Quotes about spell
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“The moral and spiritual achievements of man do not depend on tricks or luck or on esoteric spells or on any purely external agency. One's spiritual condition depends on the "stuff" one has to begin with, on the amout and quality of study and good hard work one puts into "shaping" it. Spiritual nobility calls for persistence and effort. "First the difficult…" (6:20) "His burden is heavy and his course is long."”

Herbert Fingarette (1921–2018) Philosopher

8:7
Confucius: The Secular as Sacred (1998)

Effort, Study, Dependency

“"Could you try not aiming so much?" he asked me, still standing there. "If you hit him when you aim, it'll just be luck." He was speaking, communicating, and yet not breaking the spell. I then broke it. Quite deliberately. "How can it be luck if I aim?" I said back to him, not loud (despite the italics) but with rather more irritation in my voice than I was actually feeling. He didn't say anything for a moment but simply stood balanced on the curb, looking at me, I knew imperfectly, with love. "Because it will be," he said. "You'll be glad if you hit his marble — Ira's marble — won't you? Won't you be glad? And if you're glad when you hit somebody's marble, then you sort of secretly didn't expect too much to do it. So there'd have to be some luck in it, there'd have to be slightly quite a lot of accident in it."”

Jerome David Salinger book Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction

Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction (1963), Seymour: An Introduction (1959)

Love, Feeling, Communication

“A burning at the stake, an afternoon in the rack, headscrews, a douche with boiling water, nails into hands, induced vomiting, ripped tongues, dead babes, human target practice, possession by devils, rape, transvestism, nude orgies in the nunnery. Put them all together and they spell Committed Art, because these are modern times and I certainly hope none of us is opposed to truth.”

Roger Ebert (1942–2013) American film critic, author, journalist, and TV presenter

Review http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-devils of The Devils (1 January 1971) Reviews, Zero star reviews

Truth, Hope, Art, Water

“If an S and an I and an O and a U
With an X at the end spell Su;
And an E and a Y and an E spell I,
Pray what is a speller to do?
Then, if also an S and an I and a G
And an HED spell side,
There's nothing much left for a speller to do
But to go commit siouxeyesighed.”

Charles Follen Adams (1842–1918) American poet

An Orthographic Lament; although Adams had published at least one poem playing on the pronunciation of the word Sioux, no firm evidence supports his authorship of this work.
Attributed

“Finally, she broke her silence and spelled it out to Dr. Burkley. Kneeling, John Kennedy's personal physician indicated her ghastly skirt with a trembling hand. "Another dress?", he suggested diffidently.
"No", she whispered fiercely, "Let them see the horror."”

William Manchester book The Death of a President

The Death of a President (1967)

Silence, Personality

“Current concern with reading and spelling reform steers away from visual to auditory stress.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 54

Reading

“But so far as the Hindus are concerned, this period was a prolonged spell of darkness which ended only when the Marathas and the Jats and the Sikhs broke the back of Islamic imperialism in the middle of the 18th century. The situation of the Hindus under Muslim rule is summed up by the author of Tãrîkh-i-Wassãf in the following words: “The vein of the zeal of religion beat high for the subjection of infidelity and destruction of idols… The Mohammadan forces began to kill and slaughter, on the right and the left unmercifully, throughout the impure land, for the sake of Islãm, and blood flowed in torrents. They plundered gold and silver to an extent greater than can be conceived, and an immense number of precious stones as well as a great variety of cloths… They took captive a great number of handsome and elegant maidens and children of both sexes, more than pen can enumerate… In short, the Mohammadan army brought the country to utter ruin and destroyed the lives of the inhabitants and plundered the cities, and captured their off-springs, so that many temples were deserted and the idols were broken and trodden under foot, the largest of which was Somnãt. The fragments were conveyed to Dehlî and the entrance of the Jãmi‘ Masjid was paved with them so that people might remember and talk of this brilliant victory… Praise be to Allah the lord of the worlds.””

Sita Ram Goel book The Story of Islamic Imperialism in India

The Story of Islamic Imperialism in India (1994)

Children, People, World, Religion

“The one affectation I have forced on the publisher … are my apostrophe-free ellisions. Because I write my scripts to read myself, I dont spell 'don't' with an apostrophe. I spell it 'dont'. We all know the word and it seems foolish to put in an extraneous apostrophe. Punctuation marks are devices we use to make the meaning of sentences clear. There is nothing confusing about a word like 'dont' printed without an apostrophe to indicate an omitted letter.”

Andy Rooney (1919–2011) writer, humorist, television personality

Reading

“I think I'm getting into the real mood and atmosphere of Worpswede now. What I used to call my Sunken Bell mood, the spell I was under when I first got here, was sweet, very sweet – but it was really only a dream, and one that couldn't last long in any sort of active life. Then came the reaction to it, and after that something truer – serious work and serious living for my art, a battle I must fight with all my strength. I am filled with the sun, every part of me, and with the breezy air, intoxicated with the moonlight on the bright snow... Nature was speaking with me and I listened to her, happy and vibrant. Life.”

Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876–1907) German artist

excerpt of her Journal, Worpswede 1897; as quoted in Voicing our visions, – Writings by women artists; ed. Mara R. Witzling, Universe New York, 1991, pp. 193-194
1897

Life, Dreams, Art, Mood

“Douglas, no man will ever be President of the United States who spells 'negro' with two gs.”

William H. Seward (1801–1872) American lawyer and politician

A retort to Stephen A. Douglas on the Senate floor, after the Illinois senator used an offensive slur in a speech. As quoted in Team of Rivals (2006), by Doris Kearns Goodwin (New York: Simon and Schuster), p. 163.

“And love is "evol"; spell it backwards. I'll show you.”

Eminem (1972) American rapper and actor

"Space Bound"
2010s, Recovery (2010)

Love

“The non-Christian can put no question which is not necessarily that of the Christian dogmatician as well. … In solidarity with the non-Christian, he has no prior knowledge. He must begin from the very beginning with no presupposed consciousness of God. He must learn to spell out the message which comes to him as to every man.”

Helmut Gollwitzer (1908–1993) German theologian and author

Source: Introduction to Church Dogmatics (1957), p. 11

God, Question, Knowledge, Learning

“There is a flower, a purple flower
Sown by the wind, nursed by the shower,
O'er which Love has breathed a power and spell
The truth of whispering hope to tell.
(According to the Lady’s Book of Flowers, 1842, this is the centaury)”

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

The London Literary Gazette, 1824

Love, Truth, Books, Hope

“The seventh rule of the ethics of means and ends is that generally success or failure is a mighty determinant of ethics. The judgment of history leans heavily on the outcome of success or failure; it spells the difference between the traitor and the patriotic hero. There can be no such thing as a successful traitor, for if one succeeds he becomes a founding father.”

Saul D. Alinsky (1909–1972) American community organizer and writer

Source: Rules for Radicals: A Practical Primer for Realistic Radicals (1971), p. 34

History, Failure, Success

“[About his legacy:] I'll be all right so long as it has been written on some corner of a human heart. On the heart, it doesn't matter how you spell it.”

Nelson Algren (1909–1981) American novelist, short story writer

Quoted by Ron Grossman, "Nelson Algren's Chicago" http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/commentary/ct-nelson-algren-flashback-chicago-authors-perspec-0326-jm-20170324-story.html, The Chicago Tribune, March 25, 2017. Nonfiction works

Heart

“Of all the sights and sounds which attracted me on my first arrival to live in London in the mid-thirties, one combined operation left a lingering, individual spell. I naturally went to Hyde Park to hear the orators, the best of the many free entertainments on offer in the capital. I heard the purest milk of the world flowing, then as now, from the platform of the Socialist Party of Great Britain.”

Michael Foot (1913–2010) British politician

Debts of Honour, 1980.
1980s

World, Nature

“And, in this case, science could learn an important lesson from the literati — who love contingency for the same basic reason that scientists tend to regard the theme with suspicion. Because, in contingency lies the power of each person, to make a difference in an unconstrained world bristling with possibilities, and nudgeable by the smallest of unpredictable inputs into markedly different channels spelling either vast improvement or potential disaster.”

Stephen Jay Gould book The Structure of Evolutionary Theory

Source: The Structure of Evolutionary Theory (2002), p. 1341

Love, World, Learning, Science

“Religion and philosophy, philosophy and religion – they're two words which are both … different. In spelling.”

Eddie Izzard (1962) British stand-up comedian, actor and writer

Live at the Ambassadors (1993)

Religion

“I am deeply sensitive to the spell of nationalism. I can play about thirty Bohemian folk songs… on my mouth-organ. My oldest friend, who is Czech and a patriot, cannot bear to hear me play them because he says I do it in such a schmalzy way, 'crying into the mouth organ'. I do not think I could have written the book on nationalism which I did write, were I not capable of crying, with the help of a little alcohol, over folk songs, which happen to be my favourite form of music.”

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

"Reply to Critics" in The Social Philosophy of Ernest Gellner

Alcohol, Books, Music, Way

“Norway did not even have a revolution at the time the rest of Europe was busy figuring out human rights and stuff, because we were busy fighting over how to spell it.”

Erik Naggum (1965–2009) Norwegian computer programmer

Re: PART TWO: winning industrial-use of lisp: Re: Norvig's latest paper on Lisp http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/6cce7cd281ff6126 (Usenet article). Usenet articles, Miscellaneous

Business, Time, Fight

“I have all my life been an indweller of the town, and I frankly confess, for a constant residence, I like it better than all the pastoral charms that ever made the morality of an essay, or gave grace to poetry; still there is that about the country to which the heart always turns with a feeling of freshness and renovation. The moonlight walk through the green wood, would come back upon the memory with a spell which would not belong to a lamp-lighted ramble. The green-leaf would give its freshness, the wild-flower its sweetness; on the ear would arise the murmur of the wind in the boughs — or the song of the brook singing like a child for very gladness.”

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

Literary Remains

Life, Feeling, Flowers, Light

“You'd better hope and pray
That you make it safe back to your own world
You'd better hope and pray
That you'll wake one day in your own world
Because when you sleep at night
They don't hear your cries in your own world
Only time will tell
If you can break the spell back in your own world.”

Siobhan Fahey (1958) singer and songwriter in Banarama and Shakespears Sister

"Stay"
Hormonally Yours (1992)

World, Hope, Sleep, Time

“On countless occasions during my spell as an assistant in Naples I heard people say about some newspaper or other: è pagato, it’s paid for, it lies for its client, and then on the following day these very same people who had cried pagato were absolutely convinced by some obviously bogus piece of news in the same paper. Because it was printed in such bold type, and because the other people believed it. … I also know that a part of every intellectual’s soul belongs to the people, that all my awareness of being lied to, and my critical attentiveness, are of no avail when it comes to it: at some point the printed lie will get the better of me when it attacks from all sides and is queried by fewer and fewer around me and finally by no one at all.”

Victor Klemperer book LTI – Lingua Tertii Imperii

Source: LTI – Lingua Tertii Imperii (The Language of the Third Reich) (1947), pp. 207-208.

People, Lie, Soul, Parting

“And a proverb haunts my mind
As a spell is cast,
"The mill cannot grind
With the water that is past."”

Sarah Doudney (1841–1926) English novelist and poet

Poem: Lesson of the Water-Mill.

Water, Past

“I failed kindergarten because I couldn't spell my last name.”

Zach Galifianakis (1969) American actor and comedian

Live at the Purple Onion (2007)

“Cognition is autonomous; it refuses to have any answers foisted on it from the outside. Yet it suffers without protest having certain questions prescribed to it from the outside (and it is here that my heresy regarding the unwritten law of the university originates). Not every question seems to me worth asking. Scientific curiosity and omnivorous aesthetic appetite mean equally little to me today, though I was once under the spell of both, particularly the latter. Now I only inquire when I find myself inquired of. Inquired of, that is, by men rather than by scholars. There is a man in each scholar, a man who inquires and stands in need of answers. I am anxious to answer the scholar qua man but not the representative of a certain discipline, that insatiable, ever inquisitive phantom which like a vampire drains whom it possesses of his humanity.”

Franz Rosenzweig (1886–1929) Jewish theologian and philosopher

in Franz Rosenzweig: His Life and Thought (1961/1998), p. 97

Men, Law, Question, Suffering

“More or less, we're all afflicted with the psychology of the voyeur. Not in a strictly clinical or criminal sense, but in our whole physical and emotional stance before the world. Whenever we seek to break this spell of passivity, our actions are cruel and awkward and generally obscene, like an invalid who has forgotten to walk.”

Jim Morrison (1943–1971) lead singer of The Doors

The Lords and the New Creatures: Poems (1969), The Lords: Notes on Vision

World, Sense, Affliction

“The untransacted destiny of the American people is to subdue the continent — to rush over this vast field to the Pacific Ocean — to animate the many hundred millions of its people, and to cheer them upward — to set the principle of self-government at work — to agitate these herculean masses — to establish a new order in human affairs — to set free the enslaved — to regenerate superannuated nations — to change darkness into light — to stir up the sleep of a hundred centuries — to teach old nations a new civilization — to confirm the destiny of the human race — to carry the career of mankind to its culminating point — to cause stagnant people to be re-born — to perfect science — to emblazon history with the conquest of peace — to shed a new and resplendent glory upon mankind — to unite the world in one social family — to dissolve the spell of tyranny and exalt charity — to absolve the curse that weighs down humanity, and to shed blessings round the world!
Divine task! immortal mission! Let us tread fast and joyfully the open trail before us! Let every American heart open wide for patriotism to glow undimmed, and confide with religious faith in the sublime and prodigious destiny of his well-loved country.”

William Gilpin

Address to the U.S. Senate (2 March 1846); quoted in Mission of the North American People, Geographical, Social, and Political (1873), by William Gilpin, p. 124.

Love, People, World, Family

“That was a decisive moment in Lincoln’s career, and that’s the situation he faced when he got up to give his “House Divided” speech on June 16th of 1858. It was a crisis of his own career. It was also, in my opinion, the gravest crisis this country has ever faced, because the greatest danger to the future of the country came not, I think, from the pro-slavery argument, but from the morally neutral argument of Douglas. And that’s a long story and you’ll find it all spelled out in great detail in my book, which I hope you will read with great care.”

Harry V. Jaffa (1918–2015) American historian and collegiate professor

2000s, The Real Abraham Lincoln: A Debate (2002), The Right of Secession Is Not the Right of Revolution

Books, Hope, Thinking, Decision

“My name eet is Roberto Enricque Clemente Walker. I no use Enricque—spell him E–n–r–i–c–q–u–e —and I no use Walker. Him make too long for name. Just Roberto Clemente, thas all. This Enricque is middle name. Walker eet is my mother's name. In Puerto Rico, people she use father's and mother's name. I use Roberto Clemente in thees country.”

Roberto Clemente (1934–1972) Puerto Rican baseball player

As quoted in "Sidelight on Sports: A Baseball Star is Born" https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=d5dRAAAAIBAJ&sjid=52sDAAAAIBAJ&pg=1293%2C4057980 by Al Abrams, in The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (June 7, 1955), p. 20 Comment: 1994 interview with Vera Clemente https://www.google.com/search?tbo=p&tbm=bks&q=%22Roberto+Enrique+Clemente%22+intitle:Remember+intitle:Roberto&num=10 confirms that Enrique was Clemente's middle name; the discrepancy in spelling is presumably due to a misunderstanding by the non-Spanish-speaking Abrams, mistaking the word "Si" for the letter c. Other, <big><big>1950s</big></big>, <big>1955</big>

People, Country

“In my experience, psychoanalysis demanded loyalty that could not be questioned, the blind acceptance of unexamined "wisdom". It is characteristic of religious orders to seek obedience without scepticism, but it spells the death of intellectual enquiry. All variants of "because I say so," or because the Koran says so, or the Bible says so, or the Upanishads say so, or Freud says so, or Marx says so, are simply different means of stifling intellectual dissent. In the end they cannot satisfy the inquisitive mind or still the doubts that naturally arise when such a mind is confronted with authoritative statements about human behavior.”

Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson (1941) American writer and activist

Source: Final Analysis (1990), pp. 209-210

Death, Wisdom, Behavior, Question

“There iz no alternativ. Every possible reezon that could ever be offered for altering the spelling of wurds, stil exists in full force; and if a gradual reform should not be made in our language, it wil proov that we are less under the influence of reezon than our ancestors.”

Noah Webster (1758–1843) lexicographer, textbook pioneer, English-language spelling reformer, writer, editor and author

Preface to A Collection of Essays and Fugitiv Writings (1790) http://books.google.com/books?vid=0q9zW406vxSXI6op5n8&id=pcIgAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA1&lpg=PA1&dq=%22Fugitiv+Writings%22#PPR11,M1 This quote illustrates the reformed spelling advocated by Webster.

“Her mother had once told her that there were men who kept secrets bottled up inside and that it spelled trouble for the women who loved them.”

Nicholas Sparks (1965) American writer and novelist

Denise Holton, Chapter 21, p. 231
2000s, The Rescue (2000)

Love, Women, Men, Secret

“In retrospect these years form not only the least agreeable, but the only barren and unhappy period of my life. I was happy as a child with my toys in my nursery. I have been happier every year since I became a man. But this interlude of school makes a sombre grey patch upon the chart of my journey. It was an unending spell of worries that did not then seem petty, of toil uncheered by fruition; a time of discomfort, restriction and purposeless monotony. This train of thought must not lead me to exaggerate the character of my school days … Harrow was a very good school … Most of the boys were very happy … I can only record the fact that, no doubt through my own shortcomings, I was an exception. … I was on the whole considerably discouraged … All my contemporaries and even younger boys seemed in every way better adapted to the conditions of our little world. They were far better both at the games and at the lessons. It is not pleasant to feel oneself so completely outclassed and left behind at the very beginning of the race.”

Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Source: My Early Life: A Roving Commission (1930), Chapter 3 (Examinations).

Life, World, School, Way

“Perhaps the greatest change that industrialism (along with Protestantism and rationalism) has made in daily life is to separate work from leisure in a radical and almost absolute way. Once the efficacy of work began to be more clearly and fully appreciated, work had to become more efficacious in itself — that is, more efficient. To this end, it had to be more sharply separated from everything that was not work; it had to be made more concentratedly and purely itself — in attitude, in method and, above all, in time. Moreover, under the rule of efficiency, seriously purposeful activity in general tended to become assimilated to work. The effect of all this has been to reduce leisure to an occasion more exclusively of passivity, to a breathing spell and interlude; it has become something peripheral.”

Clement Greenberg (1909–1994) American writer and artist

"The Plight of Culture" (1953), p. 31
1960s, Art and Culture: Critical Essays, (1961)

Life, Way, Change, Time

“Most heterosexual people in this country, and around the world, meet each other, and get together with one another when they’re totally, totally drunk. Smashed out of their minds they could not spell their own face. And they go home with that person! And you might spend months with that person, or a year, or you might have a family! This is what happens, this is how you meet. But you wouldn’t buy a toaster when you’re drunk, ‘cause that’s too important. It's got to be crispy in just the right way, hasn't it?”

Dylan Moran (1971) Irish actor and comedian

On starting relationship.
Like, Totally (2006)

People, World, Family, Way

“Who sings of all of Love's eternity
Who shines so bright
In all the songs of Love's unending spells? Holy lightning strikes all that's evil
Teaching us to love for goodness sake.
Hear the music of Love Eternal
Teaching us to reach for goodness sake.”

Jon Anderson (1944) English singer

Lyrics of "Loved by the Sun", on the soundtrack of the film Legend (1986).

Love, Music, Evil, Singing

“The beauty that addresses itself to the eyes," she continued, "is only the spell of the moment; the eye of the body is not always that of the soul.”

George Sand Le Beau Laurence

La beauté qui parle aux yeux, reprit-elle, n’est que le prestige d’un moment; l’œuil du corps n'est pas toujours celui de l'âme.
Le Beau Laurence, ch. 1 (1870); Carroll Owen (trans.) Handsome Lawrence (Boston: James R. Osgood, 1871) p. 30

Beauty, Soul

“Obama’s manner in dealing with other people and acting in the world fully exemplifies the cheerful impersonal friendliness—the middle distance—that marks American sociability. (Now allow me to speak as a critic. Remember Madame de Staël’s meetings that deprive us of solitude without affording us company? Or Schopenhauer’s porcupines, who shift restlessly from getting cold at a distance to prickling one another at close quarters, until they settle into some acceptable compromise position?) The cheerful impersonal friendliness serves to mask recesses of loneliness and secretiveness in the American character, and no less with Obama than with anyone else. He is enigmatic—and seemed so as much then as now—in a characteristically American way…. Moreover, he excelled at the style of sociability that is most prized in the American professional and business class and serves as the supreme object of education in the top prep schools: how to cooperate with your peers by casting on them a spell of charismatic seduction, which you nevertheless disguise under a veneer of self-depreciation and informality. Obama did not master this style in prep school, but he became a virtuoso at it nevertheless, as the condition of preferment in American society that it is. As often happens, the outsider turned out to be better at it than the vast majority of the insiders…. Together with the meritocratic educational achievements, the mastery of the preferred social style turns Obama into what is, in a sense, the first American elite president—that is the first who talks and acts as a member of the American elite—since John Kennedy …. Obama's mixed race, his apparent and assumed blackness, his non-elite class origins and lack of inherited money, his Third-World childhood experiences—all this creates the distance of the outsider, while the achieved elite character makes the distance seem less threatening.”

Roberto Mangabeira Unger (1947) Brazilian philosopher and politician

Quoted in David Remnick, The Bridgeː The Life and Rise of Barack Obama (2010), p. 185-6
On Barack Obama

Money, People, Secret, World

“I was noodling around Rotten Tomatoes, trying to determine who played the bank's security chief, and noticed the movie had not yet been reviewed by anybody. Hold on! In the "Forum" section for this movie, "islandhome" wrote at 7:58 a. m. Jan. 8: "review of this movie … tonight i'll post." At 11:19 a. m. Jan. 10, "islandhome" was finally back with the promised review. It is written without capital letters, flush left like a poem, and I quote it verbatim, spelling and all:
:hello sorry i slept when i got back
:well it was kinda fun
:it could never happen in the way it was portraid
:but what ever its a movie
:for the girls most will like it
:and the men will not mind it much
:i thought it was going to be kinda like how to beat the high cost of living
:kinda the same them but not as much fun
:ill give it a 4 0ut of 10
I read this twice, three times. I had been testing out various first sentences for my own review, but somehow the purity and directness of islandhome's review undercut me. It is so final. "for the girls most will like it/and the men will not mind it much."”

Roger Ebert (1942–2013) American film critic, author, journalist, and TV presenter

How can you improve on that? It's worthy of Charles Bukowski. ...The bottom line is some girls will like it, the men not so much, and I give it 1½ stars out of 4. Review http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/mad-money-2008 of Mad Money (17 January 2008) Reviews, One-and-a-half star reviews

Men, Way, Quotes, Girl

“To spell out the obvious is often to call it in question.”

Eric Hoffer (1898–1983) American philosopher

Section 220
The Passionate State Of Mind, and Other Aphorisms (1955)

Question

“I'll break the spell or the science of her singing yet. As the only man left it devolves on me to do it.”

R. A. Lafferty (1914–2002) American writer

Roadstrum, not realizing he has become a small ape, in Ch. 6
Space Chantey (1968)

Science, Singing

“Light, colour, love - let me come under your spell. Life can be represented only by a lively kind of painting. There is clarity in passion.”

Stefan Szczesny (1951) German painter and sculptor

Mustique (2002)

Love, Life, Light, Passion

“Had there been no other personal attribute to influence the final outcome, Tarzan of the Apes, the young Lord Greystoke, would have died as he had lived — an unknown savage beast in equatorial Africa.
But there was that which had raised him far above his fellows of the jungle — that little spark which spells the whole vast difference between man and brute — Reason. This it was which saved him from death beneath the iron muscles and tearing fangs of Terkoz.”

Edgar Rice Burroughs book Tarzan of the Apes

Source: Tarzan of the Apes (1912), Ch. 12 : Man's Reason

Death, Tear, Personality

“What does cultural pluralism signify in the absence of economic pluralism? Perhaps the question seems meaningless. Yet the apparent lack of meaning signals the intellectual retreat. The economic structure of society—call it advanced industrial society or capitalism or the market economy—stands as the invariant; few can imagine a different economic project. The silent agreement says much about multiculturalism. No divergent political or economic vision animates cultural diversity. From the most militant Afrocentrism to the most ardent feminists, all quarters subscribe to very similar beliefs about work, equality and success. The secret of cultural diversity is its political and economic uniformity. The future looks like the present with more options. Multiculturalism spells the end of utopia.”

Russell Jacoby (1945) American historian

Source: The End of Utopia (1999), pp. 39-40

Secret, Imagination, Question, Success

“With the… symbolic memory we spell out the future—not one but many futures, which we weigh one against another.”

Jacob Bronowski (1908–1974) Polish-born British mathematician

"The Reach of Imagination" (1967)

Memory, Future

“Put bluntly, there is an archaic God, a magic God, a mythic God, a mental God, and an integral God. Which God do you believe in?
An archaic God sees divinity in any strong instinctual force. A magic God locates divine power in the human ego and its magical capacity to change the animistic world with rituals and spells. A mythic God is located not on this earth but in a heavenly paradise not of this world, entrance to which is gained by living according to the covenants and rules given by this God to his peoples. A mental God is a rational God, a demythologized Ground of Being that underlies all forms of existence. And an integral God is one that embraces all of the above.
Which of those Gods is the most important? According to an integral view, all of them, because each "higher" stage actually builds upon and includes the lower, so the lower stages are more fundamental and the higher stages are more significant, but leave out any one of them and you're in trouble. You are, that is, less than integral, less than comprehensive, less than inclusive in your understanding of God.”

Ken Wilber (1949) American writer and public speaker

Which Level of God Do You Believe In? (2004)

God, People, World, Understanding

“A soft and blue Italian sky, — the blue
That painters and that poets love, — the blue
The lover worships in the maiden's eyes,
Whose beauty is their power and spell.”

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

The London Literary Gazette, 1823

Love, Beauty, Lovers

“Most experts have assumed that the allosaurs, about 35 feet long, were the worst threats to the herbivores of the Jurassic, some of which were gigantic and probably able to fend off even an allosaur. But epanterias would have spelled trouble for everyone.”

Robert T. Bakker (1945) American paleontologist

As quoted in Malcolm W. Browne, Scientist Raises Question: Is Tyrannosaurus Still Rex? http://www.nytimes.com/1990/01/04/us/scientist-raises-question-is-tyrannosaurus-still-rex.html, The New York Times (January 4, 1990)

“Is there not something even more sinister in people talking in abstract terms about Britain becoming part of this political union? People may have the impression that we, the 12 countries and perhaps more, are all pals together. The truth is that the real powerhouse of the Common Market lies in Germany. It has just annexed East Germany. It is central to the activities of all the nation states that are falling apart in eastern Europe. Political union spells something much more sinister, and that is German domination. We fought for six years against it in the second world war. If hon. Members allow this political union, they will allow the Germans to win now when they lost in 1945.”

Dennis Skinner (1932) British politician

Speech https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm199192/cmhansrd/1992-02-21/Debate-1.html in the House of Commons (21 February 1992) against the Maastricht Treaty 1990s

War, People, Truth, World

“When poetry loses its ability to enchant, it shrinks into what is just an elaborate form of argumentation. When verse casts its particular spell, it becomes the most evocative form of language.”

Dana Gioia (1950) American writer

Essays, Can Poetry Matter? (1991), Poetry as Enchantment (2015)

“Xylophone is spelled with an X, that's wrong, xylophone's zzzz, X? I don't fuckin' see it. It should be a Z up front, next time you have to spell xylophone, use a Z. When someone says "Hey that's wrong." say "No it ain't. If you think that's wrong, you need to get your head Z-rayed." It's like X wasn't given enough to do, so they had to promise it more. Okay, you don't start a lot of words, but we'll give you a co-starring role in tic-tac-toe. And you will be associated with hugs and kisses. And you will mark the spot. And you will make writing Christmas easier. And incidentally, you will start xylophone. Are you happy, you fuckin' X?!”

Mitch Hedberg (1968–2005) American stand-up comedian

Mitch All Together (2003)

Star, Kiss, Thinking, Time

“Some theologians and religious practitioners tell me that dry spells happen and that perhaps I gave up on God too quickly, but years later I am surer than ever that I don’t believe in God, and struggle to recall why I did in the first place. To be honest, the question no longer intrigues me—I’m much too interested in the complexities of being human to spend much time thinking about anything beyond that.”

Chris Stedman (1987) American activist

Source: Faitheist (2012), Chapter 5, “Unholier Than Thou: Saying Goodbye to God” (p. 86)

God, Question, Thinking, Time

“[the authors in Justice Belied made a] compelling case that this system is not only flawed but produces serious and systematic injustice. One major theme pressed in a number of chapters is that the international criminal justice system (ICJS) that has emerged in the age of tribunals and “humanitarian intervention” has replaced a real, if imperfect, system of international justice with one that misuses forms of justice to allow dominant powers to attack lesser countries without legal impediment. No tribunals have been established for Israel’s actions in Palestine or Kagame’s mass killings in the DRC. Numerous authors in Justice Belied stress the remarkable fact of the ICC’s [International Criminal Court] exclusive focus on Africans, with not a single case of charges brought against non-Africans. And within Africa itself the selectivity is notorious – U. S. clients Kagame and Museveni are exempt; U. S. targets Kenyatta, Taylor, and Gadaffi are charged. […] The system has worked poorly in service to justice, as the authors point out, but U. S. policy has had larger geopolitical and economic aims, and underwriting Kagame’s terror in Rwanda and the DRC and directing the ICC toward selected African targets while ignoring others served those aims. Many of the statutes and much political rhetoric accompanying the new ICJS proclaimed the aim of bringing peace and reconciliation. But this was blatant hypocrisy as the exclusion of aggression as a crime, the selectivity of application, the frequency of applied victor’s justice, and the manifold abuses of the judicial processes have made for war, hatred, and exacerbated conflict. The authors of Justice Belied do a remarkable job of spelling out these sorry conditions and calling for a dismantling of the new ICJS and return to the UN Charter and nation-based attention to dealing with injustice.”

Edward S. Herman (1925–2017) American journalist

Herman, review of Justice Belied: The Unbalanced Scales of International Criminal Justice, Z Magazine, January 2015.
2010s

War, Age, Peace, Justice

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

James Anthony Froude book The Nemesis of Faith

Confessions Of A Sceptic
The Nemesis of Faith (1849)

Life, Money, God, Pleasure

“Our minds fall very readily under the spell of such unmitigated words as Purity and Chastity. Only death beyond decay, absolute non-existence, can be Pure and Chaste. Life is impurity, fact is impure. Everything has traces of alien matter; our very health is dependent on parasitic bacteria; the purest blood in the world has a tainted ancestor, and not a saint but has evil thoughts…. This stupidity, this unreasonable idealism of the common mind, fills life to-day with cruelties and exclusions, with partial suicides and secret shames. But we are born impure, we die impure; it is a fable that spotless white lilies sprang from any saint's decay, and the chastity of a monk or nun is but introverted impurity. We have to take life valiantly on these conditions and make such honour and beauty and sympathy out of our confusions, gather such constructive experience, as we may…. Life is that, and abstinence is for the most part a mere evasion of life.”

H. G. Wells (1866–1946) English writer

Source: First and Last Things: A Confession of Faith and Rule of Life http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/4225 (1908), Ch.3, section 20, Of Abstinences and Disciplines

Life, Death, Health, Secret

“Do they lie? Fervently. Do they steal? Only silver and gold. Do they remember? I am in constant touch. Hardly a day passes. The children. Some can’t spell, still. Took a walk in the light-manufacturing district, where everything’s been converted. Lots of little shops, wine bars. Saw some strange things. Saw a group of square steel plates arranged on a floor. Very interesting. Saw a Man Mountain Dean dressed in heavenly blue. Wild, chewing children. They were small. Petite. Out of scale. They came and went. Doors banging. They were of different sexes but wore similar clothes. Wandered away, then they wandered back. They’re vague, you know, they tell you things in a vague way. Asked me to leave, said they’d had enough. Enough what? I asked. Enough of my lip, they said. Although the truth was that I had visited upon them only the palest of apothegms—the one about the salt losing its savor, the one about the fowls of the air.”

Donald Barthelme book Sixty Stories

“Aria”.
Sixty Stories (1981)

Children, Truth, Lie, Sex

“He knew that there was death—that there must be death if there were evolution, that death was one of the mechanisms that biologically spelled progress and advancement for evolutionary species.”

Clifford D. Simak book Time is the Simplest Thing

Source: Time is the Simplest Thing (1961), Chapter 10 (p. 75)

Death

“My so-called friends have fallen under a spell: they look me squarely in the eye and say, "Well; all is well."”

Bob Dylan (1941) American singer-songwriter, musician, author, and artist

Song lyrics, Slow Train Coming (1979), Precious Angel

“She said, "Spell 'ant' ", and I wrote out the entire alphabet. She said, "That doesn't spell 'ant' ", and I said, "It's in there somewhere! There's the A, there's the N, there's the T – the rest are silent!"”

Eddie Izzard (1962) British stand-up comedian, actor and writer

Live at the Ambassadors (1993)

“The language of the chalk is not hard to learn, not nearly so hard as Latin, if you only want to get at the broad features of the story it has to tell; and I propose that we now set to work to spell that story out together.”

Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895) English biologist and comparative anatomist

1860s, On a Piece of Chalk (1868)

Learning

“The loveliest girl in Vienna
Was Alma, the smartest as well.
Once you picked her up on your antenna,
You'd never be free of her spell.”

Tom Lehrer (1928) American singer-songwriter and mathematician

"Alma"
That Was the Year That Was (1965)

Girl

“I certainly don't spell it out. But they have to know it's possible things are bad. But, they are surrounded by people who love them and will protect them but cannot hide the fact that there is something bad.”

Maurice Sendak (1928–2012) American illustrator and writer of children's books

NOW interview (2004)

Love, People

“Screwing things up is a virtue. Being correct is never the point. I have an almost fanatically correct assistant, and by the time she re-spells my words and corrects my punctuation, I can't read what I wrote. Being right can stop all the momentum of a very interesting idea.”

Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008) American artist

Quoted in: N.M. Kelby (2009) The Constant Art of Being a Writer, p. 102
21st Century

Idea, Time, Reading

“For seventeen months I have cried aloud
calling you back to your lair.
I hurled myself at the hangman's foot.
You are my son, changed into nightmare.
Confusion occupies the world,
and I am powerless to tell
somebody brute from something human,
or on what day the word spells, "Kill!"”

Anna Akhmatova (1889–1966) Russian modernist poet

Requiem; 1935-1940 (1963; 1987), Prologue

World, Change

“It's a fairytale so tragic,
There's no prince to break the spell.
I don't believe in magic,
But for you I will, for you I will.
If I'm a fool, I'll be a fool.
Darlin' for you.”

Bruce Springsteen (1949) American singer and songwriter

"Countin' on a Miracle"
Song lyrics, The Rising (2002)

Fools, Fairytale

“But I wasn’t quite sure how to spell ‘ Cartaud, and I found listings for Cartau, Cartaud, Cartault, Cartaux, Carteau, Carteaud, Carteaux”

Patrick Modiano (1945) French writer

34
Out Of The Dark (1995)

“There are three Powers in the world which not gods nor demons nor men can stay, against which no magic shall prevail and no might shall stand, and they are the White Christ, Time, and Love.
From the first you may await only thwarting of your desire, and you must be careful that He and His in no way enter the struggle. This you can do by remembering that Heaven leaves lesser beings their free will, and thus does not force them into its own ways; even the miracles have done no more than leave open a possibility to men.
The second, which has more names than I myself—Fate, Destiny, Law, Wyrd, the Norns, Necessity, Brahm, and others beyond counting—is not to be appealed to, for it does not hear. Nor can you hope to understand how it exists together with the freedom whereof I spoke, any more than you can understand how there are both old gods and new. But for the wreaking of the greatest spells, you must ponder on this until you know in your inmost being that truth is a thing which bears as many shapes as there are minds which strive to see it.
And the third of the Powers is a mortal thing, therefore it can harm as well as help, and this is the one you must use.”

Poul Anderson book The Broken Sword

Source: The Broken Sword (1954), Chapter 6 (pp. 26-27)

Love, Men, God, Fate

“The unexpressed aim of every politician is to influence events that history books will record his name - and spell it right.”

Judy LaMarsh (1924–1980) Canadian politician, writer, broadcaster and barrister.

Source: Memoirs Of A Bird In A Gilded Cage (1969), CHAPTER 8, Centennial summer, p. 174

Books, History

“Control every single moment of a slaves life, every minute of their day; it would tell them where to go, what to wear, where to sleep, when to work, when to eat, what to eat, when to speak, when to be silent. This is probably the biggest form of government that human beings have ever invented in the whole of history. I vigorously support Abraham Lincoln’s federal takeover of the southern states, and his highly commendable commitment to human rights. Lincoln viewed secession as an attempt to expand slavery. The Confederacy was based on the glorification of inequality and tyranny. The southern leaders clearly spelled out their views. Their motivation was not to be left alone, it was to enshrine slavery. CSA President Jefferson Davis said all black people are 'not fit to govern themselves', and they should be treated in a manner similar to 'lunatics, criminals and children.”

Jefferson Davis (1808–1889) President of the Confederate States of America

Joshua Felipe, as quoted in "The Libertarian Attack on Abraham Lincoln" https://diplomatdc.wordpress.com/2010/06/05/the-libertarian-attack-on-abraham-lincoln-by-gregory-hilton/ (5 June 2010), by Gregory Hilton, The DC World Affairs Blog, WordPress

Life, Children, People, History

“He stood a spell on one foot fust
Then stood a spell on t' other,
An' on which one he felt the wust
He could n't ha' told ye nuther.”

James Russell Lowell (1819–1891) American poet, critic, editor, and diplomat

The Courtin' .
The Biglow Papers (1848–1866), Series II (1866)

“Lying under this spell you cast on me
Each moment
The more I love you.”

Dave Matthews (1967) American singer-songwriter, musician and actor

Crush
Before These Crowded Streets (1998)

Love, Lying

““The rules that society chooses to live by have always struck me as especially fascinating,” she said. “There are things one can do but not talk about, and there are things one can talk about but not do. There are things—not apparently gender-related—that men can do, but not women, and there are things women can do, but not men. We live in an invisible maze, and we have all learned where to turn and when, so as to find our way through.”
“Some of the rules are good, Mary, and many are necessary,” Lord Darcy said mildly.
“You misunderstood me, my dear,” Mary of Cumberland told him. “As in magic, where there are absolutely essential words to say and gestures to make or the spell won’t work; so in society there are absolutely essential words to say and gestures to make or we won’t understand each other or trust each other, and it will all come tumbling down around us. The problem is that the rules of society, unlike magic, have never been formalized mathematically, and we don’t know which words are essential to the spell and which are just silly words.””

Michael Kurland book Ten Little Wizards

Source: Ten Little Wizards (1988), Chapter 14 (p. 132)

Women, Men, Way, Mathematics

“Many grand notions and titles have over time attached themselves to this place: a paradise at the southern tip of Africa, the world’s richest floral kingdom, a maritime fulcrum between West and East, a European outpost at the foot of the continent, the Tavern of the Seas. But the two names that are the most potent are also two of the earliest: the contradictory claims of this being both a Cape of Storms and a Cape of Good Hope. The tension between these ideas encapsulates many of the tensions of this city.
Legend has it that the first Portuguese navigator to round the southern tip of Africa, Bartolomeu Dias, named this stormy peninsula Cabo das Tormentas. However, King João II rejected Dias’s name in favour of one that would be more inspirational for the Portuguese people: Cabo da Boa Esperança. The turning point for the Lusitanian caravels would spell untold riches in the East. But the dialectic between the two contending titles is as virile today in a city whose promise is limitless and whose socio-political storms act as a sea anchor.”

Justin D. Fox (1967) South African author, photojournalist, lecturer and editor

Cape Town Calling (2007)

People, World, Hope, Idea

“You must remember what the concert of Europe is. The concert, or, as I prefer to call it, the inchoate federation of Europe, is a body which acts only when it is unanimous…remember this—that this federation of Europe is the embryo of the only possible structure of Europe which can save civilization from the desolating effects of a disastrous war. (Cheers.) You notice that on all sides the instruments of destruction, the piling up of arms, are becoming larger and larger. The powers of concentration are becoming greater, the instruments of death more active and more numerous, and are improved with every year; and each nation is bound, for its own safety's sake, to take part in this competition. These are the things which are done, so to speak, on the side of war. The one hope that we have to prevent this competition from ending in a terrible effort of mutual destruction which will be fatal to Christian civilization—the one hope we have is that the Powers may gradually be brought together, to act together in a friendly spirit on all questions of difference which may arise, until at last they shall be welded in some international constitution which shall give to the world, as a result of their great strength, a long spell of unfettered and prosperous trade and continued peace.”

Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury (1830–1903) British politician

Speech at the Guildhall (9 November 1897), quoted in The Times (10 November 1897), p. 6
1890s

Death, War, World, Peace

“Gentleness, Virtue, Wisdom, and Endurance,
These are the seals of that most firm assurance
Which bars the pit over Destruction’s strength;
And if, with infirm hand, Eternity,
Mother of many acts and hours, should free
The serpent that would clasp her with his length;
These are the spells by which to reassume
An empire o’er the disentangled doom.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley Prometheus Unbound

Demogorgon, Act IV, l. 562–569
Prometheus Unbound (1818–1819; publ. 1820)

Wisdom

“He walks without legs,
hears without ears,
does all the deeds without hands.
He enjoys all the juices without a mouth,
spells all the truth without a voice,
touches everything without hands.
He see very object without eyes
and inhales all the scents without a breath.”

Tulsidas (1532–1623) Hindu poet-saint

Tulsidas’s definition of God in verse quoted in A Garden of Deeds: Ramacharitmanas, a Message of Human Ethics http://books.google.co.in/books?id=5em1y2PczVgC&pg=PA36, p. 36

Truth

“Out of five hundred who speak glibly of love, not one can spell the first letter of his name.”

Marie de France medieval poet

Tel cinc cent parolent d'amur,
N'en sevent pas le pior tur,
Ne que est loiax druerie.
"Graelent", line 77; p. 149.
Misattributed

Love

“If I haven't made my point clear, let me just spell it out: don't.”

TotalBiscuit (1984–2018) British game commentator

This is absolutely awful."
Audio blogs, Worms World Party Remastered b******s

“The chroniclers of the early Turkish rulers of India take pride in affirming that Qutbuddin Aibak was a killer of lakhs of infidels. Leave aside enthusiastic killers like Alauddin Khalji and Muhammad bin Tughlaq, even the "kind-hearted" Firoz Tughlaq killed more than a lakh Bengalis when he invaded their country. Timur Lang or Tamerlane says he killed a hundred thousand infidel prisoners of war in Delhi. He built victory pillars from severed heads at many places. These were acts of sultans. The nobles were not lagging behind. One Shaikh Daud Kambu is said to have killed 20,000 with his dagger. The Bahmani sultans of Gulbarga and Bidar considered it meritorious to kill a hundred thousand Hindu men, women and children every year….. The rite of Jauhar killed the women, the tradition of not deserting the field of battle made Rajputs and others die fighting in large numbers. When Malwa was attacked (1305), its Raja is said to have possessed 40,000 horse and 100,000 foot.43 After the battle, "so far as human eye could see, the ground was muddy with blood"…. Under Muhammad Tughlaq, wars and rebellions knew no end. His expeditions to Bengal, Sindh and the Deccan, as well as ruthless suppression of twenty-two rebellions, meant only depopulation in the thirteenth and first half of the fourteenth century. For one thing, in spite of constant efforts no addition of territory could be made by Turkish rulers from 1210 to 1296; for another the Turkish rulers were more ruthless in war and less merciful in peace. Hence the extirpating massacres of Balban, and the repeated attacks by others on regions already devastated but not completely subdued….. Mulla Daud of Bidar vividly describes the war between Muhammad Shah Bahmani and the Vijayanagar King in 1366 in which "Farishtah computes the victims on the Hindu side alone as numbering no less than half a million." Muhammad also devastated the Karnatak region with vengeance….. Under Akbar and Jahangir "five or six hundred thousand human beings were killed," says emperor Jahangir. The figures given by these killers and their chroniclers may be a few thousand less or a few thousand more, but what bred this ambition of cutting down human beings without compunction was the Muslim theory, practice and spirit of Jihad, as spelled out in Muslim scriptures and rules of administration.”

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

Ch 3
Theory and Practice of Muslim State in India (1999)

Women, Men, War, Children

“I am a man: little do I last
and the night is enormous.
But I look up:
the stars write.
Unknowing I understand:
I too am written,
and at this very moment
someone spells me out.”

Octavio Paz (1914–1998) Mexican writer laureated with the 1990 Nobel Prize for Literature

"Brotherhood: Homage to Claudius Ptolemy"

Star, Understanding, Night

“The "medium is the message" is one of the world's silliest remarks. The message is the message, and it doesn't matter whether you send it by e-mail, a note in a bottle or on a picture postcard. The book, or the poem, or the play is what counts and it doesn't matter if it's written with a pen on a long sheet of ruled paper, as I am writing now, or on the most highly developed word processor. No machine can help with the rhythms of your prose, even if it can spell better than you can.”

John Mortimer (1923–2009) English barrister, dramatist, screenwriter and author

Source: Where There's a Will: Thoughts on the Good Life (2003), Ch. 28 : Inventions and the Decline of Language

Books, World, Help

“There are nine million people who see me in the ring and hate my guts. Most of them are white. That's OK. Just spell my name right.”

Mike Tyson (1966) American boxer

http://espn.go.com/boxing/columns/graham_tim/1560938.html
On his fans

Hate, People

“From the creationist’s perspective, the method or mechanism of creation which these mystical beings use is nothing more than a golem spell where clay statues are animated with an enchantment. Or its an incantation in which complex modern plants and animals are "spoken" into being. That’s right, magic words which cause fully-developed adult animals to be conjured out of thin air. Or a god simply wishes them to exist; so they do. That’s it! There really is nothing more to it than that; pure freakin’ magic –by definition. Remember that the next time you hear anything from a creation “scientist.””

Aron Ra (1962) Aron Ra is an atheist activist and the host of the Ra-Men Podcast

"1st Foundational Falsehood of Creationism" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KnJX68ELbAY, Youtube (November 11, 2007) Youtube, Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism

God, Time, Animals

“These notices had been written by Christopher Robin, who was the only one in the forest who could spell; for Owl, wise though he was in many ways, able to read and write and spell his own name WOL, yet somehow went all to pieces over delicate words like MEASLES and BUTTEREDTOAST.”

A.A. Milne book Winnie-the-Pooh

Source: Winnie-the-Pooh (1926), Chapter Four.

Way, Reading

“An international system consists of a group of interacting behavior units called "nations" or "countries," to which may sometimes be added certain supra-national organizations, such as the United Nations. Each of the behavior units in the system can be described in terms of a set of "relevant variables." Just what is relevant and what is not is a matter of judgment of the system-builder, but we think of such things as states of war or peace, degrees of hostility or friendliness, alliance or enmity, arms budgets, geographic extent, friendly or hostile communications, and so on. Having defined our variables, we can then proceed to postulate certain relationships between them, sufficient to define a path for all the variables through time. Thus we might suppose, with Lewis Richardson that the rate of change of hostility of one nation toward a second depends on the level of hostility in the second and that the rate of change of hostility of the second toward the first depends on the level of hostility of the first. Then, if we start from given levels of hostility in each nation, these equations are sufficient to spell out what happens to these levels in succeeding time periods.”

Kenneth E. Boulding (1910–1993) British-American economist

Source: 1950s, National images and international systems, 1959, p. 120-121

Hostility, War, Peace, Behavior

“It was not so long ago that the Bible enjoyed a stranglehold similar to that of the Quran over vast populations in the West. The theocracies propped up by the Bible in Europe and America had enacted similar sagas of slaughter and pillage for several centuries. But a sustained Western scholarship showed up the Bible for what it was. “It would be more consistent,” proclaimed Thomas Pain, “that we call it [the Bible] the work of a demon than the word of God.” The spell of Jehovah was broken…. The rest is history. Christianity is now seeking a refuge in countries like India where its rout in the West remains unknown.”

Sita Ram Goel book The Calcutta Quran Petition

The Calcutta Quran Petition (1986)

God, Pain, History, Country

“An absolute doctrine is impossible, for once a doctrine and its articles become dogma, woe to the army which lies enthralled under its spell.”

J. F. C. Fuller (1878–1966) British Army general

Quoted in Men Against Fire. S.L.A. Marshall (1947), p. 107.

“We are here just for a spell and then pass on. So get a few laughs and do the best you can. Live your life so that whenever you lose it, you are ahead.”

Will Rogers (1879–1935) American humorist and entertainer

Inscribed on the Will Rogers Memorial Building in Claremore, Oklahoma.
Variants: We are all here for a spell; get all the good laughs you can.
As quoted in Peter's Quotations : Ideas for Our Time (1979) by Laurence J. Peter, p. 285
We are all here for a short spell; so get all the good laughs you can.
As quoted in Civilization's Quotations : Life's Ideal (2002) by Richard Alan Krieger, p. 69
As quoted in ...

Life

“In Iran, no-one can ignore the tragic record of the revolution. Over the past three decades some six million Iranians have fled their homeland. The Iran-Iraq war claimed almost a million lives on both sides. During the first four years of the Khomeinist regime alone 22,000 people were executed, according to Amnesty International. Since then, the number of executions has topped 80,000. More than five million people have spent some time in prison, often on trumped-up charges. In terms of purchasing power parity, the average Iranian today is poorer than he was before the revolution. De-Khomeinization does not mean holding the late ayatollah solely responsible for all that Iran has suffered just as Robespierre, Stalin, Mao, and Fidel Castro shared the blame with others in their respective countries. However, there is ample evidence that Khomeini was the principal source of the key decisions that led to tragedy… Memoirs and interviews and articles by dozens of Khomeini’s former associates—including former Presidents Abol-Hassan Banisadr and Hashemi Rafsanjani and former Premier Mehdi Bazargan—make it clear that he was personally responsible for some of the new regime’s worst excesses. These include the disbanding of the national army, the repression of the traditional Shi’ite clergy, and the creation of an atmosphere of terror, with targeted assassinations at home and abroad. Khomeini has become a symbol of what went wrong with Iran’s wayward revolution. De-Khomeinization might not spell the end of Iran’s miseries just as de-Stalinization and de-Maoization initially produced only minimal results. However, no nation can plan its future without coming to terms with its past.”

Amir Taheri (1942) Iranian journalist

"Opinion: Iran must confront its past to move forwards" http://www.aawsat.net/2015/02/article55341173, Ashraq Al-Awsat (February 6, 2015).

War, People, Home, Decision

“Find one person in the audience and sing to them with all of your heart. And then cast a spell over them. Hoss, if you can't do it with feeling — don't.”

Patsy Cline (1932–1963) American country music singer

On singing and performing
Attributed by Dottie West in [Nassour, Ellis, Patsy Cline, 1980, unidentified edition, unidentified pages]
Quoted in The Real Patsy Cline (1986 documentary film)
Attributed

Feeling, Singing, Heart, Personality

“This is a common criticism: the idea that the atheist is guilty of a literalist reading of scripture, and that it’s a very naive way of approaching religion, and there’s a far more sophisticated and nuanced view of religion on offer and the atheist is disregarding that. A few problems with this: anyone making that argument is failing to acknowledge just how many people really do approach these texts literally or functionally - whether they’re selective literalists, or literal all the way down the line. There are certain passages in scripture that just cannot be read figuratively. And people really do live by the lights of what is literally laid out in these books. So, the Koran says “hate the infidel” and Muslims hate the infidel because the Koran spells it out ad nauseam. Now, it’s true that you can cherry-pick scripture, and you can look for all the good parts. You can ignore where it says in Leviticus that if a woman is not a virgin on her wedding night you’re supposed to stone her to death on her father’s doorstep. Most religious people ignore those passages, which really can only be read literally, and say that “they were only appropriate for the time” and “they don’t apply now”. And likewise, Muslims try to have the same reading of passages that advocate holy war. They say “well, these were appropriate to those battles that Mohammed was fighting, but now we don’t have to fight those battles”. This is all a good thing, but we should recognize what’s happening here: people are feeling pressure from a host of all-too-human concerns that have nothing, in principle, to do with God: secularism, and human rights, and democracy, and scientific progress. These have made certain passages in scripture untenable. This is coming from outside religion, and religion is now making a great show of its sophistication in grappling with these pressures. This is an example of religion losing the argument with modernity.”

Sam Harris (1967) American author, philosopher and neuroscientist

Sam Harris in interview by Big Think (04/07/2007) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zV3vIXZ-1Y&t=6s 2000s

Death, God, Hate, War

“The tempest unleashes an alphabet
letters fall through the apertures of crazy angles
to spell out the future
uprooting the course of invention
and enslaving the masters”

Nancy Peters (1936) American writer and publisher

It's In the Wind (1977) "Ceremonies In A Polar Garden"
1970s

Future

“But, listen, let's review the rules. Here's how it works: the president makes decisions. He's the Decider. The press secretary announces those decisions, and you people of the press type those decisions down. Make, announce, type. Just put 'em through a spell check and go home. Get to know your family again. Make love to your wife. Write that novel you got kicking around in your head. You know, the one about the intrepid Washington reporter with the courage to stand up to the administration. You know — fiction.”

Stephen Colbert (1964) American political satirist, writer, comedian, television host, and actor

White House Correspondents' Association Dinner (2006)

Love, People, Making love, Family

“I was sitting in my suite one night after the show, and I looked out at the [Las Vegas] Strip and saw the huge neon billboard with my name on it, spelled out in those giant letters they use. Then I looked across the street at Caesars Palace and saw Frank Sinatra's name, in the same giant letters. And I said to myself, 'Face it, Anne; you're in the business.”

Anne Murray (1945) Canadian singer

On her popularity in Las Vegas, as quoted in "Anne Murray: Facing the Big Time Her Own Way", Section "Her Own Way", by George Anthony, Billboard, Oct 20, 1979

Business, Night

“I have won him, and shall keep him; for to his weak temper habit will be as fetters of iron. I have won him — but how? He remembered not the earnest and devoted love of the young heart, which was his, and his only. Even my beauty failed to influence his selfish carelessness : but he is mine by a more potent spell. Love may be given in vain,— beauty may be powerless; but I have mastered by the deeper magic of flattery.”

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

Other Gift Books

Love, Beauty, Heart, Selfishness

“In the beginning I drew and painted from nature in order to know her. Then later, only to fall under her spell. And today, to let her mirror my thoughts and feelings.”

William Baziotes (1912–1963) American painter

from the catalog of the traveling exhibition 'Nature in Abstraction', Whitney Museum of modern Art, 1958, p. 61
1950s

Feeling, Nature, Painting

“Poetry is a sort of inspired mathematics, which gives us equations, not for abstract figures, triangles, squares, and the like, but for the human emotions. If one has a mind which inclines to magic rather than science, one will prefer to speak of these equations as spells or incantations; it sounds more arcane, mysterious, recondite.”

Ezra Pound book The Spirit of Romance

The Spirit of Romance (1910), p. 5

Mathematics, Science

“There is but one alternative for Turkey. Either African barbarism, under Arabian direction, will burst around its head like an avalanche, or else it must re-establish strong leadership, thus putting twenty million heroes between itself and Africa and gaining a breathing spell for the accomplishment of its social regeneration.”

Recep Tayyip Erdoğan (1954) 12th President of Turkey from 2014

As said during the EU-Turkey Summit

Strong

“It is when we all play safe that we create a world of utmost insecurity. It is when we all play safe that fatality will lead us to our doom. It is in the "dark shade of courage" alone that the spell can be broken.”

Dag Hammarskjöld (1905–1961) Swedish diplomat, economist, and author

Servant of Peace : A Selection of the Speeches and Statements of Dag Hammarskjöld, Secretary General of the United Nations (1962), p. 107; this has sometimes been paraphrased: It is in playing safe that we create a world of utmost insecurity.

World, Courage

Quotes about spell page 3

Quotes about spell
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