Quotes about square (495 quotes, page 5)

“My life is square and bourgeois. I like calm and continuity. I think as a person I'm very controlling, and I'm afraid of big risks. I'm not a skier or a mountain climber or a motorcyclist. And I'm not a safari girl - I never want to go on a safari. My safaris are all on the studio floor. That's where I take my danger.”

Helen Frankenthaler (1928–2011) American artist

1970s - 1980s, interview with Deborah Salomon in 'New York Times', 1989

Life , Girl , Mountain , Thinking

““Are we innately aggressive?” asked Aquinas. “Was the nuclear predicament symptomatic of a more profound depravity? Nobody knows. But if this is so—and I suspect that it is—then the responsibility for what we are pleased to call our inhumanity still rests squarely in our blood-soaked hands. The killer-ape hypothesis does not specify a fate—it lays out an agenda. Beware, the fable warns. Caution. Trouble ahead. Genocidal weapons in the hands of creatures who are bored by peace.”
“I think I’m going to throw up,” said Brat.
“But the fable went unheeded. And the weapons, unchecked. And then, one cold Christmas season, death came to an admirable species—a species that wrote symphonies and sired Leonardo da Vinci and would have gone to the stars. It did not have to be this way. Three virtues only were needed—creative diplomacy, technical ingenuity, and moral outrage. But the greatest of these is moral outrage.””

James K. Morrow (1947) (1947-) science fiction author

Source: This Is the Way the World Ends (1986), Chapter 16, “In Which the Essential Question Is Answered and Something Very Much Like Justice Is Served” (p. 211)

Death , Fate , Peace , Way

“The method of exhaustion was not discovered all at once; we find traces of gropings after such a method before it was actually evolved. It was perhaps Antiphon. the sophist, of Athens, a contemporary of Socrates, who took the first step. He inscribed a square (or, according to another account, a triangle) in a circle, then bisected the arcs subtended by the sides, and so inscribed a polygon of double the number of sides; he then repeated the process, and maintained that, by continuing it, we should at last arrive at a polygon with sides so small as to make the polygon coincident with the circle. Thought this was formally incorrect, it nevertheless contained the germ of the method of exhaustion.”

Thomas Little Heath (1861–1940) British civil servant and academic

p, 125
Achimedes (1920)

“They were outnumbered, they were surrounded, yet no one had panicked, not one battalion had been caught deployed in column, and not one square had been rattled by the horse-men's proximity. The Light had saved the Seventh Division, and now it was saving itself with a dazzling display of professional soldiering. Pure drill was defeating French verve, and Massena's attack, which had swept around the British right flank with overwhelming force, had been rendered utterly impotent.”

Bernard Cornwell (1944) British writer

Narrator, describing the actions of the British Light Division during the Battle of Fuentes de Oñoro, p. 319
Sharpe (Novel Series), Sharpe's Battle (1995)

Men , Light , Horse

“Yes it was 1949. How I came to that. That's like how one gets to know a human being. It so happens that I've always had a preference – as everyone has prejudices and preferences – for the square as a shape in preference to the circle as a shape. And I have known for a long time that a circle always fools me by not telling me whether it's standing still or not. And if a circle circulates you don't see it. The outer curve looks the same whether it moves or does not move. So the square is much more honest and tells me that it is sitting on one line of the four, usually a horizontal one, as a basis. And I have also come to the conclusion that the square is a human invention, which makes it sympathetic to me. Because you don't see it in nature. As we do not see squares in nature, I thought that it is man-made. But I have corrected myself. Because squares exist in salt crystals, our daily salt. We know this because we can see it in the microscope. On the other hand, we believe we see circles in nature. But rarely precise ones. Mature, it seems, is not a mathematician. Probably there are no straight lines either. Particularly not since Einstein says in his theory of relativity that there is no straight line, rod knows whether there are or not, I don't. I still like to believe that the square is a human invention. And that tickles me. So when I have a preference for it then I can only say excuse me.”

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

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

Fools , Nature , Time

“I could give here several other ways of tracing and conceiving a series of curved lines, each curve more complex than any preceding one, but I think the best way to group together all such curves and them classify them in order, is by recognizing the fact that all points of those curves which we may call "geometric," that is, those which admit of precise and exact measurement, must bear a definite relation to all points of a straight line, and that this relation must be expressed by a single equation. If this equation contains no term of higher degree than the rectangle of two unknown quantities, or the square of one, the curve belongs to the first and simplest class, which contains only the circle, the parabola, the hyperbola, and the ellipse; but when the equation contains one or more terms of the third or fourth degree in one or both of the two unknown quantities (for it requires two unknown quantities to express the relation between two points) the curve belongs to the second class; and if the equation contains a term of the fifth or sixth degree in either or both of the unknown quantities the curve belongs to the third class, and so on indefinitely.”

René Descartes book La Géométrie

Second Book
La Géométrie (1637)

Way , Thinking

“I had just announced for the first time publicly on a radio show in San Francisco that I had done all the Keane paintings and not my ex-husband. And this, um, Bill Flang of the San Francisco Examiner thought that Walter and I should appear in Union Square and have a paint-off to decide who had done the paintings, since I was—said that I had done them. So, he arranged it, and LIFE magazine as there and all the different newspapers and t. v. stations and they, uh—some of them in the audience played "High Noon"—[laughs] And, of course, Walter didn't show up.”

Margaret Keane (1927) American artist

Interviewed https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oMK6aBSX2QY on The Mike Douglas Show (1972).
1972

Life , Appearance , Time , Painting

“Defiling their shadows, infidels, accursed of Allah, with fingernails that are foot-long daggers, with mouths agape like cauldrons full of teeth on the boil, with eyes all fire, shaitans possessed of Iblis, clanking into their wars all linked, like slaves, with iron chains. Murad Bey, the huge, the single-blowed ox-beheader, saw without too much surprise mild-looking pale men dressed in blue, holding guns, drawn up in squares six deep as though in some massed dance depictive of orchard walls. At the corners of the squares were heavy giins and gunners. There did not seem to be many horsemen. Murad said a prayer within, raised his scimitar to heaven and yelled a fierce and holy word. The word was taken up, many thousandfold, and in a kind of gloved thunder the Mamelukes threw themselves on to the infidel right and nearly broke it. But the squares healed themselves at once, and the cavalry of the faithful crashed in three avenging prongs along the fire-spitting avenues between the walls. A great gun uttered earthquake language at them from within a square, and, rearing and cursing the curses of the archangels of Islam on to the uncircumcized, they wheeled and swung towards their protective village of Embabeh. There they encountered certain of the blue-clad infidel horde on the flat roofs of the houses, coughing musket-fire at them. But then disaster sang along their lines from the rear as shell after shell crunched and the Mamelukes roared in panic and burden to the screams of their terrified mounts, to whose ears these noises were new. Their rear dissolving, their retreat cut off, most sought the only way, that of the river. They plunged in, horseless, seeking to swim across to join the inactive horde of Ibrahim, waiting for. action that could now never come. Murad Bey, with such of his horsemen as were left, yelped off inland to Gizeh.”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Fiction, Napoleon Symphony (1974)

Men , War , Faith , Way

“It is to be hoped—I mean, I hope—that the poetry I have been writing since 1992 squares up to, takes the measure of, weighs up, the violent evasions and stock affronts of the oligarchy of fraud. I don't, even so, write poems to be polemical; I write to create a being of beautiful energy.”

Geoffrey Hill (1932–2016) English poet and professor

A matter of timing: The Guardian, Saturday 21 September 2002 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2002/sep/21/featuresreviews.guardianreview28/print

Beauty , Hope , Fraud

“[Tim Cook's] position at Apple was to do the things Steve didn't want to do and to never be a threat to Steve, which means he likely is everything Steve isn't — yet he is trying to fit into a spot custom designed for Steve. Talk about your round peg in a square hole.”

Rob Enderle (1954) American financial analyst

Meg Whitman vs. Tim Cook by the Numbers http://technewsworld.com/story/74694.html in Tech News World (26 March 2012)

Cooking

““Which alternative is worse, I wonder?” she said. “To deny death and thus risk never being wholly alive, or to face oblivion squarely and risk paralysis by dread?”
“Nobody knows,” I said. “It’s ambiguous.”
“If I ever get to be God,” she said, unleashing the grin of the person who’d invented Largesse, “my first act will be to make ambiguity illegal.””

James K. Morrow (1947) (1947-) science fiction author

Source: The Philosopher's Apprentice (2008), Chapter 6 (pp. 134-135)

Death , God , Personality

“I was in the enormous and almost deserted square in front of the Great People's Study House—all open spaces in Pyongyang remain deserted unless filled with parades of hundreds of thousands of human automata—when a young Korean slid surreptitiously up to me and asked, "Do you speak English?"
An electric moment: for in North Korea, unsupervised contact between a Korean and a foreigner is utterly unthinkable, as unthinkable as shouting, "Down with Big Brother!"
"Yes," I replied.
"I am a student at the Foreign Languages Institute. Reading Dickens and Shakespeare is the greatest, the only pleasure of my life."
It was the most searing communication I have ever received in my life. We parted immediately afterward and of course will never meet again. For him, Dickens and Shakespeare (which the regime permitted him to read with quite other ends in view) guaranteed the possibility not just of freedom but of truly human life itself.”

Theodore Dalrymple (1949) English doctor and writer

The Dystopian Imagination http://www.city-journal.org/html/11_4_oh_to_be.html (Autumn 2001).
City Journal (1998 - 2008)

Life , People , Pleasure , Communication

“In 1966 there was a Scripture Rally in Trafalgar Square. A widower, Mr. Honick, went to it. He was about 63. A widow, Mrs. Rawnsley, also went. She was about 60. He went up to her and introduced himself. He was not much to look at. "He looked like a tramp," she said. "He has been picking up fag ends." They got on well enough, however, to exchange addresses. His was 36 Queen's Road, Waltham Cross, Hertfordshire. Hers was 74 Downton Avenue, Streatham Hill, London, S. W.2. Next day he went to her house with a gift for her. It was a rose wrapped in a newspaper. Afterwards their friendship grew apace. She was sorry for him, she said. She smartened him up with better clothes. She had him to meals. She went to his house: he went to hers. They wrote to one another in terms of endearment. We were not shown the letters, but counsel described them as love letters.”

Alfred Denning, Baron Denning (1899–1999) British judge

Burgess v. Rawnsley (1975) 30 P. & C.R. 221.
Judgments

Love , Friendship , Housing , Clothes

“And the just man trailed God's shining agent,
over a black mountain, in his giant track,
while a restless voice kept harrying his woman:
"It's not too late, you can still look back
at the red towers of your native Sodom,
the square where once you sang, the spinning-shed,
at the empty windows set in the tall house
where sons and daughters blessed your marriage-bed."”

Anna Akhmatova (1889–1966) Russian modernist poet

The just man followed then his angel guide
Where he strode on the black highway, hulking and bright;
But a wild grief in his wife's bosom cried,
Look back, it is not too late for a last sight
Of the red towers of your native Sodom, the square
Where once you sang, the gardens you shall mourn,
And the tall house with empty windows where
You loved your husband and your babes were born.
Translator unknown
Lot's Wife

God , Marriage , Mountain , Housing

“The Court exercises its jurisdiction for the enforcement of the truth, and makes a man's acts square with his words, by compelling him to perform what he has undertaken.”

John Romilly, 1st Baron Romilly (1802–1874) English Whig politician and judge

Laver v. Fielder (1862), 32 Beav. 13.

Truth , Exercises

“By mourning tongues
The death of the poet was kept from his poems. But for him it was his last afternoon as himself,
An afternoon of nurses and rumours;
The provinces of his body revolted,
The squares of his mind were empty,
Silence invaded the suburbs.
The current of his feeling failed: he became his admirers. Now he is scattered over a hundred cities
And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections;
To find his happiness in another kind of wood
And be punished under a foreign code of conscience.
The words of a dead man
Are modified in the guts of the living.”

W. H. Auden (1907–1973) Anglo-American poet

Source: In Memory of W.B. Yeats (1939), Lines 10–23

Death , Feeling , Silence , Dead

“The English mind was like the London drawing room, a comfortable and easy spot, filled with bits and fragments of incoherent furnitures, which were never meant to go together, and could be arranged in any relation without making a whole, except by the square room. Philosophy might dispute about innate ideas till the stars died out in the sky, but about innate tastes no one, except perhaps a collie-dog, has the right to doubt; least of all the Englishman, for his tastes are his being; he drifts after them as unconsciously as a honey-bee drifts after his flowers.”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

Dogs , Star , Flowers , Idea

“We started our struggle from 2005, and…we organized a lot of protests, weekly protests, in a place we called the Square of Liberty…We knew and know that the freedom of speech is the door to democracy and justice.”

Tawakkol Karman (1979) Yemeni journalist, politician, human rights activist, and Nobel Peace Prize recipient

2010s, Democracy Now! interview (2011)

Justice , Democracy , Freedom

“Among the many senses that modern painters have lost, we must number the sense of architecture. The edifice accompanying the human figure, whether alone or in a group, whether in a scene from life or in an historical drama, was a great concern of the ancients. They applied themselves to it with loving and severe spirit, studying and perfecting the laws of perspective. A landscape enclosed in the arch of a portico or in the square or rectangle of a window acquires a greater metaphysical value, because it is solidified and isolated from the surrounding space. Architecture completes nature.”

Giorgio de Chirico (1888–1978) Italian artist

1920
as quoted in Artists on Art – from the 14th – 20th centuries, ed. by Robert Goldwater and Marco Treves; Pantheon Books, 1972, London, pp. 440-441
1908 - 1920, On Mystery and Creation, Paris 1913

Love , Life , Law , Nature

“What right had I to value her less than the bodies in the square? Suffering is not increased by numbers; one body can contain all the suffering the world can feel. I had judged like a journalist, in terms of quantity, and I had betrayed my own principles; I had become as engage as Pyle, and it seemed to me that no decision would ever be simple again.”

Graham Greene book The Quiet American

Pt. IV, ch. 2, pg 242
The Quiet American (1955)

World , Feeling , Decision , Suffering

“I taught myself decimals, equations, the square, cube, and biquadrate roots. I got some knowledge of logarithms, and some of algebra. I readily got through a small schoolbook of geometry; and having an odd volume, the first, of Williamson's ' Euclid,' I attacked it vigorously and perseveringly. Williamson's is by no means the best book on the subject, yet I am still of opinion that it is the best book I could have had for the purpose of teaching myself.”

Francis Place (1771–1854) English social reformer

Source: The life of Francis Place, 1771-1854, 1898, p. 18

Books , Knowledge

“The spider-men came first, and presented her Majesty with a table full of mathematical points, lines and figures of all sorts of squares, circles, triangles, and the like; which the Empress, notwithstanding that she had a very ready wit, and quick apprehension, could not understand; but the more she endeavoured to learn, the more was she confounded”

Margaret Cavendish (1623–1673) English aristocrat, a prolific writer, and a scientist

Description of a New World, Called The Blazing World (1666)

Men , Mathematics , Understanding , Learning

“That's easy. The new rules have made these pitchers turn square, and their offerings have been clouted. I know some pitchers who used the old emery and the shiner and all the rest, and they were bearcats. Now they have to get by on their natural ability and they don't rate so high. I can think of one pitcher who was a wonder last year. They took the old sail ball away from him, and now he hasn't enough to get by in a good class AA league. So it goes. They say that the ball is livelier. I think that is the old bunk. The pitchers are not pitching as they used to and the batters have a better chance.”

Babe Ruth (1895–1948) American baseball player

As quoted in "Ruth Has One Great Fear: May Drive Ball Back At Pitcher Some Day and Injure Him"

Nature , Thinking , Chance

“Any test that turns on what is offensive to the community's standards is too loose, too capricious, too destructive of freedom of expression to be squared with the First Amendment. Under that test, juries can censor, suppress, and punish what they don’t like, provided the matter relates to "sexual impurity" or has a tendency "to excite lustful thoughts". This is community censorship in one of its worst forms. It creates a regime where in the battle between the literati and the Philistines, the Philistines are certain to win.”

William O. Douglas (1898–1980) Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

Dissenting, Roth v. United States, 354 U.S. 476, 512 (1957)
Judicial opinions

Communication , Freedom

“The moon is not kept in her orbit round the earth, nor the earth in her orbit round the sun, by a force that varies merely in the inverse ratio of the squares of the distances.”

Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834) British political economist

Source: An Essay on The Principle of Population (First Edition 1798, unrevised), Chapter XIII, paragraph 2, lines 19-22

Sun

“With the completion of Shepherd’s Grosvenor Square houses, about 1730, the development of urban design in London ceases, for a time, to be of much interest. The story, however, continues and reaches its climax in Bath where street design developed in a most important way for a matter of forty years.”

John Summerson (1904–1992) British architectural historian

Architecture in Britain, 1530–1830

Way , Time , Housing

“For us [the young artists in Vitebsk, before 1920] Suprematism did not signify the recognition of an absolute form which was part of an already completed universal system, on the contrary; here stood revealed for the first time in all its purity the clear sign and plan for a definite new world never before experienced - a world which issues forth from our inner being and which is only now in the first stages of its formation, for this reason the square [ Malevich's Black and Red Square ] of suprematism became a beacon.”

El Lissitsky (1890–1941) Soviet artist, designer, photographer, teacher, typographer and architect

Quote from Lissitzky's essay of 1920, 'Suprematism in World Reconstruction'; as quoted by Sophie Lissitzky-Küppers, in El Lissitzky: Life, Letters, Texts, trans. Helene Aldwinckle and Mary Whittall (Greenwich, Conn.: New York Graphic Society, 1968), p. 327
1915 - 1925

World , Universe , Time , Parting

“The great Cartesian invention had its roots in those famous problems of antiquity which originated in the days of Plato. In endeavoring to solve the problems of the trisection of an angle, of the duplication of the cube and of the squaring of the circle, the ruler and compass having failed them, the Greek geometers sought new curves. They stumbled on the conic sections…There we find the nucleus of the method which Descartes later erected into a principle. Thus Apollonius referred the parabola to its axis and principal tangent, and showed that the semichord was the mean propotional between the latus rectum and the height of the segment. Today we express this relation by x2 = Ly, calling the height the ordinate (y) and the semichord the abscissa (x); the latus rectum being… L. …the Greeks named these curves and many others… loci… Thus the ellipse was the locus of a point the sum of the distances of which from two fixed points was constant. Such a description was a rhetorical equation of the curve…”

Tobias Dantzig (1884–1956) American mathematician

Number: The Language of Science (1930)

Lying , Problem

“To me, the circle and the square where the sky and the earth, as symbolized by the ancient Oriental religions; they formed a kind of rudimentary alphabet by means of which everything could be expressed with the most limited means. They evoked prehistoric runes and the early I-Ching, or Book of Changes.”

Michel Seuphor (1901–1999) designer, draughtsman, painter

Source: Abstract Painting (1964), p. 98

Books , Religion , Change

“The establishment and maintenance of sound and fair social conditions; so that there should be no oppression nor injustice, but a square deal for everybody; so that the strong should not be permitted to prey upon the weak; so that the law of helpfulness should prevail, instead of the law of ravine … such sound and fair social conditions would bring to the community in which they were established and maintained, unexampled, and marvelous prosperity; and this prosperity and peace and happiness would promptly advertise themselves and set up an irresistible attraction. Such a society as this would be a magnet that would draw to itself, all the children of men. They would all want to be in it.”

Washington Gladden (1836–1918) American pastor

Source: The Nation and the Kingdom (1909), pp. 4-5

Men , Children , Peace , Law

“Sometimes captured from the great arboreal freedom of their jungle homes, monkeys are closely confined in cages only three or four feet square. … They can never sit or lie down on a flat, soft or yielding surface. Little wonder that by the time they are needed for the knife or the needle they are so crazed or inert that they are no longer representative examples of animal life. Psychologists who study the behaviour of thousands of such creatures annually, rarely make allowances for the fact that their pathetic subjects have been so deprived that they have become more like monsters than animals. Many people who have experienced close affectionate relationships with individuals of other species testify to the considerable potential for emotional and intellectual development that animals have. When properly cared for a pet dog or cat can develop great subtleties of behaviour that the laboratory animal never shows. Those who have been fortunate enough to closely observe unfrightened animals living in the wild are often struck by the complexity and richness of the life they lead. These positive pleasures the laboratory animal never knows; for him the same four white walls and the smell of disinfectant.”

Richard D. Ryder (1940) British psychologist

Experiments on Animals (1971)

Life , People , Pleasure , Lie

“How can a man be said to have a country where he has no right to a square inch of soil…”

Henry George (1839–1897) American economist

Source: Social Problems (1883), Ch. 2 : Political Dangers

Country

“We show that it is natural to introduce the concept of black-hole entropy as the measure of information about a black-hole interior which is inaccessible to an exterior observer. Considerations of simplicity and consistency, and dimensional arguments indicate that the black-hole entropy is equal to the ratio of the black-hole area to the square of the Planck length times a dimensionless constant of order unity. A different approach making use of the specific properties of Kerr black holes and of concepts from information theory leads to the same conclusion, and suggests a definite value for the constant.”

Jacob Bekenstein (1947–2015) Mexican-Israeli physicist

[Black Holes and Entropy, Phys. Rev. D, 7, 8, 2333–2346, 15 April 1973, 10.1103/PhysRevD.7.2333]

Nature , Time

“Soon after the military coup that deposed Egyptian President Mohamed Morsy, I announced that I would join the pro-Morsy demonstration outside of Cairo's Rabaa al-Adaweya square…I wished to protest the killing, forcible disappearance, and jailing of coup opponents…I declared publicly that I was going to Rabaa al-Adaweya to defend the gains of the Jan. 25, 2011, revolution -- freedom of expression, peaceful assembly, and the right of the people to select their rulers.”

Tawakkol Karman (1979) Yemeni journalist, politician, human rights activist, and Nobel Peace Prize recipient

2010s, Morsy is the Arab World's Mandela (2013)

People , Peace , Freedom

“When, in the year 1913, in my desperate attempt to free art from the ballast of objectivity, I took refuge in the square form and exhibited a picture which consisted of nothing more than a black square on a white field. The critics and, along with them, the public sighed, 'Everything which we loved was lost. We are in a desert... Before us is nothing but a black square on a white background!”

Kazimir Malevich (1879–1935) Russian and Soviet artist of polish descent

But the desert is filled with the spirit of non-objective feeling.. ..which penetrates everything.
In 'The Non-Objective World: The Manifesto of Suprematism', 1926; trans. Howard Dearstyne [Dover, 2003, ISBN 0-486-42974-1], 'part II: Suprematism', p. 68
1921 - 1930

Love , Art , Feeling

“Let us explain again by examples. In painting a person on a balcony, seen from inside the room do not limit the scene to what the square of the window renders visible; we try to render the sum total of visual sensations which the person on the balcony has experienced; the sun-baked throng in the street, the double row of houses which stretch to right and left, the beflowered balconies etc. This implies the simultaneity of the ambient, and, therefore, the dislocation and the dislocation and dismemberment of objects, the scattering and fusion of details, freed from accepted logic and independent from one another. In order to make the spectator live in the center of the picture, as we express it in our manifesto the picture must be the synthesis of what one remembers and what one sees. You must render the invisible which stirs lives beyond intervening obstacles, what we have on the right, or the left, or behind us, and not merely the small square of life artificially compressed, as it were, by the wings of a stage set. We have declared in our manifesto that what must be rendered is the dynamic sensation, that is to say, the particular rhythm of each object, its inclination, its movement, or more exactly, its interior force.”

Umberto Boccioni (1882–1916) Italian painter and sculptor

Boccioni is referring in this quote to the 'Manifesto of Futurist Painters' of 1910, and its core Futurist concept of dynamic sensation; p. 47.
1912, Les exposants au public', 1912

Life , Sun , Painting , Housing

“All the girls and boys seen preening through school halls, fighting to fit in, games they just can’t win, higher education dumbing down a nation, around the square unsure of where we fit in.”

Dawud Wharnsby (1972) Canadian musician

"Rachel"
Out Seeing The Fields (2007)

Education , School , Girl , Game

“The world as a sense, independent of the image, of the idea - this is the essence of the content of art. [My] square is not an image, just as a switch or socket are not the current.”

Kazimir Malevich (1879–1935) Russian and Soviet artist of polish descent

Malevich
Quote of Malevich, in his letter to Konstantin Rozhdestvenskii, 21 April, 1927, private archive, Moscow (transl. Todd Bludeau); as quoted by Vasilii Rakitin, in The great Utopia - The Russian and Soviet Avant-Garde, 1915-1932; Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1992, p. 27
1921 - 1930

World , Art , Idea , Sense

“Great minds are related to the brief span of time during which they live as great buildings are to a little square in which they stand: you cannot see them in all their magnitude because you are standing too close to them.”

Arthur Schopenhauer book Parerga and Paralipomena

Vol. 2, Ch. 20, § 242
Parerga and Paralipomena (1851), Counsels and Maxims

Time

“Welcoming Hegel’s idea of reconciliation as akin to his own enterprise of public reason, Rawls drew the line at his vision of the international realm as a domain of violence and anarchy, in which contention between sovereign states was bound to be regulated by war. Habermas’s gesture enlisted Hegel, on the contrary, as a patron of cosmopolitan peace. The first could not square his Law of Peoples with the lawlessness of Hegel’s states, the second could only enrol Hegel for pacific progress by turning him philosophically inside out. Bobbio, by contrast, could take the measure of Hegel’s conception of world history, as a ruthless march of great powers in which successive might founds overarching right, and invoke it in all logic to justify his approval of American imperial violence. Law was born of force, and the maxim of the conqueror – prior in tempore, potior in jure”

Perry Anderson (1938) British historian

still held.
Spectrum: From Right to Left in the World of Ideas (2005), Ch. 7. "Arms and Rights, The Adjustable Centre" (1998)

War , People , World , Peace

“Dam Square is the center of movement in our city [Amsterdam]. (translation from the original Dutch, Fons Heijnsbroek)”

George Hendrik Breitner (1857–1923) Dutch painter and photographer

version in original Dutch (citaat van Breitner's brief, in het Nederlands:) De Dam is het middenpunt van beweging in onzen stad [Amsterdam].
Quote of Breitner, after 1886; as cited in 'The Hofland Collection, from Jongkind to Mondriaan', Christies Sale Cat. https://www.christies.com/PDF/catalog/2014/AMS3060_SaleCat.pdf, p. 102
undated quotes

“A simple way to determine whether the right to dissent in a particular society is being upheld is to apply the town square test: Can a person walk into the middle of the town square and express his or her views without fear of arrest, imprisonment, or physical harm? If he can, then that person is living in a free society. If not, it's a fear society.”

Natan Sharansky book The Case for Democracy

Pages 40-1.
The Case for Democracy (2004, with Ron Dermer)

Fear , Way , Personality

“The libertarian creed, finally, offers the fulfillment of the best of the American past along with the promise of a far better future. Even more than conservatives… libertarians are squarely in the great classical liberal tradition that built the United States and bestowed on us the American heritage of individual liberty, a peaceful foreign policy, minimal government, and a free-market economy.”

Murray N. Rothbard book For a New Liberty

For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto (1973)

Peace , Past , Future

“No continent is as small and fragmented as Europe. Only Australia is smaller, yet Europe consists of fifty independent nations (including Turkey and the Caucasus, for reasons explained later). Crowded with nations, it is also crowded with people. Europe's population density is 72.5 people per square kilometer. The European Union's density is 112 people per square kilometer. Asia has 86 people per square kilometer. Europe is crowded and fragmented.”

George Friedman (1949) American businessman and political scientist

Flashpoints: The Emerging Crisis in Europe (2015)

People

“For my students at the University of Chicago and in memoriam the Dead at Tiananmen Square June 4, 1989”

Anthony C. Yu (1938–2015) American scholar of literature and religion

Dedication, p. v; quoted by John Minford in his essay In Memoriam https://www.thechinastory.org/2015/06/in-memoriam-anthony-yu-余國藩/ (30 May 2015).
Rereading the Stone (1997)

Universe , Dead

“Stone-cutters fighting time with marble, you fore-defeated
Challengers of oblivion
Eat cynical earnings, knowing rock splits, records fall down,
The square-limbed Roman letters
Scale in the thaws, wear in the rain.”

Robinson Jeffers (1887–1962) American poet

" To The Stone-Cutters http://www.tnellen.com/cybereng/poetry/stone.html" in Tamar and Other Poems (1924)

Time , Fight

“I sometimes go back to walk through the ghostly remains of Sutton Place where the rude, new buildings stand squarely in one another’s river views.”

John Cheever (1912–1982) American novelist and short story writer

“Moving Out” Esquire (June 1983).

“My faith in the future rests squarely on the belief that man, if he doesn't first destroy himself, will find new answers in the universe, new technologies, new disciplines, which will contribute to a vastly different and better world in the twenty-first century.”

Barry Goldwater (1909–1998) American politician

With No Apologies (1979)
Context: My faith in the future rests squarely on the belief that man, if he doesn't first destroy himself, will find new answers in the universe, new technologies, new disciplines, which will contribute to a vastly different and better world in the twenty-first century. Recalling what has happened in my short lifetime in the fields of communication and transportation and the life sciences, I marvel at the pessimists who tell us that we have reached the end of our productive capacity, who project a future of primarily dividing up what we now have and making do with less. To my mind the single essential element on which all discoveries will be dependent is human freedom.

World , Faith , Universe , Future

“Crowded as the country is, is overcrowding even its main problem? Hong Kong and Singapore both have greater population densities (14.315 and 12.347 per square mile, respectively) than Bangladesh, and they're called success stories. The same goes for Monaco. In fact, the whole Riviera is packed in August, and neither Malthus nor Ehrlich have complained about the topless beaches of St. Tropez.”

P. J. O'Rourke (1947) American journalist

All the Trouble in the World (1994)

Problem , Success , Country

“The doctrines added by certain churches, such as that God took upon himself human nature, I have expressly said that I do not understand; in fact, to speak the truth, they seem to me no less absurd than would a statement, that a circle had taken upon itself the nature of a square.”

Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) Dutch philosopher

Letter 21 (73) to Henry Oldenburg, November (1675)
Variant translation: The eternal wisdom of God … has shown itself forth in all things, but chiefly in the mind of man, and most of all in Jesus Christ.
Context: I do not think it necessary for salvation to know Christ according to the flesh : but with regard to the Eternal Son of God, that is the Eternal Wisdom of God, which has manifested itself in all things and especially in the human mind, and above all in Christ Jesus, the case is far otherwise. For without this no one can come to a state of blessedness, inasmuch as it alone teaches, what is true or false, good or evil. And, inasmuch as this wisdom was made especially manifest through Jesus Christ, as I have said, his disciples preached it, in so far as it was revealed to them through him, and thus showed that they could rejoice in that spirit of Christ more than the rest of mankind. The doctrines added by certain churches, such as that God took upon himself human nature, I have expressly said that I do not understand; in fact, to speak the truth, they seem to me no less absurd than would a statement, that a circle had taken upon itself the nature of a square. This I think will be sufficient explanation of my opinions concerning the three points mentioned. Whether it will be satisfactory to Christians you will know better than I.

God , Truth , Understanding , Nature

“Injustice which lasts for three long centuries and which exists among millions of people over thousands of square miles of territory, is injustice no longer; it is an accomplished fact of life. Men adjust themselves to their land; they create their own laws of being; their notions of right and wrong.”

Richard Wright (1908–1960) African-American writer

pg. 360
Native Son (1940)

Life , Men , People , Law

“The Stalin Square and Stalin Prospect were renamed Lenin Square and Lenin Prospect. The statue of Stalin was remade into statue of Lenin.”

Aleksandr Zinovyev (1922–2006) Russian writer

Katastroika (1988)

“The crowd was unarmed, except with bludgeons. It was not attacking anybody or anything. It was holding a seditious meeting. When fire had been opened upon it to disperse it, it tried to run away. Pinned up in a narrow place considerably smaller than Trafalgar Square, with hardly any exits, and packed together so that one bullet would drive through three or four bodies, the people ran madly this way and the other. When the fire was directed upon the centre, they ran to the sides. The fire was then directed to the sides. Many threw themselves down on the ground, and the fire was then directed on the ground. This was continued for 8 or 10 minutes …”

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

Speech in the House of Commons, July 8, 1920 "Amritsar" http://lachlan.bluehaze.com.au/churchill/am-text.htm
Early career years (1898–1929)
Context: Let me marshal the facts. The crowd was unarmed, except with bludgeons. It was not attacking anybody or anything. It was holding a seditious meeting. When fire had been opened upon it to disperse it, it tried to run away. Pinned up in a narrow place considerably smaller than Trafalgar Square, with hardly any exits, and packed together so that one bullet would drive through three or four bodies, the people ran madly this way and the other. When the fire was directed upon the centre, they ran to the sides. The fire was then directed to the sides. Many threw themselves down on the ground, and the fire was then directed on the ground. This was continued for 8 or 10 minutes... [i]f the road had not been so narrow, the machine guns and the armoured cars would have joined in. Finally, when the ammunition had reached the point that only enough remained to allow for the safe return of the troops, and after 379 persons … had been killed, and when most certainly 1,200 or more had been wounded, the troops, at whom not even a stone had been thrown, swung round and marched away. … We have to make it absolutely clear … that this is not the British way of doing business. … Our reign, in India or anywhere else, has never stood on the basis of physical force alone, and it would be fatal to the British Empire if we were to try to base ourselves only upon it.

People , Way

“The one place where a man ought to get a square deal is in a courtroom, be he any color of the rainbow, but people have a way of carrying their resentments right into a jury box.”

Harper Lee book To Kill a Mockingbird

Pt. 2, ch. 23
Atticus Finch
To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)
Context: The one place where a man ought to get a square deal is in a courtroom, be he any color of the rainbow, but people have a way of carrying their resentments right into a jury box. As you grow older, you’ll see white men cheat black men every day of your life, but let me tell you something and don’t you forget it — whenever a white man does that to a black man, no matter who he is, how rich he is, or how fine a family he comes from, that white man is trash.

People , Color , Way , Box

“Down! down! down! I was rapidly descending; and I knew that return to Flatland was my doom. One glimpse, one last and never-to-be-forgotten glimpse I had of that dull level wilderness — which was now to become my Universe again — spread out before my eye. Then a darkness. Then a final, all-consummating thunder-peal; and, when I came to myself, I was once more a common creeping Square, in my Study at home, listening to the Peace-Cry of my approaching Wife.”

Edwin Abbott Abbott book Flatland

Source: Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (1884), PART II: OTHER WORLDS, Chapter 19. How, Though the Sphere Showed Me Other Mysteries of Spaceland, I Still Desired More; and What Came of It
Context: p>Those who have thus appeared — no one knows whence — and have returned — no one knows whither — have they also contracted their sections and vanished somehow into that more Spacious Space, whither I now entreat you to conduct me?SPHERE (MOODILY). They have vanished, certainly — if they ever appeared. But most people say that these visions arose from the thought — you will not understand me — from the brain; from the perturbed angularity of the Seer.I. Say they so? Oh, believe them not. Or if it indeed be so, that this other Space is really Thoughtland, then take me to that blessed Region where I in Thought shall see the insides of all solid things. There, before my ravished eye, a Cube, moving in some altogether new direction, but strictly according to Analogy, so as to make every particle of his interior pass through a new kind of Space, with a wake of its own — shall create a still more perfect perfection than himself, with sixteen terminal Extra-solid angles, and Eight solid Cubes for his Perimeter. And once there, shall we stay our upward course? In that blessed region of Four Dimensions, shall we linger on the threshold of the Fifth, and not enter therein? Ah, no! Let us rather resolve that our ambition shall soar with our corporal ascent. Then, yielding to our intellectual onset, the gates of the Sixth Dimension shall fly open; after that a Seventh, and then an Eighth —How long I should have continued I know not. In vain did the Sphere, in his voice of thunder, reiterate his command of silence, and threaten me with the direst penalties if I persisted. Nothing could stem the flood of my ecstatic aspirations. Perhaps I was to blame; but indeed I was intoxicated with the recent draughts of Truth to which he himself had introduced me. However, the end was not long in coming. My words were cut short by a crash outside, and a simultaneous crash inside me, which impelled me through space with a velocity that precluded speech. Down! down! down! I was rapidly descending; and I knew that return to Flatland was my doom. One glimpse, one last and never-to-be-forgotten glimpse I had of that dull level wilderness — which was now to become my Universe again — spread out before my eye. Then a darkness. Then a final, all-consummating thunder-peal; and, when I came to myself, I was once more a common creeping Square, in my Study at home, listening to the Peace-Cry of my approaching Wife.</p

Peace , Home , Study , Universe

“Numerical analysis has begun to look a little square in the computer science setting, and numerical analysts are beginning to show signs of losing faith in themselves.”

James H. Wilkinson (1919–1986) English mathematician

Some Comments from a Numerical Analyst (1971)
Context: Numerical analysis has begun to look a little square in the computer science setting, and numerical analysts are beginning to show signs of losing faith in themselves. Their sense of isolation is accentuated by the present trend towards abstraction in mathematics departments which makes for an uneasy relationship. How different things might have been if the computer revolution had taken place in the 19th century! [... ] In any case "numerical analysts" may be likened to "The Establishment" in computer science and in all spheres it is fashionable to diagnose "rigor morris" in the Establishment.

Faith , Science

“If only ten or twenty Negroes had been put into slavery, we would call it injustice, but there were hundreds of thousands of them throughout the country. If this state of affairs had lasted for two or three years, we could say that it was unjust; but it lasted for more than two hundred years. Injustice which lasts for three long centuries and which exists among millions of people over thousands of square miles of territory, is injustice no longer; it is an accomplished fact of life.”

Richard Wright (1908–1960) African-American writer

Native Son (1940)

Life , People , Country

“To allow opposition by speech seems to indicate that you think the speech impotent, as when a man says that he has squared the circle, or that you do not care whole-heartedly for the result, or that you doubt either your power or your premises. But when men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe even more than they believe the very foundations of their own conduct that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas —that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out. That at any rate is the theory of our Constitution.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (1841–1935) United States Supreme Court justice

250 U.S. at 630.
1910s, Abrams v. United States, 250 U.S. 616 (1919)

Men , Truth , Faith , Idea

“Your chances of success are directly proportional to the degree of pleasure you derive from what you do. If you are in a job you hate, face the fact squarely and get out.”

Michael Korda (1933) British writer

Source: Success! (1977), p. 145
Context: Your chances of success are directly proportional to the degree of pleasure you derive from what you do. If you are in a job you hate, face the fact squarely and get out. You may earn a good living, you may have a safe career, but you will never be a success. Find out what you enjoy doing, and your chances of succeeding will be dramatically better. We play the game every day, sometimes without even recognizing that we're doing it. We compete with other people, or other teams, or other companies, not only because it is essential to business survival, but because we frankly enjoy competition. It's fun to be in the game, and it's even more fun to win.

Hate , Pleasure , Chance , Success

“Alas, how strong a family likeness runs through blind and persecuting humanity in all Dimensions! Points, Lines, Squares, Cubes, Extra-Cubes — we are all liable to the same errors, all alike the Slaves of our respective Dimensional prejudices, as one of your Spaceland poets has said —”

Edwin Abbott Abbott book Flatland

Preface to the Second and Revised Edition (1884)
Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (1884)
Context: p>Suppose a person of the Fourth Dimension, condescending to visit you, were to say, 'Whenever you open your eyes, you see a Plane (which is of Two Dimensions) and you INFER a Solid (which is of Three); but in reality you also see (though you do not recognize) a Fourth Dimension, which is not colour nor brightness nor anything of the kind, but a true Dimension, although I cannot point out to you its direction, nor can you possibly measure it.' What would you say to such a visitor? Would not you have him locked up? Well, that is my fate: and it is as natural for us Flatlanders to lock up a Square for preaching the Third Dimension, as it is for you Spacelanders to lock up a Cube for preaching the Fourth. Alas, how strong a family likeness runs through blind and persecuting humanity in all Dimensions! Points, Lines, Squares, Cubes, Extra-Cubes — we are all liable to the same errors, all alike the Slaves of our respective Dimensional prejudices, as one of your Spaceland poets has said — 'One touch of Nature makes all worlds akin.' </p

Family , Error , Strong

“We faced them squarely and we were determined to overcome…What has indeed happened is that now once again Britain is not prepared to be pushed around. We have ceased to be a nation in retreat”

Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013) British stateswoman and politician

Speech to Conservative Rally at Cheltenham (3 July 1982) http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/104989, regarding the Falkland Islands War.
First term as Prime Minister
Context: The battle of the South Atlantic was not won by ignoring the dangers or denying the risks. It was achieved by men and women who had no illusions about the difficulties. We faced them squarely and we were determined to overcome... What has indeed happened is that now once again Britain is not prepared to be pushed around. We have ceased to be a nation in retreat. We have instead a new-found confidence—born in the economic battles at home and tested and found true 8,000 miles away... we rejoice that Britain has re-kindled that spirit which has fired her for generations past and which today has begun to burn as brightly as before. Britain found herself again in the South Atlantic and will not look back from the victory she has won.

“Jenner's statue in Trafalgar Square tells us how fallacious the objection would have been.”

Robert Chambers (publisher, born 1802) (1802–1871) Scottish publisher and writer

Source: Testimony: its Posture in the Scientific World (1859), p. 14
Context: Meteoric stones have proved to be a verity, and not an impossibility. About the same time, the fact of so many Gloucestershire peasantry having attested the prevention of small-pox by a virus from the teats of a cow, would have been deemed a sufficient answer to the same pleading, by nine out of every ten of the best educated physicians in England. Jenner's statue in Trafalgar Square tells us how fallacious the objection would have been. It is to be observed regarding such objections, that they are almost invariably gratuitous and unproved. Were they always put to the test of experiment, how many might prove like meteorites and vaccination?

“That tower of strength
Which stood four-square to all the winds that blew.”

Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–1892) British poet laureate

St. IV
Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington (1852)

“Men must turn square corners when they deal with the Government.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (1841–1935) United States Supreme Court justice

Rock Island C.R.R. v. United States, 254 U.S. 141, 143 (22 November 1920).
1920s

Men

“The towers themselves must be either round or polygonal. Square towers are sooner shattered by military engines”

Vitruvius book De architectura

Source: De architectura (The Ten Books On Architecture) (~ 15BC), Book I, Chapter V, Sec. 5
Context: The towers themselves must be either round or polygonal. Square towers are sooner shattered by military engines, for the battering rams pound their angles to pieces but in the case of round towers they can do no harm being engaged as it were in driving wedges to their center.

“In love with whole numbers, the Pythagoreans believed that all things could be derived from them. Certainly all other numbers.
So a crisis in doctrine occurred when they discovered that the square root of two was irrational.”

Carl Sagan (1934–1996) American astrophysicist, cosmologist, author and science educator

37 min 45 sec
Cosmos: A Personal Voyage (1990 Update), The Backbone of Night [Episode 7]
Context: There can be an infinite number of polygons, but only five regular solids. Four of the solids were associated with earth, fire, air and water. The cube for example represented earth. These four elements, they thought, make up terrestrial matter. So the fifth solid they mystically associated with the Cosmos. Perhaps it was the substance of the heavens. This fifth solid was called the dodecahedron. Its faces are pentagons, twelve of them. Knowledge of the dodecahedron was considered too dangerous for the public. Ordinary people were to be kept ignorant of the dodecahedron. In love with whole numbers, the Pythagoreans believed that all things could be derived from them. Certainly all other numbers.
So a crisis in doctrine occurred when they discovered that the square root of two was irrational. That is: the square root of two could not be represented as the ratio of two whole numbers, no matter how big they were. "Irrational" originally meant only that. That you can't express a number as a ratio. But for the Pythagoreans it came to mean something else, something threatening, a hint that their world view might not make sense, the other meaning of "irrational".

Love

“There was a young fellow from Trinity,
Who took the square root of infinity.”

George Gamow (1904–1968) Russian-American physicist and science writer

One, Two, Three... Infinity (1947)
Context: There was a young fellow from Trinity,
Who took the square root of infinity.
But the number of digits, Gave him the fidgets;
He dropped Math and took up Divinity.

“At the Ansonia Hotel | Across the square | They have been practising | Ever since Destinn and Caruso | And do so now;”

Charles Tomlinson (1927–2015) English poet

“Fascism on the other hand, faces squarely the problem of the right of the state and of the duty of individuals. Individual rights are only recognized insofar as they are implied in the rights of the state. In this preeminence of duty we find the highest ethical value of fascism.”

Alfredo Rocco (1875–1935) Italian politician and jurist

Source: The Political Doctrine of Fascism (1925), p. 112

Problem

“Venetian Memories. Jane has agreed to have copied in her brain some of Paul’s memory-traces. After she recovers consciousness in the post-surgery room, she has a new set of vivid apparent memories. She seems to remember walking on the marble paving of a square, hearing the flapping of flying pigeons and the cries of gulls, and seeing light sparkling on green water. One apparent memory is very clear. She seems to remember looking across the water to an island, where a white Palladian church stood out brilliantly against a dark thundercloud.”

Derek Parfit book Reasons and Persons

Source: Reasons and Persons (1984), p. 220

Light , Water , Memory , Flying

“When the students poured into Tiananmen Square, the Chinese government almost blew it. Then they were vicious, they were horrible, but they put it down with strength. That shows you the power of strength.”

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

interview with Playboy, March 1990; quoted in the New York Daily News ( Bury Trump in a Landslide http://interactive.nydailynews.com/2016/10/daily-news-editorial-bury-trump-in-landslide/, published October 20, 2016)
1990s

“When I first started doing self-portraits – and I didn’t start until I was in my 40s, quite late – I did these portraits where my hand was kind of stretched out toward the canvas, as if about to paint…I suppose I was imitating those famous poses of Goya or Rembrandt. But something felt so false about that. Somehow women don’t have a secure place in the history of art and to portray myself in this way standing squarely, about to paint, it wasn’t right.”

Celia Paul (1959) British artist

On her painting techniques in “Celia Paul on life after Lucian Freud: ‘I had to make this story my own’” https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2019/oct/27/celia-paul-self-portrait-memoir-interview-lucian-freud in The Guardian (2019 Oct 27)

Painting , History , Art , Self-confidence

“Shortly before 5 am on 19 May, Zhao appeared in Tiananmen Square and wandered among the crowd of protesters. Using a bullhorn, he delivered a now-famous speech to the students gathered at the square. It was first broadcast through China Central Television nationwide. Here is a translated version.”

Zhao Ziyang (1919–2005) former General Secretary of the Communist Party of China

Source: Zhao Ziyang's Tiananmen Square speech, Chua, Dan-Chyi, February 2009, Asia! Magazine, 23 June 2009 http://www.theasiamag.com/cheat-sheet/zhao-ziyangs-tiananmen-square-speech,; also available in the original Chinese at Archived copy, 23 June 2009, yes, https://web.archive.org/web/20090523155929/http://www.chengmingmag.com/t285/select/285sel06.html, 23 May 2009, dmy-all http://www.chengmingmag.com/t285/select/285sel06.html, (broken link)

Appearance

“I love these characters that have a duality to them. I wanted to be Han Solo not Luke Skywalker. It’s more realistic for me, nobody is that square, especially in today’s world. We all have two sides to us, and that’s what makes us human. I love the movies where everybody was an outlaw in some way…”

Rick Yune (1971) American actor

On favoring complicated characters in “Exclusive Interview With Rick Yune On The Man With The Iron Fists” https://wegotthiscovered.com/movies/interview-rick-yune-man-iron-fists/ in We Got This Covered (2012)

World , Love , Way , Making love

“At this stage of my life with the permission of my family I came up with a sort of square rules of what I want to do from here onwards, the rules are very simple I said that I have to look after myself, I have to look after my family, I have to look after my friends and I have to do my charities in this order.”

Nasser Khalili (1945) British-Iranian scholar, collector and philanthropist

Interview on The Art Of Collecting by Sky Arts - Professor Nasser David Khalili episode (February 21, 2018) https://vimeo.com/256957904

Family , Life

“The responsibility for dividing the world rests squarely on the shoulders of the Kremlin. We do not give up hope of reuniting the world, but it can only be done if the Communists give up their ideological imperialism, their attempt to bring the whole world into line, to confine every single person within the straitjacket of Marx-Leninism. We in the Labour movement do not believe in this dead dull uniformity. On the contrary, we believe that variety is of the essence of a free society.”

Clement Attlee (1883–1967) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech in Glasgow (10 April 1949), quoted in The Times (11 April 1949), p. 4
Prime Minister

World , Personality , Hope , Dead

“Most historians agree that historical Italian Fascism was a mixed bag of rightwing and left-wing socioeconomic policies. Nevertheless, recent evidence has shed new light on the underpinnings of Italian Fascism, discovering that this totalitarian state had embodied a far more collectivistic, socialist, and progressive ideology, placing it squarely on the left side of the political dichotomy, that is, only if Marxism is also considered to be on the Left.”

L. K. Samuels (1951) American writer

Source: Killing History: The False Left-Right Political Spectrum and the Battle between the ‘Free Left’ and the ‘Statist Left', (2019), pp. 194-195

Light

“He gave more elegant rules for the sum of the squares and cubes of an initial segment of the positive integers. The sixth part of the product of three quantities consisting of the number of terms, the number of terms plus one, and twice the number of terms plus one is the sum of the squares. The square of the sum of the series is the sum of the cubes.”

Aryabhata (476–550) Indian mathematician-astronomer

Roger Cooke in: The history of mathematics: a brief course http://books.google.co.in/books?id=z-ruAAAAMAAJ, Wiley, 7 October 1997, p. 207.

Parting

“Today this young woman -The Garbo as she is known - is the most glamorous figure in the whole world; there is no one with a more magnetic, romantic or exotic personality, there never has been a film star with so wide an appeal… Greta Garbo is Queen of Hollywood, her salary is fabulous, her word law. She has pointed features in a round face, her mouth is wide and knife-like. Her teeth are large and square and like evenly matched pearls; her eyes are pale, with lashes so long that when she lowers her lids they strike her cheeks; her complexion is of an unearthly whiteness and so delicate that she looks to have one layer of skin less than other people, and the suspicion of a frown is sooner perceptible.”

Greta Garbo (1905–1990) Swedish-American actress

Cecil Beaton, Book of Beauty (1930)
Source: http://www.garboforever.com/Beatons_Book_of_Beauty.htm

Law , Personality , Star , People

“When I was a kid, my mother told me about the time my sister got lost at the circus in New York in Madison Square Garden. ... She said out of the throng of people, suddenly after looking for a long time, she said a cop just appeared and he was holding my sister's hand — she was a little girl. My mother never forgot that picture in her mind. We never see those stories about each other. And I think the writer who wants us to have a better life must take on the responsibility of showing us those kinds of stories.”

James McBride (writer) (1957) American journalist

On writing stories that are considered unseen in "James McBride's Advice For New Writers: 'A Simple Story Is The Best Story'" https://www.npr.org/2020/02/29/810052791/james-mcbrides-advice-for-new-writers-a-simple-story-is-the-best-story in NPR (2020 Feb 29)

Time , Girl , People , Thinking

““… I said about limiting factors. Well, there’s one that you can’t beat. Put steel under fifty thousand pounds per square inch pressure and it starts to flow. The metal used in this machine must have been able to withstand much greater pressure, but there was a limit beyond which it was not safe to go. At twenty miles above the planet’s surface, they had reached that limit. They had reached dead end.” <…>”

Clifford D. Simak (1904–1988) American writer, journalist

Из малой прозы

Dead

“Favelas are areas of intense activity of drug trafficking, which promotes constant conflicts between rival gangs and the police. Drug dealers stipulate curfews and prohibit people from hanging out on the streets at certain times. Socialization in the slum, which takes place in the streets, back alleys and squares, ends up being inhibited. The Internet has been a great ally to reconnect family members and friends around the favela, where physical visits to distant areas are not always easy.”

David Nemer

(p. 90)
Favela Digital- The other side of technology. (2013)

Family , Distant , Time , People

“They were more than a thousand in number, including the mere partizans of my enemies. Several attempts were made to press me down. I got many blows in the sides; and if I had been either a short or a weak man, I must have been pressed under foot, and inevitably killed. ... I had, when I left the Booth, my snuff-box in my right hand. It is oblong square, and has very sharp corners. The Savages pressed me side-ways towards my left; and I had to fight with my right hand, in order to prevent them from getting me down. I had to strike back-handed. One of the sharp corners of the snuff-box, which stuck out beyond the bottom of my little finger, did good service. It cut the noses and eyes of the Savages at a famous rate, and assisted mainly in securing my safe arrival, on the raised pavement, on which I got just opposite to the door of a shop. Just at this time, one of the Savages, foaming at the mouth like a mad dog, exclaimed: “damn him, I'll rip him up.””

William Cobbett (1763–1835) English pamphleteer, farmer and journalist

He was running his hand into his breeches pocket, apparently to take out his knife, but I...drew up my right leg, armed with a new and sharp-edged gallashe over my boot, dealt Mr. Ellice's ripping Savage so delightful a blow, just between his two eyes, that he fell back upon his followers.

‘History of the Coventry Election’, Political Register (25 March 1820), pp. 102–3
1820s

Time , Dogs , Box , Way

“The machine may also change the square which is being scanned, but only by shifting it one place to right or left.”

Alan Turing Computable Numbers

On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem (1936)

Change

“In some of the configurations in which the scanned square is blank... the machine writes down a new symbol on the scanned square: in other configurations it erases the scanned symbol.”

Alan Turing Computable Numbers

On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem (1936)

“The machine is supplied with a "tape" (the analogue of paper) running through it, and divided into sections (called "squares") each capable of bearing a "symbol."”

Alan Turing Computable Numbers

On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem (1936)

“We were at the eye of a storm. We heard gunshots from all directions. I saw armored vehicles rushing on the square and troops pouring in. We were surrounded.”

Zhou Fengsuo (1967) Chinese human rights activist

Source: June 4, 2019 Remembering Tiananmen Square Massacre 30 Years Later https://www.npr.org/2019/06/04/729510958/remembering-tiananmen-square-massacre-30-years-later?t=1589711301756

“I tend to be an optimist about human nature but a political pessimist…I think we’re living in very, very scary times and we have to find ways of looking squarely at it and finding reasons for optimism.”

Kamila Shamsie (1973) Pakistani writer

Source: On balancing pessimism and optimism in “Kamila Shamsie: 'We have to find reasons for optimism’” https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jun/08/kamila-shamsie-we-have-to-find-reasons-for-optimism-home-fire in The Guardian (2018 Jun 8)

Optimism , Time , Nature , Thinking

“In France the height of the structures is limited to five or six storeys: in America stores frequently tower up fifteen storeys or more, and with rapid smooth-running lifts one floor is as good as another. These buildings measure their floor area by the acre, and twenty, thirty, or even forty acres of floor space—or even two million square feet—are not extraordinary, while it is quite likely that before the ink on these pages has become dry some great merchant with imagination, courage and ambition will announce his purpose of erecting a structure perhaps twice as large as any now in existence. If he does so it will not be for the sake of having the biggest thing on earth but because more space will allow him to set the word "perfection" further out in the hitherto unexplored fields of endeavour.”

Harry Gordon Selfridge (1858–1947) America born English businessman

The Romance of Commerce (1918), A Representative Business of the Twentieth Century

Perfection , Courage , Imagination

“I'm your narrator. It's my task to say
Just where and how things happen in our play,
Set the bare stage with words instead of props
And keep on talking till the curtain drops. …
It's an old task — old as the human heart,
Old as those bygone players and their art
Who, in old days when faith was nearer earth,
Played out the mystery of Jesus' birth
In hall or village green or market square
For all who chose to come and see them there,
And, if they knew that King Herod, in his crown,
Was really Wat, the cobbler of the town,
And Tom, the fool, played Abraham the Wise,
They did not care. They saw with other eyes.
The story was their own — not far away,
As real as if it happened yesterday,
Full of all awe and wonder yet so near,
A marvelous thing that could have happened here
In their own town — a star that could have blazed
On their own shepherds, leaving them amazed,
Frightened and questioning and following still
To the bare stable — and the miracle.”

Stephen Vincent Benét (1898–1943) poet, short story writer, novelist

Narrator
Source: A Child is Born (1942)

Faith , Question , Star , Heart

“I expect to die in bed, my successor will die in prison and his successor will die a martyr in the public square. His successor will pick up the shards of a ruined society and slowly help rebuild civilization, as the Church has done so often in human history."”

Francis George (1937–2015) Catholic cardinal

Replying to a question about the secularization of Western culture in a meeting with a group of priests on circa May 2010.
Source: The Myth and the Reality of 'I'll Die in My Bed', Tim Drake, National Catholic Register, October 24, 2012, November 21, 2014 http://www.ncregister.com/blog/tim-drake/the-myth-and-the-reality-of-ill-die-in-my-bed,

History , Help

“The long game for Christians in the public square is a big loss if more people don't get out there and proclaim the Gospel message.”

Brian T. Carroll (1949) American educator and politician

Source: He won’t win. So why is Brian Carroll running for president? https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/43755/he-wont-win-so-why-is-brian-carroll-running-for-president (4 March 2020)

Loss , Game , People