K. R. Narayanan President of India in Conversation with N. Ram on Doordarshan and All India Radio

Women

“I think, fundamentally music is something inherently people love and need and relate to, and a lot of what's out right now feels like McDonalds. It's quick-fix. You kind of have a stomachache afterwards. It's not wholly satisfying. And it's fake. I would hope that the music that inspired me, that got me going, that talked to me, felt like it was coming from some place that had some true emotion and true integrity behind it. I think that can reemerge.”

Trent Reznor (1965) American musician

Tribune Interview https://web.archive.org/web/20131216215825/http://www.sltrib.com/themix/ci_3069586 (29 September 2005).

Love , People , Hope , Music

“Human migration beyond Earth is our destiny, not as in something preordained, but in the sense of it being inevitable and necessary. The lot of humanity seems to be that of expanding consciousness into new territory.”

Vanna Bonta (1958–2014) Italian-American writer, poet, inventor, actress, voice artist (1958-2014)

Zero Gravity interview (2006)

Sense

“It was the most terrible feeling. I'd had enough and I'd felt I'd lost something so very important to me. I thought it had died and gone away. And I was frightened it might not come back. I just didn't seem to be able to shake off this feeling of doom and gloom. I had to come home. But to what? I was tired. I missed New York and the show and the people. It was like a grieving process.”

Elaine Paige (1948) English singer and actress

Regarding finishing Sunset Boulevard; as quoted in "Getting to know me: Elaine Paige" by Richard Barber in The Daily Mirror http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4161/is_20000416/ai_n14507971 (16 April 2000)

People , Feeling , Home

“You've promised that if we come to You and ask something in faith, that You'll do it.”

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

Source: Gifted Hands: The Ben Carson Story (1990), p. 58

Faith

“About the Declaration there is a finality that is exceedingly restful. It is often asserted that the world has made a great deal of progress since 1776 — that we have had new thoughts and new experiences which have given us a great advance of the people of that day and that we may therefore very well discard their conclusions for something more modern. But, that reasoning cannot be applied to the great charter.”

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

Foundations of the Republic; Speeches and Addresses (1926), p. 451.
1920s

People , World

“There's something in the way she eases my mind
And lays me across the bed till I close my eyes.
Stirs me in the morning till I can't ever be satisfied.
I leave Carolina every night in my dreams,
Like the girls that try to love me that I only leave.
Rock me like a baby doll and hold me to your chest,
But I'm always moving too fast.”

Ryan Adams (1974) American alt-country/rock singer-songwriter

When Will You Come Back Home?
29 (2005)

Love , Dreams , Way , Girl

“The history of the apple is too absurd. Whether the apple fell or not, how can any one believe that such a discovery could in that way be accelerated or retarded? Undoubtedly, the occurrence was something of this sort. There comes to Newton a stupid, importunate man, who asks him how he hit upon his great discovery. When Newton had convinced himself what a noodle he had to do with, and wanted to get rid of the man, he told him that an apple fell on his nose; and this made the matter quite clear to the man, and he went away satisfied.”

Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777–1855) German mathematician and physical scientist

As quoted by Robert Chambers, "Sir Isaac Newton and the Apple," The Book of Days (1832) Vol. 2 https://books.google.com/books?id=K0UJAAAAIAAJ, p. 757.

Stupidity , Way , History

“I don't respect people unless I think they deserve the respect. There are people who think that respect is something that should be given, and I happen to be one of the people who is perfectly happy saying no; respect should be earned. And without being earned, you don't get it. It's really that simple.”

Linus Torvalds (1969) Finnish-American software engineer and hacker

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Mg5_gxNXTo

DebConf 14: Q&A with Linus Torvalds

DebConf 2014 Portland

Youtube/Google

14min35

2014

Daniel Gillmore, Ana Guerrerero López.
2010s, 2014

People , Thinking , Happiness

“You are what is keeping and making the black race look bad. Wake up fool. Do not glorify this half a man, he has worked for nothing. He chose to keep himself where he is, not the white people. It is time to take responsibility for your own actions, and not act like a stinking fool. Kids and young black men and women look at this site, and believe that they are abused. That is a bold-faced lie. It is out of the mouths of cheap thugs like you that are hurting our young and taking away the chances they have to make themselves a productive part of society. Brothers and sisters, the only slavery in America now is the one you put yourself into. Rise up like Doctor King as taught us, and be a real human being. We are all in this togehter, white and black. Peace to all, and I hope this stupid fake hate stops real soon. We are all brothers and sisters. Do not be fooled by the tyranny of evil men like this. Lift yourself up, educate yourselves, and work hard for a good life. No one owes you anything. Stand proud as a person of color, and do something meaningful with your life. I did and I am the best at what I do! Peace out, R. Sherman.”

Richard Sherman (American football) (1988) American football player

Posted on a website under the alias "RSherman25", quoted in "Richard Sherman Blasts 'Black Lives Matter' Activist" https://web.archive.org/web/20150916235759/http://newsbusters.org/blogs/culture/dylan-gwinn/2015/09/14/richard-sherman-blasts-black-lives-matter-activist (14 September 2015), by Dylan Gwinn, NewsBusters (2015), Reston, Virginia: Media Research Center. Sherman has said that although he agreed with some of the sentiments expressed, he did not write or say this http://www.seattletimes.com/sports/seahawks/video-richard-sherman-speaks-passionately-on-black-lives-matter/.
Misattributed

Life , Women , Men , Hate

“The Prophet said, "O 'Abdur-Rahman! Do not seek to be a ruler, for if you are given authority on your demand then you will be held responsible for it, but if you are given it without asking (for it), then you will be helped (by Allah) in it. If you ever take an oath to do something and later on you find that something else is better, then you should expiate your oath and do what is better."”

Muhammad (570–632) Arabian religious leader and the founder of Islam

Narrated 'Abdur-Rahman bin Samura, in Bukhari, Volume 9, Book 89, Number 260
Sunni Hadith

Help

“On the account (or for the reason that, or… from the fact that… "Du fait que", Fr.) that one person advocate and want something, it does not follow that others have to want it too; only the postulates of reason and certitude are identicals, invariables, and can always be of use to everyone as a fulcrum ("point d'appui", Fr.) with a view to a free agreement”

African Spir (1837–1890) Russian philosopher

"entente libre", Fr
Source: Words of a Sage : Selected thoughts of African Spir (1937), p. 42.

Personality

“I frankly can't wait, because the idea of Bill Clinton back in the White House with nothing to do is something I just can't imagine, I can't imagine the American people can imagine….”

Mitt Romney (1947) American businessman and politician

In response to the question, "How would you run against Hillary and Bill Clinton in November?", MSNBC, Republican Presidential Candidate Debate, FL, 2007-01-25
2007 campaign for Republican nomination for United States President

People , Imagination , Idea , Waiting

“There is a view that one should never be permitted to be criticized for being even possibly in the future engaged in a contributory act that might be immoral, and that that type of arse-covering is more important than actually saving people's lives. That it is better to let a thousand people die than risk going to save them and possibly running over someone on the way. And that is something that I find to be philosophically repugnant.”

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

[Wikileaks:Secrets and Lies, http://www.channel4.com/programmes/wikileaks-secrets-and-lies/4od, 2012-06-30]

People , Way , Future

“[W]hat al Qaeda is fighting for is a traditional understanding of the family. This is not a minor part of their program: it is at its heart. The traditional family is built around some clearly defined principles. First, the home is the domain of the woman and life outside the house is the purview of the man. Second, sexuality is something confined to the family and the home, and extramarital, extrafamilial sexuality is unacceptable. Women who move outside the home invite extramarital sexuality just by being there. Third, women have as their primary tasks reproduction and nurturing of the next generation. Therefore, intense controls on women are necessary to maintain the integrity of the family and of society. In an interesting way it is all about women, and bin Laden's letter [to the U. S. ] drives this home. What he hates about America is that it promotes a completely different view of women and the family.”

George Friedman (1949) American businessman and political scientist

Source: The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century (2009), p. 50

Life , Women , Hate , Family

“As far as fanatical Muslims are concerned, Yazidis must be classified among the heathen because they do not belong to any of the three Abrahamic religions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Under Islamic rules, Jews and Christians are regarded as “people of the book” and thus could live among Muslims provided they pay a protection fee known as “dhimma.” Even if they wanted to, Yazidis cannot make use of that provision because they regard themselves as followers of Zoroaster, a prophet of ancient Iranian peoples who preached around 700 BC… A peaceful people opposed to violence and bloodshed, Yazidis believe that no cause is worth killing people for, something that scandalizes fanatical Muslims who regard the spread of “The Only True Faith” by sword as a duty and the man who does it as the “Ghazi” (Holy Warrior) who is assured a place in paradise. The Yazidis tradition of equality between men and women, including the rejection of polygamy, also scandalizes their fanatical Muslim neighbors.”

Amir Taheri (1942) Iranian journalist

"Why some Muslims want to kill the Yazidis by genocide" http://nypost.com/2014/08/17/why-some-muslims-want-to-destroy-the-yazidis-by-genocide/, New York Post (August 17, 2014).
New York Post

Women , Men , People , Books

“In addition to that sentience, which the insect or animal has, the human being is endowed with intellect. Intellect is what is cognized, which the animal need not do. So it is this power of the intellect to discriminate and interpret what is cognized that gives the individual being a sense of individuality and makes him consider himself something special in this manifestation. What is more, he goes to the extent of believing that the entire manifestation has been created for his benefit! So, all the time he is thinking, In what way can I benefit by exploiting nature?”

Ramesh Balsekar (1917–2009) Indian guru

And the extent to which the human being has 'benefited' himself, we can all see.
Page 16

Way , Nature , Thinking , Sense

“[T]he assumption describes our actions, not our thoughts. If you had to understand something intellectually in order to do it, none of us would be able to walk.
Economics is based on the assumption that people have reasonably simple objectives and choose means to achieve them. Both assumptions are false-but useful.
Suppose someone is rational only half the time. Since there is generally one right way of doing things and many wrong ways, the rational behavior can be predicted but the irrational cannot. If we assume he is rational, we predict his behavior correctly about half of the tie - far from perfect, but a lot better then nothing. If I could do well at the racetrack I would be a very rich man.
[R]ationality is an assumption I make about other people. I know myself.
[R]ationality is an assumption I make about other people. I know myself well enough to allow for the consequences of my own irrationality. But for the vast mass of my fellow humans, about whom I know very little, rationality is the best predictive assumption available.”

David D. Friedman (1945) American economist, physicist, legal scholar, and libertarian theorist

As cited in Ronald J. Baker (2010) Implementing Value Pricing: A Revolutionary Business Model for Professional Firms. p. 122
Source: Hidden Order: The Economics of Everyday Life, 1996, pp.3-5

People , Way , Behavior , Understanding

“The flying Rumours gather'd as they roll'd,
Scarce any Tale was sooner heard than told;
And all who told it, added something new,
And all who heard it, made Enlargements too,
In ev'ry Ear it spread, on ev'ry Tongue it grew.”

Alexander Pope (1688–1744) eighteenth century English poet

Source: The Temple of Fame (1711), Lines 468-472.

Flying

“Humanity will have to extricate itself from the bags created by false moralists, according to whom we taste happiness and then pass judgment on it, as if it were a piece of fruit. But I maintain that even for a piece of fruit we can do something to help it taste good. This is even truer of marriage and every other human relationship; these things are not meant to be tasted or passively accepted; they must be made. A relationship is not like a bit of shade where one is comfortable or uncomfortable depending on the weather and the way the wind is blowing. On the contrary, it is a place of miracles, where the magician makes the rain and the good weather.”

Alain (1868–1951) French philosopher

On Private Life
Alain On Happiness (1928)

Marriage , Way , Help , Dependency

“I did not come to know part II of 'Faust' until long after I made my illustrations, and even then only very superficially. It struck me as an ill-digested work, of little interest from the literary standpoint, but among those most calculated to inspire a painter owing to the mixture of characters and styles it contains... You asked what gave me the first idea of the Faust lithographs. I remember that about 1821 I saw the designs made by Retch [ Retzsch] and found them rather striking; but it was above all the performance of a dramatic opera on Faust that I saw in London in 1825 which stirred me to do something on the subject. The actor.... was a perfect Mephistopheles; he was fat, but that in no way diminished his nimbleness and his Satanic character.”

Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863) French painter

Quote in Delacroix' letter to Philippe Burty, 1 March 1862; as quoted in Letters of the great artists – from Blake to Pollock, Richard Friedenthal, Thames and Hudson, London, 1963, p. 76
Delacroix describes the source of his series Faust lithographs
1831 - 1863

Way , Idea , Parting , Perfection

“Since taking this job things have happened. I've been spending my free time studying the Word. Each night the Lord seemed to get hold of me a little more. Night before last I was reading in Nehemiah. I finished the book, and read it through again. Here was a man who left everything as far as position was concerned to go do a job nobody else could handle. And because he went the whole remnant back in Jerusalem got right with the Lord. Obstacles and hindrances fell away and a great work was done. Jim, I couldn't get away from it. The Lord was dealing with me. On the way home yesterday morning I took a long walk and came to a decision which I know is of the Lord. In all honesty before the Lord I say that no one or nothing beyond Himself and the Word has any bearing upon what I've decided to do. I have one desire now - to live a life of reckless abandon for the Lord, putting all my energy into it. Maybe He'll send me someplace where the name of Jesus Christ is unknown. Jim, I'm taking the Lord at His word, and I'm trusting Him to prove His Word. It's kind of like putting all your eggs in one basket, but we've already put our trust in Him for salvation, so why not do it as far as our life is concerned? If there's nothing to this business of eternal life we might as well lose everything in one crack and throw our present life away with out life hereafter. But if there is something to it, then everything else the Lord says must hold true likewise. Pray for me, Jim.”

Ed McCully (1927–1956) American Christian missionary

Life , Books , Way , Home

“Is this kind of ethics individualistic or not? Yes, if one means by that that it accords to the individual an absolute value and that it recognizes in him alone the power of laying the foundations of his own existence. It is individualism in the sense in which the wisdom of the ancients, the Christian ethics of salvation, and the Kantian ideal of virtue also merit this name; it is opposed to the totalitarian doctrines which raise up beyond man the mirage of Mankind. But it is not solipsistic, since the individual is defined only by his relationship to the world and to other individuals; he exists only by transcending himself, and his freedom can be achieved only through the freedom of others. He justifies his existence by a movement which, like freedom, springs from his heart but which leads outside of him.
This individualism does not lead to the anarchy of personal whim. Man is free; but he finds his law in his very freedom. First, he must assume his freedom and not flee it by a constructive movement: one does not exist without doing something; and also by a negative movement which rejects oppression for oneself and others.”

Simone de Beauvoir book The Ethics of Ambiguity

Une telle morale [la morale existentialiste] est-elle ou non un individualisme? Oui, si l’on entend par là qu’elle accorde à l’individu une valeur absolue et qu’elle reconnaît qu’a lui seul le pouvoir de fonder son existence. Elle est individualisme au sens où les sagesses antiques, la morale chrétienne du salut, l’idéal de la vertu kantienne méritent aussi ce nom ; elle s’oppose aux doctrines totalitaires qui dressent par-delà I’homme le mirage de l’Humanité. Mais elle n’est pas un solipsisme, puisque l’individu ne se définit que par sa relation au monde et aux autres individus, il n’existe qu’en se transcendant et sa liberté ne peut s’accomplir qu’à travers la liberté d’autrui. Il justifie son existence par un mouvement qui, comme elle, jaillit du coeur de lui-même, mais qui aboutit hors de lui.
Cet individualisme ne conduit pas à l’anarchie du bon plaisir. L’homme est libre ; mais il trouve sa loi dans sa liberté même. D’abord il doit assumer sa liberté et non la fuir; il l’assume par un mouvement constructif : on n’existe pas sans faire; et aussi par un mouvement négatif qui refuse l’oppression pour soi et pour autrui.
Conclusion http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/ethics/de-beauvoir/ambiguity/ch04.htm
The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947)

Wisdom , World , Law , Spring

“You’ll be pleased to know that you ‘secularists’ have a successful and time-tested way of tackling free speech: I am no longer writing for Rediff since its top honcho, Ajit Balakrishnan (also involved with discredited SABRANG communications Communalism Combat, ), finds me ‘very inflammatory.’ That’s surely something to rejoice over.”

Varsha Bhosle (1956–2012) Singer, Columnist

Quoted from Varsha Will Live On http://www.ibtl.in/column/1304/varsha-will-live-on/ http://www.sandeepweb.com/2007/04/27/does-anyone-remember-her/

Way , Communication , Time , Success

“It seemed clear that wars were not made by generations and their special stupidities, but that wars were made instead by something ignorant in the human heart.”

John Knowles book A Separate Peace

Gene, on war.
Source: A Separate Peace (1959), P. 193

War , Stupidity , Heart

“There is surely a piece of Divinity within us, something that was before the Elements, and owes no homage unto the Sun.”

Thomas Browne book Religio Medici

Section 11
Religio Medici (1643), Part II

Sun

“Anderson Cooper: Is Islam at war with the West?
Donald Trump: I think Islam hates us. There is something there, there is a tremendous hatred there, and we have to get to the bottom of it. There is an unbelievable hatred of us.
Cooper: In Islam itself?
Trump: You're going to have to figure that out, but there is a tremendous hatred and we have to be very vigilant, we have to be very careful and we can't allow people coming into this country who have this hatred of the United States and of people that are not Muslim.
Cooper: The question is is there a war between the West and radical Islam or is it between the West and Islam itself?
Trump: Well it's radical but it's very hard to define, it's very hard to separate because you don't know who's who.”

Donald J. Trump (1946) 45th President of the United States of America

9 March CNN interview, as quoted in "US Election 2016: Donald Trump tells CNN TV interviewer 'Islam hates us'" http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/us-election-2016-donald-trump-tells-cnn-tv-interviewer-islam-hates-us-1548760 by Harriet Sinclair, International Business Times (10 March 2016)
2010s, 2016, March

Hate , War , People , Question

“The idea that work is something apportioned out by men leaves people discontent with their portion and dubious about whether work is a good thing at all. … The ancient injunction to labor fades when we regard our work as cut out for us by men, who, by present dogma, are no better than ourselves. That curious modern hypostatization “service” is often called in to substitute for the now incomprehensible doctrine of vocation. It tries to secure subordination by hypothesizing something larger than the self, which turns out, however, to be only a multitude of selfish selves. The familiar change from quality to quantity may again be noted; one serves not the higher part of the self (this entails hierarchy) … but merely consumer demand. And who admires those at the top of a hierarchy of consumption? Man as a consuming animal is thus seen to be not enough.”

Richard M. Weaver (1910–1963) American scholar

Source: Ideas have Consequences (1948), p. 77.

Men , People , Idea , Change

“[In response to using profanity] I think I was just being myself for a moment there…Look, I think people should be kind of light about this. It's something that plenty of people have heard in their lives for sure.”

Eric Garcetti (1971) American politician

quoted by Michael Finnegan of the Los Angeles Times http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-garcetti-kings-swearing-apology-20140617-story.html (July 17, 2014)
2014, Los Angeles Kings Stanley Cup celebration

People , Thinking , Light

“They see something they may never have seen before: a normal human reacting normally to a traumatic situation. Livia, these people have been insulated within inscape their whole lives. They have lived in a world where their merest whim could be granted with a thought. Reality has always conformed to their desires—never the other way around. Now they find themselves in a world that obstinately refuses to change itself to fit their imagination. They literally have no idea how to respond.”

Karl Schroeder (1962) Author. Technology consultant

Source: Lady of Mazes (2005), Chapter 14 (p. 159).

People , World , Way , Imagination

“I got those, Data’s chair and console, the side walls, and some panels from Vegas. And though I didn’t know I'd have the entire bridge someday, I knew they were an invaluable history of Trek,
I couldn't allow it to bring me down. I spent almost a year trying to convince people to help me. If worst came to worst it could go to a rich guy’s house but then no one would see it.
Once this happened, that's how this bridge got forgotten about—people changed hands, people got fired,
I didn't know if he had standing assembled walls or what,
My whole thing was: this is good, it's great to have a dream, but it’s great to have your feet on the floor too.
They said: ‘You have to do something. This can't remain in this condition.”

Huston Huddleston

December 2012 https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/12/captain-i-saved-the-bridge-boldly-going-where-no-tv-set-has-gone-before/

People , Dreams , Guy , History

“We are not a small people, we are maybe something of a great people.”

René Lévesque (1922–1987) Quebec politician

On n'est pas un petit peuple, on est peut-être quelque chose comme un grand peuple.
Victory speech, 1976 Quebec election. http://archives.radio-canada.ca/politique/partis_chefs_politiques/clips/6151/

People

“I think I still have something to give. There is still that passion, that fire in me that says, ‘Let’s feel sorry for yourself for a day or so and let’s get back at it. Let’s get back on the horse.”

David Wright (1982) American baseball player

"
quoted by the New York Post http://nypost.com/2017/09/07/david-wright-is-certain-about-what-hell-be-doing-next-season/

Feeling , Thinking , Passion , Horse

“I think there are some objective [musical] qualities… how complex something is, how melodic, how diverse the tonality is, et cetera. But I could also make a piece of music that contains all of those and yet isn't "good" from a subjective viewpoint. For example, take Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata", Beatles "Yesterday", and Underworld's "Born Slippy", and play them all on top of each other at the same time. Great music in their own right, but terrible sounding together.”

Andrew Sega (1975) musician from America

Andrew Sega Shrine interview, 2011

Music , Thinking , Time

“I worry that this incredibly important and incredibly difficult conversation about race and policing has become focused entirely on the nature and character of law enforcement officers, when it should also be about something much harder to discuss. Debating the nature of policing is very important, but I worry that it has become an excuse, at times, to avoid doing something harder.”

James Comey (1960) American lawyer and the seventh director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)

2010s, Hard Truths: Law Enforcement (2015)

Law , Nature , Time

“Anything which may take possession of one’s soul shares its sublimity with all other things, and is for this reason at the same time something ordinary. Without such a dialectic clarification of our consciousness all adoration is idol worship.”

Joseph Dietzgen (1828–1888) german philosopher

Letter 3
Letters on Logic: Especially Democratic-Proletarian Logic (1906)

Soul , Time

“A love struck Romeo, sings a street-suss serenade;
Laying everybody low, with a love song that he made.
Finds a convenient street light, steps out of the shade
'N' says something like, "You and me babe, how about it?"”

Mark Knopfler (1949) English guitarist

Romeo and Juliet
Song lyrics, Making Movies (1980)

Love , Light , Singing

“The distinction between identifying reference and uniquely existential assertion is something quite undeniable. The sense in which the existence of something answering to a definite description used for the purpose of identifying reference, and its distinguishability by an audience from anything else, is presupposed and not asserted in an utterance containing such an expression, so used, stands absolutely firm, whether or not one opts for the view that radical failure of the presupposition would deprive the statement of a truth-value. It remains a decisive objection to the theory of Descriptions… that… it amounts to a denial of these undeniable distinctions.”

P. F. Strawson (1919–2006) British philosopher

Strawson (1964) "Identifying Reference and Truth-Values", Theoria Vol xxx; As cited in: Paul Snowdon (2009) " Peter Frederick Strawson http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2009/entries/strawson/", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Truth , Failure , Decision , Sense

“Fame to be sweet must resound in the ears of those we love, in the atmosphere of the land that will guard our ashes. Fame should hover over our tomb to warm with its heat the chill of death, so that we may not be completely reduced to nothingness, that something of us may survive.”

José Rizal (1861–1896) Filipino writer, ophthalmologist, polyglot and nationalist

Noli me Tangere

Love , Death

“I used to think I could understand everything and express everything. Or almost everything. I remember when I was writing my book about the war in Afghanistan, Zinky Boys, I went to Afghanistan and they showed me some of the foreign weapons that had been captured from the Afghan fighters. I was amazed at how perfect their forms were, how perfectly a human thought had been expressed. There was an officer standing next to me and he said, "If someone were to step on this Italian mine that you say is so pretty it looks like a Christmas decoration, there would be nothing left of them but a bucket of meat. You'd have to scrape them off the ground with a spoon." When I sat down to write this, it was the first time I thought, "Is this something I should say?" I had been raised on great Russian literature, I thought you could go very very far, and so I wrote about that meat. But the Zone—it's a separate world, a world within the rest of the world—and it's more powerful than anything literature has to say.”

Svetlana Alexievich book Voices from Chernobyl

Source: Voices from Chernobyl (2005), pp. 239–240

War , Books , World , Boy

“Sorry, I don’t understand ragas. Just show me the tune and I sing.” Then sing anything you like, said Boral, and Saigal started singing something in Raag Asawari.”

K. L. Saigal (1904–1947) Indian actor

In

Understanding , Singing

“The Cubists, to be objective, restrict themselves to considering things by turning around them, to produce their geometric writing. So they remain at a stage of intelligence which sees everything and feels nothing, which brings everything to a standstill in order to describe everything. We Futurists are trying, on the contrary, with the power of intuition, to place ourselves at the very center of things, in such a way that our ego forms with their own uniqueness a single complex. We thus give plastic planes a plastic expansion in space, obtaining this feeling of something in perpetual motion which is peculiar to everything living.”

Carlo Carrà (1881–1966) Italian painter

1910's
Source: Piani plastici come espanzione sferica nello spazio Carrà, March 1913, as quoted in Futurism, Didier Ottinger (ed.), 2008, p. 146

Way , Feeling , Intelligence

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

Paul Conrad (1924–2010) German theologian

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

People , Reading

“You can, after all, produce an orgasm yourself if that's what you want, so we must go to bed for something more.”

Merle Shain (1935–1989) Canadian writer

Some Men are More Perfect Than Others (1973)

“Yugoslavia is, with Iran, the only country which under difficult, not to say agonising, circumstances stood up to Joseph Stalin. It was not easy to unite ethnic groups or to modernize a country like Yugoslavia, and it must be acknowledged that Marshal Tito achieved something extraordinary. May God grant that his successors be as capable as he.”

Mohammad Reza Pahlavi (1919–1980) Shah of Iran

Page 146-147
Publications, The Shah's Story (1980), On world leaders and statesmen

God , Country

“How do we account for the current paranormal vogue in the popular media? Perhaps it has something to do with the millennium – in which case it's depressing to realise that the millennium is still three years away.”

Richard Dawkins (1941) English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author

The Richard Dimbleby Lecture: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder (1996)

“For me… the notion of an intimate relationship between music and society functions not as a distant goal but as a starting point of great immediacy, and not as an hypothesis but as an assumption. It functions as an idea about a relationship which in turn allows the examination of that relationship from many points of view and its exploration in many directions. It is an idea that generates studies the goal of which (or at least one important goal of which) is to articulate something essential about why any particular music is the way it is in particular, that is, to achieve insight into the character of its identity.”

Rose Rosengard Subotnik (1942) American musicologist

Rose Rosengard Subotnik (1987). "On grounding Chopin", Music and Society: The Politics of Composition, Performance, and Reception. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521379776.

Music , Way , Idea , Study

“It's like seeing someone for the first time, and you look at each other for a few seconds, and there's this kind of recognition like you both know something. Next moment the person's gone, and it's too late to do anything about it.”

Elmore Leonard book Out of Sight

Jack Foley
Out of Sight (1996)

Time , Personality

“Is love so fragile,
And the heart so hollow,
Shatter with words,
Impossible to follow,
You're saying I'm fragile, I try not to be,
I search only, for something I can't see.”

Stevie Nicks (1948) American singer and songwriter, member of Fleetwood Mac

Leather And Lace
Bella Donna (album) (1981)

Love , Search , Heart

“With the added psychological deterrent of litigation, my clashes with the pigs declined somewhat in frequency. They focused primarily on isolating me from others. Their efforts to perpetuate a discontinuity in our unity has been the pigs’ only effective weapon against me. And they’ve admitted in a thousand ways that their greatest fear is ending up with many other prisoners on their hands who think and act as I do. Their isolating me was long a tactic that I could not devise an effective countermeasure against, that is, until after 2001, when I was first exposed to revolutionary theory and have since come to understand the role of ideology. Without a unifying ideology, there can be no unity of struggle. Ideology was something I’d never had, and thus something I could not share. The prisoners who’d united in struggle with me had done so because of me. Not because of a shared principle. Therefore, when I was no longer around, they lost the initiative to struggle on.”

Kevin Rashid Johnson (1971) American prisoner and social activist

Defying the Tomb: Selected Prison Writings and Art of Kevin Rashid Johnson (2010)

Fear , Way , Understanding , Thinking

“There is rarely an exception: once a cat makes up her mind to do something, your pleadings matter not at all. A dog, in the same circumstances, no matter how urgently he needs to do something, will change his mind if you insist. He is made for compromise, for self-sacrifice, for thinking about how you feel. Not cats.”

Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson (1941) American writer and activist

Source: The Nine Emotional Lives of Cats (2002), Ch. 2

Dogs , Feeling , Cats , Thinking

“This [covariance] is something that is not in the habit of thinking of most amateur investors. They look at their investments one at a time, and they don't, you always have to go back and say, what's the covariance? That's what really matters for what happen to your portfolio. Because when you invest in a lot of companies that are all the same, you're asking for trouble, because the whole thing is going to either blow up or succeed. And you can't live like that. You have to be looking for low covariance.”

Robert J. Shiller (1946) American economist

Robert Shiller. Chalk Talk - Covariance, Financial Markets (Coursera) https://www.coursera.org/learn/financial-markets-global/lecture/41Ujc/chalk-talk-covariance.

Thinking , Time

“I felt something like the man on the resurrection morning who was reading his own tombstone and said either someone is an awful liar or I'm in the wrong hole.”

Tommy Douglas (1904–1986) Scottish-born Canadian politician

August 3,1961, NDP Leadership Convention http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFmD3U2s7tI.

Reading

“I began studying philosophy and economics about the same time. The similarity of the two disciplines struck me at once. I found no difficulty in grasping the differences between the great philosophical systems as they were presented by our textbooks and our teachers. Economic theory was easier still. Indeed, I thought the successive systems of economics were rather crude affairs compared with the subtleties of the metaphysicians. Having run the gamut from Plato to T. H. Green (as undergraduates do) I felt the gamut from Quesnay to Marshall was a minor theme. The technical part of the theory was easy. Give me premises and I could spin speculations by the yard. Also I knew that my 'deductions' were futile…
Meanwhile I was finding something really interesting in philosophy and in economics. John Dewey was giving courses under all sorts of titles and every one of them dealt with the same problem — how we think… And, if one wanted to try his own hand at constructive theorizing, Dewey's notion pointed the way. It is a misconception to suppose that consumers guide their course by ratiocination—they don't think except under stress. There is no way of deducing from certain principles what they will do, just because their behavior is not itself rational. One has to find out what they do. That is a matter of observation, which the economic theorists had taken all too lightly. Economic theory became a fascinating subject—the orthodox types particularly — when one began to take the mental operations of the theorists as the problem…
Of course Veblen fitted perfectly into this set of notions. What drew me to him was his artistic side… There was a man who really could play with ideas! If one wanted to indulge in the game of spinning theories who could match his skill and humor? But if anything were needed to convince me that the standard procedure of orthodox economics could meet no scientific tests, it was that Veblen got nothing more certain by his dazzling performances with another set of premises…
William Hill set me a course paper on 'Wool Growing and the Tariff.”

Wesley Clair Mitchell (1874–1948) American statistician

I read a lot of the tariff speeches and got a new sidelight on the uses to which economic theory is adapted, and the ease with which it is brushed aside on occasion. Also I wanted to find out what really had happened to wool growers as a result of protection. The obvious thing to do was to collect and analyze the statistical data... That was my first 'investigation'.
Wesley Clair Mitchell in letter to John Maurice Clark, August 9, 1928. Originally printed in Methods in Social Science, ed. Stuart Rice; Cited in: Arthur F. Burns (1965, 65-66)

Way , Behavior , Game , Idea