Quotes about something
page 72

“The deliberate, solemn conviction of good men through the world, that slavery is a grievous wrong to human nature, will make itself felt. To increase this moral power is every man's duty. To embody and express this great truth is in every man's power; and thus every man can do something to break the chain of the slave.”

William Ellery Channing (1780–1842) United States Unitarian clergyman

Slavery (1835)

Men, Truth, World, Nature

“I am waiting for something to go wrong
I am waiting for familiar resolve”

Ben Gibbard (1976) American singer, songwriter and guitarist

Expo '86
Transatlanticism (2003)

Waiting

“The Falcon was forever going wrong. Time and again Han and his rebel cohorts would have to bang on the dashboard with their fists to get some wayward system working. And this too helped give the ship a flawed, almost human quality. This is something I look for in all machines…”

Jeremy Clarkson (1960) English broadcaster, journalist and writer

I Know You Got Soul (2004)

Time, Help

“What each individual wills is obstructed by everyone else, and what emerges is something that no one willed.”

Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) German social scientist, author, political theorist, and philosopher

Letter to Jean-Richard Bloch http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1890/letters/90_09_21.htm (September 21, 1890)

“Maybe I sound like some Victorian who felt that forty years ought to be enough for any man, but one of the marks of a live well lived has to be reaching a state of finally getting it, of not needing more, and of being able to sign off with something approaching peace of mind.”

David Rakoff (1964–2012) writer

Don´t Get Too Comfortable (2005)

Peace

“Psychics exploit the human being's natural desire that longs for something higher than themselves.”

Christine O'Donnell (1969) American Tea Party politician and former Republican Party candidate

TV appearances

Nature

“But when I do think about religious problems, I think in Hindu categories. When my father died, it was the first time something really terrible happened to me-and Christianity and Judaism were of absolutely no use to me. My Jewish and Christian friends would take me to synagogues and churches, and it didn't help at all. And then I started thinking about the myths I was translating at the time, which were about death-why there is death, how death came into the world, what happens when we die, speculations about karma and rebirth. The Hindu version of it made more sense to me than anything. It just seemed like Shiva as a god was more likely to be responsible for the world the way I knew it than the gods of Judaism and Christianity. Capricious, beautiful, violent, it just made more sense.”

Wendy Doniger (1940) American Indologist

About her intent to practice Hinduism.
Q&A with Wendy Doniger, the Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor and author of The Hindus

Death, God, World, Beauty

“If you have a dream, a passion and have the opportunity to make it happen, great. BUT, if you can’t get to it right away, which is quite often the case, give the job you’re doing 100 per cent and keep your eyes open. You never know what opportunity might arise … something you never thought of could become your life’s work. Success of any kind is the result of hard work … there’s no shortcut.”

Anne Murray (1945) Canadian singer

On success
Mount Saint Vincent University speech (2016)

Life, Dreams, Passion, Success

“Benjamin Black is a craftsman and these are crafted works. I'm very proud of them. I think they're well made, but Banville is doing something else – he's trying to make a kind of poetry, I suppose. I'm a perfectionist. It's an illness but a good illness. It's a completely different method of writing. Banville writes with a fountain pen on paper in a manuscript book and Black works straight on to the screen. It could take me a whole morning to write a few sentences as Banville, but as Black I'd be very annoyed if I didn't have at least two or three pages done. This drives crime-writers crackers because they think I'm saying that their craft is not worth it. I'm simply saying it's a different thing. I don't know why they worry when I talk about speed; after all, Georges Simenon wrote his books in about 10 days.”

John Banville (1945) Irish writer

John Banville: Who cares whodunnit? (2013)

Books, Thinking, Speed

“I wanted something that was direct – right to you eye.... something you didn't have to look around – you got the whole thing right away.”

Frank Stella (1936) American artist

Quotes, 1960 - 1970

“Most often, the reason something is "on your mind" is that you want it to be different than it currently is, and yet: you haven't clarified exactly what the intended outcomes is; you haven't decided what the very next physical action step is; and/or you haven't put reminders of the outcome and the action required in a system you trust. That's why it's on your mind.”

David Allen (1945) American productivity consultant and author

Source: Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity (2001), Chapter 1

“Some day birth control will come off prescription, and they'll need those cute little catchy names like the patent medicines have…some day birth control pills will have names like, "Preg-Not"! Doctors prefer "Embry-No"! Here's one for the ladies, "Nary-A-Carry"! Something lofty and poetic: "Nay Family Way"; something earthhy and crude: "Mom Bomb"; something for the youngsters, "Junior Miss"; here's a real man's product, "Inconceivable"! "Mommy-Not", "Fetus Fail", "Kiddie Kill", "Papa Stopper", "Womb Broom", "Humpty Dumpty"… I wouldn't be surprised if they came up with a birth control pill that doesn't work all the time; they'd call it "Baby Maybe!"”

George Carlin (1937–2008) American stand-up comedian

FM & AM (1972)

Family, Way, Moms, Birth

“The duty of the artist is not to be calculating in any sense, so that he may be free himself of human emotions while carried by the universal forces of life. Only then does one not think about making art, or about styles, or directions. Something comes about, something happens.”

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

Karel Appel – the complete sculptures,' (1990) not-paged

Life, Art, Thinking, Sense

“How to be one up - how to make the other man feel that something has gone wrong, however slightly.”

Stephen Potter (1900–1969) British writer

Some Notes on Lifemanship (1950) p. 14
Definition of one-upmanship

Feeling

“A life given to determining the best form for the letters of the alphabet — does it seem extraordinary to you? But no day passes that our eyes do not fall upon something that was influenced, and made better, by this extraordinary, eccentric Scot, and if that is not a life well spent, I should be interested in a better definition.”

Robertson Davies (1913–1995) Canadian journalist, playwright, professor, critic, and novelist

Edward Johnston (1960).

Life

“And the soul, my soul at least, longs for something else, not absorption, not quietude, not peace, not appeasement, it longs ever to approach and never to arrive, it longs for the never-ending longing, for an eternal hope which is eternally renewed but never wholly fulfilled. And together with all this, it longs for an eternal lack of something and an eternal suffering. A suffering, a pain, thanks to which it grows without ceasing in consciousness and longing. Do not write upon the gate of heaven that sentence which Dante placed over the threshold of hell, Lasciate ogni speranza! [Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate: All hope abandon, ye who enter in] Do not destroy time!”

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

The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), X : Religion, the Mythology of the Beyond and the Apocatastasis

Pain, Peace, Hope, Soul

“What is my personal strategy for the next 10 hours? Who can I talk with or what can I volunteer for to learn something new?”

Tom Peters (1942) American writer on business management practices

Source: Tom Peters Daily, Weekly Quote, February 4, 2013.

Learning, Personality

“The essential of painting is that something, that 'ethereal glue', that intermediary product which the artist secretes with all his creative being and which he has to place, to encrust, to impregnate into the pictorial stuff of the painting.”

Yves Klein (1928–1962) French artist

Yves Klein, catalogue of exhibition in the Jewish Museum, New York 1967, p. 18
from posthumous publications

Secret, Painting

“I don't think I shall ever forget my first sight of Hercule Poirot. Of course, I got used to him later on, but to begin with it was a shock, and I think everyone else must have felt the same! I don't know what I'd imagined — something like Sherlock Holmes — […] Of course, I knew he was a foreigner, but I hadn't expected him to be quite as foreign as he was, if you know what I mean. When you saw him you just wanted to laugh! He was like something on the stage or at the pictures. […] He looked like a hairdresser in a comic play!”

Agatha Christie book Murder in Mesopotamia

Amy Leatheran
Murder in Mesopotamia (1936)

Imagination, Thinking, Forgetting

“I conceive the essential relationship between God and the world to be not one of power and violence, as might think the primitive man, who worships physical strength and imagines that it is a superior power shaking the earth with earthquakes or hurling a thunderbolt through space; it is nearness, something which might seem insignificant but which brings spiritual awareness.”

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

Hymn

God, World, Imagination, Thinking

“We do not “look” at something or someone; we “eat” it: we are like “cannibals” consuming the world for our own benefit. “The only people who have any hope of salvation are those who occasionally stop and look for a time, instead of eating.” Here we have Weil’s version of changing from a position of egocentrism to egolessness. … Weil is claiming that it all starts with paying attention to the other—any other—as the way to form our appropriate stance toward the world and all its creatures. Her essay titled “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God” joins what appear to be opposites—a child’s concentration on working on a math problem and training for loving God. From her own earliest days, she saw the value of studying math and science, disciplines that demanded an openness and patience to a subject outside of oneself and whose truth did not rest with one’s own interpretation.”

Sallie McFague (1933–2019) American feminist and theologian

describing Simone Weil’s view, Blessed Are the Consumers

Love, God, People, Truth

“You know the Art Rule: Do something that entertains/interests YOU, if you're lucky it'll do (the) same for others”

Keith Olbermann (1959) American sports and political commentator

[From Twitter]

Art

“Generations of Rationalists and freethinkers have held that Jesus Christ corresponds to no historical character: There never was a Jesus of Nazareth. We might call this categorical denial “Jesus atheism.” What I am describing is something different, a “Jesus agnosticism.” There may have been a Jesus on earth in the past, but the state of the evidence is so ambiguous that we can never be sure what this figure was like or, indeed, whether there was such a person.”

Robert M. Price (1954) American theologian

Past, Christ, Personality

“External success has to do with people who may see me as a model, or an example, or a representative. As much as I may dislike or want to reject that responsibility, this is something that comes with public success. It's important to give others a sense of hope that it is possible and you can come from really different places in the world and find your own place in the world that's unique for yourself.”

Amy Tan (1952) American novelist

American Acheivement interview (1996)

People, World, Hope, Sense

“[On the victims of the hurricane Katrina] "Here in Idaho, we couldn't understand how people could sit around on the kerbs waiting for the federal government to come and do something. We had a dam break in 1976, but we didn't whine about it. We got out our backhoes and we rebuilt the roads and replanted the fields and got on with our lives. That's the culture here. Not waiting for the federal government to bring you drinking water. In Idaho there would have been entrepreneurs selling the drinking water."”

Jim Risch (1943) American politician

Quoted in Guardian, August 31, 2007. http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/mark_schmitt/2007/08/the_real_hypocrisy_of_idaho_co.html

People, Drink, Understanding, Water

“Some one wrote to me upon the publication of my book two years ago: “But you live in England! Poor man: then you are a preacher in the desert!” So I am. But I owe something to my desert. The desert is an excellent place for anybody who can make use of it, as biblical and post-biblical experience proves. Without my desert I should not have written my book. Without coming to England I should have become a modern creature, going in for money and motor-cars. For I was born with a fatal inclination for such lighter and brighter kind of things. I was born under a lucky star, so to say: I was born with a warm heart and a happy disposition; I was born to play a good figure in one of those delightful fêtes champêtres of Watteau, Lancret, and Boucher, with a nice little shepherdess on my arm, listening to the sweet music of Rossini and drinking the inspiring “Capri bianco” or “Verona soave” of that beautiful country Italy. But the sky over here is not blue—nor grows there any wine in England—and no Rossini ever lived here; and towards the native shepherdesses I adopted the ways of the Christian towards his beautiful ideals: I admired them intensely but kept myself afar. So there was nothing to console your thirsty and disenchanted traveller in the British Sahara. In the depths of his despair, there was sent to him, as to the traveller in the desert, an enchanting vision, a beautiful fata Morgana rising on the horizon of the future, a fertile and promising Canaan of a new creed that had arisen in Germany (there too as a revulsion against the desert): the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche.
So I owe something to the desert. Had I not wandered there so long, I could never have fervently wished to escape nor finally succeeded in coming out of it.”

Oscar Levy (1867–1946) German physician and writer

Preface, pp. xii-xiii.
The Revival of Aristocracy (1906)

Money, Happiness, Books, Beauty

“I don't like firing people. It's not a pleasant thing and it's sad. … In some cases, it's a terrible, terrible situation for the person who gets fired, how strongly they take it. So it's not something that any rational or sane person can love doing, but it also happens to be a fact of life in business.”

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

Boston Herald (7 January 2004), as quoted in The World According to Trump (2005) by Ken Lawrence, p. 16
2000s

Love, Life, People, Sadness

“There is not and cannot possibly be any hard and fast antithesis between self-interest and care for others, for man is a social creature, born into family, clan, community, nation, brought up in mutual dependence. The founders of our religion made this a cornerstone of morality. The admonition: love they neighbour as thyself, and do as you would be done by, expresses this. You will note that it does not denigrate self, or elevate love of others above it. On the contrary, it sees concern for self and responsibility for self as something to be expected, and asks only that this be extended to others. This embodies the great truth that self-regard is the root of regard for one's fellows.”

Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013) British stateswoman and politician

Speech to Greater London Young Conservatives (Iain Macleod Memorial Lecture - "Dimensions of Conservatism") (4 July 1977) http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/103411 Leader of the Opposition

Love, Truth, Family, Religion

“The large 'White Flower' [Georgia painted in 1929] with the golden heart is something I have to say about White – quite different from what White has been meaning to me. Whether the flower or the color is the focus I do not know. I do know that the flower is painted large to convey to you my experience of the flower – and what is my experience of the flower if it is not color.”

Georgia O'Keeffe (1887–1986) American artist

both quotes in a letter to William M. Milliken, New York November 1, 1930; as quoted in Voicing our visions, – Writings by women artists; ed. Mara R. Witzling, Universe New York, 1991, p. 227
1930s

Color, Flowers, Heart, Painting

“I say all the time, if I sell that to you, you pay me for 3 colors. And I sell you 4, I betray you. Not to cheat you, but to pet you. You see I betray you in a positive way. I make you see more than there is. And that's in all my art that way. Absolutely something else. And that's what my book is about. You never see what you see. I lead you to see something else. And therefore I direct you. That's help.”

Josef Albers (1888–1976) German-American artist and educator

Homage to the square' (1964), Oral history interview with Josef Albers' (1968)

Books, Art, Color, Way

“My writing is careless, but all through it is something that is good, that is mine alone, that no other writer could ever achieve.”

William Saroyan (1908–1981) American writer

The Bicycle Rider In Beverly Hills (1952)

“I've always been a believer. I've been a believer in many different realms of alternate reality, the human capacity to move out of different planes of reality. It's something that has been with me since I was a child.”

Gillian Anderson (1968) American-British film, television and theatre actress, activist and writer

Time Inc. "8 Questions With Gillian Anderson" http://time.com/4153871/gillian-anderson-questions/ (December 21, 2015) 2010s

Reality

“God gives us the power to act for ourselves, but let me tell you something. At five in the morning I have never heard this [he says mimicking a knock on the door]. Hello Jack, this is Jesus. I will work out today.”

Jack LaLanne (1914–2011) American exercise instructor

In "Live Young Forever: 12 Steps to Optimum Health, Fitness and Longevity", pp.10-11

God

“The Fascists got what they deserved,” Floyd said.
“My husband lived long enough to see those monsters come to come to power. He saw through their lies and promises, but he also knew that they spoke to something nasty and squalid in the human spirit. Something in all of us. We want to hate those who are not like us. All we need is an excuse, a whisper in the ear.”

Alastair Reynolds book Century Rain

Source: Century Rain (2004), Chapter 9 (p. 135)

Hate

“Half the campus was designed by Bottom the Weaver, half by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe; Benton had been endowed with one to begin with, and had smiled and sweated and and spoken for the other. A visitor looked under black beams, through leaded casements (past apple boughs, past box, past chairs like bath-tubs on broomsticks) to a lawn ornamented with one of the statues of David Smith; in the months since the figure had been put in its place a shrike had deserted for it a neighboring thorn tree, and an archer had skinned her leg against its farthest spike. On the table in the President’s waiting-room there were copies of Town and Country, the Journal of the History of Ideas, and a small magazine—a little magazine—that had no name. One walked by a mahogany hat-rack, glanced at the coat of arms on an umbrella-stand, and brushed with one’s sleeve something that gave a ghostly tinkle—four or five black and orange ellipsoids, set on grey wires, trembled in the faint breeze of the air-conditioning unit: a mobile. A cloud passed over the sun, and there came trailing from the gymnasium, in maillots and blue jeans, a melancholy procession, four dancers helping to the infirmary a friend who had dislocated her shoulder in the final variation of The Eye of Anguish.”

Randall Jarrell book Pictures from an Institution

Source: Pictures from an Institution (1954) [novel], Chapter 1: “The President, Mrs., and Derek Robbins”, p. 3; opening paragraph of novel

Smile, History, Idea, Tree

“It is characteristic of the unlearned that they are forever proposing something which is old, and because it has recently come to their own attention, supposing it to be new.”

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

From 'Address at Holy Cross' (25 June 1919), published in Have Faith In Massachusetts: A Collection of Speeches and Messages (2nd Ed.) http://www.archive.org/details/havefaithinmassa00cooluoft, Coolidge, Houghton Mifflin, p. 231. 1910s, Address at Holy Cross (1919)

“I don't research anything. If I need something, I'll invent it.”

Mickey Spillane (1918–2006) American writer

Crime Time interview (2001)

“You are suffering from the unrestricted imports of cheaper goods. You are suffering also from the unrestricted immigration of the people who make these goods. (Loud and prolonged cheers.)…The evils of immigration have increased during recent years. And behind those people who have already reached these shores, remember there are millions of the same kind who, under easily conceivable circumstances, might follow in their track, and might invade this country in a way and to an extent of which few people have at present any conception. The same causes that brought 10,000 and 20,000, and tens of thousands, may bring hundreds of thousands, or even millions. (Hear, hear.) If that would be an evil, surely he is a statesman who would deal with it in the beginning. (Hear, hear.)…When it began we were told it was so small that it would not matter to us. Now it has been growing with great rapidity, it has already affected a whole district, it is spreading into other parts of the country…Will you take it in time (hear, hear), or will you wait, hoping for something to turn up which will preserve you from what you all see to be the natural consequences of such an invasion? …it is a fact that when these aliens come here they are answerable for a larger amount of crime and disease and hopeless poverty than are proportionate to their numbers. (Cheers.) They come here—I do not blame them, I am speaking of the results—they come here and change the whole character of a district. (Cheers.) The speech, the nationality of whole streets has been altered; and British workmen have been driven by the fierce competition of famished men from trades which they previously followed. (Cheers.)…But the party of free importers is against any reform. How could they be otherwise?…they are perfectly consistent. If sweated goods are to be allowed in this country without restriction, why not the people who make them? Where is the difference? There is no difference either in the principle or in the results. It all comes to the same thing—less labour for the British working man.”

Joseph Chamberlain (1836–1914) British businessman, politician, and statesman

Cheers.
Speech in Limehouse in the East End of London (15 December 1904), quoted in ‘Mr. Chamberlain In The East-End.’, The Times (16 December 1904), p. 8.
1900s

Men, People, Disease, Hope

“Saturday is a dismayingly bad book. The numerous set pieces—brain operations, squash game, the encounters with Baxter, etc. — are hinged together with the subtlety of a child's Erector Set. The characters too, for all the nuzzling and cuddling and punching and manhandling in which they are made to indulge, drift in their separate spheres, together but never touching, like the dim stars of a lost galaxy. The politics of the book is banal, of the sort that is to be heard at any middle-class Saturday-night dinner party, before the talk moves on to property prices and recipes for fish stew. There are good things here, for instance the scene when Perowne visits his senile mother in an old-folks' home, in which the writing is genuinely affecting in its simplicity and empathetic force. Overall, however, Saturday has the feel of a neoliberal polemic gone badly wrong; if Tony Blair — who makes a fleeting personal appearance in the book, oozing insincerity — were to appoint a committee to produce a "novel for our time," the result would surely be something like this.”

John Banville (1945) Irish writer

Banville on Saturday http://marksarvas.blogs.com/elegvar/2005/05/banville_on_sat.html, from The New York Review of Books (source dated 10 May 2005). Original source http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2005/may/26/a-day-in-the-life/?pagination=false.

Books, Feeling, Home, Game

“The way I solved the theoretical problem was to go into the shop and build something concrete.”

Robert B. Leighton (1919–1997) American astronomer

finding out that he was not a theoretical but an experimental physicist, as quoted in his biographical memoir. [Jesse L. Greenstein, Robert B. Leighton, 1919—1996, Biographical Memoirs v.75, National Academy of Sciences, 1998, 0-309-06295-0, 164, http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=9649&page=164]

Way, Problem

“There is room enough for a natural 'painture'. The great vice of the present day is bravura, an attempt to do something beyond the truth. In endeavouring to do something better than well, they do what in reality is good for nothing. Fashion always had, & will have, its day — but truth (in all things) only will last, and can only have just claims on posterity.”

John Constable (1776–1837) English Romantic painter

Letter to John Dunthorne (29 May 1802), from John Constable's Correspondence, part 2, pp. 31-32
1800s - 1810s

Truth, Fashion, Nature, Reality

“The love of people goes far beyond liberty, rights, equality, and justice. It is something positive, seeks the fullest possible self-realization; it contemplates happiness, overflows all differences, and creates the kind of wealth that can be produced only by people who enjoy their common participation in a community.”

Elmer Eric Schattschneider (1892–1971) American political scientist

Source: Two Hundred Million Americans in Search of a Government (1969), p. 43

Love, Happiness, People, Justice

“I was supposed to devote myself only to the Talmud. But the Talmud utterly repelled me, thought I was still a pious Jew-boy [Judenkind]. I wanted to satisfy my craving to be active, to do something: this craving looked for a sphere for itself because none was offered it. I did not want to be a good-for-nothing - and therefore I became a writer.”

Moses Hess (1812–1875) German philosopher

Hess' Diary

Boy

“The Speaker is seen, but not heard and the President is neither seen nor heard. He would very much would a President who is neither seen nor heard, but who decides. I would like to do something silently.”

Neelam Sanjiva Reddy (1913–1996) sixth President of India

His statement on assuming office of President in: Dr. Janak Raj Jai "Presidents of India, 1950-2003", P.140

“If speaking to nonscientific audiences is something that interests you or will likely be asked of you, keep in mind three overriding requirements: first, you must be a human being, an interesting one if at all possible; second, you must be accurate in what you say, that is, tell the truth (about what is known and what isn't; about issues, debates, controversies); and third, if your subject is scientific knowledge, you must remain a scientist and not slip into the role of advocate or activist.”

Scott L. Montgomery (1951) American geologist and writer

The Chicago Guide to Communicating Science, second edition, University of Chicago press, 2017, page 302 ISBN 978-0-226-14450-4.

Truth, Knowledge

“Truer notions of genetic physiology are given by the Hebrew expression "seed". If we speak of a man as "of the blood-royal" we think at once of plebeian dilution, and we wonder how much of the royal fluid is likely to be "in his veins"; but if we say he is "of the seed of Abraham" we feel something of the permanence and indestructibility of that germ which can be divided and scattered among all nations, but remains recognisable in type and characteristics after 4000 years.”

William Bateson (1861–1926) British geneticist and biologist

Australian Meeting of the British Association. Inaugural Address. August 20th, 1914.

Feeling, Thinking

“Love when felt at all deeply has an element of transcendentalism in it, which makes it the most natural thing in the world for the two lovers — even though drawn together by a passing sex-attraction — to swear eternal troth to each other; but there is something quite diabolic and mephistophelean in the practice of the Law, which creeping up behind, as it were, at this critical moment, and overhearing the two thus pledging themselves, claps its book together with a triumphant bang, and exclaims: "There now you are married and done for, for the rest of your natural lives."”

Edward Carpenter (1844–1929) British poet and academic

Love's Coming of Age (1896)

Love, Books, World, Law

“The natural law of good communications takes the following, quite different, form in SA:
Everything worth saying
about anything worth saying something about
must be expressed in six or fewer pieces.”

Douglas T. Ross (1929–2007) American computer scientist

Source: Structured analysis (SA): A language for communicating ideas (1977), p. 18; Statement cited in: Peter Freeman, ‎Anthony I. Wasserman (1983), Tutorial on software design techniques. p. 98.

Law, Communication, Nature

“It's a public library. If you don't like the book, magazine, CD-ROM or film, put it down and pick up something else. Libraries provide choice. Our responsibility is to have in our collection a broad range of ideas and information.”

Judith Krug (1940–2009) librarian and freedom of speech proponent

" Oak Lawn Library Vows to Keep Playboy on Shelf http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2005-06-23/news/0506230234_1_library-board-president-library-officials-magazine" by Jo Napolitano, Chicago Tribune (June 23, 2005)

Books, Idea

“The truth is that what really needs fixing is something only a few, like President Obama, are willing to speak about, perhaps because it is so daunting a task. Through the “My Brother’s Keeper” initiative, the President is addressing the disproportionate challenges faced by young men of color. For instance, data shows that the percentage of young men not working or not enrolled in school is nearly twice as high for blacks as it is for whites. This initiative, and others like it, is about doing the hard work to grow drug-resistant and violence-resistant kids, especially in communities of color, so they never become part of that officer’s life experience.”

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

2010s, Hard Truths: Law Enforcement (2015)

Life, Men, Truth, School

“I've now got the music book ready,
Do sit up and sing like a lady
A recitative from Tancredi,
And something about "Palpiti!"
Sing forte when first you begin it,
Piano the very next minute,
They'll cry "What expression there's in it!"”

Thomas Haynes Bayly (1797–1839) English poet, songwriter, dramatist, and writer

Don't sing English ballads to me!
Don't Sing English Ballads to Me; reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 56.

Books, Music, Singing, Cry

“It's a simple fact, when you move from one color space to another color space, that if there's a value contrast you get a strong optical illusion. Strong value contrast can be expressive and dramatic. Like the difference between high or low volume or the low key and the high keys on the piano... Actually, if you're moving from one flat color to another flat color, if there's a difference of color – if one is matte and the other is shiny – that contrast of tactility can keep them visually in the same dimension. It keeps them adjacent – side by side... Another reason is that a matte color and a shiny, transparent color are emotionally different. If something is warm and fuzzy and dense we have a kind of emotional response to that. If something is clear and you can see through it, like yellow or green or red can be, we have a different emotional sensation from that. So there's an expressive difference you can get that gives you more expressive range.”

Kenneth Noland (1924–2010) American artist

Source: Color, Format and Abstract Art' (1977), pp. 99 – 105

Color, Strong

“We approach one another as if we were separate entities and see the other only from a limited point of view – not as part of us; we do not open ourselves to others with complete faith. When we first encounter objects or persons we think, because of this feeling of separateness, that they are just as we find them and nothing else. But if my attitude towards this person is of love, interest, oneness, then I will lose that first impression of having accidentally found them and will grow beyond my limitations towards something at once more intimate and more vast.”

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

Hymn

Love, Faith, Feeling, Thinking

“Coalition: If the political developments in the country have created a situation like this, then it is for the country to decide whether they should have this Constitution or frame something which will take care of such situations. But as the Constitution stands, we cannot ask the President to do many things. The Constitution as framed is inadequate to deal with situations of the kind that have risen since the framing of the Constitution.”

R. Venkataraman (1910–2009) seventh Vice-President of India and the 8th President of India

The Rediff Interview/R Venkataraman

Country

“What a struggle I had to make on that ['Mother and Child']. You would say, a nice assignment to make something good out of it, isn't it. I myself thought it that way. So I went to Heeze, I made a mass of studies of women with children, came back with the sketches to my studio... Oh, what an obsession..”

Suze Robertson (1855–1922) Dutch painter

(version in original Dutch / origineel citaat van Suze Robertson:) Wat heb ik dáár op getobd ['Moeder en Kind']. Ge zoudt zeggen, niet waar: 'n opgaaf [opdracht] om best iets goed van te maken. Dat dacht ik ook. 'k ging dus naar nl:Heeze, maakte er massa's studies van vrouwen met kinderen, kwam daarmee op m'n atelier terug.. .Maar wat een obsessie..
Source: 1900 - 1922, Onder de Menschen: Suze Robertson' (1912), p. 34

Women, Children, Way, Study

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

Errol Morris (1948) American filmmaker and writer

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

Truth, World, Change, Falseness

“It is always impossible—he was conscious again with that strange clarity of mind—for a man to face his own death honestly. A man always continues to believe to the last moment of his life that something will intervene to save him.”

Andre Norton book The Time Traders

Source: The Time Traders (1958), p. 198

Life, Death

“Some have an idea that the reason we in this country discard things so readily is because we have so much. The facts are exactly opposite-the reason we have so much is simply because we discard things so readily. We replace the old in return for something that will serve us better.”

Alfred P. Sloan (1875–1966) American businessman

Alfred P. Sloan, in: General Motors, News and Views. (1945), p. 1;

Idea, Country

“It's hard to hear what they're saying. Have you ever tried to say, 'What's the special today?' to somebody from Bulgaria? And the worst ones — if they're from India. I mean, they're all lovely people, but you gotta have an interpreter. Or how many of you try to return something on Amazon on a telephone?”

Paul LePage (1948) American businessman, Republican Party politician, and the 74th Governor of Maine

About workers with accents. http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/maine-gov-paul-lepage-mocks-immigrant-workers-speech-article-1.2613543 (April 25, 2016)

Love, People

“Incompossible, adj. Unable to exist if something else exists. Two things are incompossible when the world of being has scope enough for one of them, but not enough for both — as Walt Whitman's poetry and God's mercy to man.”

Ambrose Bierce book The Devil's Dictionary

The Devil's Dictionary (1911)

God, World

“Rand always says, “Never pass up an opportunity to pass moral judgment.” Well I say: “Look for an opportunity to do something more useful instead.” Nobody was led to virtue by being told he was a scoundrel.”

Nathaniel Branden (1930–2014) Canadian–American psychotherapist and writer

Interview by Alec Mouhibian in The Free Radical (November 2004)

“When I started out, I believed that there were very distinct systems paradigms, and there was a need to choose and defend yours against other people’s paradigms. Today I prefer to see a systems perspective as something that you develop over a lifetime. It’s like building a house that evolves: you can redecorate it, even build an extension.”

Gerald Midgley (1960) New Zealand acaedmic

Midgley (2012) Interview with systems thinker Gerald Midgley http://www.shiftn.com/news/detail/interview_with_systems_thinker_gerald_midgley, March 5, 2012.

People, Housing

“This may be the most bizarre recommendation, but I am sincere. I'm not saying it's not an issue or it's not important, but proportionally speaking, stop complaining about health care…if there was something that we could do about it that were quick or easy, it would be done…There is no solution.”

John E. Sununu (1964) American politician

Sununu: No quick fix for health costs http://www.concordmonitor.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20061203/REPOSITORY/612030359, Concord Monitor (December 3, 2006)

Health, Sincerity

“This is something you can never erase. It leaves a scar on you.”

Ai Weiwei (1957) Chinese concept artist

2010-, Ai Weiwei: ‘Shame on Me.’, 2011

“As a matter of fact, however, no church rises with everything against it. Something is favorable to it, or it could not exist. If it succeeds and grows, it is absolutely certain that the conditions are favorable. If it spreads rapidly, it simply shows that the conditions are exceedingly favorable, and that the forces in opposition are weak and easily overcome.”

Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–1899) Union United States Army officer

Rome, or Reason? A Reply to Cardinal Manning. Part I. The North American Review (1888)

“My views on abortion come from my mom. She was a nurse in surgery for her entire adult life, and used to tell me how terrible it was before Roe vs. Wade—when back-alley abortions often placed the woman's life in danger. Today, some people live under a false premise that, if the government makes something illegal, it will go away. But then the illegal activity is simply controlled by an underground or criminal element. And, in the case of abortion, you will not receive the safety and precautions necessary.”

Jesse Ventura (1951) American politician and former professional wrestler

Source: Don't Start the Revolution Without Me! (2008), Ch. 10 (p. 182)

Life, People, Moms, Falseness

“It was not his fight. Not personally his fight. No more his fight than any one of them. But he had made it his. Because of Stone, because of Rand and Harriet, because of priest who’d hounded him across half the continent, he had tried to make a fight of it. And perhaps, as well, because of something undefinable, unknown to himself, unsuspected in himself—some crazy idealism, some deep-rooted sense of justice, some basic aversion to bullies and bigots and reformers.”

Clifford D. Simak book Time is the Simplest Thing

Source: Time is the Simplest Thing (1961), Chapter 32 (p. 245)

Justice, Sense, Fight, Personality

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

Charles Eisenstein (1967) American writer

The Ascent of Humanity
The Ascent of Humanity (2007)

“Government — they used to teach it in college. It's actually something you should study and learn and know how to do. The Republicans always run on the idea that government isn't very effective. Well, not the way you do it. But it can be effective.”

Bill Maher (1956) American stand-up comedian

As quoted in "Real talk with Bill Maher" by Joan Walsh at Salon.com (16 February 2007) http://www.salon.com/ent/tv/int/2007/02/16/maher/index2.html

Way, Idea, Study, Learning

“We start with enthusiasm — out we go each of us to our task in all the brightness of sunrise, and hope beats along our pulses; we believe the world has no blanks except to cowards, and we find, at last, that, as far as we ourselves are concerned, it has no prizes; we sicken over the endless unprofitableness of labour most when we have most succeeded, and when the time comes for us to lay down our tools we cast them from us with the bitter aching sense, that it were better for us if it had been all a dream. We seem to know either too much or too little of ourselves — too much, for we feel that we are better than we can accomplish; too little, for, if we have done any good at all, it has heen as we were servants of a system too vast for us to comprehend. We get along through life happily between clouds and sunshine, forgetting ourselves in our employments or our amusements, and so long as we can lose our consciousness in activity we can struggle on to the end. But when the end comes, when the life is lived and done, and stands there face to face with us; or if the heart is weak, and the spell breaks too soon, as if the strange master-worker has no longer any work to offer us, and turns us off to idleness and to ourselves; in the silence then our hearts lift up their voices, and cry out they can find no rest here, no home. Neither pleasure, nor rank, nor money, nor success in life, as it is called, have satisfied, or can satisfy; and either earth has nothing at all which answers to our cravings, or else it is something different from all these, which we have missed finding — this peace which passes understanding — and from which in the heyday of hope we had turned away, as lacking the meretricious charm which then seemed most alluring.
I am not sermonizing of Religion, or of God, or of Heaven, at least not directly.”

James Anthony Froude book The Nemesis of Faith

Confessions Of A Sceptic
The Nemesis of Faith (1849)

Life, Money, God, Pleasure

“"Andrea presented herself as a street fighter intellectual, a bohemian freedom fighter, and someone who wanted to get to the bottom of things. That quote about Malcolm X is apt. Malcolm pointed out “The problem is WHITE PEOPLE.” Dworkin said, “The problem is MEN.” And for all the holes that can be poked in that cloth, there is something about that grain that is absolutely true, when you are the short end of the bolt."”

Andrea Dworkin (1946–2005) Feminist writer

" Andrea Dworkin Has Died http://susiebright.blogs.com/susie_brights_journal_/2005/04/andrea_dworkin_.html" by Susie Bright, Susie Bright's Journal (blog), April 11, 2005. About

Men, People, Quotes, Problem

“Deception, in turn, suggests morality: the morality of deceiving people into thinking something is so when it is not. […] The moral principle is this: whoever attempts to tame a part of a wicked problem, but not the whole, is morally wrong.”

C. West Churchman (1913–2004) American philosopher and systems scientist

Source: 1960s - 1970s, Guest editorial: Wicked problems (1967), p. 142 cited in: Rob Hundman (2010) Weerbarstig veranderen. p. 38

People, Problem, Thinking, Parting

“No dogma taught by the present civilization seems to form so insuperable an obstacle in the way of a right understanding of the relations which culture sustains to wildness, as that which declares that the world as made especially for the uses of men. Every animal, plant, and crystal controverts it in the plainest terms. Yet it is taught from century to century as something ever new and precious, and in the resulting darkness the enormous conceit is allowed to go unchallenged.”

John Muir (1838–1914) Scottish-born American naturalist and author

" Wild Wool http://books.google.com/books?id=LcIRAAAAYAAJ&pg=P361", Overland Monthly, volume 14, number 4 (April 1875) pages 361-366 (at page 364); modified slightly and reprinted in Steep Trails (1918), chapter 1 1870s

Men, World, Way, Understanding

“"Good God, almighty!" (said usually when someone or something unexpected happens during a match)”

Jim Ross (1952) American professional wrestling commentator, professional wrestling referee, and restaurateur

Commentary Quotes

God

“It is little silly to be a caricature of something of which you know very little, and which means very little to you, but to be your own caricature — that is the true carnival!”

Karen Blixen (1885–1962) Danish writer

Carnival: Entertainments and Posthumous Tales (1971)

“A true seeker could not accept any teachings, not if he sincerely wished to find something. But he who had found, could give his approval to every path, every goal; nothing separated him from all of the other thousands who lived in eternity, who breathed the Divine.”

Hermann Hesse (1877–1962) German writer

Source: Siddhartha (1922), p. 80

Sincerity

“When the newspapers have got nothing else to talk about, they cut loose on the young. The young are always news. If they are up to something, that's news. If they aren't, that's news too.”

Kenneth Rexroth (1905–1982) American poet, writer, anarchist, academic and conscientious objector

"The Students Take Over," The Nation (1960); later printed as "Beginnings of a New Revolt" http://www.bopsecrets.org/rexroth/newrevolt.htm, Assays (1961)

“Within the indigenous world the act of coming to know something involves a personal transformation. The knower and the known are indissolubly linked and changed in a fundamental way. …it is a dynamic and living process, an aspect of the ever-changing, ever-renewing process of nature.”

F. David Peat (1938–2017) British physicist

The Blackfoot Physics (2006)

World, Way, Nature, Change

“Ask the locals. They can point you in the direction of the area's shopping district where you'll be sure to find something different and unique that pleases you.”

Rachael Ray (1968) American businessman

Unsourced

“Whenever Islam becomes empowered, the non-Muslim population suffers. That's something to keep in mind as Islam relentlessly expands throughout the West.”

Geert Wilders (1963) Dutch politician

Source: 2010s, Marked for Death (2012), Ch. 6: "Tears of Babylon", p. 99

Suffering

“In recent times the rainbow (albeit with some different colors) has come to represent something far different. To many people it means freedom, love, pride, a new era, and, specifically, the LGBTQ movement… But the rainbow itself wasn’t designed to be a symbol of freedom, love, pride, or the LGBTQ movement. God created this beautiful, colorful phenomenon and designated it as a sign of His covenant with Noah and his descendants forever. Sadly, people ignore what God intended the rainbow to represent and proudly wave rainbow-colored flags in defiance of God’s command and design for marriage. Because of this, many Christians shy away from using the rainbow colors. But the rainbow was a symbol of God’s promises before the LGBTQ movement—and will continue to be after that movement has ended. As Christians, we need to take the rainbow back and teach our young people its true meaning.”

Ken Ham (1951) Australian young Earth creationist

Rainbow Lights at the Ark https://answersingenesis.org/blogs/ken-ham/2016/12/20/rainbow-lights-at-ark/, Around the World with Ken Ham (December 20, 2016) Around the World with Ken Ham (May 2005 - Ongoing)

Love, God, Marriage, People

“If we could dredge up something forgotten not only by ourselves but by our whole generation or our entire civilization, we should become indeed the boonbringer, the culture hero of the day—a personage of not only local but world historical moment. In a word: the first work of the hero is to retreat from the world scene of secondary effects to those causal zones of the psyche where the difficulties really reside, and there to clarify the difficulties, eradicate them in his own case (i. e., give battle to the nursery demons of his local culture) and break through to the undistorted, direct experience and assimilation of what C. G. Jung called "the archetypal images." This is the process known to Hindu and Buddhist philosophy as viveka, "discrimination."”

Joseph Campbell book The Hero with a Thousand Faces

Source: The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), Chapter 1

World

“The process in which something functions as a sign may be called '. This process, in a tradition which goes back to the Greeks, has commonly been regarded as involving three (or four) factors: that which acts as a sign, that which the sign refers to, and the effect on some interpreter in virtue of which the thing in question is a sign to that interpreter. These three components in semiosis may be called, respectively, the sign vehicle, the designatum, and the interpretant; the interpreter may be included as a fourth factor. These terms make explicit the factors left undesignated in the common statement that a sign refers to something for someone.”

Charles W. Morris (1903–1979) American philosopher

Source: "Foundations of the Theory of Signs," 1938, p. 3

Question

“It is all a matter of comparing one’s own life with something worse and consoling oneself with the relativity of human fortunes. When I was eight or nine I had an experience which came clearly to mind when I read your advice. I used to know a family in a little village near mine: father, mother and sons: they were small landowners and had an inn. Very energetic people, especially the woman. I knew (I had heard) that besides the sons we knew, this woman had another son nobody had seen, who was spoken of in whispers, as if he were a great disgrace for the mother, an idiot, a monster or worse. I remember that my mother referred to this woman often as a martyr, who made great sacrifices for this son, and put up with great sorrows. One Sunday morning about ten, I was sent to this woman’s: I had to deliver some crocheting and get the money. I found her shutting the door, dressed up to go out to mass, she had a hamper under her arm. On seeing me she hesitated then decided. She told me to accompany her to a certain place, and that she would take delivery and give me the money on our return. She took me out of the village, into an orchard filled with rubbish and plaster; in one corner there was a sort of pig sty, about four feet high, and windowless, with only a strong door. She opened the door and I could hear an animal-like howling. Inside was her son, a robust boy of 18, who couldn’t stand up and hence scraped along on his seat to the door, as far as he was permitted to move by a chain linked to his waist and attached to the ring in the wall. He was covered with filth, and his eyes shone red, like those of a nocturnal animal. His mother dumped the contents of her basket – a mixed mess of household leftovers – into a stone trough. She filled another trough with water, and we left. I said nothing to my mother about what I had seen, so great an impression it had made on me, and so convinced was I that nobody would believe me. Nor when I later heard of the misery which had befallen that poor mother, did I interrupt to talk of the misery of the poor human wreck who had such a mother.”

Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937) Italian writer, politician, theorist, sociologist and linguist

Gramsci, 1965, p. 737 cited in Davidson, 1977, p. 35.

Life, Money, People, Family

“Science is the knowledge of Consequences, and dependence of one fact upon another: by which, out of that we can presently do, we know how to do something else when we will, or the like, another time:”

Thomas Hobbes book Leviathan

The First Part, Chapter 5, p. 21
Leviathan (1651)

Knowledge, Science, Time, Dependency

“But I thought: Of course -- Lyman was representing my own ideas about something else too; the overly gullible people who parade as skeptics. All many of them need is a word they've been some big shot in a past life, or known some famous person, and presto, they're confirmed "believers." People like that -- like the boy on the phone -- never trust their own vision.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Source: Psychic Politics: An Aspect Psychology Book (1976), p. 13

Life, People, Boy, Idea

“But there was something else that the Abstract Expressionists taught us: they began to use something besides the conventional means of art; to want other kinds of paint, or kinds of canvas, or ways of making pictures that weren't the usual ways. Some of the next generation, the Pop Art artists [like Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol, picked up this attitude and began to put actual things into art. We [=w:Morris Louis and Noland] were making abstract art, but we wanted to simplify the selection of materials, and to use them in a very economical way. To get to raw canvas, to use the canvas un-stretched – to use it in more basic or fundamental ways, to use it as fabric rather than as a stretched surface.”

Kenneth Noland (1924–2010) American artist

Source: Color, Format and Abstract Art' (1977), pp. 99 – 105

Art, Way, Painting

“There are many steps on the continuum between controlling something and doing nothing at all.”

Orson Scott Card Ender's Game hexalogy

Page 57
Ender's Game series, First Meetings in the Enderverse (2003), The Polish Boy

“I wanted something different—something to make me stand out and for people to notice.”

Tony Esposito (1943) American ice hockey goaltender

Quoted in Andrew Podnieks, "One on One with Tony Esposito," http://www.legendsofhockey.net/html/spot_oneononep198801.htm Legends of Hockey.net (2002-03-04) Esposito explains why he chose to wear the number 35, instead of the more standard goaltender numbers 1 and 30.

People

“As you read these stories you will see that whenever I was properly humble and willing to let something besides a human be my instructor, these various four-legged, six-legged and no-legged fellows shared priceless wisdom with me. They taught me that perfect understanding and perfect co-operation between the human and all other forms of life is unfailing whenever the human really does his required part.”

J. Allen Boone (1882–1965) American writer

Foreword to Kinship With All Life (Harper & Row, 1954), ISBN 0060609125

Life, Wisdom, Understanding, Reading

“Those who believe that they are exclusively in the right are generally those who achieve something.”

Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) English writer

" Note on Dogma http://books.google.com/books?id=gcfPAAAAMAAJ&q=&quot;Those+who+believe+that+they+are+exclusively+in+the+right+are+generally+those+who+achieve+something&quot;" Proper Studies (1927)

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

Derren Brown (1971) British illusionist

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

Drink, Speed

“If you see something different for yourself in the future, you have to do something different for yourself in the present.”

Steve Maraboli (1975)

Source: Life, the Truth, and Being Free (2010), p. 110

Future

“When I was very young, somebody — maybe it was a squirrel, they talk so much, or a magpie, or maybe a fishie — told me that Pan owned all this forest. Well, not owned owned. Not like he would sell the forest to someone else, or put a wall all around it … It's not hard to own something. Or everything. You just have to know that it's yours, and then be willing to let it go.”

Neil Gaiman book Stardust

Stardust (1999)

“Perhaps it is true that the trials of life always teach us something, but it is undeniable that we are not always so eager to learn.”

Fausto Cercignani (1941) Italian scholar, essayist and poet

Examples of self-translation (c. 2004), Quotes - Zitate - Citations - Citazioni

Life, Learning

“We do know from the numbers of people who have come out already--and from the anger that we know exists in the communities where we live--that people want to fight. They don't necessarily know how to fight or what to do. But they want to, and that's important because it means people want things to be different, and that's an important starting place to work with. For people who want to do something, and do it now, this means we have to be both patient in terms of how larger movements develop, but also urgent about doing the work of organizing for the things we can do now. Movements aren't built by waiting for the struggle to develop and build itself--it's based on what we do today.”

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor (1950) American academic and author

The fight against racism doesn't stop here (2013)

People, Communication, Waiting, Fight

“Debased men, but they all had something in common: They showed a keen regard for virtue, and tried to dress themselves in that costume. Hypocrisy, for all its bad reputation, at least showed a decent respect for goodness.”

Orson Scott Card (1951) American science fiction novelist

Source: The Tales of Alvin Maker, Alvin Journeyman (1995), Chapter 14.

Men

“By committing a crime, a man places himself, of his own accord, outside the chain of eternal obligations which bind every human being to every other one. Punishment alone can weld him back again; fully so, if accompanied by consent on his part; otherwise only partially so. Just as the only way of showing respect for somebody suffering from hunger is to give him something to eat, so the only way of showing respect for somebody who has placed himself outside the law is to reinstate him inside the law by subjecting him to the punishment ordained by law.
The need for punishment is not satisfied where, as is generally the case, the penal code is merely a method of exercising pressure through fear.”

Simone Weil (1909–1943) French philosopher, Christian mystic, and social activist

Source: Simone Weil : An Anthology (1986), The Needs of the Soul (1949), p. 103

Hunger, Fear, Law, Way

“We are participators in bringing into being not only the near and here but the far away and long ago. We are in this sense, participators in bringing about something of the universe in the distant past and if we have one explanation for what's happening in the distant past why should we need more?”

John Archibald Wheeler (1911–2008) American physicist

"The Anthropic Universe" http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/scienceshow/the-anthropic-universe/3302686 (Feb 18, 2006) Australia's Science Show, with Martin Redfern moderating excerpts from several scientists, including Wheeler. Audio recording http://mpegmedia.abc.net.au/rn/podcast/2006/02/ssw_20060218_1200.mp3 and transcript available. See also same show at WayBack Machine, https://web.archive.org/web/20080616183602/http://www.abc.net.au/rn/science/ss/stories/s1572643.htm Internet archive.org.

Sense, Universe, Distant, Past

“Remember above all to be true to yourself. It is ok to act and to pretend that something is ok, but admit the truth to yourself.”

Nigel Cumberland (1967) British author and leadership coach

Source: Your Job-Hunt Ltd – Advice from an Award-Winning Asian Headhunter (2003), Successful Recruitment in a Week (2012) https://books.google.ae/books?idp24GkAsgjGEC&printsecfrontcover&dqnigel+cumberland&hlen&saX&ved0ahUKEwjF75Xw0IHNAhULLcAKHazACBMQ6AEIGjAA#vonepage&qnigel%20cumberland&ffalse, Managing Teams in a Week (2013) https://books.google.ae/books?idqZjO9_ov74EC&printsecfrontcover&dqnigel+cumberland&hlen&saX&ved0ahUKEwjF75Xw0IHNAhULLcAKHazACBMQ6AEIIDAB#vonepage&qnigel%20cumberland&ffalse, Secrets of Success at Work – 50 techniques to excel (2014) https://books.google.ae/books?id4S7vAgAAQBAJ&printsecfrontcover&dqnigel+cumberland&hlen&saX&ved0ahUKEwjF75Xw0IHNAhULLcAKHazACBMQ6AEIJjAC#vonepage&qnigel%20cumberland&ffalse, p.23

Truth

Quotes about something page 72

Quotes about something
page 72