Quotes about special
page 4

“You're going to burn in a very special level of hell. A level they reserve for child molesters and people who talk at the theater.”

Joss Whedon (1964) American director, writer, and producer for television and film

People, Hell

“The only thing that made me, or any of us, special was that no one in the whole of history would ever see the universe exactly the same way any other of us saw it.”

Grant Morrison (1960) writer

Source: Supergods: What Masked Vigilantes, Miraculous Mutants, and a Sun God from Smallville Can Teach Us About Being Human

Way, History, Universe

“The witching hour, somebody had once whispered to her, was a special moment in the middle of the night when every child and every grown-up was in a deep deep sleep, and all the dark things came out from hiding and had the world all to themselves.”

Roald Dahl The BFG

Source: The BFG

World, Sleep, Night

“Because the world isn’t divided into the special and the ordinary. Everyone has the potential to be extraordinary. As long as you have a soul and free will, you can be anything, do anything, choose anything”

Cassandra Clare book City of Heavenly Fire

Variant: Because the world isn’t divided into the special and the ordinary. Everyone has the potential to be extraordinary. As long as you have a soul and free will, you can be anything, do anything, choose anything.
Source: City of Heavenly Fire

World, Soul

“What we need are more people who specialize in the impossible.”

Theodore Roethke (1908–1963) American poet

People

“The incorporation of a bank and the powers assumed [by legislation doing so] have not, in my opinion, been delegated to the United States by the Constitution. They are not among the powers specially enumerated.”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

Opinion on the Constitutionality of the Bill for Establishing a National Bank., 1791. http://www.yamaguchy.netfirms.com/7897401/jefferson/natbank.html ME 3:146 <br class="br">Posthumous publications, On financial matters

“Good memories are like charms… Each is special. You collect them, one by one, until one day you look back and discover they make a long, colorful bracelet.”

James Patterson book Suzanne's Diary for Nicholas

Source: Suzanne's Diary for Nicholas

Color, Memory

“Kate's Speciality: Killing things, with much bloodshed. Talking trash, infuriating authority. Driving Beast Lord crazy.”

Ilona Andrews American husband-and-wife novelist duo

“I haven't got any special religion this morning. My God is the God of Walkers. If you walk hard enough, you probably don't need any other god.”

Bruce Chatwin (1940–1989) English novelist

God, Religion

“Every one of a hundred thousand cities around the world had its own special sunset and it was worth going there, just once, if only to see the sun go down.”

Ryū Murakami book Coin Locker Babies

Source: Coin Locker Babies (1980)

World, Sun

“People should never think that you have to be a very special person to help those who need you.”

Miep Gies (1909–2010) Dutch citizen who hid Anne Frank

People, Thinking, Help, Personality

“creative people always suffer from depression because we're so
super sensitive and special?”

Elizabeth Gilbert (1969) American writer

People, Suffering

“And a special thanks for not burning up the whole ship. Including yourself, you daft bum-rag.”

Scott Westerfeld book Leviathan

Source: Leviathan

“We are one of those couples i used to watch, thinking to myself that I'd never be on the inside of something so special. I remember reassuring myself that it probably looked nicer than it actually was, I am happy to be wrong about that.”

Emily Giffin Something Borrowed

Source: Something Borrowed

Happiness, Thinking

“Is it possible to specialize in more than one element?"
She laughed and shook her head. "No. Too much power. No one could handle all that magic, not without losing her mind."
Oh. Great.”

Richelle Mead Vampire Academy

Source: Vampire Academy

“Yes, there was something special about me, and I knew what it was. I was the kind of girl they found dead in a hall bedroom with an empty bottle of sleeping pills in her hand.”

Marilyn Monroe (1926–1962) American actress, model, and singer

Source: My Story

Girl, Sleep, Dead

“In general, librarians enjoyed special requests. A reference librarian is someone who likes the chase. When librarians read for pleasure, they often pick a good mystery.”

Karen Joy Fowler (1950) American novelist, short story writer, editor

Pleasure, Reading

“You are not special. You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake. You're the same decaying organic matter as everything else.”

Chuck Palahniuk Fight Club

Source: Fight Club

Beauty

“A special effect without a story is a pretty boring thing.”

George Lucas (1944) American film producer

Star Wars to Jedi: The Making of a Saga (1983) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ykmZp5cgbkU <br class="br">Context: One of the fatal mistakes that almost every science-fiction film makes is that they spend so much time on the settings — you know, creating the environment — that they spend film time on it. And you don't have to spend too much film time to create an environment. What they're doing is showing off the amount of work that they generated, and it slows the pace of the film down. And the story is not the settings. The story is the stories, plot. You're always surprised with characters, I mean in film it's even more dramatic than it is in writing, because eventually you actually take a real person and stick them into that character. And that real person brings with him, or her, an enormous package of reality. I mean, Threepio is just a hunk of plastic, and without Tony Daniels in there it just isn't anything at all. In the first film we had maybe 20 colors to paint with, and this time we've had 40 colors to paint with. Well, that doesn't mean it's going to be a better painting. Special effects are just a tool, a means of telling a story. People have a tendency to confuse them as an end to themselves. A special effect without a story is a pretty boring thing.

“Everybody is special. Everybody. Everybody is a hero, a lover, a fool, a villain. Everybody. Everybody has their story to tell.”

Alan Moore V for Vendetta

Source: V for Vendetta

Fools, Lovers

“But nothing disturbs the feeling of specialness like the presence of other human beings feeling identically special.”

Jonathan Franzen book Freedom

Source: Freedom

Feeling

“Have you called the alphas?"

"Yes."

"The rats, too?"

He bristled. "What about the rats?"

"They think you're hiding information from them"

"I hide information from everyone. Do they think they're special?”

Ilona Andrews American husband-and-wife novelist duo

Source: Magic Breaks

Thinking

“A prophet is not someone with special visions, just someone blind to most of what others see”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb book The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms

Source: The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms

“I wanted to touch him like he was a bunny, a kitten, something so special and soft your fingertips can’t leave it alone.”

E. Lockhart book We Were Liars

Source: We Were Liars

“I think housework is far more tiring and frightening than hunting is, no comparison, and yet after hunting we had eggs for tea and were made to rest for hours, but after housework people expect one to go on just as if nothing special had happened.”

Nancy Mitford (1904–1973) British writer

People, Thinking, Tea

“Frightened people live in their own special hell. You could say they make it themselves, but they can't help it. It's the way they're built. They deserve sympathy and compassion.”

Stephen King book Revival

Source: Revival

People, Way, Hell, Help

“Here she is,” her mum said, cooing at the baby, “my special girl.”
“Oh, cheers,” Valkyrie said, rolling her eyes.”

Derek Landy (1974) Irish children's writer

Source: Death Bringer

Girl, Baby

“You do not mess with the special investigators.”

Lee Child book Bad Luck and Trouble

Source: Bad Luck and Trouble

“There is a special charm to journeys undertaken before daybreak in hot lands: the air is soft and cool and the coming of dawn reveals a landscape fresh from the night dew.”

Aung San Suu Kyi book Letters from Burma

Source: Letters from Burma

Night

“Sometimes it’s like people are a million times more beautiful to you in your mind. It’s like you see them through a special lens — but maybe if it’s how you see them, that’s how they really are. It’s like the whole tree falling in the forest thing.”

Jenny Han (1980) American writer

Source: The Summer I Turned Pretty

People, Beauty, Tree, Time

“Our moments are music, and sometimes – just sometimes – we can catch them and put them into some lasting form. If we didn’t have music, I don’t think we could ever be truly happy, and if we didn’t have special moments, we would never find music.”

David Levithan (1972) American author and editor

Source: How They Met, and Other Stories

Happiness, Music, Thinking

“The degree that the individual maintains a show before others that he himself does not believe, he can come to experience a special kind of alienation from self and a special kind of wariness of others.”

Erving Goffman book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life

Source: 1950s-1960s, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, 1959, p. 229

“There is nothing special in the world. nothing magic. just physics.”

Chuck Palahniuk book Diary

Source: Diary

World

“But if you knew you might not be able to see it again tomorrow, everything would suddenly become special and precious, wouldn’t it?”

Haruki Murakami book Kafka on the Shore

Source: Kafka on the Shore

“There's a special quality to the loneliness of dusk, a melancholy more brooding even than the night's.”

Ed Gorman (1941–2016) American writer

Source: Everybody's Somebody's Fool

Loneliness, Night

“Goats," said Maxwell Hyde, "are a special case. Mad as hatters, all of them.”

Diana Wynne Jones book The Merlin Conspiracy

Source: The Merlin Conspiracy

Madness

“I know quite certainly that I myself have no special talent; curiosity, obsession and dogged endurance, combined with self-criticism, have brought me to my ideas.”

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

Dogs, Idea

“And over all those sleepy weeks, the dream always ended the same way, with the dragon coming for the princess saying the same words every time….
"Face it, Tally-wa, you're Special.”

Scott Westerfeld book Pretties

Source: Pretties

Dreams, Way, Time, Princess

“I was very grateful to have heard it again. Because I guess we all forget sometimes. And I think everyone is special in their own way. I really do.”

Stephen Chbosky book The Perks of Being a Wallflower

Source: The Perks of Being a Wallflower

Way, Thinking, Forgetting

“Six hundred and forty fish later, the only thing I know is everything you love will die. The first time you meet someone special, you can count on them one day being dead and in the ground.”

Chuck Palahniuk book Survivor

Source: Survivor

Love, Fish, Time, Dead

“Time moves in it special way in the middle of the night.”

Haruki Murakami book After Dark

Source: After Dark

Way, Time, Night

“Everyone is special in their own way.”

Stephen Chbosky book The Perks of Being a Wallflower

Source: The Perks of Being a Wallflower

Way

“Isabelle!” Simon called. “Stop throwing clothes at me! Just because you’re a Shadowhunter and I’m a vampire doesn’t mean we can never happen. Our love is forbidden like the love of a shark and a—and a shark hunter. But that’s what makes it special.”

Cassandra Clare book City of Heavenly Fire

Source: City of Heavenly Fire

Love, Clothes

“Hell is the special pain that dwells in that loss which you yourself have caused”

Elliot Perlman book Seven Types of Ambiguity

Source: Seven Types of Ambiguity

Pain, Hell, Loss

“Sometimes it’s better to bend the law a little in special cases.”

Harper Lee book To Kill a Mockingbird

Source: To Kill a Mockingbird

Law

“Wouldn't it be something if we could have things we love in abudance without their losing that special attraction the want of them held for us.”

Dolly Parton (1946) American singer-songwriter and actress

Source: Dolly: My Life and Other Unfinished Business

Love

“Hush, Harry. Or you'll go to the special hell."

I blinked at that, confused. I'm not supposed to be the guy who doesn't get the reference joke, dammit.”

Jim Butcher book Cold Days

Source: Cold Days

Guy, Hell

“Special things have a way of surviving.”

Alexander McCall Smith (1948) British writer

Source: The World According to Bertie

Way

“Know this. I think you could be special if you only thought there was anything special about yourself.”

Pat Conroy (1945–2016) American novelist

Source: My Losing Season: A Memoir

Thinking

“deep down I believe my year was a special year: it produced me.”

Ned Vizzini (1981–2013) American writer

Birthday

“A person's birthday should be a special day, a wonderful day, a day of pure celebration for the luck of being born!”

Elise Broach Masterpiece

Source: Masterpiece

Birthday, Personality

“We are not special. We are not crap or trash, either. We just are. We just are, and what happens just happens.”

Chuck Palahniuk Fight Club

Source: Fight Club

“I didn’t and don’t want to be a ‘feminine’ version or a diluted version or a special version or a subsidiary version or an ancillary version, or an adapted version of the heroes I admire. I want to be the heroes themselves.”

Joanna Russ book The Female Man

Part 9, Chapter 4 (p. 206)
Source: Fiction, The Female Man (1975)
Context: Remember: I didn’t and don’t want to be a “feminine” version or a diluted version or a special version or a subsidiary version or an ancillary version, or an adapted version of the heroes I admire. I want to be the heroes themselves.
What future is there for a female child who aspires to being Humphrey Bogart?

“For a split second I felt as though she was nobody special in the larger scheme of my life. She was just some girl who had tied me to her leg to help her sink when she jumped off the bridge. Then I blinked and was in love with her again.”

Miranda July (1974) American performance artist, musician and writer

Source: No One Belongs Here More Than You

Love, Life, Girl, Help

“But suicides have a special language.
Like carpenters they want to know which tools.
They never ask why build.

Twice I have so simply declared myself,
have possessed the enemy, eaten the enemy,
have taken on his craft, his magic.”

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

Suicide

“Because the world isn't divided into the special and the ordinary. Everyone has the potential to be extra ordinary.”

Cassandra Clare book City of Heavenly Fire

Source: City of Heavenly Fire

World

“He specializes in virgins! The brush of his fingertips turns virgins into slobbering mush."
Mary Lou Molnar”

Janet Evanovich book One for the Money

Source: One for the Money

“Academics were not intellectuals; they were not curious, they built their stolid tents of specialized knowledge and stayed securely in them.”

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie book Americanah

Source: Americanah

Knowledge

“The world will always punish the few people with special talents the rest of us don’t recognize as real.”

Chuck Palahniuk book Haunted

Source: Haunted (2005)

People, World

“We each have a special something we can get only at a special time of our life. like a small flame. A careful, fortunate few cherish that flame, nurture it, hold it as a torch to light their way. But once that flame goes out, it’s gone forever.”

Haruki Murakami book Sputnik Sweetheart

Source: Sputnik Sweetheart

Life, Way, Light, Time

“We Pisces, we're a special breed.”

Jodi Picoult book Sing You Home

Source: Sing You Home

“Remember that no matter where I am or what I'm doing I've got a special place inside me that's all for you. It's been there since the day we met.”

Sara Zarr (1970) American children's writer

Source: Sweethearts

“There was that special smell made up of paper, ink, and dust; the busy hush; the endless luxury of thousands of unread books. Best of all was the eager itch of anticipation as you went out the door with your arms loaded down with books.”

Zilpha Keatley Snyder (1927–2014) American writer of children's fiction

Source: The Velvet Room

Books, Business

“Colors shone with exceptional clarity in the rain. The ground was a deep black, the pine branches a brilliant green, the people wrapped in yellow looking like special spirits that were allowed to wander over the earth on rainy mornings only.”

Haruki Murakami book Norwegian Wood

Source: Norwegian Wood

People, Color

“But suicides have a special language.
Like carpenters they want to know which tools.
They never ask why build.”

Anne Sexton book Live or Die

"Wanting to Die"
Live or Die (1966)

Suicide

“When a demigod like me comes around, bad things happen. Really bad.-Leo

Maybe it's the other way around, Jason suggested. Maybe people with special gifts show up when bad things are happening because that's when they're needed most.”

Rick Riordan book The Lost Hero

Source: The Lost Hero

People, Way

“There's something wrong in not appreciating one's own special abilities, my girl. Find your own limitations, yes, but don't limit yourself with false modesty.”

Anne McCaffrey Dragonsinger

Source: Dragonsinger

Girl, Falseness

“Says the girl dressed up in formal Goth mourning," Shane said. "Seriously, who buys a black lace veil? You keep that on hand for special occasions, like prom and kid's birthdays?”

Rachel Caine (1962) American writer

Source: Last Breath

Girl, Birthday

“Waiting for a special occasion to kill me? Christmas is coming.”

Cassandra Clare book City of Glass

Source: City of Glass

Waiting, Christmas

“… the best gift we can give each other is the gift of time -- those precious, special, eternal moments.”

Shmuley Boteach (1966) American Orthodox rabbi and writer

Time

“When a man is that special, you know it sooner than you think possible. You recognize it instinctively, and you're certain that no matter what happens, there will never be another one like him.”

Nicholas Sparks book The Lucky One

Source: The Lucky One

Thinking

“Christmas is a day of meaning and traditions, a special day spent in the warm circle of family and friends.”

Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013) British stateswoman and politician

Family, Christmas, Christmas

“Your mother won a special reward," she told me, "because everyone had a head in her pictures. We all applauded.”

Sarah Dessen book Dreamland

Source: Dreamland

“Is dere anysing special about you? Anysing vorth saving?"

Besides my fashion sense? I play a mean harmonica.”

James Patterson (1947) American author

Source: Saving the World and Other Extreme Sports

Fashion, Sense

“Our love is forbidden like the love of a shark and a—and a shark hunter. But that’s what makes it special.”

Cassandra Clare book City of Heavenly Fire

Source: City of Heavenly Fire

Love

“I pursue no objectives, no systems, no tendency; I have no program, no style, no direction. I have no time for specialized concerns, working themes, or variations that lead to mastery. I steer clear of definitions. I don't know what I want. I am inconsistent, non-committal, passive; I like the indefinite, the boundless; I like continual uncertainty.”

Gerhard Richter (1932) German visual artist, born 1932

Source: after 2000, Doubt and belief in painting' (2003), p. 60, note 92

Time

“If we had met five years ago, you wouldn't have found a more staunch defender of the newspaper industry than me … I was winning awards, getting raises, lecturing college classes, appearing on TV shows, and judging journalism contests. So how could I possibly agree with people like Noam Chomsky and Ben Bagdikian, who were claiming the system didn't work, that it was steered by powerful special interests and corporations, and existed to protect the power elite? And then I wrote some stories that made me realize how sadly misplaced my bliss had been. The reason I'd enjoyed such smooth sailing for so long hadn't been, as I'd assumed, because I was careful and diligent and good at my job … The truth was that, in all those years, I hadn't written anything important enough to suppress.”

Gary Webb (1955–2004) American investigative journalist

Into the Buzzsaw: Leading Journalists Expose the Myth of a Free Press.

People, Truth, Appearance

“This situation [alienation] can therefore [according to Durkheim] be remedied by providing the individual with a moral awareness of the social importance of his particular role in the division of labour. He is then no longer an alienated automaton. but is a useful part of an organic whole: ‘from that time, as special and uniform as his activity may be, it is that of an intelligent being, for it has direction, and he is aware of it.’ This is entirely consistent with Durkheim’s general account of the growth of the division of labour, and its relationship to human freedom. It is only through moral acceptance in his particular role in the division of labour that the individual is able to achieve a high degree of autonomy as a self-conscious being, and can escape both the tyranny of rigid moral conformity demanded in undifferentiated societies on the one hand and the tyranny of unrealisable desires on the other.
Not the moral integration of the individual within a differentiated division of labour but the effective dissolution of the division of labour as an organising principle of human social intercourse, is the premise of Marx’s conception. Marx nowhere specifies in detail how this future society would be organised socially, but, at any rate,. this perspective differs decisively from that of Durkheim. The vision of a highly differentiated division of labour integrated upon the basis of moral norms of individual obligation and corporate solidarity. is quite at variance with Marx’s anticipation of the future form of society.
According to Durkheim’s standpoint. the criteria underlying Marx’s hopes for the elimination of technological alienation represent a reversion to moral principles which are no longer appropriate to the modern form of society. This is exactly the problem which Durkheim poses at the opening of The Division of Labour: ‘Is it our duty to seek to become a thorough and complete human being. one quite sufficient unto himself; or, on the contrary, to be only a part of a whole, the organ of an organism?’ The analysis contained in the work, in Durkheim’s view, demonstrates conclusively that organic solidarity is the ‘normal’ type in modern societies, and consequently that the era of the ‘universal man’ is finished. The latter ideal, which predominated up to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in western Europe is incompatible with the diversity of the contemporary order. In preserving this ideal. by contrast. Marx argues the obverse: that the tendencies which are leading to the destruction of capitalism are themselves capable of effecting a recovery of the ‘universal’ properties of man. which are shared by every individual.”

Anthony Giddens (1938) British sociologist

Source: Capitalism and Modern Social Theory (1971), pp. 230-231.

Hope, Intelligence, Problem, Decision

“Get the process of negotiation away from the small specialized group that some people have called the "nuclear theologians," who in effect said this is a complicated issue of seeing how little we can give away, how much we can extract from the other side; it's highly specialized. Only a few people can understand the nature of these weapons, the delivery systems, the targeting, the nature of the MIRV and the CRUISE, on down, and the MX. This kept the whole discussion to a very limited group of people who, in a way, had assumed responsibility for saying whether we should live or die.”

John Kenneth Galbraith (1908–2006) American economist and diplomat

The Ashes of Capitalism and the Ashes of Communism (1986)

People, Way, Understanding, Nature

““What do lesbians have against capitalized letters?”
“Capitalization implies a hierarchy, that some letters are more special than others.””

Douglas Coupland book JPod

JPod (2006)

“Unfortunately, too many academics retreat into narrow specialisms, allow themselves to become adjuncts of the corporation, or align themselves with dominant interests that serve largely to consolidate authority rather than to critique its abuses. Refusing to take positions on controversial issues or to examine the role they might play in lessening human suffering, such academics become models of moral indifference and examples of what it means to disconnect learning from public life. This is a form of education, as Howard Zinn notes, where scholars “publish while others perish.” Even many leftist and liberal academics have retreated into arcane discourses that offer them the safe ground of the professional recluse.”

Henry Giroux (1943) American academic

"Higher Education Under Siege: Implications for Public Intellectuals," Thought and Action (Fall 2006), p. 64

Life, Education, Suffering, Learning

“The regulative principles of management along scientific lines include four important elements:
(a) Planning of the processes and operations in detail by a special department organized for this purpose.
(b) Functional organization by which each man superintending the workman is responsible for a single line of effort. This is distinctly opposed to the older type of military organization, where every man in the management is given a combination of executive, legislative and judicial functions.
(c) Training the worker so as to require him to do each job in what has been found to be the best method of operation.
(d) Equable payment of the workers based on quantity and quality of output of each individual. This involves scientific analysis of each operation to determine the proper time that should be required for its accomplishment and also high payment for the worker who obtains the object sought.”

Hugo Diemer (1870–1937) American mechanical engineer

(1921, p. 10); Diemer quotes the ASCM committee
Factory organization and administration, 1910

Effort, Time, Training

“Shortly after I was offered the role, I realized that although it would be possible to replace all of the members of the staff and all of the other actors, it would not be possible to replace me. I also realized that if I didn't go into work because I was sick, none of the members of the special effects staff would be able to do their work. All of this gave me a tremendous sense of pride.”

Haruo Nakajima (1929–2017) Japanese actor

As quoted by David Milner, "Haruo Nakajima Interview" http://www.davmil.org/www.kaijuconversations.com/nakajima.htm, Kaiju Conversations (March 1995)

Sense

“The experience of the democratic countries with the most advanced economies also tells us that no single pattern, or even a dominant one, has emerged; and what has emerged is a product of the special characteristics and the unique history of each country.”

Robert A. Dahl (1915–2014) American political scientist

After the Revolution? (1970; 1990), Ch. 3 : Democracy and Markets

History, Country

“It had been different during his first year of graduate school, when he temporarily forsook physics to explore instead the realm of the senses. Applying logic to the late-blooming quandries of maturity, he had parsed the elements of encounter, banter, negotiation, and consummation, separating and solving the variables one by one until the problem—if not generally solved—did appear to have tractable special solutions.”

David Brin book Earth

Part V (p. 236)
Earth (1990)

School, Problem, Sense, Appearance

“Like proselytization, desecrating and demolishing the temples of non-Muslims is also central to Islam…. India too suffered terribly as thousands of Hindu temples and sacred edifices disappeared in northern India by the time of Sikandar Lodi and Babur. Will Durant rightly laments in the Story of Civilization that "We can never know from looking at India today, what grandeur and beauty it once possessed". In Delhi, after the demolition of twenty-seven Hindu and Jain temples, the materials of which were utilized to construct the Quwwat-ul-Islam masjid, it was after 700 years that the Birla Mandir could be constructed in 1930s. Sita Ram Goel has brought out two excellent volumes on Hindu Temples: What happened to them. These informative volumes give a list of Hindu shrines and their history of destruction in the medieval period on the basis of Muslim evidence itself. This of course does not cover all the shrines razed. Muslims broke temples recklessly. Those held in special veneration by Hindus like the ones at Somnath, Ayodhya, Kashi and Mathura, were special targets of Muslims, and whenever the Hindus could manage to rebuild their shrines at these places, they were again destroyed by Muslim rulers. From the time of Mahmud of Ghazni who destroyed the temples at Somnath and Mathura to Babur who struck at Ayodhya to Aurangzeb who razed the temples at Kashi Mathura and Somnath, the story is repeated again and again.”

K. S. Lal book Theory and Practice of Muslim State in India

Theory and Practice of Muslim State in India (1999)

Beauty, History, Suffering, Time

“So long as commerce specializes in business methods which take no account of human nature and social motives, so long may we expect strikes and sabotage to be the ordinary accompaniment of industry. Sabotage is essentially a protest of the human spirit against dull mechanism. And the emphasis which democracy places upon political methods tends to transform mere sporadic acts of sabotage into an organized conspiracy against society.”

Elton Mayo (1880–1949) Australian academic

Source: Democracy and freedom. 1919, p. 56

Democracy, Motivation, Business, Nature

“They don't know my head's full of me
And that I have my own special thing,
And there's no hole in my head.
Too bad.”

Malvina Reynolds (1900–1978) American folk singer

Song No Hole In My Head

“The social system is, thus, a very complex entity. As an organization of human interests, activities and commitments, it must be viewed as a system and in functional perspective. This is the key to its lines of organization, its modes of differentiation, and its integration. Such a system may be considered as both structure and process, in different aspects and for different scientific purposes. Structurally, we have suggested that there is a double basis for systematizing differentiation and variation : that internal to the primary social system itself and that involved in its relations to its primary environments, as analyzed with reference to the general system of action. Processually, the categories of analysis must follow from and integrate with those of structure. I suggest that, given the central position language as definitive of human society, the more differentiated and specialized symbolic media of interchange constitute the master scheme for the systematic analysis of social system processes.”

Talcott Parsons (1902–1979) American sociologist

Talcott Parsons (1968) "Systems Analysis: Social Systems" in: David L. Sills ed. International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. p. 472

“In the case of immigrants from Syria and Iraq I would like to see special preference given to apostates, people who have given up Islam, they are in particular danger.”

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

In an interview to The Times — Richard Dawkins: Atheist academic calls for religion 'to be offended at every opportunity' http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/richard-dawkins-atheist-academic-calls-for-religion-to-be-offended-at-every-opportunity-a7043226.html (23 May 2016)

People

“ALL PRECEDENTS ARE UNDER THE CONTROUL OF THE PRINCIPLES OF THE LAW … No Acts of Parliament can establish such a writ [writ of assistance enabling British search of homes for no reason]: … it would be void, "AN ACT AGAINST THE CONSTITUTION IS VOID." Vid. Viner. But … special writs may be granted on oath and probable suspicion.”

James Otis Jr. (1725–1783) Lawyer in colonial Massachusetts

Massachusetts Spy (April 29, 1773)(Principle of judicial review. In addition, much like the prohibition of unreasonable searches and seizures under the Fourth Amendment of the US Constitution).

Law, Home, Search

“The circumstances of the camping trip are multiply special: many features distinguish it from the circumstances of life in a modern society. One may therefore not infer, from the fact that camping trips of the sort that I have described are feasible and desirable, that society-wide socialism is equally feasible and equally desirable. There are too many major differences between the contexts for that inference to carry any conviction. What we urgently need to know is precisely what are the differences that matter, and how can socialists address them? Because of its contrasts with life in the large, the camping trip model serves well as a reference point for purported demonstrations that socialism across society is not feasible and/or desirable, since it seems eminently feasible and desirable on the trip.”

Gerald Cohen (1941–2009) Canadian philosopher

I. The Camping Trip
Why Not Socialism? (2009)

Life

“First of all, no one knows his place in society, his class position or social status; nor does he know his fortune in the distribution of natural assets and abilities, his intelligence and strength, and the like. Nor, again, does anyone know his conception of the good, the particulars of his rational plan of life, or even the special features of psychology such as his aversion to risk or liability to optimism or pessimism. More than this, I assume that the parties do not know the particular circumstances of their own society. That is, they do not know its particular economic or political situation, or the level of civilization and culture it has been able to achieve. The persons in the original position have no information as to which generation they belong.”

John Rawls book A Theory of Justice

Source: A Theory of Justice (1971; 1975; 1999), p. 117

Life, Intelligence, Optimism, Nature