Quotes about state
page 21

“Commitment is a state of being in which an individual becomes bound by his actions and through this actions to beliefs that sustain his activities and his own involvement.”

Gerald R. Salancik (1943–1996) American organizational theorist

Gerald R. Salancik (1982), "Attitude-behavior consistencies as social logics." Consistency in social behavior: The Ontario symposium. Vol. 2. 1982. p. 207

“We shall envision the mind (or brain) as composed of many partially autonomous "agents"—as a "Society" of smaller minds. …It is easiest to think about partial states that constrain only agents within a single Division. …(we suggest) the local mechanisms for resolving conflicts could be the precursors of what we know later as reasoning”

Marvin Minsky (1927–2016) American cognitive scientist

useful ways to combine different fragments of knowledge.
K-Linesː A Theory of Memory (1980)

Way, Knowledge, Thinking

“As a 15 year jurist, I like to think I speak with clarity. So let me try again. When a United States Senator commits a non criminal act of indiscretion; and when it is brought to his attention he immediately has the integrity to apologize; and the apology is accepted by the victim: IT IS WRONG for the dogs of war to leap onto his back and demand his resignation from the United States Senate. It is morally wrong.
And as an aside for all you sanctimonious judges who are demanding my resignation, hear this. I was a civil right lawyer actively prosecuting sexual harassment cases on behalf of the Attorney General's Office before Anita Hill and before you were born.
Lighten up folks. This is how Democrats remain in the minority.”

Bill O'Neill (1947) Ohio judge

Facebook post, 11-17-2017 PM

War, Dogs, Thinking

“EVERY HUMAN BEING IS AN ARTIST who -
from his state of freedom -
the position of freedom that he experiences at first-hand -
learns to determine the other positions in the TOTAL ARTWORK OF THE FUTURE SOCIAL ORDER!”

Joseph Beuys (1921–1986) German visual artist

1970's, I Am Searching For Field Character,' 1973/74

Freedom, Learning, Future

“Speaking biologically, fruit in a slightly shriveled state is holding its respiration and energy consumption down to the lowest possible level. It is like a person in meditation: his metabolism, respiration, and calorie consumption reach an extremely low level. Even if he fasts, the energy within the body will be conserved. In the same way, when mandarin oranges grow wrinkled, when fruit shrivels, when vegetables wilt, they are in the state that will preserve their food value for the longest possible time.”

Masanobu Fukuoka book The One-Straw Revolution

Source: The One-Straw Revolution (1975), Chapter 3, p. 88

Food, Way, Time, Personality

“Physiologists have usually represented that our species holds a middle rank, in the masticatory and digestive apparatus, between the flesh-eating and the herbivorous animals; — a statement which seems rather to have been deduced from what we have learned by experience on this subject, than to result fairly from an actual comparison of man and animals. … The teeth of man have not the slightest resemblance to those of the carnivorous animals, except that their enamel is confined to the external surface. He possesses, indeed, teeth called canine, but they do not exceed the level of the others, and are obviously unsuited to the purposes which the corresponding teeth execute in carnivorous animals. … Thus we find that, whether we consider the teeth and jaws, or the immediate instruments of digestion, the human structure closely resembles that of the simiæ; all of which, in their natural state, are completely herbivorous.”

Sir William Lawrence, 1st Baronet (1783–1867) British surgeon

Lectures on Comparative Anatomy, Physiology, Zoology, and the Natural History of Man, Eighth Edition (London: John Taylor, 1840), Section I, Chapter VI, pp. 148-150. Full text online at the Internet Archive https://archive.org/stream/lecturesoncompar00lawr#page/n5/mode/2up.

Nature, Learning, Animals

“The liberal state is neutral between capitalism and its critics until the critics look like they are winning.”

Terry Eagleton (1943) British writer, academic and educator

Source: 2010s, Why Marx Was Right (2011), Chapter 9, p. 197

“It was Reagan who began the realignment of American politics, making the Republicans into internationalist Jeffersonians with his speech in London at the Palace of Westminster in 1982, which led to the creation of the National Endowment for Democracy and the emergence of democracy promotion as a central goal of United States foreign policy.”

Michael Ignatieff (1947) professor at Harvard Kennedy School and former Canadian politician

"Who Are Americans to Think That Freedom Is Theirs to Spread?", New York Times Magazine, June 26, 2005

Democracy

“The Vietnam War is behind us but not entirely forgotten. Like our Civil War, Vietnam holds a fascination for many Americans, and I suspect that this will grow rather than diminish as research continues and new works are published about the war. For the older military professionals who served during the Vietnam War and for the still older career military men who were perplexed by it, my advice is to look at Vietnam in a broader historical perspective. For the young military professional who did not serve in Vietnam, my advice is to learn all you can about the war and try to understand it. Finally for those military men now serving at the top military positions, as well as those who will rise to those positions later, my advice is to do all you can to improve the civilian-military interface in the highest councils of our government. This is the best way I know to better the chances that our civilian leaders truly understand the risks, costs, and probable outcomes of military actions before they take the nation to war. The United States cannot afford to put itself again at such enormous strategic disadvantage as we found ourselves in in Vietnam. How deep Vietnam has stamped its imprint on American history has yet to be determined. In any event, I am optimistic enough to believe that we Americans can and will learn and profit from our experience.”

Bruce Palmer Jr. (1913–2000) United States Army Chief of Staff

Closing words, p. 209-210
The 25-Year War: America's Military Role in Vietnam (1984)

Men, War, Way, History

“Talk about a "higher consciousness" superior to reason naturally comforts persons who find mental exertion painful, and notions about transcendental powers naturally console persons who do not have the courage or stamina to confront the realities of a universe that was not made for man. These ideas, in the form in which they are peddled by Uspenski and Orage, are derived from the early Hindu mystics of the Vedas and Upanishads. They did reach a state of exalted consciousness -- by the use of what they called soma, which, as R. G. Weston has shown, was simply the Amanita muscaria, a mushroom that has been for millennia a prime source of religiosity.”

Revilo P. Oliver (1908–1994) American philologist

"Orage and New Age Consciousness", private letter, February 1977, published on National Vanguard http://www.nationalvanguard.org/story.php?id=6657 (October 25, 2005) 1970s

Pain, Idea, Courage, Nature

“I like them in their natural state. They're lilke nuclear lemonades!”

Gloria Estefan (1957) Cuban-American singer-songwriter, actress and divorciada

answer to question "mojitos -- plain or flavored?" Latina Magazine (September, 2007)
2007, 2008

Nature

“I do not want to impugn anybody but only to help the refugees. The fact that there are these refugees is the direct consequence of the action of the Arab States in opposing partition and the Jewish State. The Arab States agreed upon this policy unanimously and they must share in the solution of the problem.”

Emil Ghoury

Israel did not cause the Arabs to leave http://web.archive.org/20020604080915/holyland-isreal.tripod.com/pal-refugees.htm, Beirut Telegraph (September 6, 1948).

Problem, Help

“The true key to the declension of the Roman empire — which is not to be found in all Gibbon's immense work — may be stated in two words: — the imperial character overlaying, and finally destroying, the national character. Rome under Trajan was an empire without a nation.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) English poet, literary critic and philosopher

15 August 1833
Table Talk (1821–1834)

“Nationalists were gratified by [ Franz von Papen’s ] policy of making an end of party politics and of liberalism; the state began to be authoritarian, despotic… All that united it was the negative purpose of breaking with the past system. Its two main sections, representing the industrialists and the big landowners, were directly opposed to one another on first principles: the industrialists were for free trade and unrestricted capitalist competition; the landowners were for ‘autarchy,” neo-mercantilism. ‘Enlightened capitalism’ on one side, pre-capitalist patriarchalism or post-capitalist economic planning on the other. But the great new forces of the Nationalism and Socialism were unrepresented.”

Hermann Rauschning (1887–1982) German politician

Source: The Revolution of Nihilism: Warning to the West (1939), p. 8

Past

“This new-democratic republic will be different from the old European-American form of capitalist republic under bourgeois dictatorship, which is the old democratic form and already out of date. On the other hand, it will also be different from the socialist republic of the Soviet type under the dictatorship of the proletariat which is already flourishing in the U. S. S. R., and which, moreover, will be established in all the capitalist countries and will undoubtedly become the dominant form of state and governmental structure in all the industrially advanced countries. However, for a certain historical period, this form is not suitable for the revolutions in the colonial and semi-colonial countries. During this period, therefore, a third form of state must be adopted in the revolutions of all colonial and semi-colonial countries, namely, the new-democratic republic. This form suits a certain historical period and is therefore transitional; nevertheless, it is a form which is necessary and cannot be dispensed with.”

Mao Zedong (1893–1976) Chairman of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China

On New Democracy (1940)
Original: (zh-CN) 这种新民主主义共和国，一方面和旧形式的、欧美式的、资产阶级专政的、资本主义的共和国相区别，那是旧民主主义的共和国，那种共和国已经过时了；另一方面，也和苏联式的、无产阶级专政的、社会主义的共和国相区别，那种社会主义的共和国已经在苏联兴盛起来，并且还要在各资本主义国家建立起来，无疑将成为一切工业先进国家的国家构成和政权构成的统治形式；但是那种共和国，在一定的历史时期中，还不适用于殖民地半殖民地国家的革命。因此，一切殖民地半殖民地国家的革命，在一定历史时期中所采取的国家形式，只能是第三种形式，这就是所谓新民主主义共和国。这是一定历史时期的形式，因而是过渡的形式，但是不可移易的必要的形式。

Country

“Whoever lives continually in a state of dissipation and distraction, becomes a stranger in his own heart.”

Adolph Freiherr Knigge book Über den Umgang mit Menschen

Wer immer in Zerstreuungen lebt, wird fremd im eigenen Herzen.
Über den Umgang mit Menschen (1788)

Heart

“The operational sciences hoped to nourish business management, which however largely ignored them, and the latter continues to be undernourished by the business schools which are fairly broad but shallow everywhere. By over focus on short-range financial values, business management in the United States has lost a dozen major markets to the Japanese, added pollution in all its forms, and enriched itself out of all proportion to its value as just one factor of production.
Action science, developed by the social sciences over many years in relative isolation from the applied physical sciences, and which might otherwise have humanized them and made engineering more productive, was doomed to fail by being on one end of the two-culture problem wherein science and the humanities do not even speak the same language.
I could go on listing a few dozen paradigms: art, law, computer software design, medicine, politics, and architecture, each addressed to a certain context, level, or phase, each good in itself, but each limited to the fields of its origin and its purposes. The methodological problem is the same as if, in designing any large system, each subsystem designer were left to design each subsystem to the best requirements he knew. The overall requirement might not be met; overall harmony could not be achieved, and conflict could ensue to cause failure at the system level.
What is envisioned is a new synthesis, a unified, efficient, systems methodology (SM): a multiphase, multi-level, multi-paradigmatic creative problem-solving process for use by individuals, by small groups, by large multi-disciplinary teams, or by teams of teams. It satisfies human needs in seeking value truths by matching the properties of wanted systems, and their parts, to perform harmoniously with their full environments, over their entire life cycles”

Arthur D. Hall (1925–2006) American electrical engineer

Source: Metasystems Methodology, (1989), p.xi-xii, cited in Philip McShane (2004) Cantower VII http://www.philipmcshane.ca/cantower7.pdf

Life, Truth, School, Law

“Lenin’ s article of 1905, "Party Organization and Party Literature", was used for decades, and is still used, to justify ideologically the enslavement of the written word in Russia. It has been argued that it refers only to political literature, but this is not so: it relates to every kind of writing. It contains the words: "Down with non-partisan writers! Down with literary supermen! Literature must become part of the common cause of the proletariat, ‘ a cog and a screw’ of one single great Social Democratic mechanism set in motion by the entire politically conscious vanguard of the entire working class" (Works, vol. 10, p. 45). For the benefit of "hysterical intellectuals" who deplore this seemingly bureaucratic attitude, Lenin explains that there can be no mechanical levelling in the field of literature; there must be room for personal initiative, imagination, etc.; none the less, literary work must be part of the party’ s work and controlled by the party. This, of course, was written during the fight for "hourgeois democracy", on the assumption that Russia would in due course enjoy freedom of speech but that literary members of the party would have to display party-mindedness in their writings; as in other cases, the obligation would become general when the party controlled the apparatus of state coercion.”

Leszek Kolakowski (1927–2009) Philosopher, historian of ideas

pg. 515
Main Currents Of Marxism (1978), Three Volume edition, Volume II, The Golden Age

Democracy, Imagination, Literature, Freedom

“I used to go out with Severin a lot to dance clubs but we wouldn't dance. It'd be more like take drugs and try to get to the toilet which would usually take about two hours…we became good friends but we were never really good for each other. Our friendship was based entirely on altered states. Whenever we went out together I would never come home until the next day. Mary hated it.”

Robert Smith (musician) (1959) English singer, songwriter and musician

Faith, 1983

Hate, Friendship, Faith, Home

“Guan Yin Citta Dharma Door belongs to Guan Yin Bodhisattva. We follow and take refuge in the three Sages of the West. Guan Yin Citta Dharma Door is the solution to resolving the problems of the human realm. Our practice is based on Zen Buddhism and wisdom in life. Our practice is aimed at transcending the mundane world and it is based on the Pure Land school of Buddhism. Hence, Guan Yin Citta Dharma Door is an integration of the essence of various schools of Buddhism. Thus, the objective of our practice is the Four Sublime States of Loving-kindness, Compassion, Appreciative joy and Equanimity.”

Jun Hong Lu (1959) Australian Buddhist leader

Los Angeles, (September 2016)[citation needed]
Guan Yin Citta Dharma Door

Love, Life, Wisdom, World

“I am a Republican because I believe in the constitution, strength in national defense, limited government, individual freedom, and personal responsibility as the concrete foundation for American government. They reinforce the resolve that the United States is the greatest country in the world and we can all be eternally grateful to our founding fathers for the beautiful legacy they left us today.”

Martha Raye (1916–1994) American comic actress and singer

Quoted in Jane Maddern Pittrone: Take It from the Big Mouth: The Life of Martha Raye, p. 220

World, Beauty, Freedom, Personality

“Love's not an emotion. It's a state of being, an ability.”

Vanna Bonta book Flight: A Quantum Fiction Novel

Flight: A Quantum Fiction Novel (1995)

Love

“Libertarians, in short, simply do not believe that theft is proper whether it is committed in the name of a state, a class, a crises, a credo, or a cliche.This is a far cry from sharing common ground with those who want to create a society in which super capitalists are free to amass vast holdings and who say that that is ultimately the most important purpose of freedom.”

Karl Hess (1923–1994) American journalist

"Letter From Washington," http://www.panarchy.org/hess/libertarianism.html The Libertarian Forum 1, no. 6 http://web.archive.org/web/20071201123614/http://mises.org/journals/lf/1969/1969_06_15.pdf (15 June 1969), p. 2

Freedom, Cry

“But contrast the attitude of the Socialist Government towards their Bolshevist friends and their attitude to the great self-governing Dominions of the Crown. To the enemies of Britain, of civilization, of freedom, to those who deserted us in the crises of the war—smiles, compliments, caresses, cash. But for Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, who sent their brave men to fight and die by scores of thousands, who never flinched and never wearied, who are bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh—to them nothing but frigid repulsion. Our bread for the Bolshevist serpent; our aid for the foreigner of every country; our favours for the Socialists all over the world who have no country; but for our own daughter States across the oceans, on whom the future of the British island and nation depends, only the cold stones of indifference, aversion, and neglect. (Cheers.) That is the policy with which the Socialist Government confronts us, and against that policy we will strive to marshal the unconquerable might of Britain.”

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

Speech in Edinburgh (25 September 1924), quoted in The Times (26 September 1924), p. 14
Early career years (1898–1929)

Men, War, World, Smile

“I saw that the State was half-witted, that it was timid as a lone woman with her silver spoons, and that it did not know its friends from its foes, and I lost all my remaining respect for it, and pitied it.”

Henry David Thoreau book Civil Disobedience

Civil Disobedience (1849)

“Athenian democracy was different from the much later American form, not only because it was the expression of a single city-state but because it was a direct [democracy], rather than a representative democracy. To us, looking backwards, it may seem imprudent to invite all citizens to vote on all major initiatives, but Solon was right to appreciate that no Athenian freeman could allow himself to be left out of anything.”

Thomas Cahill (1940) American scholar and writer

Source: Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter (2003), Ch.IV The Politician and the Playwright: How to Rule

Democracy

“Conscious of a strength which removes us from either fear or truculence, satisfied with dominions and resources which free us from lust of territory or empire, we see that our highest interest will be promoted by the prosperity and progress of our neighbors. We recognize that what has been accomplished here has largely been due to the capacity of our people for efficient cooperation. We shall continue prosperous at home and helpful abroad, about as we shall maintain and continually adapt to changing conditions the system under which we have come thus far. I mean our Federal system, distributing powers and responsibilities between the States and the National Government. For that is the greatest American contribution to the organization of government over great populations and wide areas. It is the essence of practical administration for a nation placed as ours is. It has become so commonplace to us, and a pattern by so many other peoples, that we do not always realize how great an innovation it was when first formulated, or how great the practical problems which its operation involves. Because of my conviction that some of these problems are at this time in need of deeper consideration, I shall take this occasion to try to turn the public mind in that direction.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

1920s, The Reign of Law (1925)

People, Fear, Home, Problem

“In the United States you're not allowed to talk about class differences. In fact, only two groups are allowed to be class-conscious in the United States. One of them is the business community, which is rabidly class-conscious. When you read their literature, it's all full of the danger of the masses and their rising power and how we have to defeat them. It's kind of vulgar, inverted Marxism. The other group is the high planning sectors of the government. They talk the same way — how we have to worry about the rising aspirations of the common man and the impoverished masses who are seeking to improve standards and harming the business climate. So they can be class-conscious. They have a job to do. But it's extremely important to make other people, the rest of the population, believe that there is no such thing as class. We're all just equal, we're all Americans, we live in harmony, we all work together, everything is great.”

Noam Chomsky book The Prosperous Few and the Restless Many

"The Unmentionable Five-Letter Word" in How the World Works, p. 120
Quotes 1990s, 1990-1994, The Prosperous Few and the Restless Many, 1993

People, Way, Communication, Literature

“By age 10, nearly all kids have fatty streaks in their arteries. This is the first sign of atherosclerosis, the leading cause of death in the United States. So the question for most of us is not whether we should eat healthy to prevent heart disease, but whether we want to reverse the heart disease we may already have.”

Michael Greger (1972) American physician, author, and vegan health activist

"Heart Disease Starts in Childhood" https://nutritionfacts.org/video/heart-disease-starts-in-childhood/?utm_content=buffer364bf&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer, in NutritionFacts.org (23 September 2013).

Death, Age, Disease, Question

“The key books about object-oriented graphical modeling languages appeared between 1988 and 1992. Leading figures included Grady Booch [Booch, OOAD]; Peter Coad [Coad, OOA], [Coad, OOD]; Ivar Jacobson (Objectory) [Jacobson, OOSE]; Jim Odell [Odell]; Jim Rumbaugh (OMT) [Rumbaugh, insights], [Rumbaugh, OMT]; Sally Shlaer and Steve Mellor [Shlaer and Mellor, data], [Shlaer and Mellor, states]; and Rebecca Wirfs-Brock (Responsibility Driven Design) [Wirfs-Brock].”

Rebecca Wirfs-Brock (1953) American software engineer

Martin Fowler (2004) A Brief Guide to the Standard Object Modeling Language. p. 7

Books, Appearance

“The Party which dares to attack the foundations of our State, which sets itself against religion and does not stop at attacking the person of the All-Highest Ruler must be rooted out to the very last stump.”

Wilhelm II, German Emperor (1859–1941) German Emperor and King of Prussia

Speech (26 February 1897), quoted in Michael Balfour, The Kaiser and His Times (London: Penguin, 1975), p. 159
1890s

Religion, Personality

“The Minister of State should stop saying "with respect". He and his Government have no respect at all for this House.”

David Norris (1944) Irish scholar, independent Senator, and gay and civil rights activist

At Brian Hayes on 4 July 2013 http://www.kildarestreet.com/sendebates/?id=2013-07-04a.180&s=speaker%3A210#g310

Housing

“The ecclesiastical authorities, for all practical purposes, acted as servants of the State in the confrontation with Jesus. In one version, the chief priest protests: "Caesar is our king, we have no other king but Caesar." In the dispute over jurisdiction between Pilate and Herod, they warn: "If you release him, you will not be Caesar's friend." The ecclesiastics were, practically speaking, surrogates of the State. That is an all-too-familiar situation for chief priests to be found in.”

William Stringfellow (1928–1985) American theologian

Source: William Stringfellow: Essential Writings (2013), "Jesus the Criminal" (1969), pp. 65-66

“Honor, justice and humanity call upon us to hold and to transmit to our posterity, that liberty, which we received from our ancestors. It is not our duty to leave wealth to our children; but it is our duty to leave liberty to them. No infamy, iniquity, or cruelty can exceed our own if we, born and educated in a country of freedom, entitled to its blessings and knowing their value, pusillanimously deserting the post assigned us by Divine Providence, surrender succeeding generations to a condition of wretchedness from which no human efforts, in all probability, will be sufficient to extricate them; the experience of all states mournfully demonstrating to us that when arbitrary power has been established over them, even the wisest and bravest nations that ever flourished have, in a few years, degenerated into abject and wretched vassals.”

John Dickinson (1732–1808) American politician

From ‘A Duty to Posterity’, as contained in A Library of American Literature From the Earliest Settlement to the Present Time, Volume 3, ed. Edmund Clarence Stedman, C. L. Webster (1892), pp. 177-178

Children, Education, Justice, Effort

“I am convinced our own happiness requires that we should continue to mix with the world, and to keep pace with it as it goes; and that every person who retires from free communication with it is severely punished afterwards by the state of mind into which he gets, and which can only be prevented by feeding our sociable principles. I can speak from experience on this subject. From 1793 to 1797 I remained closely at home, saw none but those who came there, and at length became very sensible of the ill effect it had on my own mind, and of its direct and irresistible tendency to render me unfit for society and uneasy when necessarily engaged in it. I felt enough of the effect of withdrawing from the world then to see that it led to an anti-social and misanthropic state of mind, which severely punishes him who gives in to it; and it will be a lesson I never shall forget as to myself.”

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

Letter to Maria Jefferson Eppes (8 March 1809)
1800s, Post-Presidency (1809)

Happiness, World, Home, Communication

“The union of the States of Germany into a form of government similar in many respects to that of the American Union is an event that can not fail to touch deeply the sympathies of the people of the United States. This union has been brought about by the long-continued, persistent efforts of the people, with the deliberate approval of the governments and people of twenty-four of the German States, through their regularly constituted representatives.”

Ulysses S. Grant (1822–1885) 18th President of the United States

Message regarding the unification of Germany http://millercenter.org/president/grant/speeches/message-regarding-unification-of-germany (7 February 1871) 1870s

People, Effort

“With a democratic society, the concept of multiculturalism is difficult to reconcile. Maybe in a very long term. But if you ask, where multicultural societies have so far worked, you can get very quickly to the conclusion that they only work there peacefully where there is a strong authoritarian state there. So, it was a mistake that we picked up at the beginning of the 60's guest workers from foreign cultures into the country.”

Helmut Schmidt (1918–2015) Chancellor of West Germany 1974-1982

Hamburger Abendblatt http://www.abendblatt.de/politik/deutschland/article290699/Wieviel-Anatolien-vertraegt-Europa.html, 24. November 2004

Strong, Country

“In every commercial state, notwithstanding any pretension to equal rights, the exaltation of a few must depress the many.”

Adam Ferguson book An Essay on the History of Civil Society

PART IV, SECTION II.
An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767)

“Her neck is like a stately tower,
Where Love himself imprison'd lies”

Thomas Lodge (1558–1625) English dramatist and writer

Poem, Rosalynde

Love

“The beauty of the democratic system of thought control, as contrasted with their clumsy totalitarian counterparts, is that they operate by subtly establishing on a voluntary basis – aided by the forces of nationalism and media control by substantial interests – presuppositions that set the limits of debate, rather than by imposing beliefs with a bludgeon. Then let the debate rage; the more lively and vigorous it is, the better the propaganda system is served, since the presuppositions (U. S. benevolence, lack of rational imperial goals, defensive posture, etc.) are more firmly established. Those who do not accept the fundamental principles of state propaganda are simply excluded from the debate”

Edward S. Herman (1925–2017) American journalist

or if noticed, dismissed as “emotional,” “irresponsible,” etc.
Source: After the Cataclysm: Postwar Indochina and the Reconstruction of Imperial Ideology, with Noam Chomsky, 1979, p. 30.

Beauty, Rage

“Unless the person is aiming upward, there is nothing you can do about their situation. And this seems to be about that initial choice between good and evil. Once someone comes to therapy, they've already done something. They've already said: I have a problem, conceivably I can fix it, and I need to do something about it. And so half the work is already done before they show up, because they've already said that 'things aren't as good as they could be, and I want to do something about it.' The question is, can you do anything about that person who is not at that state? You can't. All you can do is serve by example. But until the person has decided, on their own, that they're wrong (that's why they're suffering – there's something wrong about what they are doing) and that they want to fix it… I think that hammering against their situation often makes it worse. That's part of free will. I do not think that people can learn unless they admit that they're wrong.”

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

People, Question, Problem, Thinking

“(Television) Being a woman is as much a state of mind as a state of being. (Sylvia) Right. You stop paying attention, you might turn into a tuna.”

Nicole Hollander (1939) Cartoonist

Source: Sylvia cartoon strip, p. 167

“I see a whole lot. I think, first of all, I think that the world knows that terrorism is not just the United States' problem. And I think that Bush has alienated every friend that we've made over the last 200 years with his arrogance and indifference. And so it makes a lot of sense to me that Kerry, all he has to do is to try to convince people that we've got to deal with the problems in the Middle East. And we just can't have them all down to Crawford Ranch and say everything is going great… It was Rumsfeld who said that we're creating more terrorists than we're killing. And we need a president to restore the honesty, the integrity that the United States of America has abroad.”

Charles B. Rangel (1930) Recipient of the Purple Heart and politician

Rangel (2004) on HBO's Real Time with Bill Maher Sept 24, 2004
On the differences between George W. Bush and John Kerry during the 2004 Presidential election campaign.

People, World, Problem, Thinking

“India had never known a theocratic state till the advent of Islam in this country in the first quarter of the eighth century AD. Hindu Dharma has always been a pluralistic religion. Hindu culture and society too have been pluralistic throughout their hoary history. It was, therefore, impossible for the Hindus to erect an established church or to proclaim a state religion and call upon the State to impose it by force. The Hindu state extended its patronage to all religious sects equally, even when a king and his courtiers adhered to a particular sect in their private lives. Religious strife followed by bloodshed had never blackened the fair face of Hindu society. …The Hindu experience of a theocratic state was a very painful experience, spread as it was over several centuries. Even so, the Hindus did not learn any lessons in theocracy. The Hindu states which re-emerged under the Rajputs, the Marathas, the Sikhs, and the Jats were secular states….”

Sita Ram Goel (1921–2003) Indian activist

Defence of Hindu Society (1983)

Pain, Religion, History, Learning

“Take Kentucky. Kentucky's legislature voted not to secede, and early in the war, Confederate Gen. Albert Sidney Johnston ventured through the western part of the state and found 'no enthusiasm as we imagined and hoped but hostility … in Kentucky.' Eventually, 90,000 Kentuckians would fight for the United States, while 35,000 fought for the Confederate States. Nevertheless, according to historian Thomas Clark, the state now has 72 Confederate monuments and only two Union ones.”

James W. Loewen (1942) American historian

2015, Why do people believe myths about the Confederacy? Because our textbooks and monuments are wrong (2015)

Hostility, War, Hope, Imagination

“I have… instituted systematic, voluntary measures of cooperation with the business institutions and with State and municipal authorities to make certain that fundamental businesses of the country shall continue as usual, that wages and therefore consuming power shall not be reduced, and that a special effort shall be made to expand construction work in order to assist in equalizing other deficits in employment… I am convinced that through these measures we have reestablished confidence. Wages should remain stable. A very large degree of industrial unemployment and suffering which would otherwise have occurred has been prevented. Agricultural prices have reflected the returning confidence. The measures taken must be vigorously pursued until normal conditions are restored.”

Herbert Hoover (1874–1964) 31st President of the United States of America

State of the Union Address (3 December 1929)

Confidence, Business, Effort, Suffering

“Sex also concentrates the mind wonderfully, and that is why civilised man is so obsessed by it. It enables him to "savour every fraction of an inch," not merely of the act of sexual intercourse, but of living itself. But that, of course, only underlines the basic problem: after coitus, "man becomes sad," because he quickly returns to his unconcentrated and defocused state. In sexual excitement, it is the spirit itself that becomes erect, and becomes capable of penetrating the meaning of life. Normal consciousness is limp and flaccid; its attitude towards reality is defensive. This is what Sartre called contingency, that feeling of being at the mercy of chance.”

Colin Wilson book The Misfits: A Study of Sexual Outsiders

Source: The Misfits: A Study of Sexual Outsiders (1988), pp. 45-46

Life, Sadness, Sex, Feeling

“I earnestly invoke the attention of Congress to the consideration of such measures within its well-defined constitutional powers as will secure to all our people a free exercise of the right of suffrage and every other civil right under the Constitution and laws of the United States. No evil, however deplorable, can justify the assumption either on the part of the Executive or of Congress of powers not granted, but both will be highly blamable if all the powers granted are not wisely but firmly used to correct these evils. The power to take the whole direction and control of the election of members of the House of Representatives is clearly given to the General Government. A partial and qualified supervision of these elections is now provided for by law, and in my opinion this law may be so strengthened and extended as to secure on the whole better results than can be attained by a law taking all the processes of such election into Federal control. The colored man should be protected in all of his relations to the Federal Government, whether as litigant, juror, or witness in our courts, as an elector for members of Congress, or as a peaceful traveler upon our interstate railways.”

Benjamin Harrison (1833–1901) American politician, 23rd President of the United States (in office from 1889 to 1893)

First State of the Union Address (1889)

People, Peace, Law, Color

“Perhaps one of the few positive aspects of the coup is that it has discredited the claim that that that the state had been taken over by the Brotherhood under Morsi.”

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

2010s, Egypt's coup has crushed all the freedoms won in the revolution (2013)

“Only those who are subjective, one-sided and superficial in their approach to problems will smugly issue orders or directives the moment they arrive on the scene, without considering the circumstances, without viewing things in their totality (their history and their present state as a whole) and without getting to the essence of things (their nature and the internal relations between one thing and another). Such people are bound to trip and fall.”

Mao Zedong (1893–1976) Chairman of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China

On Practice (1937)

People, History, Nature, Problem

“The US is the most wretchedly villainous state of all times. Anyone aware of global issues can easily imagine how vast the hatred for the United States - a corrupted, swollen, paralysing and suffocating political entity - must be across the Third World - and among the thinking minority of the West too.”

Pentti Linkola (1932) Finnish ecologist

Can Life Prevail?: A Revolutionary Approach to the Environmental Crisis. page 159

World, Imagination, Thinking, Time

“The Secure Fence Act is part of our efforts to reform our immigration system. We have more to do. Meaningful immigration reforms means that we must enforce our immigration laws in the United States. It is against the law to hire someone who is here illegally. We fully understand that most businesses want to obey that law, but they cannot verify the legal status of their employees because of widespread document fraud. So we're creating a better system for verifying documents and work eligibility, and in the meantime, holding people to account for breaking the law. We must reduce pressure on our border by creating a temporary worker plan. Willing workers ought to be matched with willing employers to do jobs Americans are not doing for a temporary -- on a temporary basis.”

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

2000s, 2004, Signing of Secure Fence Act of 2006

People, Law, Understanding, Business

“He also has stated that no one would care if France was a victim of a terrorist attack. Fox's Gibson on "golden opportunity" missed: If France had been selected for 2012 Olympics, terrorists would "blow up Paris, and who cares?"”

John Gibson (media host) (1946) American radio talk show host

http://mediamatters.org/items/200507080002

“This death’s livery which walled its bearers from ordinary life was sign that they have sold their wills and bodies to the State: and contracted themselves into a service not the less abject for that its beginning was voluntary.”

T. E. Lawrence (1888–1935) British archaeologist, military officer, and diplomat

The Revolt in the Desert (1927) Ch. 35

Life, Death

“This strategy aims directly at a reannexation of the Southwest, not militarily, but ethnically, linguistically and culturally through transfer of millions of Mexicans into the United States and a migration of "Anglos" out of the lands Mexico lost in 1848. In California, the project is well advanced.”

Patrick Buchanan (1938) American politician and commentator

2000s, State of Emergency (2006)

“An armed seizure of power by a highly organized minority party, whether in the name of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, the Glory of Rome, the Supremacy of the Nordics, or any other slogan that may be invented, and no matter how ingeniously integrated with the masses of the population, will normally lead to the totalitarian state. 'Totalitarian state' is merely the modern name for tyranny.”

Max Eastman (1883–1969) American activist

Source: Reflections on the Failure of Socialism (1955), p. 18

“(referring to phone numbers stored in a database of phone and email records) Since '1' identifies anyone in the regional zone 1 of the world, that's the US, Canada and some of the islands - it's right there in the front of your white pages book … all they have to do is use that as a base of knowledge to go in to their entire database and count all of the phone numbers there that had a one in them, right-and then the ones are in the United States and then they'd have a count of how many Americans are in the database and how often each one's there. And yet they claim they can't do that, which is false. You can do the same thing with email, with service providers, IPs and things like that.”

William Binney former U.S. intelligence official and cryptoanalyst; whistleblower

source: William Binney - 'The Government is Profiling You' - video lecture at MIT https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qB3KR8fWNh0

Books, World, Knowledge, Falseness

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

Morris Kline (1908–1992) American mathematician

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

Life, Mathematics, Nature, Study

“If you examine the record of the so-called the anti-war movement in this country and imagine what would have happened had its counsel been listened to over the last 15 and more years, you would have a world in which the following would be the case:Saddam Hussein would be the owner and occupier of Kuwait, he would have succeeded in the annexation, not merely the invasion, but the abolition of an Arab and Muslim state that was a member of the Arab League and of the United Nations. And with these resources as we now know because he lost that war, he was attempting to equip himself with the most terrifying arsenal that it was possible for him to lay his hands on. That's one consequence of anti-war politics, that's what would have happened.In the meanwhile, Slobodan Milošević would have made Bosnia part of a greater Serbia, and Kosovo would have been ethnically cleansed and also annexed. The Taliban would be still in power in Afghanistan if the anti-war movement had been listened to, and al-Qaeda would still be their guests. And Saddam Hussein, with his crime family, would still be privately holding ownership over a terrorized people in a state that's been most aptly described as a concentration camp above ground and a mass grave underneath it.Now if I had that record politically, I would be extremely modest, I wouldn't be demanding explanations from those of us who said it's about time that we stop this continual capitulation to dictatorship, to racism, to aggression and to totalitarian ideology. That we will not allow to be appeased in Iraq, the failures in Rwanda, and in Bosnia, and in Afghanistan, and elsewhere. And we take pride in having taken that position, and we take pride in our Iraqi and Kurdish friends who are conducting this struggle, on our behalves I should say.”

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) British American author and journalist

Christopher Hitchens vs. George Galloway debate http://www.seixon.com/blog/archives/2005/09/galloway_vs_hit.html, New York City (2005-09-14): On the 2003 invasion of Iraq 2000s, 2005

War, People, World, Family

“Our swollen budgets constantly have been misrepresented to the public. Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear — kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor — with the cry of grave national emergency. Always there has been some terrible evil at home or some monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it by furnishing the exorbitant funds demanded. Yet, in retrospect, these disasters seem never to have happened, seem never to have been quite real.”

Douglas MacArthur (1880–1964) U.S. Army general of the army, field marshal of the Army of the Philippines

Address to the Annual Stockholders Sperry Rand Corporation (30 July 1957), as published in General MacArthur Speeches and Reports 1908-1964 (2000) by Edward T. Imparato, p. 206

Fear, Home, Evil, Cry

“Before Mary Follett, industrial groups had seldom been the subject of study of political or social scientists. It was her special merit to turn from the traditional subjects of study - the state or the community as a whole - progressively to concentrate on the study of industry… Her approach was to analyse the nature of the consent on which any democratic group is based by examining the psychological factors underlying it. This consent, she suggested, is not static but a continuous process, generating new and living group ideas through the interpenetration of individual ideas.”

Lyndall Urwick (1891–1983) British management consultant

Source: 1950s, The pattern of management, 1956, p. 132-133, as cited in: John Sheldrake (2003), Management Theory, p. 74

Communication, Idea, Nature, Study

“During the daily peak viewing periods, television in the main insulates us from the realities of the world in which we live. If this state of affairs continues, we may alter an advertising slogan to read: LOOK NOW AND PAY LATER.
For surely we shall pay for using this most powerful instrument of communication to insulate the citizenry from the hard and demanding realities which must be faced if we are to survive. I mean the word survive literally.”

Edward R. Murrow (1908–1965) Television journalist

RTNDA Convention Speech (1958)

World, Communication, Reality, Reading

“I became one of the stately homos of England.”

Quentin Crisp book The Naked Civil Servant

Source: The Naked Civil Servant (1968), Ch. 23

“After Rome had acquired the undisputed mastery of the world, the Greeks were wont to annoy their Roman masters by the assertion, that Rome was indebted for her greatness to the fever, of which Alexander of Macedon died at Babylon on the 11th of June, 323. As it was not very agreeable for them to reflect on the actual past, they were fond of allowing their thoughts to dwell on what might have happened, had the great king turned his arms towards the west, and contested the Carthaginian supremacy by sea with his fleet, and the Roman supremacy by land with his phalanxes. It is not impossible that Alexander may have cherished such thoughts; nor is it necessary to resort for such an explanation of their origin to the mere difficulty which an autocrat provided with soldiers and ships experiences in setting limits to his warlike career. It was an enterprise worthy of a great Greek king to protect the siceliots against Carthage and the Tarentines against Rome.. and the Italian embassies from the Bruttians, Lucanians, and Etruscans, that long with numerous others made their appearance at Babylon, afforded him sufficient opportunities of becoming acquainted with the circumstances of the peninsula, and of contracting relations with it. Carthage with is many connections in the east could not but attract the attention of the mighty monarch, and it was probably part of his design to convert the nominal sovereignty of the Persian king over the Tyrian colony into a real one: the apprehensions of the Carthaginians are shown by the Phoenician spy in the suite of Alexander. Whether, however, those ideas were dreams or actual projects, the king died without having interfered in the affairs of the west, and his ideas were buried with him. For a few brief years a Grecian ruler had held in his hands the whole intellectual vigour of the Hellenic race combined with the whole material resources of the east. On his death the work to which his life had been devoted - the establishment of a Hellenism in the east - was by no means undone; but his empire had barely been united when it was again dismembered, and, admidst the constant quarrels of the different states that were formed out of its ruins, the object of world-wide interest which they were destined to promote - the diffusion of Greek culture in the east - though not abandoned, was prosecuted on a feeble and stunted scale.”

Theodor Mommsen (1817–1903) German classical scholar, historian, jurist, journalist, politician, archaeologist and writer

Vol. 1., Page 394 - 395. Translated by W.P.Dickson.
The History of Rome - Volume 1

Life, Death, World, Dreams

“Get the mind into the (partial) state that solved the old problem; then it might handle the new problem in the "same way."”

Marvin Minsky (1927–2016) American cognitive scientist

K-Linesː A Theory of Memory (1980)

Way, Problem

“It's obviously a tremendous loss for the state …. I think Livingston's stepping down makes a very powerful argument that Clinton should resign as well and move beyond this mess.”

David Vitter (1961) U.S. Senator from Louisiana

In May 1999, Vitter replaced Congressman Bob Livingston after Livingston resigned due to an adultery scandal.
[Konigsmark, Anne Rochell, A Week Of Crisis Impeachment: The Speakership Livingston's Constituents Decision to resign jolts home district, D4, The Atlanta Journal and The Atlanta Constitution, December 20, 1998, http://nl.newsbank.com/nl-search/we/Archives?p_action=doc&p_docid=0EADA4168D35692C, 2007-07-10]

Thinking, Loss

“The separation of men from women at the dinner was still in the mediaeval tradition. Another interesting feature of the evening is the relatively small number of people involved. Eighteen sat down to dinner, fifteen couples danced at the ball. The entertaining was ‘the finest that ever was seen’ because of the style and richness of the accompaniments, not because of its size. This was typical of the period. Feasts for several hundred people were still being given in the country, to prepare for an election or celebrate Christmas, births, weddings, and comings of age. They usually centred round dinner in the hall, and could involve all the neighbouring gentry and near-gentry, and even the tenants and local freeholders. But the entertainments which enjoyed the most prestige were small but elaborate ones for relatively few people – just as the prestigious part of the house was devoted to a few large apartments for great people coming on what amounted to a state visit. A hard line was still drawn between the inner ring of the great and smaller fry.”

Mark Girouard (1931) British architectural historian

Life in the English Country House: A Social and Architectural History (1978)

Women, Men, People, Age

“Religious faith is the only area of discourse where immunity through conversation is considered noble. It's the only area of our lives where someone can win points for saying, "There's nothing that you can do to change my mind and I'm taking no state of the world ultimately into account in believing what I believe. There's nothing to change about the world that would cause me to revise my beliefs."”

Sam Harris (1967) American author, philosopher and neuroscientist

Sam Harris, "The View From The End Of The World" (9 December 2005)
2000s

World, Faith, Change

“The party is all-embracing. It rules our lives in all their breadth and depth… Each activity and each need of the individual will thereby be regulated by the party as the representative of the general good… This is Socialism- not such trifles as the private possession of the means of production. Of what importance is that if I range men firmly within a discipline they cannot escape. Let them own land or factories as much as they please. The decisive factor is that the State, through the party, is supreme over all, regardless of whether they are owners or workers… Our Socialism goes far deeper.”

Hermann Rauschning (1887–1982) German politician

Source: The Voice of Destruction (1940), p. 191

Men, Decision

“The southern institution of racial segregation or racial separation was the correct, self-evident truth which arose from the chaos and confusion of the reconstruction period. Separation promotes racial harmony. It permits each race to follow its own pursuits, and its own civilization. Segregation is not discrimination. Segregation is not a badge of racial inferiority, and that it is not is recognized by both races in the Southern States. In fact, segregation is desired and supported by the vast majority of the members of both races in the South, who dwell side by side under harmonious conditions. … Let me make this clear, Mr. President: There is no racial hatred in the South. The Negro race is not an oppressed race. … Mr. President, it is the law of nature, it is the law of God, that every race has both the right and the duty to perpetuate itself. All free men have the right to associate exclusively with members of their own race, free from governmental interference, if they so desire. Free men have the right to send their children to schools of their own choosing, free from governmental interference and to build up their own culture, free from governmental interference. These rights are inherent in the Constitution of the United States and in the American system of government, both state and national, to promote and protect this right.”

James Eastland (1904–1986) American politician

1950s

Men, God, Children, Truth

“The collegiate young are being re-educated before they have been educated. From our collegiate ranks, the therapeutic will appear a re-educated man, one who can conquer even his subtler inhibitions; his final know-how will be to irrationalize his rationality and play games, however intellectualized, with all god-terms in order to be ruled by none. In their moral modestly therapeutics will be capable of anything; they will know that everything is possible because they will not be inhibited by any truth. Far more destructively than earlier interdict-burdened character types, the therapeutic will be the warring state writ small; he may be even cannier, less sentimental, stronger in ego, shifting about his principles and impulses like so many stage props.”

Philip Rieff (1922–2006) American sociologist

Fellow Teachers (1973)

God, War, Truth, Education

“Well, the clandestine aspect is that, clearly, the ability to influence the Congress--that's a clandestine activity, a covert activity. You know to some extent, the idea that the Holocaust Museum here in our country is another great ability to somehow make people feel guilty about being the people who did the most to try to end the Holocaust. I find--I just find the whole debate in the United States unbearably restricted with the inability to factually discuss what goes on between our two countries.”

Michael Scheuer (1952) American counterterrorism analyst

On Israel's alleged "clandestine activities". http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/005/249irrsq.asp 2000s

People, Feeling, Idea, Country

“At one time the Spartans were capable of such a wise measure, but not our present, mendaciously sentimental, bourgeois patriotic nonsense. The rule of six thousand Spartans over three hundred and fifty thousand Helots was only thinkable in consequence of the high racial value of the Spartans. But this was the result of a systematic race preservation; thus Sparta must be regarded as the first Völkisch State. The exposure of sick, weak, deformed children, in short their destruction, was more decent and in truth a thousand times more humane than the wretched insanity of our day which preserves the most pathological subject, and indeed at any price, and yet takes the life of a hundred thousand healthy children in consequence of birth control or through abortions, in order subsequently to breed a race of degenerates burdened with illnesses.”

Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) Führer and Reich Chancellor of Germany, Leader of the Nazi Party

As translated in Hitler's Secret Book (1961) Grove Press edition, pp. 8-9, 17-18
1920s, Zweites Buch (1928)

Life, Children, Truth, Birth

“The aesthetics of painting were always in a state of development parallel to the development of painting itself. They influenced each other and vice versa. But all of the sudden, in that famous turn of the century [1900] a few people thought they could take the bull by the horns and invent an aesthetic beforehand. After immediately disagreeing with each other, they began to form all kinds of groups, each with the idea of freeing art... The question as they saw it, was not so much what you could paint, but what you could not paint. You could not paint a house or a tree or a mountain. It was then that the subject matter came into existence as something you ought not to have.”

Willem de Kooning (1904–1997) Dutch painter

De Kooning's speech 'What Abstract Art means to me' on the symposium 'What is Abstract At' - at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 5 February, 1951, n.p.
1950's

People, Art, Mountain, Idea

“Regardless of the response from the Jewish person, we remain friends in support of the State of Israel as required by scripture.”

Jerry Falwell (1933–2007) American evangelical pastor, televangelist, and conservative political commentator

"Hagee, Falwell deny endorsing 'dual covenant'" in The Jerusalem Post (2 March 2006) http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull&cid=1139395523403

Support, Personality

“To be sure, the moment the study passes beyond bare description the student must leave the landscape itself, must go beneath it, even to state what its form represents — to translate the outer foliage of a forest into the forest, the outer surface of buildings into different kinds of buildings, etc…. Our interest in houses, factories, and forests cannot be confined to their surface form; only in the limited field of aesthetic geography could such a restriction be justified. Our very use of such words as house, barn, factory, office building, etc., indicates that we are primarily concerned with the internal functions within these structures, the external form is a secondary aspect which we use simply as a handy means to detect the internal function - and should use only insofar as it is a reliable means for that purpose.”

Richard Hartshorne (1899–1992) American Geographer

Source: The Nature of Geography (1939), p. 215-216; as cited in: John A. Agnew, James S. Duncan (2011) The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Human Geography. p. 122

Study, Housing

“The late affray that happened in this place, between the people of the town and those of the fleet, has been found to originate from a parcel of soldiers belonging to the Convention troops, and a party of British sailors which were engaged on board a privateer. The secret enemies to our cause, and the British officers in the neighbourhood of this place, are endeavouring to sow the seeds of discord as much as possible between the inhabitants of the place and the French belonging to the fleet. The French officers are well satisfied this is the state of the case, and it fills them with double resentment against the British. The Admiral and all the French officers are now upon an exceeding good footing with the gentlemen of the town. General Hancock takes unwearied pains to promote a good understanding with the French officers. His house is full from morning till night.”

Nathanael Greene (1742–1786) American general in the American Revolutionary War

Letter to George Washington (September 1778)

Pain, People, Secret, Understanding

“Japan's racialized worldview equated virtue with strength, the North Koreans are taught that their virtue has rendered them as vulnerable as children in an evil world — unless they are protected by a great leader who keeps a watchful eye on military readiness. Unfortunately for the United States, there is no place in this for any improvement in relations between the two countries.”

Brian Reynolds Myers (1963) American professor of international studies

2010s, North Korea's Race Problem (February 2010)

Children, World, Evil, Country

“I signed this measure with a deep sense of pride that the United States is an open society in which the people's right to know is cherished and guarded.”

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

1960s, Statement on the Freedom of Information Act (1966)

People, Sense

“In a general way, the literature of the twentieth century is essentially psychological; and psychology consists of describing states of the soul by displaying them all on the same plane, without any discrimination of value, as though good and evil were external to them, as though the effort toward the good could be absent at any moment from the thought of any man.”

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

“The responsibility of writers,” p. 168
On Science, Necessity, and the Love of God (1968)

Way, Soul, Literature, Effort

“Cherish the Minnesota State Fair. Wherever you find beauty and simplicity and truth, know that there is a committee somewhere planning to improve it --- don't let them do it.”

Garrison Keillor (1942) American radio host and writer

University of Minnesota Alumni Association (UMAA) Annual Meeting Keynote Speech (29 April 1992) UMAA 199204 to 199306 Meeting Minutes http://conservancy.umn.edu/bitstream/48842/1/199204-199306.pdf

Truth, Beauty

“It seems to me obvious that infants and many animals that do not in any ordinary sense have a language or perform speech acts nonetheless have Intentional states. Only someone in the grip of a philosophical theory would deny that small babies can literally be said to want milk and that dogs want to be let out or believe that their master is at the door.”

John Rogers Searle (1932) American philosopher

Source: Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind (1983), P. 5.

Dogs, Sense, Animals, Baby

“Whatever the reasons behind dubbing Modi an international pariah and the subject of a diplomatic boycott involving both the US and the European Union member states, one conclusion was inescapable: it was a brazen attempt to pronounce judgment on the internal affairs of a sovereign country. Modi, after all, hadn’t been held guilty [of] "mass murder" by an Indian criminal court. Indeed, there were no charges against him then or subsequently. Yes, the Gujarat leader had been pilloried mercilessly by both his political opponents and the human rights lobby that has formidable international links. A political aversion to Modi was translated into the diplomatic censure of a man who held a [c]onstitutional position. It was a step too far and one that didn't lend itself to an easy U-turn.”

Swapan Dasgupta (1955) Indian politician, journalist and columnist

"A mighty fall from a moral high ground", 2014

Country

“I was attacked for fighting a rearguard action in defence of “middle-class interests.”…Well, if “middle class values” include the encouragement of variety and individual choice, the provision of fair incentives and rewards for skill and hard work, the maintenance of effective barriers against the excessive power of the State and a belief in the wide distribution of individual private property, then they are certainly what I am trying to defend. This is not a fight for “privilege”; it is a fight for freedom—freedom for every citizen.”

Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013) British stateswoman and politician

Article for Daily Telegraph ("My Kind of Tory Party") (30 January 1975) http://www.margaretthatcher.org/speeches/displaydocument.asp?docid=102600 Shadow Secretary for Environment

Freedom, Fight

“They went after–and I know this because I had my hands literally on the paperwork for these sort of things–they went after high-ranking military officers; they went after members of Congress, both Senate and the House, especially on the intelligence committees and on the armed services committees and some of the–and judicial. But they went after other ones, too. They went after lawyers and law firms. All kinds of–heaps of lawyers and law firms. They went after judges. One of the judges is now sitting on the Supreme Court that I had his wiretap information in my hand. Two are former FISA court judges. They went after State Department officials. They went after people in the executive service that were part of the White House–their own people. They went after antiwar groups. They went after U. S. international–U. S. companies that that do international business, you know, business around the world. They went after U. S. banking firms and financial firms that do international business. They went after NGOs that–like the Red Cross, people like that that go overseas and do humanitarian work. They went after a few antiwar civil rights groups. So, you know, don’t tell me that there’s no abuse, because I’ve had this stuff in my hand and looked at it. And in some cases, I literally was involved in the technology that was going after this stuff.”

Russ Tice (1961) former intelligence analyst

As told to Peter B. Collins on Boiling Frog Post News, which is the website of Sibel Edmonds, a high-level FBI whistle-blower NSA Whistleblower: NSA Spying On – and Blackmailing – Top Government Officials and Military Officers, Fox News, 2013-06-20 http://nation.foxnews.com/2013/06/20/nsa-whistleblower-nsa-spying-%E2%80%93-and-blackmailing-%E2%80%93-top-government-officials-and-military,

People, World, Law, Intelligence

“Public officers, whose character and conduct remain open to debate and free discussion in the press, find their remedies for false accusations in actions under libel laws providing for redress and punishment, and not in proceedings to restrain the publication of newspapers and periodicals. The general principle that the constitutional guaranty of the liberty of the press gives immunity from previous restraints has been approved in many decisions under the provisions of state constitutions. The importance of this immunity has not lessened. While reckless assaults upon public men, and efforts to bring obloquy upon those who are endeavoring faithfully to discharge official duties, exert a baleful influence and deserve the severest condemnation in public opinion, it cannot be said that this abuse is greater, and it is believed to be less, than that which characterized the period in which our institutions took shape. Meanwhile, the administration of government has become more complex, the opportunities for malfeasance and corruption have multiplied, crime has grown to most serious proportions, and the danger of its protection by unfaithful officials and of the impairment of the fundamental security of life and property by criminal alliances and official neglect, emphasizes the primary need of a vigilant and courageous press, especially in great cities. The fact that the liberty of the press may be abused by miscreant purveyors of scandal does not make any the less necessary the immunity of the press from previous restraint in dealing with official misconduct. Subsequent punishment for such abuses as may exist is the appropriate remedy consistent with constitutional privilege.”

Charles Evans Hughes (1862–1948) American judge

Near v. Minnesota, 283 U.S. 697 (1931).
Judicial opinions

Life, Men, Unfaithfulness, Law

“Do we really think that the United States will have the protection of innocent Afghans in mind if it rains terror down on the Afghan infrastructure? We are supposedly fighting them because they immorally killed innocent civilians. That made them evil. If we do the same, are we any less immoral?”

George Lakoff (1941) American linguist

Don't Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate — The Essential Guide for Progressives (2004) as quoted in the Washington Monthly (November 2004) http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/monthly/2004_11.php

Thinking, Evil, Fight

“Agreeably to the request of the House of Representatives, communicated in their resolution of the 16th instant, I proceed to state under the reserve therein expressed, information received touching an illegal combination of private individuals against the peace and safety of the Union, and a military expedition planned by them against the territories of a power in amity with the United States, with the measures I have pursued for suppressing the same….
But by information received yesterday I learn that on the 22d of December, Mr. Burr descended the Cumberland with two boats merely of accommodation, carrying with him from that State no quota toward his unlawful enterprise. Whether after the arrival of the proclamation, of the orders, or of our agent, any exertion which could be made by that State, or the orders of the governor of Kentucky for calling out the militia at the mouth of Cumberland, would be in time to arrest these boats, and those from the falls of the Ohio, is still doubtful.”

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

Special Message to Congress on the Burr Conspiracy, declaring his former Vice President an illegal conspirator and a fugitive from justice (22 January 1807)
1800s, Second Presidential Administration (1805-1809)

Peace, Communication, Learning, Time

“There is nothing, nothing on Urras that we Anarresti need! We left with empty hands, a hundred and seventy years ago, and we were right. We took nothing. Because there is nothing here but States and their weapons, the rich and their lies, and the poor and their misery. There is no way to act rightly, with a clear heart, on Urras. There is nothing you can do that profit does not enter into, and fear of loss, and the wish for power. You cannot say good morning without knowing which of you is ‘superior’ to the other, or trying to prove it. You cannot act like a brother to other people, you must manipulate them, or command them, or obey them, or trick them. You cannot touch another person, yet they will not leave you alone. There is no freedom. It is a box—Urras is a box, a package, with all the beautiful wrapping of blue sky and meadows and forests and great cities. And you open the box, and what is inside it? A black cellar full of dust, and a dead man. A man whose hand was shot off because he held it out to others. I have been in Hell at last. Desar was right; it is Urras; Hell is Urras.”

Ursula K. Le Guin Hainish Cycle

Source: Hainish Cycle, (1974), Chapter 11 (pp. 346-347)

People, Fear, Beauty, Way

“It was our hope that Libya with its revolution would become a model of freedom, popular democracy and a state free from oppression and injustice. However Libya became another conventional state, even a dictatorial or police state. This is deeply regrettable. We are not like that, nor do we want to be like that.”

Muammar Gaddafi (1942–2011) Libyan revolutionary, politician and political theorist

Speech to heads of justice of the Jamahiriya (20 May 2009) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rM64DYglBk Speeches

Hope, Democracy, Freedom

“The acceptance of partition does not commit us to renounce Transjordan: one does not demand from anybody to give up his vision. We shall accept a state in the boundaries fixed today, but the boundaries of Zionist aspirations are the concern of the Jewish people and no external factor will be able to limit them.”

David Ben-Gurion (1886–1973) Israeli politician, Zionist leader, prime minister of Israel

Speech in 1937, accepting a British proposal for partition of Palestine which created a potential Jewish majority state, as quoted in New Outlook (April 1977)

People