Quotes about specification
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“Faith, then, generically, is confidence in a personal being. Specifically, religious faith is confidence in God, in every respect and office in which He reveals Himself. As that love of which God is the object, is religious love, so that confidence in Him as a Father, a Moral Governor, a Redeemer, a Sanctifier, in all the modes of His manifestation, by which we believe whatever He says because He says it, and commit ourselves and all our interests cheerfully and entirely into His hands, is, religious faith.”

Mark Hopkins (educator) (1802–1887) American educationalist and theologian

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 238.

Love, God, Faith, Confidence

“Because we cannot yet (1) characterize all the possible experimental designs along quantitative scales and (2) generate cost-of-error functions, comparisons must be made in specific contexts rather than by use of analytic optimizing.”

Russell L. Ackoff (1919–2009) Scientist

Source: 1960s, Scientific method: optimizing applied research decisions, 1962, p. 340 as cited in: Philosophica gandensia, Vol.6-7 (1968). p. 141.

Error, Optimism

“The specific media my change, but the principles of human nature have remained fairly constant over the millenia.”

Randal Marlin (1938) Canadian academic

Source: Propaganda & The Ethics Of Persuasion (2002), Chapter One, Why Study Propaganda?, p. 15

Nature, Change

“The person who is going to preach ought to live in the Christian thoughts and ideas: they ought to be his daily life. If so – this is the view of Christianity – then you, too, will have eloquence enough and precisely that which is needed when you speak extemporaneously without specific preparation. However, it is fallacious eloquence if someone, without otherwise occupying himself with, without living in these thoughts, once in a while sits down and laboriously collects such thoughts, perhaps in the field of literature, and then works them into a well-composed discourse, which is then committed to memory and delivered superbly, with respect both to voice and diction and gestures.”

Sören Kierkegaard book For Self-Examination

Soren Kierkegaard, For Self-Examination, Hong p. 10
1850s, For Self-Examination (1851), What is Required in Order to Look at Oneself with True Blessing in the Mirror of the Word?

Life, Literature, Idea, Memory

“I never believed, as many Marxists professed to do, that normative principles were irrelevant to the socialist movement, that, since the movement was of oppressed people fighting for their own liberation, there was no room or need for specifically moral inspiration in it. I thought no such thing partly for the plain reason that I observed enormous selfless dedication among the active communists who surrounded me in my childhood, and partly for the more sophisticated reason that the self-interest of any oppressed producer would tell him to stay at home, rather than to risk his neck in a revolution whose success or failure would be anyhow unaffected by his participation in it. Revolutionary workers and, a fortiori, bourgeois fellow-travellers without a particular material interest in socialism, must perforce be morally inspired.”

Gerald Cohen (1941–2009) Canadian philosopher

G. A. Cohen, Self-ownership, Freedom, and Equality https://books.google.com/books?id=oeUQjOLNY-wC&pg=PA3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 3

People, Travel, Home, Failure

“Once the experience of war makes visible the possibility of death that lies locked up in each moment, our thoughts cannot travel from one day to the next without meeting death's face. The mind is then strung up to a pitch it can stand for only a short time; but each new dawn introduces the same necessity; and days piled on days make years. On each one of these days the soul suffers violence. Regularly, each morning, the soul castrates itself of aspiration, for thought cannot journey through time without meeting death on the way. Thus war effaces all conceptions of purpose or goal, including even its own "war aims." It effaces the very notion of war's being brought to an end. Consequently, nobody does anything to bring this end about. In the presence of an armed enemy, what hand can relinquish its weapon? The mind ought to find a way out, but the mind has lost all capacity to so much as look outward. The mind is completely absorbed in doing itself violence. Always in human life, whether war or slavery is in question, intolerable sufferings continue, as it were, by the force of their own specific gravity, and so look to the outsider as though they deprived the sufferer of the resources which might serve to extricate him.”

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

Source: Simone Weil : An Anthology (1986), The Iliad or The Poem of Force (1940-1941), p. 181

Life, Death, War, Way

“Mechanism… provides us with no grasp of the specific characteristics of organisms, of the organization of organic processes among one another, of organic 'wholeness', of the problem of the origin of organic 'teleology', or of the historical character of organisms… We must therefore try to establish a new standpoint which — as opposed to mechanism — takes account of organic wholeness, but… treats it in a manner which admits of scientific investigation.”

Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1901–1972) austrian biologist and philosopher

Source: 1930s, Modern Theory of Development, 1933, 1962, p. 46

Problem

“Originally UML was intended to serve as a specification language. But a specification is primarily intended to describe properties of systems that the system developers want to be valid, but to leave open other properties that are not clear already. Today this is partly achieved by having a semantics that is rather vague (and here we mean imprecise as opposed to not detailed). However, this is not an advantage, as the developer cannot fix this kind of impreciseness within UML, but can adapt the individual interpretation only. Furthermore, to get complete (and therefore executable) UML descriptions, often certain details have to be specified, which the developer does not yet know or wants to leave open to a later phase of development or even implementation. It is an intrinsic problem of executable languages that this kind of over-specification frequently occurs. Instead it would be of some help to have flexible concepts of under-specification to postpone detail decisions to situations, where the decisions can and must be made.”

Bernhard Rumpe (1967) German computer scientist

Bernhard Rumpe (1998) " A Note on Semantics (with an Emphasis on UML) http://sse-tubs.de/~rumpe/publications/papers/RUM98a/RUM98a.pdf." Proceedings of Second ECOOP Workshop on Precise Behavioral Semantics. 1998.

Problem, Decision, Help

“If I had to preach a sermon on the family I would take for my text this phrase of Paul Valery's: "In every family there is concealed a specific interior boredom which causes its members to escape and live their own lives. There is also in every family an ancient and powerful force which manifests itself when the group is gathered in the dining-room for its evening meal, when its members feel free to be completely themselves.”

André Maurois (1885–1967) French writer

Un Art de Vivre (The Art of Living) (1939), The Art of Family Life

Family, Feeling

“Unable to grasp the importance of Black women’s intersectional experiences, not only courts, but feminist and civil rights thinkers as well have treated Black women in ways that deny both the unique compoundedness of their situation and the centrality of their experiences to the larger classes of women and Blacks. Black women are regarded either as too much like women or Blacks and the compounded nature of their experience is absorbed into the collective experiences of either group or as too different, in which case Black women’s Blackness or femaleness sometimes has placed their needs and perspectives at the margin of the feminist and Black liberationist agendas. While it could be argued that this failure represents an absence of political will to include Black women, I believe that it reflects an uncritical and disturbing acceptance of dominant ways of thinking about discrimination. Consider first the definition of discrimination that seems to be operative in antidiscrimination law: Discrimination which is wrongful proceeds from the identification of a specific class or category; either a discriminator intentionally identifies this category, or a process is adopted which somehow disadvantages all members of this category.”

Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw book Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex

Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex (1989)

Women, Law, Way, Failure

“We are greatly in need of specific research in this area of schizophrenic experience to help us understand Mesolithic man.”

Julian Jaynes book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

Book I, Chapter 6, p. 137
The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976)

Understanding, Help

“Core values = The organization’s essential and enduring tenets – a small set of general guiding principles, not to be confused with specific cultural or operating practices, and not to be compromised for financial gain or short-term expediency.
Purpose = The organization’s fundamental reasons for existence beyond simply making money – a perpetual guiding star on the horizon, not to be confused with specific goals or business strategies”

James C. Collins book Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies

Source: Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies, 1994, p. 73

Money, Star, Business

“Any form of idealism involves avoiding some specific pain or suffering.”

Ken McLeod (1948) Canadian lama

Money and Value http://www.unfetteredmind.org/money-value-life-1#sect8. Unfettered Mind http://www.unfetteredmind.org. (2007-12-02) (Topic: Life)

Pain, Suffering

“"So long as it is universal suffrage implemented in that jurisdiction, it is genuine universal suffrage." – on being asked specifically whether Burma and North Korea have genuine universal suffrage. (2015)”

Leung Chun-ying (1954) Hong Kong politician

Universe

“I make this proposal to you now with a specific sense of urgency arising from the imminent New Year holidays in Viet-Nam. If you are able to accept this proposal I see no reason why it could not take effect at the end of the New Year, or Tet, holidays. The proposal I have made would be greatly strengthened if your military authorities and those of the Government of South Viet-Nam could promptly negotiate an extension of the Tet truce.”

Lyndon B. Johnson (1908–1973) American politician, 36th president of the United States (in office from 1963 to 1969)

1960s, Letter to Ho Chi Minh (1967)

Sense, Holiday

“The formal structure of a decision problem in any area can be put into four parts: ( 1 ) the choice of an objective function denning the relative desirability of different outcomes; (2) specification of the policy alternatives which are available to the agent, or decisionmaker, (3) specification of the model, that is, empirical relations that link the objective function, or the variables that enter into it, with the policy alternatives and possibly other variables; and (4) computational methods for choosing among the policy alternatives that one which performs best as measured by the objective function.”

Kenneth Arrow (1921–2017) American economist

Source: 1970s-1980s, The Economics of Information (1984), p. 55

Problem, Decision, Parting

“Speaking of the sanctions, they are not just a knee-jerk reaction on behalf of the United States or its allies to our position regarding the events and the coup in Ukraine, or even the so-called Crimean Spring. I’m sure that if these events had never happened – I want to point this out specifically for you as politicians sitting in this auditorium – if none of that had ever happened, they would have come up with some other excuse to try to contain Russia’s growing capabilities, affect our country in some way, or even take advantage of it. 4 December 2014, The Kremlin Moscow, http://eng.news.kremlin.ru/news/23341”

Vladimir Putin (1952) President of Russia, former Prime Minister

On Ukraine

Jerk, Way, Spring, Country

“The major obstacle and most difficult challenge in pursuit of a genuinely loving and caring relationship is to overcome the seductive powers and the addiction to the content approach to entering, creating, and maintaining it. The elusive golden thread of understanding lies in the how, and not the what. Specifically, as gender polarization in a relationship decreases, the experience of it improves. Without that rebalancing, even the most perfect content will unravel increasingly. Once the process is balanced, the magic of having ideal content is no longer necessary. The rebalancing process which creates a relationship free of polarizing gender defenses is clearly difficult and threatening initially in the same way that giving up an addiction seems to be. Once achieved however, a relationship free of distortion, false illusions, resentment, and hopelessness truly becomes possible.”

Herb Goldberg (1937–2019) American psychologist

What Men Still Don't Know About Transforming Their Relationships, pp. 194–198
What Men Still Don't Know About Women, Relationships, and Love (2007)

Love, Way, Understanding, Perfection

“The idea of white privilege is absolutely reprehensible. And it's not because white people aren't privileged. We have all sorts of privileges, and most people have privileges of all sorts, and you should be grateful for your privileges and work to deserve them. But the idea that you can target an ethnic group with a collective crime, regardless of the specific innocence or guilt of the constituent elements of that group - there is absolutely nothing that's more racist than that. It's absolutely abhorrent. If you really want to know more about that sort of thing, you should read about the Kulaks in the Soviet Union in the 1920's. They were farmers who were very productive. They were the most productive element of the agricultural strata in Russia. And they were virtually all killed, raped, and robbed by the collectivists who insisted that because they showed signs of wealth, they were criminals and robbers. One of the consequences of the prosecution of the Kulaks was the death of six million Ukrainians from a famine in the 1930's. The idea of collectively held guilt at the level of the individual as a legal or philosophical principle is dangerous. It's precisely this sort of danger that people who are really looking for trouble would push. Just a cursory glance at 20th century history should teach anyone who wants to know exactly how unacceptable that is.”

Jordan Peterson (1962) Canadian clinical psychologist, cultural critic, and professor of psychology

Concepts

Death, People, History, Idea

“Like literature, philosophy is not distinguished from other subjects by a specific approach to a subject-matter independent of it. Chemistry deals with chemicals, biology with life and astronomy with very large, very distant objects. Philosophy can boast no such definite subject-matter.”

David Wood (1946) British philosopher, born 1946

Source: Philosophy At The Limit (1990), Chapter 4, Philosophy As Writing: The Case Of Hegel, p. 69

Life, Literature, Distant

“[Teachers] emphasize the human side of science: real activities by real human beings, both today and in specific periods of history. Personal characteristics of scientists, with which students can identify, should be emphasized rather than making scientists seem superhuman or alien.”

Jay Lemke (1946) American academic

Source: Talking Science: Language, Learning, and Values. 1990, p. 175-6; as cited in: Hanuscin & Lee (2010)

History, Teachers, Science, Personality

“The most influential specific postmodern approach has been Jacques Derrida's, known since the 60's as deconstruction. Postmodernism is philosophy means above all the writings of Derrida, and this earliest and most extreme outlook has found a resonance well beyond philosophy, in the popular culture and its mores.”

John Zerzan book Future Primitive and Other Essays

The Catastrophe of Postmodenity
Future Primitive and Other Essays (1994)

“As poetry is a species of art, its essential principle must be a specific development of the principle essential to all art; and it will merely remain for us to determine what the specific addition is, which the peculiar conditions of the poet's art make to the principle of art in general.”

George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) American philosopher

Source: The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905), The Art-Principle as Represented in Poetry, p.182

Art

“Contemporary art -- the field we are usually working in because there's money -- is mostly concerned with systems or systematic concepts. In the context of their work, artists adapt models of individual art-specific or economic or political systems like in a laboratory, to reveal the true nature of these systems by deconstructing them. So would it be fair to say that by their chameleon-like adaptation they are attempting to generate a similar system? Well… the corporate change in the art market has aged somewhat in the meantime and looks almost as old as the 'New Economy'. Now even the last snotty brat has realized that all the hogwash about the creative industries, sponsoring, fund-raising, the whole load of bullshit about the beautiful new art enterprises, was not much more than the awful veneer on the stupid, crass fanfare of neo-liberal liberation teleology. What is the truth behind the shifting spheres of activity between computer graphics, web design and the rest of all those frequency-orientated nerd pursuits? A lonely business with other lonely people at their terminals. And in the meantime the other part of the corporate identity has incidentally wasted whole countries like Argentina or Iceland. That's the real truth of the matter.”

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

Interview on Furtherfield http://www.furtherfield.org/interviews/interview-johannes-grenzfurthner-monochrom-part-1

Money, People, Truth, Age

“In definitional terms, a process is simply a structured, measured set of activities designed to produce a specific output for a particular customer or market. It implies a strong emphasis on how work is done within an organization, in contrast to a product focus’s emphasis on what. A process is thus a specific ordering of work activities across time and space, with a beginning and an end, and clearly defined inputs and outputs: a structure for action.”

Thomas H. Davenport (1954) American academic

Process Innovation: Reengineering Work through Information Technology, 1993

Strong, Time

“Marx may have erred in analyzing the nature of this conflict. Interests of workers and capitalists may not be irreconcilable under all circumstances, and workers may see the choice between capitalism and socialism differently depending upon the specific political and economic conditions under which they live.”

Adam Przeworski (1940) Polish-American academic

Adam Przeworski and Michael Wallerstein, The American Political Science Review (Jun., 1982)

Nature, Dependency

“It was a really interesting experience for me because, like I said, I had never seen a horror film. It was a very physical role. Wes was so specific and clear about what he wanted, such a good captain of a ship. He was very respectful, funny and smart. We were all so young making that movie, I think we were the near the same ages as his children at the time, and he was just so good with us, kind, supportive, and nurturing.”

Amanda Wyss (1960) American actress

INTERVIEW WITH AMANDA WYSS OF ‘A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET’ & ‘THE ID’ http://horrorgeeklife.com/2016/11/10/interview-amanda-wyss/ (November 10, 2016)

Children, Age, Support, Thinking

“The new information technologies can be seen to drive societies toward increasingly dynamic high-energy regions further and further from thermodynamical equilibrium, characterized by decreasing specific entropy and increasingly dense free-energy flows, accessed and processed by more and more complex social, economic, and political structures.”

Ervin László (1932) Hungarian musician and philosopher

Laszlo (1992) "Information Technology and Social Change: An Evolutionary Systems Analysis". Behavioral Science 37: p. 247.

“I think everyone has what it takes to be a good actor innately within them. It’s really about connecting to your own humanity and your own behaviors, and getting to a level of self-awareness so that you can have perspective and step outside of yourself and transform and become another person. You can’t become another person if you’re not self-aware; you wouldn’t know what’s changed. [But] the ability to play pretend is something that everyone has access to; you see little kids doing it. On the spectrum of imagination, there are people who are more imaginative than others—I guess some kids are hardcore pretenders and have imaginary friends for years and other kids play and they have fun, but it’s not quite as specific like that. I’m sure there’s a range, but I think everyone can pretend.”

Bryce Dallas Howard (1981) American actress

Bryce Dallas Howard https://www.interviewmagazine.com/film/bryce-dallas-howard (February 10, 2017)

People, Behavior, Imagination, Thinking

“When I met Wittgenstein, I saw that Schlick's warnings were fully justified. But his behavior was not caused by any arrogance. In general, he was of a sympathetic temperament and very kind; but he was hypersensitive and easily irritated. Whatever he said was always interesting and stimulating and the way in which he expressed it was often fascinating. His point of view and his attitude toward people and problems, even theoretical problems, were much more similar to those of a creative artist than to those of a scientist; one might almost say, similar to those of a religious prophet or a seer. When he started to formulate his view on some specific problem, we often felt the internal struggle that occurred in him at that very moment, a struggle by which he tried to penetrate from darkness to light under an intense and painful strain, which was even visible on his most expressive face. When finally, sometimes after a prolonged arduous effort, his answers came forth, his statement stood before us like a newly created piece of art or a divine revelation. Not that he asserted his views dogmatically … But the impression he made on us was as if insight came to him as through divine inspiration, so that we could not help feeling that any sober rational comment of analysis of it would be a profanation.”

Rudolf Carnap (1891–1970) German philosopher

Rudolf Carnap, as quoted in The Philosophy of Rudolf Carnap (1963) by Paul Arthur Schilpp, p. 25, and in Ludwig Wittgenstein : The Duty of Genius (1991) by Ray Monk, p. 244

Pain, People, Art, Way

“I have never really understood the objection to art which is specifically made for a gallery or museum, and so cannot be collected by an individual or taken home. It is rather like saying that all music should be confined to the chamber work or novels to the short story.”

Nicholas Serota (1946) British curator

The Dimbleby Lecture 2000

Art, Music, Home

“The vocation of man, as that of any other creature, is to be active in all his being. But man cannot act as an individual. The essence of his life activity is cooperation with other individuals of his species. Outside this cooperation, outside of society, man does not achieve any specific human activity. But so long as this co-operation is arbitrarily ruled by accidentality, so long as it is not organized, man remains limited and constricted in his life-activity….”

Moses Hess (1812–1875) German philosopher

Bestimmung des Menschen, p. 275
Hess' Diary

Life

“[Darwin’s] inquiry characteristically confines itself to the process of cumulative change. His results, as well as his specific determination of the factors at work in this process of cumulative change, have been questioned; perhaps they are open to all the criticisms levelled against them as well as a few more not thought of; but the scope and method given to scientific enquiry by Darwin and the generation whose spokesman he is has substantially not been questioned, except by that diminishing contingent of the faithful”

Thorstein Veblen book The Theory of Business Enterprise

Source: The Theory of Business Enterprise, 1904, p. 370

Faith, Question, Change

“An ordered set of assertions about a generic behavior or structure assumed to hold throughout a significantly broad range of specific instances.”

Karl E. Weick (1936) Organisational psychologist

Source: 1980s-1990s, "Theory construction as disciplined imagination," 1989, p. 517

Behavior

“Not all are called to be artists in the specific sense of the term. Yet, as Genesis has it, all men and women are entrusted with the task of crafting their own life: in a certain sense, they are to make of it a work of art, a masterpiece.”

Pope John Paul II (1920–2005) 264th Pope of the Catholic Church, saint

Letter to artists, 4 April 1999 <br class="br">Source: Libreria Editrice Vaticana http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/letters/documents/hf_jp-ii_let_23041999_artists_en.html

Life, Women, Men, Art

“No matter how abstractly formulated are a general theory of systems, a general theory of evolution and a general theory of communication, all three theoretical components are necessary for the specifically sociological theory of society. They are mutually interdependent.”

Niklas Luhmann (1927–1998) German sociologist, administration expert, and social systems theorist

Luhmann (1982) The Differentiation of Society, Translated by Stephen Holmes and Charles Larmore. Columbia University Press, New York, 1982, pp. 261. Cited in: Loet Leydesdorff (2000) " Luhmann, Habermas, and the Theory of Communication http://www.leydesdorff.net/montreal.htm".

Communication

“We investigate how the degree to which credit markets are centralized affects efficiency when there is asymmetric information. Specifically, we argue that decentralization of credit may promote efficient project selection when creditors are not fully informed ex ante about project quality.
Our starting point is the idea that, although an entrepreneur (project manager) may have a relatively good idea of her project's quality from the outset, creditors acquire this information only later on, by which time the criteria for profitability may have changed. Thus, a poor project (one whose completion time is too long to be profitable ex ante) may nevertheless be financed, since a creditor cannot distinguish it at the time from a good (quick) project.”

Eric Maskin (1950) American Nobel laureate in economics

Mathias Dewatripont and Eric Maskin. " Credit and efficiency in centralized and decentralized economies http://www.sef.hku.hk/~cgxu/0601/ECON0601/Dewatripont-Maskin_SBC_RES95.pdf." The Review of Economic Studies 62.4 (1995): 541-555.

Idea, Change, Time

“A strategy coordinates action to address a specific challenge. It is not defined by the pay grade of the person authorizing the action.”

Richard Rumelt (1942) American economist

Source: Good Strategy Bad Strategy, 2011, p. 92

Personality

“Yet while they exist, regardless of how long, each system has a specific structure made up of certain maintained relationships among its parts, and manifests irreducible characteristics of its own.”

Ervin László (1932) Hungarian musician and philosopher

Variant: Each system has a speciﬁc structure made up of certain maintained relationships among its parts, and manifests irreducible characteristics of its own.
Source: Introduction to Systems Philosophy (1972), p. 12.

Parting

“Without thinking too much about it in specific terms, I was showing the America I knew and observed to others who might not have noticed. My fundamental purpose is to interpret the typical American. I am a story teller.”

Norman Rockwell (1894–1978) Armatian

As quoted in Fodor's New England (2008) by Debbie Harmsen, p. 194

Thinking

“After this first approximation, the various aspects of the situation undergo a more and more detailed analysis. In contrast to this the second method [for analysis of life space] begins with the life space as a whole and defines its fundamental structure. The procedure in this case is not to add disconnected items but to make the original structure more specific and differentiated. This method therefore proceeds by steps from the more general to the particular and thereby avoids the danger of a "wrong simplification" by abstraction.”

Kurt Lewin (1890–1947) German-American psychologist

Source: 1930s, Principles of topological psychology, 1936, p. 4; partly cited in: Chris Argyris (1952) An introduction to field theory and interaction theory.

Life

“I don't believe you until you tell me, do you really believe, for example, if they say they are Catholic, "Do you really believe that when a priest blesses a wafer, it turns into the body of Christ? Are you seriously telling me you believe that? Are you seriously saying that wine turns into blood?" Mock them. Ridicule them. In public. Don't fall for the convention that we're all too polite to talk about religion. Religion is not off the table. Religion is not off limits. Religion makes specific claims about the universe which need to be substantiated and need to be challenged and, if necessary, need to be ridiculed with contempt.”

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

Reason Rally, National Mall, Washington, DC,

Religion, Universe, Wine, Christ

“The only secondary cause… which has, as yet, been even conjecturally brought forward, to explain how, in the ordinary course of nature, a new specific form may be generated is, as Lamarck declared, 'variation,' and this has been rendered a far more probable hypothesis by the way in which Natural Selection is shown to give intensity and permanency to certain varieties.”

Charles Lyell (1797–1875) British lawyer and geologist

Source: The Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man (1863), Ch.21, p. 422

Way, Nature

“They who interpret secularism as dharma-nirpekshata fail to understand either dharma or secularism. A secular state does not mean an anti-religious state, nor even an irreligious state. For, in that sense, the people of India just never can become secular. A secular state simply means a state which does not identify itself with any specific mode of worship and holds the balance even between all sects- secularism thus mean sampradayanirpekshata and not dharma-nirpekshata.”

Atal Bihari Vajpayee (1924–2018) 10th Prime Minister of India

Bharatiya Pratinidhi Sabha Session, Indore – September, 7-8, 1968
Quotes from ataljee.org

People, Understanding, Sense

“Most books, after all, are ephemeral; their specifics, several years later, inspire about as much interest as daily battle reports from the Hundred Years' War.”

Stephen Jay Gould book An Urchin in the Storm

Preface, p. 10
An Urchin in the Storm (1987)

War, Books

“My use of extracts from the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" was too much for political purity to take. It didn't matter that I had emphasised, as I do in this book, that this is not a plot by Jewish people; it didn't matter that I renamed them the "Illuminati Protocols" for the specific reason of getting away from their association with Jewish people; it didn't matter that these Protocols, which came to light in the late-1800s, contain details of the very plan of manipulation which has provably unfolded through the twentieth century.”

David Icke (1952) English writer and public speaker

ibid. p. 453

People, Books, Light

“The research questions that motivate most quantitative studies in the health, social and behavioral sciences are not statistical but causal in nature. For example, what is the efficacy of a given drug in a given population? Whether data can prove an employer guilty of hiring discrimination? What fraction of past crimes could have been avoided by a given policy? What was the cause of death of a given individual, in a specific incident? These are causal questions because they require some knowledge of the data-generating process; they cannot be computed from the data alone.”

Judea Pearl (1936) Computer scientist

Pearl, Judea (2008) "Causal Inference," in: Pearl, Judea. The science and ethics of causal modeling. (2010).

Death, Health, Behavior, Motivation

“I do not believe that art must develop on national lines, but I am convinced that there never was and never will be an international art. There is and was French, German, Italian, and Flemish art. But I deny those specific definitions so fashionable with adepts of fascism which make of every country an hermetic cell from which all foreign artists are excluded. [shortly after the end of the German occupation]”

Ossip Zadkine (1890–1967) French sculptor

quote, New York, early 1944; as cited in: Artists on Art – from the 14th – 20th centuries, ed. Robert Goldwater and Marco Treves; Pantheon Books, 1972, London, p. 430
1940 - 1960

Art, Fashion, Country

“Nor are the general laws of economics "institutional." They work in an institutional setting, and upon institutional material; institutions supply much of their content and furnish the machinery by which they work themselves out, more or less quickly and completely, in different actual situations. Institutions may determine the alternatives of choice and fix the limits of freedom of choice, but the general laws of choice among competing motives or goods are not institutional unless rational thinking and an objective world are institutions, an interpretation which would make the term meaningless. Economic activity consists in the use of certain resources by certain processes, to produce "wealth." The content of the concept wealth is largely institutional, and the resources available and processes known and used at any place and time for producing wealth are in a sense historical products; but there are general laws of production and consumption which hold good whatever specific things are thought of as wealth and whatever productive factors and processes in use.”

Frank Knight (1885–1972) American economist

Source: "The limitations of scientific method in economics", 1924, p. 129 (2009 edition)

World, Law, Motivation, Thinking

“We understand instinctively that being a prodigy wasn’t [Wayne Gretzky’s] platform for a lifetime’s achievement; it marked the possibility of a highly specific, highly term-limited kind of performance.”

Adam Gopnik (1956) American journalist

How to Raise a Prodigy, The New Yorker (2018)

Understanding

“One of the common means by which one nation exploits another and one that is relevant to Africa’s external relations is exploitation through trade. When the terms of trade are set by one country in a manner entirely advantageous to itself, then the trade is usually detrimental to the trading partner. To be specific, one can take the export of agricultural produce from Africa and the import of manufactured goods into Africa from Europe, North America, and Japan. The big nations establish the price of the agricultural products and subject these prices to frequent reductions. At the same time the price of manufactured goods is also set by them, along with the freight rates necessary for trade in the ships of those nations. The minerals of Africa also fall into the same category as agricultural produce as far as pricing is concerned. The whole import-export relationship between Africa and its trading partners is one of unequal exchange and of exploitation.”

Walter Rodney book How Europe Underdeveloped Africa

Source: How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972), p. 38.

Time, Country

“Cave man and Industrial man are both versions of a model of man that is, itself, constantly changed by its own eccentricities -- and their subjective experience of reality is so different that the respective versions follow entirely divergent paths. Cave man did not turn into Industrial man. Nor is Industrial man a better version of an earlier model. Each chose eccentricities that involved specific orientations within the same time-space framework. Each uses the contents of a given earth differently.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Source: Psychic Politics: An Aspect Psychology Book (1976), p. 59

Reality, Change, Time

“He never had really been able to understand what it was that she wanted him for…although he felt certain that she wanted him for something real, that he filled some need for her, as she did for him, which could for lack of a more specific term be called love.”

Robert Silverberg (1935) American speculative fiction writer and editor

Source: Short fiction, Against Babylon (1986), p. 276

Love, Understanding

“The differential equation of the first order
\frac {dy}{dx} = f(x, y)
… prescribes the slope \frac {dy}{dx} at each point of the plane (or at each point of a certain region of the plane we call the field")…. a differential equation of the first order… can be conceived intuitively as a problem about the steady flow of a river: Being given the direction of the flow at each point, find the streamlines…. It leaves open the choice between the two possible directions in the line of a given slope. Thus… we should say specifically "direction of an unoriented straight line" and not merely "direction."”

George Pólya (1887–1985) Hungarian mathematician

Mathematical Methods in Science (1977)

Problem

“In the following decades “Kierkegaard remained completely unknown, Schelling’s work was contemptuously buried, and Marx and Feuerbach were interpreted as dogmatic materialists. Then a new impetus came in the 1880’s with the work of Dilthey, and particularly with Freidrich Nietzsche, the “philosophy of life” movement, and the work of Berson. The third phase came after the shock of WWI – “Kierkegaard and the early Marxists were rediscovered and the serious challenges to the spiritual and psychological basis of Western society given by Nietzsche could no longer be covered over by Victorian self-satisfied placidity. The specific form of the third phase owes much to the phenomenology of Edmond Husserl, which gave to Heidegger, Jaspers, and the others the tool they needed to undercut the subject object cleavage which had been such a stumbling block to science as well as philosophy.”

Rollo May (1909–1994) US psychiatrist

Source: The Discovery of Being (1983), p. 54-55

Life, Science

“Objectivism is a philosophical movement; since politics is a branch of philosophy, Objectivism advocates certain political principles — specifically, those of laissez-faire capitalism — as the consequence and the ultimate practical application of its fundamental philosophical principles. It does not regard politics as a separate or primary goal, that is: as a goal that can be achieved without a wider ideological context…. Objectivists are not "conservatives." We are radicals for capitalism; we are fighting for that philosophical base which capitalism did not have and without which it was doomed to perish.”

Ayn Rand (1905–1982) Russian-American novelist and philosopher

“Choose Your Issues,” The Objectivist Newsletter, Vol. 1, No. 1 (1962)

Fight

“The "imagination that shudders at the Hell of Dante," is not that the same faculty, weaker in degree, as Dante's own? No one but Shakspeare can embody, out of Saxo Grammaticus, the story of Hamlet as Shakspeare did: but every one models some kind of story out of it; every one embodies it better or worse. We need not spend time in defining. Where there is no specific difference, as between round and square, all definition must be more or less arbitrary. A man that has so much more of the poetic element developed in him as to have become noticeable, will be called Poet by his neighbors.”

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

1840s, Heroes and Hero-Worship (1840), The Hero as Poet

Imagination, Hell, Time

“People have asked me to speak on being sick, and even specifically on chronic pain diseases. … And I don't know what to tell you, except this — this is something I have discovered. Your body is fighting to live. This is in your very blood, in your heart, in your bones — your body is trying to live, it's fighting to live — and don't give up without a fight, you know? Do what you can do. Figure something out. If you have to, fight with people to get help — whatever it is, but don't give up without a fight. You remember — mark my words — you are here — you should be here — stay.”

Ysabella Brave (1979) American singer

"Youtube Live? Album?" (3 November 2008) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWapPazv0j4

Pain, People, Disease, Help

“One thing we specifically discussed that night was our desire to start a site that would be unapologetically pro-freedom and pro-Israel. We were sick of the anti- Israel bias of the mainstream media and J-Street. By launching Breitbart Jerusalem, the journey comes full circle and a promise between two friends is fulfilled. And in a very real sense, Breitbart News Network returns to its roots.”

Larry Solov (1968) American attorney and media executive

Breitbart News Network: Born In The USA, Conceived In Israel http://www.breitbart.com/big-journalism/2015/11/17/breitbart-news-network-born-in-the-usa-conceived-in-israel/ (November 17, 2015)

Sense, Freedom, Night

“The concept of management as a specific body of knowledge and practice forming the basis of a specialised profession … Wherever human activities are carried out in an organised and co-operative form, there management must be found.”

Lyndall Urwick (1891–1983) British management consultant

Vol II, p. 216.
1940s, The Making Of Scientific Management, 1945

Knowledge

“The creation and implementation of integrated information systems involves a variety of collaborators including people from specialist departments, informatics, external advisers and manufacturers. They need clear rules and limits within which they can process their individual sub-tasks, in order to ensure the logical consistency of the entire project. Therefore, an architecture needs to be established to determine the components that make up the information system and the methods to be used to describe it. The ARIS architecture developed in this book is described in concrete terms as an information model within the entity-relationship approach. This information model provides the basis for the systematic and rational application of methods in the development of information systems. It also serves as the basis for a repository in which the enterprise's application - specific data, organization and function models can be stored. The ARIS architecture constitutes a framework in which integrated applications systems can be developed, optimized and converted into EDP - technical implementations. At the same time, it demonstrates how business economics can examine and analyze information systems in order to translate their contents into EDP-suitable form.”

August-Wilhelm Scheer (1941) German business theorist

August-Wilhelm Scheer, I. Cameron (1992) Architecture of integrated information systems: foundations of enterprise modelling. Abstract.

People, Books, Optimism, Business

“In effect, to follow, not to force the public inclination; to give a direction, a form, a technical dress, and a specific sanction, to the general sense of the community, is the true end of legislature.”

Edmund Burke (1729–1797) Anglo-Irish statesman

Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol (1777)

Communication, Sense

“Organization aims to unite individuals into a body which shall work together for a common end. Specifically, organization prepares for the transaction of business by electing and appointing officers and committees, delegating authorities and bringing into systematic connection and cooperation, each and every part of the industrial body. Right organization, in short, puts vitality into the entire factory, secures the efficient working-together of all employees, from the manager's office to the mechanic's bench, routes materials, sub-divides work, inspects output and delivers the right goods, fully processed, at the shipping room door on the correct delivery date.”

Clinton Edgar Woods (1863) American engineer

Source: Industrial organization (1914), p. 24

Business, Parting

“Neither Watt's steam engine nor Whitney's standardized parts really started the Industrial Revolution, although each has been awarded that claim, in the past. The real start was the awakening of scientific and technological thoughts during the Renaissance, with the idea that the lawful behavior of nature can be understood, analyzed, and manipulated to accomplish useful ends. That idea itself, alone, was not enough, however, for not until the creation and evolution of blueprints was it possible to express exactly how power and parts were to be combined for each specific task at hand.”

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

Source: Structured analysis (SA): A language for communicating ideas (1977), p. 16.

Law, Behavior, Idea, Nature

“Project management is the planning, organizing, directing, and controlling of company resources for a relatively short-term objective that has been established to complete specific goals and objectives. Furthermore, project management utilises the systems approach to management by having functional personnel (the vertical hierarchy) assigned to a specific project”

Harold Kerzner (1940) American engineer, management consultant

the horizontal hierarchy
Source: Project management for executives (1982), p. 3

“Executable UML is at the next higher layer of abstraction, abstracting away both specific programming languages and decisions about the organization of the software so that a specification built in Executable UML can be deployed in various software environments without change.”

Stephen J. Mellor (1952) British computer scientist

Source: Executable Uml: A Foundation for Model-Driven Architecture, 2002, p. 5.

Decision, Change

“Analytic therapy is thus a form of re-education; Freud specifically called it that. It is re-education so far as it eliminates those symptoms through which the patient has tried, mistakenly, to resolve the contradictions in his life.”

Philip Rieff (1922–2006) American sociologist

The Triumph of the Therapeutic (1966)

Life, Education

“Much of the research into humans' risk-avoidance machinery shows that it is antiquated and unfit for the modern world; it is made to counter repeatable attacks and learn from specifics. If someone narrowly escapes being eaten by a tiger in a certain cave, then he learns to avoid that cave.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb (1960) Lebanese-American essayist, scholar, statistician, former trader and risk analyst

"Learning to Expect the Unexpected," http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/taleb04/taleb_index.html The New York Times (2004-04-08}

World, Learning

“The actual manufacture of material into a specific product is a sort of digestive process which must have a functioning organization purposed to meet the required ends, just as the human body has, and it is governed by similar conditions. It must also be directed by a specific intelligence and must have internal and external avenues of correspondence to keep it alive; and, like a living organism, must adhere to the eternal economy of things and show a profit by its activities or it cannot progress.
To exemplify this in a simple way, the writer has laid out Figure I, showing the prime elements composing the anatomy of an industrial body. One does not have to draw on the imagination very far to make a comparison of this anatomy with that of man. It has its mind, will power, and brain to direct it, as indicated by the stockholders, directors and executive officers, a heart which keeps in flow the circulating medium internally; and avenues of correspondence with the outside world which furnish to it the very elements of existence.
This chart shows first, that the stockholders are simply elements belonging to the general public who have made an investment for some specific purpose; second, that immediately after this, the election of directors sets into action the first internal factor in the body, which is then divided into different functioning powers by the election of executive officers.”

Clinton Edgar Woods (1863) American engineer

Source: Organizing a factory (1905), p. 24

World, Way, Imagination, Intelligence

“The first Christian who can write decent Latin is Minucius Felix, whose Octavius, written in the first half (possibly the first quarter) of the Third Century must have done much to make Christianity respectable. He concentrates on ridiculing pagan myths that no educated man believed anyway and on denying that Christians (he means his kind, of course!) practice incest (a favorite recreation of many sects that had been saved by Christ from the tyranny of human laws) or cut the throats of children to obtain blood for Holy Communion (as some groups undoubtedly did). He argues for a monotheism that is indistinguishable from the Stoic except that the One God is identified as the Christian deity, from whose worship the sinful Jews are apostates, and insists that Christians have nothing to do with the Jews, whom God is going to punish. What is interesting is that Minucius has nothing to say about any specifically Christian doctrine, and that the names of Jesus or Christ do not appear in his work. There is just one allusion: the pagans say that Christianity was founded by a felon (unnamed) who was crucified. That, says Minucius, is absurd: no criminal ever deserved, nor did a man of this world have the power, to be believed to be a god (erratis, qui putatis deum credi aut meruisse noxium aut potuisse terrenum). That ambiguous reference is all that he has to say about it; he turns at once to condemning the Egyptians for worshipping a mortal man, and then he argues that the sign of the cross represents (a) the mast and yard of a ship under sail, and (b) the position of man who is worshipping God properly, i. e. standing with outstretched arms. If Minucius is not merely trying to pull the wool over the eyes of the gullible pagans, it certainly sounds as though this Christian were denying the divinity of Christ, either regarding him, as did many of the early Christians, as man who was inspired but was not to be identified with God, or claiming, as did a number of later sects, that what appeared on earth and was crucified was merely a ghost, an insubstantial apparition sent by Christ, who himself prudently stayed in his heaven above the clouds and laughed at the fools who thought they could kill a phantom. Of course, our holy men are quite sure that he was "orthodox."”

Revilo P. Oliver (1908–1994) American philologist

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

Men, God, Children, World

“Lyrically speaking, I know that there were a lot of things going on in and around the world and there were some very specific people in my mind coming dangerously close to having megolomaniacal tendancies and so I did my best to write those thoughts down.”

Brandon Boyd (1976) American rock singer, writer and visual artist

On the song Megalomaniac

People, World

“The great majority of experimental psychologists relate to the tradition of their field in much the same way as physicists. Their look at the past might take the form of a review of the literature in a specific research area, and perhaps they would go so far as to take time off for celebrating a few icons on appropriate ceremonial occasions, but there is no room in their world for a reflective or critical history. They would gladly leave anything like that to the professional historians without any sense of having surrendered something that might have the slightest relevance to their own research interests. In the U. S. this attitude may be more widespread than elsewhere, and it is certainly accompanied by a growing tendency for the history of psychology to be taken up by historians rather than psychologists, but of course, the same attitudes are to be found wherever there are psychological laboratories.”

Kurt Danziger (1926) German academic

Source: "Does the history of psychology have a future?." 1994, p. 472

World, Way, History, Literature

“All US presidents — and all US presidential candidates — have to be religious or have to pretend to be religious. More specifically, they have to subscribe to "born again" Christianity. Bush, with his semi-compulsory prayer-breakfasts and so on, isn't pretending to be religious… We hear about the successful "Texanisation" of the Republican party. And doesn't Texas sometimes seem to resemble a country like Saudi Arabia, with its great heat, its oil wealth, its brimming houses of worship, and its weekly executions?”

Martin Amis (1949) Welsh novelist

"The Palace of the End" (2003)

Success, Housing, Country, Wealth

“Generalized statements … which instill nebulous fear without specific information are exactly in line with the goals of terrorism.”

Ze Frank (1972) American online performance artist

http://www.zefrank.com/theshow/archives/2006/08/081006.html
"The Show" (www.zefrank.com/theshow/)

Fear

“A genre is maintained by the conventions of a community, and in most cases serves specific functions within the system of practices of particular institutions of that community.”

Jay Lemke (1946) American academic

Lemke, J. (2005). "Multimedia genres and transversals." Folia Linguistica, 39(1-2): 45-56. p. 46

Communication

“More than two weeks ago, I gave Taliban leaders a series of clear and specific demands: Close terrorist training camps. Hand over leaders of the Al Qaeda network, and return all foreign nationals, including American citizens unjustly detained in our country. None of these demands were met. And now, the Taliban will pay a price.”

George W. Bush (1946) 43rd President of the United States

2000s, 2001, Invasion of Afghanistan (October 2001)

Training, Country

“The overly specific sexual orientation, then, reflects a basic division in consciousness. It not only separates a man from his own intuitions and emotions to some extent, or a woman from her own intellect, but it effectively provides a civilization in which mind and heart, fact and revelation, appear completely divorced. To some degree each person is at war with the psyche, for all of an individual’s human characteristics must be denied unless they fit in with those considered normal to the sexual identity.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Session 772, Page 81
The Nature of the Psyche: Its Human Expression (1979)

War, Appearance, Heart, Personality

“Freud describes the neurotic personality of the late nineteenth century as one suffering from fragmentation – that is, from repression of instinctual drives, blocking off of awareness, loss of autonomy, weakness and passivity of the ego, together with the various neurotic symptoms which result from this fragmentation. “Kierkegaard-who wrote the only known book before Freud specifically devoted to the problem of anxiety-analyzes not only anxiety but particularly the depression and despair which result from the individual’s self-estrangement, an estrangement he proceeds to clarify in its different forms and degrees of severity. Nietzsche proclaims ten years before Freud’s first book that the disease of contemporary man is that “his soul had gone stale” he is – he describes how blocked instinctual powers turn within the individual into resentment, self-hatred, hostility and aggression. Freud did not know Kierkegaard’s work, but he regarded Nietzsche as one of the authentically great men of all time.””

Rollo May (1909–1994) US psychiatrist

Source: The Discovery of Being (1983), p. 60-61

Men, Hostility, Books, Disease

“I answer that, It was necessary for woman to be made, as the Scripture says, as a "helper" to man; not, indeed, as a helpmate in other works, as some say, since man can be more efficiently helped by another man in other works; but as a helper in the work of generation. This can be made clear if we observe the mode of generation carried out in various living things. Some living things do not possess in themselves the power of generation, but are generated by some other specific agent, such as some plants and animals by the influence of the heavenly bodies, from some fitting matter and not from seed: others possess the active and passive generative power together; as we see in plants which are generated from seed; for the noblest vital function in plants is generation. Wherefore we observe that in these the active power of generation invariably accompanies the passive power. Among perfect animals the active power of generation belongs to the male sex, and the passive power to the female. And as among animals there is a vital operation nobler than generation, to which their life is principally directed; therefore the male sex is not found in continual union with the female in perfect animals, but only at the time of coition; so that we may consider that by this means the male and female are one, as in plants they are always united; although in some cases one of them preponderates, and in some the other. But man is yet further ordered to a still nobler vital action, and that is intellectual operation. Therefore there was greater reason for the distinction of these two forces in man; so that the female should be produced separately from the male; although they are carnally united for generation. Therefore directly after the formation of woman, it was said: "And they shall be two in one flesh"”

Thomas Aquinas book Summa Theologica

Gn. 2:24
I, q. 92, art. 1 (Whether the Woman should have been made in the first production of things?)
Summa Theologica (1265–1274)

Life, Sex, Time, Help

“The one mission of the Church receives its specification from the actual context in which it is exercised in the concrete situations in which it is fulfilled.”

Kurien Kunnumpuram (1931–2018) Indian theologian

Kunnumpuram, K. (2007) The Indian Church of the Future. Mumbai: St Pauls, p. 26
On the Church

Exercises

“A number of proposals have been advanced in recent years for the development of ‘general systems theory’ which, abstracting from properties peculiar to physical, biological, or social systems, would be applicable to all of them. We might well feel that, while the goal is laudable, systems of such diverse kinds could hardly be expected to have any nontrivial properties in common. Metaphor and analogy can be helpful, or they can be misleading. All depends on whether the similarities the metaphor captures are significant or superficial.
It may not be entirely vain, however, to search for common properties among diverse kinds of complex systems… The ideas of feedback and information provide a frame of reference for viewing a wide range of situations, just as do the ideas of evolution, of relativism, of axiomatic method, and of operationalism… hierarchic systems have some common properties that are independent of their specific content…”

Herbert A. Simon (1916–2001) American political scientist, economist, sociologist, and psychologist

H.A. Simon (1962) "The Architecture of complexity." in: Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society. Vol 106, pp. 467-468. as cited in: "James Grier Miller (1916-)" at isss.org retrieved Nov 16, 2012.
1960s-1970s

Feeling, Search, Idea, Help

“The triplet of specifications - the product-market scope, the growth vector and the competitive advantage - describes the firm's product-market path in the external environment.”

Igor Ansoff (1918–2001) American mathematician

Source: Corporate Strategy, 1965, p. 110

“Specifically, in these days when brutal and murderous terrorism seeks to drive us apart, we must reiterate to ourselves – here, in the Knesset, in schools, in academia and in the halls of Torah study – that to be Jewish is democratic and democracy is Jewish. Only in this way can we know that brutal terrorism will not break us physically, or our spirit.”

Reuven Rivlin (1939) Israeli politician, 10th President of Israel

This bill strikes at Israel’s heart http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/nov/27/bill-israel-judaism-democracy-president-israel-jewishness-reuven-rivlin, 27 November 2014

School, Way, Democracy, Study

“The new perspective also manifested itself in other ways: the shift of attention to sociologists such as Max Weber who were primarily concerned, not with overall 'development', but with the one specific development, that of modern society; the tendency to be concerned with those aspects of Marxism relevant to this one transition, and to ignore its Evolutionist aspects; and, recently and most characteristically, the concern with the notion of industrial society, and its antithesis, to the detriment of other classifications, oppositions and alternatives.”

Ernest Gellner (1925–1995) Czech anthropologist, philosopher and sociologist

Thought and Change (1964)

Way

“Robert Caserio recently said to me, “The whole profession has become a vast mimicry. The idea that there is open debate is an absolute fiction. There is only the Foucault monologue, the Lacan monologue, the Derrida monologue. There is no room for creative disagreement. No deviation from what is approved is tolerated.” These monologues are really one, the monotonous drone of the School of Saussure, which has cast its delusional inky cloud over modern academic thought. Never have so many been wrong about so much. It is positively idiotic to imagine that there is no experience outside of language. … It has been a truism of basic science courses for decades in America that the brain has multiple areas of function and that language belongs only to specific areas, injured by trauma and restored by surgery or speech therapy.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Sex, Art and American Culture : New Essays (1992), Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders : Academe in the Hour of the Wolf, p. 214

School, Imagination, Idea, Science

“I don't think there's anything guaranteed 100% in life. I want to have discussions for sure and there's lots of talking to be done. I'm not saying I don't want to be Derby manager, I'm saying that I don't think in life anything is 100% guaranteed. Now we'll sit down, have a chat and see what happens. I'm not prepared to discuss it at the moment and I'm not prepared to go into specifics. I've never said I'm leaving but it was always my intention to get to the end of the season and have a discussion.”

Billy Davies (1964) Scottish association football player and manager

May 2007, http://www.sundaysun.co.uk/sport/north-east-football/2007/05/29/derby-county-1-west-brom-0-79310-19213006/
Billy made these remarks shortly after gaining promotion to the Premiership with Derby County

Life, Thinking, Season

“We will encourage reporters to be as specific as possible about the source of any anonymous quotation.”

Alan Rusbridger (1953) British newspaper editor

Alan Rusbridger. " No more ghostly voices http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2000/jul/15/labour.labour1997to99." The Guardian. 14 July 2000; As cited in Bob Franklin, ‎Martin Hamer, ‎Mark Hanna (2005) Key Concepts in Journalism Studies. p. 134. <br class="br">2000s

“When you write your own lyrics, you tend to be over-analytical. One second everything you do is brilliant, and the next, everything is garbage, and I want to be able to express personal things without being made to feel stupid. One of the first times I remember writing something personal was on tour. I was feeling really freaky and down, and I looked in the mirror and I was wearing a red T-shirt and some baggy tennis shorts. I remember thinking that as bummed as I felt, I looked like some beach kid. And then I came up with that line—’I’m looking California / And feeling Minnesota,’ from the song ‘Outshined’—and as soon as I wrote it down, I thought it was the dumbest thing. But after the record came out and we went on tour, everybody would be screaming along with that particular line when it came up in the song. The was a shock. How could anyone know that that was one of the most personally specific things I had ever written? It was just a tiny line. But somehow, maybe because it was personal, it just pushed that button.”

Chris Cornell (1964–2017) American singer-songwriter, musician

Interview with Details Magazine, December 1996 https://pitchfork.com/features/article/10081-chris-cornell-searching-for-solitude/, <br class="br">Soundgarden Era

Stupidity, Feeling, Thinking, Time

“Should we worry about social media sites sharing everything they know about us with third-party commercial interests? Of course, no one wants to be pestered by targeted advertising. More sinister, however, is the prospect of health insurance companies learning whether you had been Googling research on specific illnesses or prospective employers prying into your personal social history by analyzing your data trail on the Web to spot potential quirks, idiosyncrasies, or even possible antisocial behavior.”

Jeremy Rifkin (1945) American economist

The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism (2014)

Health, Behavior, History, Learning

“No, nothing short of the creative principle of imagination gives the fine arts their specific quality—the principle that creates for the sake of creating, for the sake of giving free course to that imagination which is not only an essential but the guiding factor in the supersensible being of man, and which not only founds for him the world of religion and of science, as well as that of art, but is the constructive and developing principle of the universe itself.”

George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) American philosopher

Source: The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905), The Art-Principle as Represented in Poetry, p.206

World, Religion, Art, Imagination

“It is not just about the need to identify victims of specific events and the experience but to also accept that this includes many others who consider themselves victims too. We urgently need the mechanisms to deal with the differences as they emerge because we want to progress together.”

Josefa Iloilo (1920–2011) President of Fiji

Fiji Day address, 10 October 2005 (excerpts)

“Laplace made many important discoveries in mathematical physics… Indeed, he was interested in anything that helped to interpret nature. He worked on hydrodynamics, the wave propagation of sound, and the tides. In the field of chemistry, his work on the liquid state of matter is classic. His studies of the tension in the surface layer of water, which accounts for the rise of liquids inside a capillary tube, and of the cohesive forces in liquids, are fundamental. Laplace and Lavoisier designed an ice calorimeter (1784) to measure heat and measured the specific heat of numerous substances; heat, to them, was still a special kind of matter. Most of Laplace's life was, however, devoted to celestial mechanics.”

Morris Kline (1908–1992) American mathematician

Source: Mathematical Thought from Ancient to Modern Times (1972), p. 495

Life, Mathematics, Nature, Study

“We assert that it is possible to describe analytically any human function which can be reasonably defined in objective terms and we specifically include in such functions "thinking" insofar as that term is definable. If by "thinking" one means being able to do arithmetic, or play a good game of chess, or learn from experience, or make optimal decisions in exceedingly complex situations, then we assert that thinking can be described analytically. And there are two important corollaries: if It can be described analytically, it can be simulated; and if it can be simulated, it can be performed mechanically.”

Robert E. Machol (1917–1998) American systems engineer

Source: Information and Decision Processes (1960), p. viii-ix

Game, Optimism, Thinking, Decision

“A work can be as powerful as it can be thought to be. Actual space is intrinsically more powerful and specific than paint on a flat surface.”

Donald Judd (1928–1994) artist

Source: 1960s, "Specific Objects," 1965, p. 76; As quoted in: De gids, Vol. 131, Nr. 1-5, (1968), p. 262

Painting

“Several features or attributes of organizations can therefore be recognized
# Organizations are social institutions (entities) composed of sets of persons with established patterns of interaction.
# Organizations develop to achieve specific goals. Therefore, organizations are social creations that require order and cooperation.
# Organizations are social instruments possessing relatively identifiable boundaries and existing on a relatively permanent basis. While this final point is perhaps less clear than were those that precede it, the identification of fixed boundaries (for instance, the distinction between members and nonmembers) and continuity (that is, existence and identity over time) provide a conceptual framework for the study of organizational activity.”

Arthur G. Bedeian (1946) American business theorist

Source: Organizations: Theory and Analysis, 1984, p. 3-4 (1984: 2-3)

Study, Time, Personality

“Instead of funding issues of paper on the hypothecation of specific redeeming taxes (the only method of anticipating, in a time of war, the resources of times of peace, tested by the experience of nations), we are trusting to tricks of jugglers on the cards, to the illusions of banking schemes for the resources of the war, and for the cure of colic to inflations of more wind.”

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

Letter to José Correia da Serra (1814) ME 14:224
Posthumous publications, On financial matters

War, Peace, Time

“Let me start a different/ analysis by recalling an idea from Max Weber. He characterized cultural modernity as the separation of the substantive reason expressed in religion and metaphysics into three autonomous spheres. They are science, morality and art. These came to be differentiated because the unified world-views of religion and metaphysics fell apart. Since the 18th century, the problems inherited from these older world-views could be arranged so as to fall under specific aspects of validity: truth, normative rightness, authenticity and beauty. They could then be handled as questions of knowledge, or of justice and morality, or of taste. Scientific discourse, theories of morality, Jurisprudence, and the production and criticism of art could in turn be institutionalized. Each domain of culture could be made to correspond to cultural professions in which problems could be dealt with as the concern of special experts. This professionalized treatment of the cultural tradition brings to the fore the intrinsic structures of each of the three dimensions of culture. There appear the structures of cognitive-instrumental, of moral-practical and of aesthetic-expressive rationality, each of these under the control of specialists who seem more adept at being logical in these particular ways than other people are. As a result, the distance grows between the culture of the experts and that of the larger public. What accrues to culture through specialized treatment and reflection does not immediately and necessarily become the property of everyday praxis. With cultural rationalization of this sort, the threat increases that the life-world, whose traditional substance has already been devalued, will become more and more impoverished.”

Manuel Castells (1942) Spanish sociologist (b.1942)

Source: Modernity — An Incomplete Project, 1983, p. 8-9

Life, People, Truth, World

“The term “system” is unquestionably one of the most widely used terms not only in science, but in other areas of human endeavor as well. It is a highly overworked term, which enjoys different meanings under different circumstances and for different people. However, when separated from its specific connotations and uses, the term "system" is almost never explicitly defined.”

George Klir (1932–2016) American computer scientist

Source: Facets of Systems Science, (2001), p. 4.

People, Science

“I don't feel the need to be a role model, it's just something that's been thrust upon me. Teachers and a lot of Asian-American organizations, for example, say to me, "We need you to come and speak to us because you're a role model."… Placing on writers the responsibility to represent a culture is an onerous burden. Someone who writes fiction is not necessarily writing a depiction of any generalized group, they're writing a very specific story.”

Amy Tan (1952) American novelist

SALON Interview (1995)

Feeling, Teachers

“What you want if you're asking that question is a specific time in your life to come back to you, and that will never happen. You will never be 15 years old again. I could write, verbatim, another Take This To Your Grave, and you won't feel the same way. It's not going to mean anything to you because it wouldn't mean anything to me.”

Patrick Stump (1984) American musician

When asked "how do you respond to people who say they wish Fall Out Boy would just write another Take This To Your Grave?"
AbsolutePunk.net, Patrick Stump, Part 1 - 10.06.08

Life, Way, Feeling, Question

Quotes about specification page 2

Quotes about specification
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