Quotes about start
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“I am not so much afraid of death, as ashamed thereof; 'tis the very disgrace and ignominy of our natures, that in a moment can so disfigure us that our nearest friends, Wife, and Children stand afraid and start at us.”

Thomas Browne book Religio Medici

Section 40
Religio Medici (1643), Part I

Death, Children, Nature

“I grew up always wanting to be an artist, and it was in high school when I started to really like writing. I was a junior in high school thinking about what I wanted to do with my life and I thought it would be great if I could find a job in which I could both draw and paint … and write which was this new thing that I loved. And I thought children's picture books would be the perfect job for me. It was a great combination of those skills and that's when I decided that's what I wanted to do.”

Kevin Henkes (1960) American children's illustrator and writer

Some Kids' Books Are Worth The Wait: 'They Do Take Time,' Says Kevin Henkes https://www.npr.org/2015/09/22/442521229/some-kids-books-are-worth-the-wait-they-do-take-time-says-kevin-henkes (September 22, 2015)

Love, Life, Children, Books

“The bomb will not start a chain-reaction in the water converting it all to gas and letting all the ships on all the oceans drop down to the bottom. It will not blow out the bottom of the sea and let all the water run down the hole. It will not destroy gravity. I am not an atomic playboy, as one of my critics labeled me, exploding these bombs to satisfy my personal whim.”

William H. P. Blandy (1890–1954) American admiral

As Vice Admiral, Commander Joint Task Force One in Operation Crossroads
Quoted in Gerard J. De Groot, The Bomb: A Life p. 119.

Water, Personality, Sea

“Newton and Descartes started to try and prove that God existed in the same way as they would try and prove something in the laboratory or with their mathematics … And when you try and mix science and religion you get bad science and bad religion. The two are doing two different things. … Science can give you a diagnosis of cancer. It can even cure your disease, but it cannot touch your grief and disappointment, nor can it help you to die well.”

Karen Armstrong (1944) author and comparative religion scholar from Great Britain

Ode interview (2009)

God, Disease, Religion, Disappointment

“Darling, would you like to grow a beard?'
'Would you like me to?'
'It might be fun. I'd like to see you with a beard.'
'All right. I'll grow one. I'll start now this minute. It's a good idea. It will give me something to do.”

Ernest Hemingway book A Farewell to Arms

Catherine and Henry discussing whether he should grow a beard, in Ch. 38
A Farewell to Arms (1929)

Idea

“Franz Kafka is dead.He died in a tree from which he wouldn't come down. "Come down!" they cried to him. "Come down! Come down!" Silence filled the night, and the night filled the silence, while they waited for Kafka to speak. "I can't," he finally said, with a note of wistfulness. "Why?" they cried. Stars spilled across the black sky. "Because then you'll stop asking for me." The people whispered and nodded among themselves. […] They turned and started for home under the canopy of leaves. Children were carried on their fathers' shoulders, sleepy from having been taken to see who wrote his books on pieces of bark he tore off the tree from which he refused to come down. In his delicate, beautiful, illegible handwriting. And they admired those books, and they admired his will and stamina. After all: who doesn't wish to make a spectacle of his loneliness? One by one families broke off with a good night and a squeeze of the hands, suddenly grateful for the company of neighbors. Doors closed to warm houses. Candles were lit in windows. Far off, in his perch in the trees, Kafka listened to it all: the rustle of the clothes being dropped to the floor, or lips fluttering along naked shoulders, beds creaking along the weight of tenderness. That night a freezing wind blew in. When the children woke up, they went to the window and found the world encased in ice.”

Nicole Krauss The History of Love

Source: The History of Love (2005), P. 187

Children, People, Books, World

“There's nothing that's ever happened in the world that didn't start in one human mind.”

Tom Clancy (1947–2013) American author

2000s, In Depth with Tom Clancy (2002)

World

“I have never in my whole life had a fight with a smart person or even seen anybody else have one either. That is because when the fight starts the smart people are not there anymore. They have gone off someplace else, and when it is over they come back and tell you how much they did in the fight, only it is all lies.”

Gene Wolfe book Starwater Strains

"Has Anybody Seen Junie Moon?", Moon Shots (1999), ed. Peter Crowther, Reprinted in Gene Wolfe, Starwater Strains (2005), Reprinted in Gene Wolfe, The Best of Gene Wolfe (2009)
Fiction

Life, People, Fight, Personality

“All sins are forgiven once you start making a lot of money.”

RuPaul (1960) Actriz de Televisa, dueña y señora de los ejidos cacaoahuateros

Quoted by Joslyn Pine in: Money and Wealth: A Book of Quotations http://books.google.co.in/books?id=YXPCAgAAQBAJ&pg=PA209, Courier Dover Publications, 2 September 2013, p. 209

Money

“To anyone growing up in any large city, the immediate neighborhood becomes the world. The street on which one lives provides a kid with local identification somewhat similar to being branded by national origin. Streets have a status. They grow, get old and change in character. In large coastal cities, immigration has an effect on the profile of a street altering it as each new group enters, stays a while, assimilates and then moves away. Streets seem to have a discernible life. Some start out ostentatiously and gradually descend into slums while others begin as poor the disreputable neighborhoods and rise to ostentation through what city planners call gentrification.”

Will Eisner (1917–2005) American cartoonist

XIX, December 2004
A Contract With God (2004)

Life, World, Change

“An idea starts to be interesting when you get scared of taking it to its logical conclusion.”

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

Source: The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010), p. 3

Idea

“This patchwork of largely fictional works makes the Protocols an incoherent text that easily reveals its fabricated origins. It is hardly credible, if not in a roman feuilleton or in a grand opera, that the “bad guys” should express their evil plans in such a frank and unashamed manner, that they should declare, as the Elders of Zion do, that they have “boundless ambition, a ravenous greed, a merciless desire for revenge and an intended hatred.” If at first the Protocols was taken seriously, it is because it was presented as a shocking revelation, and by sources all in all trustworthy. But what seems incredible is how this fake arose from its own ashes each time someone proved that it was, beyond all doubt, a fake. This is when the “novel of the Protocols” truly starts to sound like fiction. Following the article that appeared in 1921 in the Times of London revealing that the Protocols was plagiarized, as well as every other time some authoritative source confirmed the spurious nature of the Protocols, there was someone else who published it again claiming its authenticity. And the story continues unabated on the Internet today. It is as if, after Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler, one were to continue publishing textbooks claiming that the sun travels around the earth.
How can one explain resilience against all evidence, and the perverse appeal that this book continues to exercise? The answer can be found in the works of Nesta Webster, an antisemetic author who spent her life supporting this account of the Jewish plot. In her Secret Societies and Subversive Movements, she seems well informed and knows the whole story as Eisner narrates it here, but this is her conclusion:
The only opinion I have committed myself is that, whether genuine or not, the Protocols represent the programme of a world revolution, and that in view of their prophetic nature and of their extraordinary resemblance to the protocols of certain secret societies of the past, they were either the work of some such society or of someone profoundly versed in the lore of secret society who was able to reproduce their ideas and phraseology.
Her reasoning is flawless: “since the Protocols say what I said in my story, they confirm it,” or: “the Protocols confirm the story that I derived from them, and are therefore authentic.” Better still: “the Protocols could be fake, but they say exactly what the Jews think, and must therefore be considered authentic.””

Will Eisner (1917–2005) American cartoonist

In other words, it is not the Protocols that produce antisemetism, it is people’s profound need to single out an Enemy that leads them to believe in the Protocols.
I believe that-in spite of this courageous, not comic but tragic book by Will Eisner- the story is hardly over. Yet is is a story very much worth telling, for one must fight the Big Lie and the hatred it spawns.
Umberto Eco, Milan Italy December 2004 translated by Allesandra Bastagli, p. vi-vii
The Plot: The Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (10/2/2005)

Life, People, Lie, Secret

“Now that I've lost everything to you
You say you wanna start something new
And it's breakin' my heart you're leaving
Baby, I'm grieving”

Cat Stevens (1948) British singer-songwriter

Wild World
Song lyrics, Tea for the Tillerman (1970)

Heart, Baby

“I am very scared of being outside my home for long periods of time. I start sweating and shaking and having panic attacks if I am not at home. I get very anxious and am scared in crowds and things like that. Before I go onstage I just take medication and I'm alright.”

Daniel Johns (1979) Australian musician

Metal Hammer magazine, "Growing Pains" March 1999.
Interviews

Home, Time

“I'm a human being. I'm not dumping on what I've done. I mean I know we were doing social (stuff), all right? I just don't like boastin' about it, OK? I know what we were doin'. I know damn well what we did. But I ain't gonna start crying about it now, all right?”

Joe Strummer (1952–2002) British musician, singer, actor and songwriter

Strummer on Man, God, Law and the Clash (31 January 1988)

Cry

“Creationists insist that mutations are very rare and are usually, if not always harmful. But the fact is that the vast majority of mutations are completely neutral. They’d have to be because, according to the National Center for Biotechnology Information, there is an overall average of 128 mutations per human zygote! So apparently, in creationist terms, “very rare” means “more than a hundred per person right from the point of conception”. Because those are just the mutations we start out with. Our cells will mutate again 30 more times over the course of our lives, and some of these subsequent mutations can be passed on to our children too –usually with no more effect than those we recognize as family traits.”

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

Youtube, Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism Source: "8th Foundational Falsehood of Creationism" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TU-7d06HJSs, Youtube (March 22, 2008)

Children, Family, Time, Personality

“A fundamental part of the non-proliferation bargain is the commitment of the five nuclear States recognized under the non-proliferation treaty — Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States — to move toward disarmament. Recent agreements between Russia and the United States are commendable, but they should be verifiable and irreversible. A clear road map for nuclear disarmament should be established — starting with a major reduction in the 30,000 nuclear warheads still in existence, and bringing into force the long-awaited Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.”

Mohamed ElBaradei (1942) Egyptian law scholar and diplomat, former Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency, and Nobel …

Saving Ourselves From Self-Destruction (2004)

Parting

“Summing up, Nanoscale Communication Networks is a demanding but also very interesting book, an ambitious primer. It is definitely a good starting point for further reading. The author guides the reader through all the aspects of nanonetworks, giving in most cases a clear description of his thinking process within transitions between equations. There are also many cross references between chapters and sections which give a broader view of the topic and help to memorize it. One can also find many pictures, diagrams and tables throughout this book in order to systematize the presented knowledge.”

Stephen F Bush

Book Reviews, REVIEWER: JAKUB PALIDER, NANOSCALE COMMUNICATION NETWORKS STEPHEN F. BUSH, ARTECH HOUSE, 2010, ISBN-13: 978-1-60807-003-9, HARDCOVER, 308 PAGES, IEEE Communications Magazine, August 2011.

Books, Communication, Knowledge, Thinking

“When once the idea of the separate condensation was started, all these improvements followed as corollaries in quick succession, so that in the course of one or two days the invention was thus far complete in my mind, and I immediately set about an experiment to verify it practically.”

James Watt (1736–1819) British engineer

"Notes on Professor Robison's Dissertation on Steam-engines" (1769)

Idea, Success

“I was introduced to the great philosophical systems of the past to which the Western universities have given their blessing, arranging and classifying them with the delicate care lavished on museum pieces. When once these systems were so handled, it was natural that they should be regarded as monuments of human intellection. And monuments, because they mark achievements at their particular point in history, soon become conservative in the impression which they make on posterity. I was introduced to Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Marx and other immortals, to whom I should like to refer as the university philosophers. But these titans were expounded in such a way that a student from a colony could easily find his breast agitated by Conflicting attitudes. These attitudes can have effects which spread out over a whole society, should such a student finally pursue a political life. A colonial student does not by origin belong to the intellectual history in which the university philosophers are such impressive landmarks. The colonial student can be so seduced by these attempts to give a philosophical account of the universe, that surrenders his whole personality to them. When he does this, he loses sight of the fundamental social fact that he is a colonial subject. In this way, he omits to draw from his education and from the concern displayed by the great philosophers for human problems, anything which he might relate to the very real problem of colonial domination, which, as it happens, conditions the immediate life of every colonized African. With single-minded devotion, the colonial student meanders through the intricacies of the philosophical systems. And yet these systems did aim at providing a philosophical account ofthe world in the circumstances and conditions of their time. For even philosophical systems are facts of history. By the time, however, that they come to be accepted in the universities for exposition, they have lost the vital power which they had at their first statement, they have shed their dynamism and polemic reference. This is a result of the academic treatment which they are given. The academic treatment is the result of an attitude to philosophical systems as though there was nothing to them hut statements standing in logical relation to one another. This defective approach to scholarship was suffered hy different categories of colonial student. Many of them had heen handpicked and, so to say, carried certificates ofworthiness with them. These were considered fit to become enlightened servants of the colonial administration. The process by which this category of student became fit usually started at an early age, for not infrequently they had lost contact early in life with their traditional background. By reason of their lack of contact with their own roots, they became prone to accept some theory of universalism, provided it was expressed in vague, mellifluous terms. Armed with their universalism, they carried away from their university courses an attitude entirely at variance with the concrete reality of their people and their struggle. When they came across doctrines of a combative nature, like those of Marxism, they reduced them to arid abstractions, to common-room subtleties. In this way, through the good graces oftheir colonialist patrons, these students, now competent in the art of forming not a concrete environmental view of social political problems, but an abstract, 'liberal' outlook, began to fulfil the hopes and expectations oftheir guides and guardians.”

Kwame Nkrumah (1909–1972) Pan Africanist and First Prime Minister and President of Ghana

Source: Consciencism (1964), Introduction, pp. 2-4.

Life, People, Age, World

“Carol was discovering that the one thing that can be more disconcerting than intelligent hatred is demanding love. "She supposed that she was being gracefully dull and standardized in the Smails' presence, but they scented the heretic, and with forward-stooping delight they sat and tried to drag out her ludicrous concepts for their amusement. They were like the Sunday-afternoon mob starting at monkeys in the Zoo, poking fingers and making faces and giggling at the resentment of the more dignified race… They were staggered to learn that a real tangible person, living in Minnesota, and married to their own flesh-and-blood relation, could apparently believe that divorce may not always be immoral; that illegitimate children do not bear any special and guaranteed form of curse; that there are ethical authorities outside of the Hebrew Bible; that men have drunk wine yet not died in the gutter; that the capitalistic system of distribution and the Baptist wedding-ceremony were not known in the Garden of Eden;… that there are Ministers of the Gospel who accept evolution; that some persons of intelligence and business ability do not always vote the Republican ticket straight;… that a violin is not inherently more immoral than a chapel organ… 'Where does she get all them the'ries?'”

Sinclair Lewis book Main Street

marveled Uncle Whittier Smail.
Main Street (1920)

Love, Men, Children, Intelligence

“As soon as I get an idea, I write a short story, or I start a novel, or I do a poem. So I have no need for a notebook. I do keep files of ideas and stories that didn’t quite work a year ago, five years ago, ten years ago. I come back to them later and I look through the titles.”

Ray Bradbury (1920–2012) American writer

The Paris Review interview (2010)

Idea

“Starting in a hollowed log of wood — some thousand miles up a river, with an infinitesimal prospect of returning! I ask myself 'Why?' and the only echo is 'damned fool!… the Devil drives'.”

Richard Francis Burton (1821–1890) British explorer, geographer, translator, writer, soldier, orientalist, cartographer, ethnologist, spy, lin…

Burton to Lord Houghton as quoted in The Devil Drives: A life of Sir Richard Burton (1984) by Fawn Brodie.

Fools

“We thought: we're poor, we have nothing,
but when we started losing one after the other
so each day became
remembrance day,
we started composing poems
about God's great generosity
and — our former riches.”

Anna Akhmatova (1889–1966) Russian modernist poet

"We thought: we're poor"
We thought we were beggars, we thought we had nothing at all
But then when we started to lose one thing after another,
Each day became
A memorial day -
And then we made songs
Of great divine generosity
And of our former riches.
Translated by Ilya Shambat (2001)
White Flock (1917)

God

“It seemed to me singularly ill-contrived for the British government to be going to war with Hitler when Hitler might have been about to attack the Russians, and even more ill-contrived that, when Hitler did attack the Russians, he had already defeated the French army. What I'm saying is that the war shouldn't have been started in September 1939…from the point of view of Britain, the war was really not a good thing and I would regard it as, in effect, a defeat.”

Maurice Cowling (1926–2005) historian

Interviewed in Naim Attallah, Singular Encounters (Quartet Books, 1990), p. 144.

War

“At first, when California started winning its water lawsuits and shutting off cities, the displaced people just followed the water—right to California. It took a little while before the bureaucrats realized what was going on, but finally someone with a sharp pencil did the math and realized that taking in people along with their water didn't solve a water shortage.”

Paolo Bacigalupi (1972) American science fiction and fantasy writer

"The Tamarisk Hunter", High Country, 26 June 2006

People, Water

“Once we started to urbanize, we put ourselves on this treadmill. We traded away stability for growth. And growth requires change.”

Geoffrey West (1940) British physicist

2010s Source: Jonah Lehredec. " A Physicist Solves the City http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/19/magazine/19Urban_West-t.html?pagewanted=5&_r=1," in www.nytimes.com. Dec 17, 2010.

Change

“A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system.”

John Gall (1925–2014) American physician

Source: General systemantics, an essay on how systems work, and especially how they fail..., 1975, p. 65, cited in: Grady Booch (1991) Object oriented design with applications. p. 11

“It really began with my own personal evolution that brought me to a new way of thinking for ethical reasons: I wanted to get the violence out of my life and adopt a truly non-violent lifestyle. One night while pontificating over my pursuit of a non-violent lifestyle over steak dinner with a friend, he leaned forward and said, “This is all very nice, Michael, but if you really want to eliminate the violence in your life, you might want to start with that piece of flesh on your plate—because your desire for that taste of meat in your mouth is paying for the death of an animal.” When he said that, a little voice inside me said, “You know, he’s right.” And it didn’t take long before my leather shoes had to go, along with milk, cheese and everything else in my life with hidden violence attached that I could jettison, or at least, modify. I became vegan in my diet, lost 20 pounds, and saw my borderline high blood pressure drop to normal levels along with a reduction in my cholesterol levels. I then began applying this to my patients—and they saw the same great results.”

Michael Klaper (1947) American physician

"Interview with Michael Klaper, M.D." https://web.archive.org/web/20141113185517/https://www.healthscience.org/about/nha-history/books-and-publications/health-science-summer-2013/interview-michael-klaper-md by Mark Huberman, National Health Association (29 April 2014).

Life, Death, Shoe, Way

“I think if we study the primates, we notice that a lot of these things that we value in ourselves, such as human morality, have a connection with primate behavior. This completely changes the perspective, if you start thinking that actually we tap into our biological resources to become moral beings. That gives a completely different view of ourselves than this nasty selfish-gene type view that has been promoted for the last 25 years.”

Frans de Waal (1948) Dutch primatologist and ethologist

Frans de Waal, in a NOVA interview, " The Bonobo in All of Us" PBS (1 January 2007) http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/nature/bonobo-all-us.html; quotes from this interview were for some time misplaced on this page, which probably generated similar misattributions elsewhere, and the misplacement was not discovered until after this quotation had been selected for Quote of the Day, as a quote of Goodall. Corrections were subsequently made here, during the day the quote was posted as QOTD. The Bonobo in All of Us (2007)

Behavior, Thinking, Study, Change

“…the wild flowers blooming in hushed solitude
Start not at the whispering, 'tis but the breeze”

Rosanna Eleanor Leprohon (1829–1879) Canadian writer

from A Canadian Summer Evening

Flowers, Solitude

“I pull you close but when we kiss I can feel a doubt.
I remember back when we started,
My kisses used to turn you inside out.
I used to drive you to work in the morning;
Friday night I'd drive you all around.
You used to love to drive me wild,
But lately girl you get your kicks from just driving me down.”

Bruce Springsteen (1949) American singer and songwriter

"I'm Goin' Down"
Song lyrics, Born in the U.S.A. (1984)

Love, Feeling, Girl, Kiss

“Every man wonders about the size of their penis. Laying in bed alone at night, or in a hammock with a parrot. You start thinking, “Do I have a small penis or just gigantic balls?””

Dave Attell (1965) comedian

"Skanks for the Memories"

Thinking, Night

“This idea of reserving right to withdraw was started at Richmd. & considered as a conditional ratification which was itself considered as worse than a rejection.”

James Madison (1751–1836) 4th president of the United States (1809 to 1817)

1780s, Letter to Alexander Hamilton (1788)

Idea

“Soon after Athens had reached the height of its glory under Pericles in the Fifth Century, B. C., and had started on its decline, the rise of Macedon under Philip carried Greek influence into new regions. The glory of Athens had been based upon sea power, but the conquests of Macedon were the work of land armies— Philip invented the invincible phalanx. Upon Philip's death his son, Alexander the Great, set forth to conquer the whole of the then known world, and as that world in his day lay to the east, his marches were in that direction. In a few years he had overrun the fertile plains and opulent cities of Asia Minor, Syria, Mesopotamia, and Persia, and had carried his conquests to the gates of Delhi. In all the cities in the intervening countries he left large garrisons of Greek soldiers. In many of these countries he founded flourishing new cities. In every place his soldiers were followed by large colonies of Greek civilians. The result was that the whole of western Asia, and of what we call the Near East, including Asia Minor Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Babylonia, Mesopotamia, Persia, and northwestern India, was saturated with the Greek influence and with Greek colonies.”

Henry Morgenthau, Sr. (1856–1946) American diplomat

I was sent to Athens http://www.hri.org/docs/Morgenthau/

Death, World, Sea, Country

“He started for the conquest of ManDalgaDh on 26 Muharram, AH 861 (AD 24 December, 1456) after making full preparation… Reaching there the Sultãn issued orders that ‘trees should be uprooted, houses demolished and no trace should be left of human habitation’… A great victory was achieved on 1 Zilhijjã, AH 861 (AD 20 October, 1457). Sultãn Mahmûd offered thanks to Allãh in all humility. Next day, he entered the fort. He got the temples demolished and their materials used in the construction of a Jãmi‘ Masjid. He appointed there a qãzi, a muftî, a muhtasib, a khatîb and a mu‘zzin and established order in that place…”

Nizamuddin Ahmad (1551–1594) historian

Sultãn Mahmûd Khaljî of Malwa (AD 1436-1469) Mandalgadh (Rajasthan)
Tabqãt-i-Akharî

Tree, Victory, Housing

“I could not adopt him so I married him. You know how wonderful he is, like all Russians. He starts reciting verse at two o'clock in the morning.”

Isadora Duncan (1877–1927) American dancer and choreographer

Of her husband, the Russian poet Sergei Yesenin, as quoted in A Century of Sundays : 100 years of Breaking News in the Sunday Papers (2006) by Nadine Dreyer, p. 65.

“The basic thing, starting from the initial perception of these nuclei of contradictions (which include the principal contradiction of society as a larger epochal unit) is to study the inhabitants' awareness of these contradictions.”

Paulo Freire (1921–1997) educator and philosopher

Pedagogia do oprimido (Pedagogy of the Oppressed) (1968, English trans. 1970)

Study

“They've started this filthy floodlit cricket with cricketers wearing tin hats and advertisements for contraceptives on their boots.”

Alan Ayckbourn Intimate Exchanges

A Gardener in Love, Intimate Exchanges (1982).

“We have now done what the Romans did when they started to commit suicide. We have shifted from an army of citizens to an army of mercenaries…”

Carroll Quigley (1910–1977) American historian

Oscar Iden Lecture Series, Lecture 3: "The State of Individuals" (1976)

Suicide

“I shall be reading poems that are meant to dispense with conventional language, no less, and to have done with it. Dada Johann Fuchsgang Goethe. Dada Stendhal. Dada Dalai Lama, Buddha, Bible, and Nietzsche. Dada m'dada. Dada mhm dada da. It's a question of connections, and of loosening them up a bit to start with. I don't want words that other people have invented..”

Hugo Ball (1886–1927) German author, poet and one of the leading Dada artists

1916, Dada Manifesto (1916)

People, Question, Reading

“I was on an airplane last year when a talk show began playing on the TVs. I decided to start narrating for the people, which is a really great game if you're ever bored enough. I realized a time will probably come when television will watch us if we're watching it, if that hasn't already happened, figuratively or literally. It sounded like some sort of pseudo-Big Brother nightmare, so I wrote it down.”

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

His influence on writing the song Talk Shows on Mute

People, Game, Time

“!-- I come from the Arts Lab. Most of the writing I used to do was used for performance, so consequently I learnt that when you are reading a poem it has to read properly, which is to do with syllables and stresses. What takes me the longest with my fine writing, like say Voice of the Fire, is reading it through and finding the bits where it clunks, where it’s one syllable too long, and once you find that rhythm – the reader probably won’t be aware of it, consciously, but there is a tidal wave embedded in the prose that the reader is responding to. In the last chapter of Voice in the Fire, where it is actually me talking in my own voice, I don’t use the word ‘I’ or ‘me’ or ‘mine’. I don’t know why – perhaps I had been reading that Private Eye column where it is all ‘I’ ‘I’ ‘I’ and started to feel a bit self-conscious about it – but --> I thought if I can still be the central voice but without having an ‘I’ there, and by not having it there, it makes it easier for the reader to slip into the consciousness of the narrator. If you remove the letter ‘I’ it becomes a universal I. Everybody is the author walking down those streets while they are in the prose.”

Alan Moore (1953) English writer primarily known for his work in comic books

De Abaitua interview (1998)

Art, Feeling, Universe, Reading

“It starts at the bottom, viewing an organism as a large population of simple machines, and works upwards synthetically from there — constructing large aggregates of simple, rule-governed objects which interact with one another nonlinearly in the support of life-like, global dynamics. The ‘key' concept in AL is emergent behavior.”

Christopher Langton (1949) American computer scientist

Source: Artificial Life (1989), p.2

Life, Behavior, Support

“Master, we can start now; I have killed them all.'
'I am very sorry to hear it,' said Tripitaka. 'One has no right to kill robbers, however violent and wicked they may be. The most one may do is to bring them before a magistrate. It would have been quite enough in this case if you had driven them away. Why kill them? You have behaved with a cruelty that ill becomes one of your sacred calling.'
'If I had not killed them,' said Monkey, 'they would have killed you.'
'A priest,' said Tripitaka, 'should be ready to die rather than commit acts of violence.”

Arthur Waley (1889–1966) British academic

Source: Translations, Monkey: Folk Novel of China (1942), Ch. 14 (p. 132)

““The free addition of a religious nature is to move from a starting point of a unity and common destiny, not saying: * “I will be saved but not you – I am inspired, the agent of a special mission but not you”. Instead saying: * “We are part of a unity and a common destiny, and if you are not aware of it, I will add to what you feel my feeling and my action in this way. And it might be that your lack of awareness in this might benefit me by deepening my awareness and religious consciousness.
Therefore my religious life will have two essential aspects:”

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

Hymn

Life, Way, Feeling, Nature

“Mrs. May knows that with her current, slim majority in Parliament, she is at the behest of the hard Brexiteers who could easily mount a coup against her, defying the party whip, and may be even worse, if she demurs from her short-lived mantra of “Brexit means Brexit”. And you don’t need to fall for it or worry about it either. Look at the mathematics of a parliamentary election, before you head down into the comments and start screaming, “But Corbyn doesn’t want ANY Brexit! She’s our only hope!” The fact is you’re going to end up with her anyway. There’s no chance Corbyn and this fantasy “coalition of chaos” comes to pass, given the situation up and down the country. It’s a magnificent, though somewhat predictable, piece of Tory electioneering. But that’s all it is.”

Raheem Kassam (1986) British journalist and politician

Brexit Voters Cannot Afford to Give Theresa May a Massive Majority as She Plans Compromise on Free Movement http://www.breitbart.com/london/2017/05/17/kassam-theresa-may-preparing-screw-brexit-voters-hard-youre-still-voting/ (May 17, 2017)

Hope, Mathematics, Chance, Country

“I don't think either one of them literally want to incite violence. But they have to realize that when they tell people to get up in your face, that there are some crazy unstable people out there. There are truly people who have anger issues. The guy that shot over two hundred rounds from a semi-automatic weapon at us at the ballfield, was an angry guy. He was a guy that would go down to the city council and yell and scream and get angry and red in the face. He once hit a neighbor with the butt of his gun. He had all of these anger issues. But then when people stoke that and say "get up in their face", "go to Washington". He showed up at the ballfield that day, and as he started shooting at us he yelled "This is for healthcare!", and then when they were finally able to kill him in his pocket was a list of five or six conservative republicans that he came there intending to kill. So instead of saying "get up in their face", we should say let's have constructive dialog. Let's forcefully present our position in a verbal way and in an intellectual way.”

Rand Paul (1963) American politician, ophthalmologist, and United States Senator from Kentucky

2010s

People, Way, Guy, Thinking

“There's no switch inside you [high school students] that magically flips when you turn a certain age or graduate from some institution. You start being an adult when you decide to take responsibility for your life. You can do that at any age.”

Paul Graham (1964) English programmer, venture capitalist, and essayist

"What You'll Wish You'd Known", January 2005

Life, Age, School

“On the same day as I started to keep my own pillow-book -- I met my future husband for the first time. I was six, he was ten. We did not exchange a word. He had been hand-picked by my father's publisher.”

Peter Greenaway (1942) British film director

Nagiko's journal for Sep 16 1993
The Pillow Book

Books, Time, Future

“Calling the whole system "Linux" leads people to think that the system's development was started in 1991 by Linus Torvalds. That is what most users seem to think. The occasional few users that do know about the GNU Project often think we played a secondary role — for example, they say to me, 'Of course I know about GNU — GNU developed some tools that are part of Linux.'”

Richard Stallman (1953) American software freedom activist, short story writer and computer programmer, founder of the GNU project

2000s, Thus Spake Stallman (2000)

People, Thinking, Parting

“You know, when the season is over a lot of guys go home and eat peanuts and drink beer and they show up in spring training with a big belly. I will go home and start working on my body right away. My right shoulder is not the way it is supposed to be. I'm not going to wait until spring training and hope it is all right. I will work on it when I get home.”

Roberto Clemente (1934–1972) Puerto Rican baseball player

Speaking during the 1971 World Series, as quoted in The Chicago Tribune by Bob Markus, reprinted in I'll Play These: From Ecstacy to Angst, A Sports Writer’s Journey https://books.google.com/books?id=sdzKAmeIoE8C&pg=PA219 (2011), p. 219 Baseball-related, <big><big>1970s</big></big>, <big>1971</big>

Hope, Way, Guy, Home

“Eating a vegan diet — it’s just so much healthier — and you avoid a lot of toxins that could age your skin and your body. I really noticed a difference in my skin not too long after switching to fully vegan. … The older I’ve gotten, the more it’s occurred to me that I’m doing it in order to live longer, though the vanity component will always be there. … I just told myself one day that I’m going to do it and I’m going to give myself eight weeks. And that I’m not going to commit on this for a lifetime because it’s psychologically huge for people to wrap their minds around it. And I’m just going to see how I feel, I’m going to test my blood again and see if there’s anything. Giving it that long you sort of get over the fact of feeling how big and difficult it is at the beginning. And if you really give yourself long enough to start feeling differently and sort of see the benefits then it will be great.”

Michelle Pfeiffer (1958) American actress

"Michelle Pfeiffer’s Big Secret", interview with Urbanette (February 2016) http://urbanette.com/michelle-pfeiffer-interview/

People, Age, Feeling

“A lot of my tracked music was written when I was very young, relatively speaking. I was very optimistic, I had finally discovered some sort of public musical outlet, it was generally a very happy time. So, the music of that time sort of reflects that, I think? By the time I started the Alpha Conspiracy project, I was older, a bit more sophisticated (and, well, cynical), and so the music got more complex.”

Andrew Sega (1975) musician from America

Andrew Sega Shrine interview, 2011

Happiness, Music, Thinking, Time

“It’s early in the process for me, but my infatuation with fame is waning, my need for external approval and the control of other people’s opinions is expiring. Practically I’ve decided that profits from this book will go towards creating a place where recovering addicts like me can run a business based on the ideas in this book. A café and production company run to create community, not money, democratically managed by the workforce. No bosses. No profit. No bullshit. Selling food sourced ethically, grown locally, and served by people who have had a Revolution in their own lives and are now able to learn and give back. Supporting modest creative projects, building a community of people who want to be part of something other than the toxic hegemony. We will start small but we will grow quickly because we have a limitless resource and we are providing an alternative to a dying system. There are no limits to what we can achieve if we behave collectively, responsibly, and humanely.”

Russell Brand book Revolution

Revolution (2014)

Money, People, Books, Food

“I wanna say this to every man that has a mind, to all the intelligent life forms that exist on this planet Earth. I wish the British would say this to the Scottish Rites and the Masons and all the people with minds who have degrees of knowledge, and who are aware of courts, laws, United Nations, governments.
In the 40s, we had a war, and all of our economies went towards this war effort. The war ended on one level, but we wouldn't let it end on the other levels. We kept buying and selling this war. I'm not locked in the penitentiary for crimes, I'm locked in the Second World War. I'm locked in the Second World War with this decision to bring to the World Court - there must be a One World Court, or we're all gonna be devoured by crime.
Crime, and the definition of crime comes from Nuremberg, when the judges decided that they wanted to call Second World War a crime. Honor and war is not a crime. Crime is bad. When you go to war and you're a soldier, and you fight for your God and your country, that's not criminal. That's honorable. That's what you must do to be a man. If you don't fight for your God and your country, you're not worth anything. If you have no honor, then you're not worth petty's pigs.
Truth is, we've got to overturn this decision that you made in the Second World War, or the Second World War will never end. Degrees of the war was written in Switzerland, in Geneva, at conferences that were made by the men at the tables, clearly stated that anyone in uniform would be given the respect of their rank and their uniforms. Then when the United States and got all the Germans in handcuffs, they started breaking their own rules. And they've been breaking their own rules ever since. War is not a crime, but if you judge war as a crime in a court room, then turn around: If 2 + 3 = 5, and 3 + 2 = 5; if you say war is a crime, then crime becomes your war. I am, by all standards, a prisoner of war.
I've been a prisoner of war since 1944 in Juvenile Hall, for setting a school building on fire in Indianapolis, Indiana. I've been locked up 45 years trying to figure out why I got to be a criminal. It matters not whether I want to be; you've got to keep criminals going to keep the war going because that's your economy, your whole economy is based on the war. You've got to get your dollar bills off the war, you've got your silver market sterling off of the war, you've got to take your gold and your diamonds off of the war - You've got to overturn that decision, that hung 6000 men by the neck.
You killed 6000 soldiers for obeying orders. It's wrong. And the world has got to accept that's wrong. When you accept you're wrong, and you say you're sorry for all the things you've done, then that will be a note on that court, and we'll have some harmony going on this planet Earth, now.”

Charles Manson (1934–2017) American criminal and musician

Interview with Bill Murphy (1994) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XAjh_wOByoY

Life, Men, God, War

“Because of my age and what I do for a living and the amount of time that I’ve spent away from my family and loved ones, I’m starting to relate more to the late-period Kerouac stuff in the way that I once related to the fun and excitement of the early material. There’s a darkness inside of me that I’m only now starting to come to grips with and accept. And it’s starting to scare me.”

Ben Gibbard (1976) American singer, songwriter and guitarist

Source: The Meaning Of Life, I

Love, Age, Family, Way

“You looked so intense. Whatever you were saying, you seemed to mean it, and it wasn't amusing at all. Started quite a fashion. People keep looking for purpose now. Complicates everything.”

Orson Scott Card (1951) American science fiction novelist

Treason (1988)

People, Fashion

“We wait -- it seems for minutes -- looking at the night sky. Then, suddenly breaking the silence and making us start with alarm and fear… there is a savage, heart-rending, gurgling scream.”

Peter Greenaway (1942) British film director

Prospero's Books

Fear, Silence, Waiting, Heart

“Anything that gets the adrenalin moving like a 440 volt blast in a copper bathtub is good for the reflexes and keeps the veins free of cholesterol… but too many adrenaline rushes in any given time span has the same effect on the nervous system as too many electro-shock treatments are said to have on the brain: after a while you start burning out the circuits. When a jackrabbit gets addicted to road-running, its only a matter of time before he gets smashed — and when a journalist turns into a politics junkie he will sooner or later start raving and babbling in print about things that only a person who has Been There can possibly understand.”

Hunter S. Thompson (1937–2005) American journalist and author

1970s, Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72 (1973)

Understanding, Time, Personality

“Start each day badly and you wave success goodbye. How you start anything plays a key part in how successful you will be. This is true for how you begin each day. Everyone knows the adage about ‘getting out of bed on the wrong side’ – it may not be literally true but metaphorically it is 100-per-cent correct.”

Nigel Cumberland (1967) British author and leadership coach

Your Job-Hunt Ltd – Advice from an Award-Winning Asian Headhunter (2003), Successful Recruitment in a Week (2012) https://books.google.ae/books?idp24GkAsgjGEC&printsecfrontcover&dqnigel+cumberland&hlen&saX&ved0ahUKEwjF75Xw0IHNAhULLcAKHazACBMQ6AEIGjAA#vonepage&qnigel%20cumberland&ffalse, 100 Things Successful People Do: Little Exercises for Successful Living (2016) https://books.google.ae/books?idnu0lCwAAQBAJ&dqnigel+cumberland&hlen&saX&ved0ahUKEwjF75Xw0IHNAhULLcAKHazACBMQ6AEIMjAE

Success, Parting

“I don't care what they think of me,
And I don't care what they say.
I don't care what they think if you're leavin'.
I'm gonna beg you to stay.
I don't care if they start to avoid me.
I don't care what they do.
I don't care about anything else
But bein' with you,
Bein' with you.”

Smokey Robinson (1940) American R&B singer-songwriter and record producer

Being with You (1981)
Song lyrics, Solo

Thinking

“As the prerogative of Natural Science is to cultivate a taste for observation, so that of Mathematics is, almost from the starting point, to stimulate the faculty of invention.”

James Joseph Sylvester (1814–1897) English mathematician

"A plea for the mathematician", Nature, Vol. 1, p. 261.

Mathematics, Nature, Science

“People who hadn't noticed me, or who had written me off as a game show host, started to reassess me. There were people who hadn't seen me as a stand-up artist and liked it. Suddenly I was in fashion again.”

Bob Monkhouse (1928–2003) English entertainer

Independent on Sunday obituary http://web.archive.org/web/20100522031727/http://www.independent.co.uk/news/media/bob-monkhouse-jokewriter-to-the-stars-and-the-longreigning-king-of-primetime-comedy-dies-at-75-578058.html

People, Game, Fashion

“I have thought a lot about the question of titles. I must confess that I find any for works that take off from an arbitrary starting point and end with something real…. [Miro allowed Pierre Matisse to make titles, based on the] real things…. [if they do] not evoke some tendency or other, something I want to avoid completely [very probably Miro meant here: the Surrealists ]. [advising Pierre Matisse; who showed then several modern European painters in New York].”

Joan Miró (1893–1983) Catalan painter, sculptor, and ceramicist

In a letter to his art-seller Pierre Matisse, 12 October 1934; as quoted in Calder Miro, ed. Elizabeth Hutton Turner / Oliver Wick; Philip Wilson Publishers, London 2004, p. 82, note 24
1915 - 1940

Question

“Over time, due to liberal habit, drugs, women also working, the number of homosexuals has really increased. I also tend to say if your son starts hanging out with certain people with a certain behavior, he'll adopt that sort of behavior. He'll think it's normal.”

Jair Bolsonaro (1955) Brazilian president elect

Interview to Ellen Page in March 2016. "Você foge a normalidade", diz Jair Bolsonaro a Ellen Page https://www.opovo.com.br/noticias/brasil/2016/03/voce-foge-a-normalidade-diz-jair-bolsonaro-a-ellen-page.html. O Povo (11 March 2016).

Women, People, Behavior, Thinking

“I've just sort of gone with the flow and I ended up here. Crazy. I'm not going to start planning anything, my life is way better than anybody could have planned it.”

Rachael Ray (1968) American businessman

Unsourced

Life, Way

“The characters in this movie should be arrested for loitering with intent to moan. Never have teenagers been in greater need of a jump-start. Granted some of them are more than 100 years old, but still: their charisma is by Madame Tussaud. The Twilight Saga: New Moon takes the tepid achievement of Twilight (2008), guts it, and leaves it for undead. You know you're in trouble with a sequel when the word of mouth advises you to see the first movie twice instead. Obviously the characters all have. Long opening stretches of this film make utterly no sense unless you walk in knowing the first film, and hopefully both Stephanie Meyer novels, by heart. Edward and Bella spend murky moments glowering at each other and thinking, So, here we are again.”

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

Review http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-twilight-saga-new-moon-2009 of The Twilight Saga: New Moon (18 November 2009) Reviews, One-star reviews

Thinking, Sense, Heart

“Once some engineers from the veneer trust laboratory came to me for consultation with a quite skilful presentation of their problems. Diﬀerent productivity is obtained for veneer-cutting machines for diﬀerent types of materials; linked to this the output of production of this group of machines depended, it would seem, on the chance factor of which group of raw materials to which machine was assigned. How could this fact be used rationally?
This question interested me, but nevertheless appeared to be quite particular and elementary, so I did not begin to study it by giving up everything else. I put this question for discussion at a meeting of the mathematics department, where there were such great specialists as Gyunter, Smirnov himself, Kuz’min, and Tartakovskii. Everyone listened but no one proposed a solution; they had already turned to someone earlier in individual order, apparently to Kuz’min. However, this question nevertheless kept me in suspense. This was the year of my marriage, so I was also distracted by this. In the summer or after the vacation concrete, to some extent similar, economic, engineering, and managerial situations started to come into my head, that also required the solving of a maximization problem in the presence of a series of linear constraints.
In the simplest case of one or two variables such problems are easily solved—by going through all the possible extreme points and choosing the best. But, let us say in the veneer trust problem for ﬁve machines and eight types of materials such a search would already have required solving about a billion systems of linear equations and it was evident that this was not a realistic method. I constructed particular devices and was probably the ﬁrst to report on this problem in 1938 at the October scientiﬁc session of the Herzen Institute, where in the main a number of problems were posed with some ideas for their solution.
The universality of this class of problems, in conjunction with their difficulty, made me study them seriously and bring in my mathematical knowledge, in particular, some ideas from functional analysis.
What became clear was both the solubility of these problems and the fact that they were widespread, so representatives of industry were invited to a discussion of my report at the university.”

Leonid Kantorovich (1912–1986) Russian mathematician

L.V. Kantorovich (1996) Descriptive Theory of Sets and Functions. p. 39; As cited in: K. Aardal, ‎George L. Nemhauser, ‎R. Weismantel (2005) Handbooks in Operations Research and Management Science, p. 15-26

Marriage, Search, Mathematics, Idea

“Every 3 feet of lead is worth about one-tenth of a second, and a rolling start is worth a good half second. Indeed, the difference between the runner having his weight mainly on his front foot and mainly on his back foot (but don't let the pitcher catch you leaning!) must be worth more than one-tenth of a second.”

Robert Adair (physicist) (1924) Physicist and author

Source: The Physics Of Baseball (Second Edition - Revised), Chapter 4, Running, Fielding, And Throwing, p. 57

“Pretty smart piece of thinkware by all accounts: full Turing compliance; about as clever as you can make a machine before you have to start giving it human rights.”

Alastair Reynolds (1966) British novelist and astronomer

Nightingale (p. 277)
Short fiction, Galactic North (2006)

“A treatise called Astadhyayi (or Astaka) is Panini's major work. It consists of eight chapters, each subdivided into quarter chapters. In this work Panini distinguishes between the language of sacred texts and the usual language of communication. Panini gives formal production rules and definitions to describe Sanskrit grammar. Starting with about 1700 basic elements like nouns, verbs, vowels, consonants he put them into classes. The construction of sentences, compound nouns etc., is explained as ordered rules operating on underlying structures in a manner similar to modern theory. In many ways Panini's constructions are similar to the way that a mathematical function is defined today.”

Pāṇini ancient Sanskrit grammarian

An Analytical Study of 'Sanskrit' and 'Panini' as Foundation of Speech Communication in India and the World

Way, Communication, Mathematics

“[My mother] said, "Arlo, I was out in the middle of China. And they brought out these school kids, and they started singing us songs, and they started singing 'This Land is Your Land', and I said 'STOP! Stop the song! My husband wrote that song!" She must have drove them nuts! She was driving me nuts about it! It was weeks after she had got back she hadn't slowed down about it one little bit! And I just looked at her and I said, "You know, mom… California….. to the New York Island. What are they singing it for over there anyhow?" She just looked with one of those Mom kind of looks. She said, "Oh Arlo…" She walked away. I was left standing there feeling like my usual self. I knew she was right, but I just didn't know why. After a while though, it come to me. I could see it, just because it said "California to the New York Island", didn't mean it had to go the short way! I could see it going around back! Redwood Forests, Gulf stream waters, around that way! Then the whole world could be singing that song! Except America.”

Arlo Guthrie (1947) American folk singer

Talking about the song "This Land is Your Land" which was his father's most famous song, and his mother's trip to China. (Live in Sydney)

World, School, Way, Feeling

“Karl's diary - Woke up at 9.55am. Soon as I woke up, I looked at Suzanne and she looked at me. I said, Did I tell you about the immune system? Suzanne starting laughing, I said it's amazing. She said, Not now.”

Karl Pilkington (1972) English television personality, social commentator, actor, author and former radio producer

Podcast - Bonus Disc
On Biology

“I venture out to the great 'sujet'; but, I repeat, my painting always remains object painting; it starts around 1936 with 'Adam et Eve'. My figures humanise themselves further, but I always stick to the pictorial circumstance – no eloquence, no romanticism”

Fernand Léger (1881–1955) French painter

Bekentnisse und Gespräche, Fernand Léger, André Verdet, Zürich 1957, pp. 32-33
Quotes of Fernand Leger, 1950's

Painting

“He told them it was only dogs that bark and go for strange dogs, and men set on a dog because it suits them to show that they are still masters, but if the dogs weren't dumb animals they would come to an agreements with each other and start barking at them.”

Cesare Pavese (1908–1950) Italian poet, novelist, literary critic, and translator

Source: The moon and the bonfire (1950), Chapter XVIII, p. 107

Men, Dogs, Animals

“We started with pure parliamentary democracy at the Centre and in the States. Now this has been extended to the grassroots, though not in the Gandhian way, but according to the dream of Gandhiji, along that line. We have extended democracy to the grassroots, in the panchayati raj experiment and I think that has given solid support to our parliamentary system. Our parliamentary system could not have survived, without this basic grassroot support. But all these can function only in an atmosphere of social and economic progress and greater equality.”

K. R. Narayanan (1920–2005) 9th Vice President and the 10th President of India

Shri K. R. Narayanan President of India in Conversation with N. Ram on Doordarshan and All India Radio

Dreams, Way, Democracy, Support

““Sultãn Mahmûd started again in AH 863 (AD 1458-59) for punishing the Rajpûts. When he halted at ÃhãD, Prince Ghiyãsu’d-Dîn and Fidan Khãn were sent towards Kîlwãrã and Dîlwãrã in order to lay waste those lands. They destroyed those lands and attacked the environs of Kumbhalmîr….“When they came to the presence of the Sultãn and praised the fort of Kumbhalmîr, the Sultãn started for Kumbhalmîr next day and went ahead destroying temples on the way. When he halted near that fort, he mounted his horse and went up a hill which was to the east of the fort in order to survey the city. He said, ‘It is not possible to capture this fort without a siege lasting for several years’…”159”

Nizamuddin Ahmad (1551–1594) historian

Sultãn Mahmûd Khaljî of Malwa (AD 1436-1469) Kelwara and Delwara (Rajasthan)
Tabqãt-i-Akharî

Way, Horse

“Western culture from the start has swerved from femaleness. The last western society to worship female powers was Minoan Crete. And significantly, that fell and did not rise again.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 8

“I saw Amadeus when I was nine years old and fell in love with Mozart. The part of Mozart's Requiem called "Lacrymosa" is my favorite piece of music ever. I always wished we could cover it, but with programming and guitars and make it cool. It's our moment to try all the things I wanted to and couldn't, so I started messing with it in Protools. Terry wrote some riffs and turned it into this awesome metal epic.”

Amy Lee (1981) American singer-songwriter and pianist

Explaining her song "Lacrymosa", in "Evanescence: Amy Lee Explains the New Songs" at VH1 News (18 September 2006)

Love, Music, Parting

“Warren Buffett, one of the richest guys in the world, openly admits that his effective tax rate is lower than his secretary's. It's time to tell the billionaire class that if they want to enjoy the benefits of America, they have to accept their responsibilities, and they have to start paying their fair share of taxes.”

Bernie Sanders (1941) American politician, senator for Vermont

Late Night with Seth Meyers, (2 June 2015)
2010s, 2015

World, Guy, Time

“No one forced me to focus on technology. I just did it because I had a passion for it. When I started, there weren’t a lot of women role models. It was Carol Bartz, Judy Estrin. I think there’s been a lot of progress since then, and I think that if women have a passion and really want to succeed, they can. On a relative basis, the male-female ratio is certainly skewed to men, but on an absolute basis, there are a lot of very successful women in technology.”

Mary Meeker (1959) American venture capitalist and securities analyst

Interview with Wired: "The Indomitable Mary Meeker" https://www.wired.com/2012/09/mf-mary-meeker/ (21 September 2012)

Women, Men, Thinking, Passion

“You have been amazingly energetic and clever," this letter ran, "though what you stand to gain by it I cannot imagine. You are against me. For a whole day you have chased me; you have tried to rob me of a night's rest. But I have had food in spite of you, I have slept in spite of you, and the game is only beginning. The game is only beginning. There is nothing for it, but to start the Terror. This announces the first day of the Terror. Port Burdock is no longer under the Queen, tell your Colonel of Police, and the rest of them; it is under me—the Terror! This is day one of year one of the new epoch—the Epoch of the Invisible Man. I am Invisible Man the First. To begin with the rule will be easy. The first day there will be one execution for the sake of example—a man named Kemp. Death starts for him to-day. He may lock himself away, hide himself away, get guards about him, put on armour if he likes—Death, the unseen Death, is coming. Let him take precautions; it will impress my people. Death starts from the pillar box by midday. The letter will fall in as the postman comes along, then off! The game begins. Death starts. Help him not, my people, lest Death fall upon you also. Today Kemp is to die.”

H. G. Wells book The Invisible Man

Source: The Invisible Man (1897), Chapter 27: The Seige of Kemp's House

Death, People, Food, Imagination

“The city was still …. Soon the machinery would start working again, not out of any sense of purpose, but like a watch that is wound daily by someone’s hand. Almost without any choice in the matter, people would embark upon the minute frustrations and satisfactions of their daily lives. It was in this moment of postponement that the azaan was heard, neither announcing the day nor keeping it a secret.”

Amit Chaudhuri (1962) contemporary Indian-English novelist

Freedom Song (1998)

People, Secret, Sense

“This monkey is running backwards and forwards! This tribesman right here—" [starts swinging his machete in an attempt to get the tribesman's attention] "Hi.”

TotalBiscuit (1984–2018) British game commentator

WTF Is…? series, Day One: Garry's Incident (October 1, 2013)

“During the final months of the campaign, as polls indicated that I had a real chance of becoming the next leader, opposition from the supply management lobby gathered speed. Radio-Canada reported on dairy farmers who were busy selling Conservative Party memberships across Quebec. A Facebook page called Les amis de la gestion de l’offre et des régions (Friends of supply management and regions) was set up and had gathered more than 10,500 members by early May. As members started receiving their ballots by mail from the party, its creator, Jacques Roy, asked them to vote for Andrew Scheer.
Andrew, along with several other candidates, was then busy touring Quebec’s agricultural belt, including my own riding of Beauce, to pick up support from these fake Conservatives, only interested in blocking my candidacy and protecting their privileges. Interestingly, one year later, most of them have not renewed their memberships and are not members of the party anymore. During these last months of the campaign, the number of members in Quebec had increased considerably, from about 6,000 to more than 16,000. In April 2018, according to my estimates, we are down to about 6,000 again.
A few days after the vote, Éric Grenier, a political analyst at the CBC, calculated that if only 66 voters in a few key ridings had voted differently, I could have won. The points system, by which every riding in the country represented 100 points regardless of the number of members they had, gave outsized importance in the vote to a handful of ridings with few members. Of course, a lot more than 66 supply management farmers voted, likely thousands of them in Quebec, Ontario, and the other provinces. I even lost my riding of Beauce by 51% to 49%, the same proportion as the national vote.
At the annual press gallery dinner in Ottawa a few days after the vote, a gala where personalities make fun of political events of the past year, Andrew was said to have gotten the most laughs when he declared: “I certainly don’t owe my leadership victory to anybody…”, stopping in mid-sentence to take a swig of 2% milk from the carton. “It’s a high quality drink and it’s affordable too.” Of course, it was so funny because everybody in the room knew that was precisely why he got elected. He did what he thought he had to do to get the most votes, and that is fair game in a democratic system. But this also helps explain why so many people are so cynical about politics, and with good reason.”

Maxime Bernier (1963) Canadian politician

page 23 in "Live or die with supply management", chapter 5 previewed April 2018 http://www.maximebernier.com/my_chapter_on_supply_management of "Doing Politics Differently: My Vision for Canada"

People, Game, Drink, Business

“Funny how that term caught on, isn't it? I tell everyone, I hated it. Somebody said 'drain the swamp' and I said, 'Oh, that is so hokey. That is so terrible.' I said, all right, I'll try it. So like a month ago I said 'drain the swamp' and the place went crazy. And I said 'Whoa, what's this?' Then I said it again. And then I start saying it like I meant it, right? And then I started to love it, and the place loved it. Drain the swamp. It's true. It's true. Drain the swamp.”

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

During a rally in Des Moines, Iowa http://www.cnbc.com/2016/12/21/trump-adviser-says-he-is-ditching-drain-the-swamp.html (December 2016) 2010s, 2016, December

Love, Hate

“I repeat what I said when I started out — that I have no axe to grind, that I'm not asking anybody for anything. It's all water over the dam as far as I am concerned. I can say that my conscience is clear and that I'll stand on my record in that World Series. I'm not what you call a good Christian, but I believe in the Good Book, particularly where it says "what you sow, so shall you reap." I have asked the Lord for guidance before, and I am sure He gave it to me. I'm willing to let the Lord be my judge.”

Joe Jackson (1887–1951) American baseball player

This is the Truth! (1949)

Books, World, Water

“Scott took LITERATURE so solemnly. He never understood that it was just writing as well as you can and finishing what you start.”

Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) American author and journalist

Letter to Arthur Mizener (12 May 1950); published in Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917–1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker

Literature

“.. drawing, always all my learning had to do with drawing. And I never really thought about color at all. When I first started thinking about color it was sort of out of perversity. In other words, say around 1950 and '51, it occurred to me that something ugly or muddy could be a color as well as something clear and bright and a nameable, beautiful, known color.”

Helen Frankenthaler (1928–2011) American artist

quote about her years 1950-51 - reacting on the general view that her painting art was mainly focused on color and not on drawing / line
1960s, Interview with Barbara Rose', Archives - American Art, 1968

Beauty, Color, Thinking, Learning

“I eased him into his new bed [beneath the floorboards] … A week later, I wondered whether his body had changed at all or had started to decompose. I disinterred him and pulled the dirt-stained youth up onto the floor. His skin was very dirty. I stripped myself naked and carried him into the bathroom and washed the body. There was practically no discoloration and his skin was pale white. His limbs were more relaxed than when I had put him down there.”

Dennis Nilsen (1945–2018) British serial killer

As quoted by Brian Masters (2011), Killing for Company, Random House, p. 113, ISBN 1446428737

Youth, Change

“That's five stars to start with. That's five stars to start with. That's Gil Evans, isn't it? The only thing that disturbed me about this—the whole thing, in its entirety, was tremendously satisfying: performance, orchestration is good, the harmonic usage is beautiful, the contrasting texture of orchestra, the whole thing is just great—but there are certain sections there when the background was so lovely it just seemed like the alto saxophone was out of place. Now this is the type of thing that just makes me smile. I enjoy every minute of it. I don't have to go for a "peak" and then think about something else while I'm listening. Gil Evans' writing, to me, is such a boon that when he came along with the Miles Ahead album, I was thankful, because since about the Stan Kenton Orchestra of 1952, where the writing had been very good, between Mulligan and Rugolo and the whole works, between those periods there had been a void, a retrogression back to the roots, and this took writing back to a standpoint which just wasn't interesting. So when Evans came along, I just flipped.”

Clare Fischer (1928–2012) American keyboardist, composer, arranger, and bandleader

Reviewing Evans' arrangement https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ao4dcHdoR4k of Dizzy Gillespie's "Manteca,", from New Bottle, Old Wine; as quoted in "Clare Fischer: Blindfold Test" http://www.mediafire.com/view/fix6ane8h54gx/Clare_Fischer#rjvay58eo774rhe

Love, Smile, Beauty, Star

“After KMT elects its leader, we can together start to improve the economy of Taiwan.”

Chen Shui-bian (1950) Taiwanese politician

June 27, 2005
Pet Phrases, 2005

“I have been into Odissi for over a decade now. I started around the time I was in standard X. I started dancing with Meenakshi Seshadri. My guru Pandit Ravindra Attibuthi has also taught Meenakshi and Hema Malini.”

Rani Mukerji (1978) Indian film actress

citation needed
Famous Quotes

Time, Dance

“Starting in 1918 at General Motors I found to my surprise] that if I followed the prevailing practice of intercorporate relations I would no longer be able to determine the rate of return on investment for these accessory divisions individually or as a group. This would necessarily mean that I would lose some degree of managerial control over my area of operations. At that time, material within General Motors was passing from one operating division to another at cost, or at cost plus some predetermined percentage. My divisions in the United Motors Corporation had sold both to outside customers and to their allied divisions at the market price. I knew that I operated a profit-making group, and I wished to continue to be able to demonstrate this performance to the general management, rather than to have my operating results on interdivisional business swallowed up in the extra bookkeeping profits of some other division. It was a case of keeping the information clear.”

Alfred P. Sloan (1875–1966) American businessman

Source: My Years with General Motors, 1963, p. 48

Business, Time

“I had some left wing fella ask me this, he started asking me my views on most things. I'm liberal in many senses, like when it comes to (probably not when I was younger) when it comes to gay people's rights I fight for a gay man's rights – so on all of these issues, as I've grown up, I said,… when people say that I'm far right, well what makes me right wing? Am I right wing just because I don't like Islam? Does that make me right wing just because I don't like a fascist ideology? If I didn't like scientology, does that make me right wing? No, it's an ideology. So I said like, "most of my views, they're very liberal – many of them would be left-wing."”

Tommy Robinson (1982) English right-wing activist

Extreme Britain Part Two: Tommy Robinson Interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5dRiBRM-BD8, UNION magazine (19 November 2015) 2015

People, Sense, Fight

“I knew I had to be sure-footed about the issues I was talking about. When you're twenty-nine years old, who the hell is going to think you're credible? It wasn't enough to have ideas; I had to know my facts. I had to demonstrate command from the minute I started running. I understood that was the test I had to pass.”

Joe Biden (1942) 47th Vice President of the United States (in office from 2009 to 2017)

Page 63
2000s, Promises to Keep (2008)

Idea, Hell, Thinking

“When's there ever been a decent saint who didn't start out as a thief?”

Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) Icelandic author

Jón Hreggviðsson
Íslandsklukkan (Iceland's Bell) (1946), Part III: Fire in Copenhagen

“Companies that go bankrupt are a danger to healthy competition. They are able to make their creditors and shareholders pay for their losses and bad management and then to start anew with assets that they essentially got for free, quite unlike the competition that has not gone bankrupt, who have to pay full price for their assets, but quite similar to how their customers have wanted their products, for too little money.”

Erik Naggum (1965–2009) Norwegian computer programmer

Re: ...and even for those _NOT_ interested... http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/8ff1b48135b78862 (Usenet article). Usenet articles, Miscellaneous

Money, Loss

“Stop the habit of wishful thinking and start the habit of thoughtful wishes.”

Mary Martin (1913–1990) American actress

As quoted in Right Time, Right Place, Right Move, Right Now! (1992) by Perry W. Buffington, Section I : Life

Thinking

Quotes about start page 27

Quotes about start
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