Quotes about state
page 61

“Though the words "personal" and "personality" date to the 1380s, "responsibility" emerged only in the 1640s, as England began its great democratic ferment. This linguistic lag marked an arrested moral development. Our civilization developed personality early and responsibility late. Only the duties of democratic governance required a word to express the abstract principle, "a state of being responsible."”

Mark Riebling (1963) American writer

Personal Responsibility: How the Framers coined a phrase as they created a nation (2010)

Personality

“My chief reason for supporting the Church of England I find in the fact that, when compared with other creeds and other sects, it is essentially the Church of religious liberty. Whether in one direction or in another, it is continually possessed by the ambition, not of excluding, but of including, all shades of religious thought, all sorts and conditions of men, and in standing out like a lighthouse over a stormy ocean it marks the entrance to a port where those who are wearied at times with the woes of the world, and troubled often by the trials of existence, may search for and may find that "peace that passeth all understanding". I cannot and will not allow myself to believe that the English people, who are not only naturally religious, but also eminently practical, will ever consent, for the purpose of gratifying sectarian animosities, or for the wretched purpose of pandering to infidel proclivities, to deprive themselves of so abundant a fountain of aid and consolation, or acquiesce in the demolition of a constitution which elevates the life of the nation and consecrates the acts of the State.”

Lord Randolph Churchill (1849–1895) British politician

Speech in Birmingham (16 April 1884), quoted in The Times (17 April 1884), p. 10

Life, Men, People, World

“I have endeavoured, in the following treatise, to convey as complete an account of the present state of knowledge on the subject of Differential Equations, as was consistent with the idea of a work intended, primarily, for elementary instruction. It was my object, first of all, to meet the wants of those who had no previous acquaintance with the subject, but I also desired not quite to disappoint others who might seek for more v advanced information. These distinct, but not inconsistent - aims determined the plan of composition.”

George Boole (1815–1864) English mathematician, philosopher and logician

Source: 1850s, A treatise on differential equations (1859), p. v; Lead paragraph of the preface

Disappointment, Idea, Knowledge

“"Then those people are right who say that Heaven and Hell are only states of mind?"
"Hush," he said sternly. "Do not blaspheme. Hell is a state of mind — ye never said a truer word. And every state of mind, left to itself, every shutting up of the creature within the dungeon of its own mind — is, in the end, Hell. But Heaven is not a state of mind. Heaven is reality itself. All that is fully real is Heavenly."”

Clive Staples Lewis book The Great Divorce

Source: The Great Divorce (1944–1945), Ch. 9

People, Hell, Reality

“Do they believe that the aim of teaching English is to increase the exact and beautiful use of the language? Or that it is to inculcate and augment patriotism? Or that it is to diminish sorrow in the home? Or that it has some other end, cultural, economic, or military? … it was their verdict by a solemn referendum that the principal objective in teaching English was to make good spellers, and that after that came the breeding of good capitalizers. … I have maintained for years, sometimes perhaps with undue heat: that pedagogy in the United States is fast descending to the estate of a childish necromancy, and that the worst idiots, even among pedagogues, are the teachers of English. It is positively dreadful to think that the young of the American species are exposed day in and day out to the contamination of such dark minds. What can be expected of education that is carried on in the very sewers of the intellect? How can morons teach anything that is worth knowing?”

H.L. Mencken (1880–1956) American journalist and writer

On "teachers of English" in "The Schoolmarm's Goal" in The Lower Depths (1925)
1920s

Education, Beauty, Home, Thinking

“No state can match the beauty of the Chesapeake Bay, our beaches and farms, or the mountains of Western Maryland, the Port of Baltimore, or the historic charm of every corner of our state.”

Larry Hogan (1956) American politician

" State of the State Address: A New Direction for Maryland http://governor.maryland.gov/2015/02/04/state-of-the-state-address/" (4 February 2015)

Beauty, Mountain

“The world "legendary" is much overused, but it certainly applies to the seventy-six-year-old Andreas Papandreou, whose life had encompassed so much Greek-American history. As a Greek-born American citizen, he earned a doctorate in economics from Harvard, served in the United States Navy during World War II, and then taught at Harvard, the University of Minnesota, and Berkeley (where he was chairman of the economics department). He was part of Adlai Stevenson's advisory team during his two runs for the presidency. Then he returned to Greece and fought his way into power, surviving a long period in the political wilderness after right-wing pressure forced the resignation of his father, Georgios Papandreou, in 1965, two years before the military coup. He won the prime ministership fifteen years after his father had been forced out of it, and then lost it following a series of corruption scandals - only to make another astonishing comeback, regaining it again in 1993. To conservative Americans, he was anathema, an American turncoat. To Greeks, both those who followed him and those who hated him, he was the dominant political figure of the era.”

Richard Holbrooke (1941–2010) American diplomat

Source: 1990s, To End a War (1998), p. 124

Life, Hate, War, World

“Side by side … the British and French peoples have advanced to rescue … mankind from the foulest and most soul-destroying tyranny which has ever darkened and stained the pages of history. Behind them … gather a group of shattered States and bludgeoned races: the Czechs, the Poles, the Norwegians, the Danes, the Dutch, the Belgians -- upon all of whom the long night of barbarism will descend, unbroken even by a star of hope, unless we conquer, as conquer we must; as conquer we shall.”

Winston S. Churchill book The Second World War

Radio broadcast, Be Ye Men of Valour, May 19, 1940 ( partial text http://www.churchill-society-london.org.uk/BeYeMofV.html). The Second World War (1939–1945)

People, Hope, Soul, History

“Doing identity politics means trying to drum up support by appealing to specific groups on the basis of their ethnicity, religion, language, sexuality or other characteristics, instead of speaking to them as Canadians interested in the wellbeing of our country as a whole.
Identity politics has become pervasive and is being practiced by all political parties trying to buy votes. Political debate has degenerated into a contest between different ways of pandering to specific groups instead of appealing to our common interests.
I have repeatedly stated that I believe identity politics is reductive, divisive and destructive of our social cohesion. I am doing THE OPPOSITE of identity politics by focusing on policy solutions that concern ALL Canadians. And I will continue to do so.”

Maxime Bernier (1963) Canadian politician

16 August 2018 https://twitter.com/MaximeBernier/status/1030087576328105985

Religion, Way, Support, Country

“I think it is only because capitalism has proved so enormously more efficient than alternative methods that it has survived at all. (…) I'm not sure capitalism is the right word. There is a sense in which every society is capitalist. The Soviet Union was capitalist, but it was state capitalism. Latin American societies in the past have been capitalist, but it has been oligarchic capitalism. So what we really need to talk about is not capitalism but free market or competitive capitalism which is the system that we would like to have adopted, not just capitalism.”

Milton Friedman (1912–2006) American economist, statistician, and writer

Interview with Parker in Randall E. Parker(ed.), Reflection on the Great Depression (2002)

Thinking, Sense, Past

“Democracy makes Rumanian citizens out of millions of Jews by making them the Rumanians' equals. By giving them the same legal rights. Equality? What for? We have been here for thousands of years. Plow and weapon in hand. With our labors and blood. Why equality with those who have been here for only one hundred, ten, or even five years? Let's look at the past: We created this state. Let's look at the future: We Rumanians are fully responsible for Greater Rumania. They have nothing to do with it. What could be the responsibility of Jews, in the history books, for the disappearance of the Rumanian state? Thus: no equality in labor, sacrifice, and struggle for the creation of the state and no equal responsibility for its future. Equality? According to an old maxim: Equality is to treat unequally the unequal. What are the reasons for the Jews' demanding equal treatment, equal political rights with the Rumanians?”

Corneliu Zelea Codreanu (1899–1938) Romanian politician

For My Legionaries: The Iron Guard (1936), Politics

Books, Democracy, History, Past

“Now shall the promises made to Christ by God the Father before the foundation of the world, the promises of the covenant of redemption, be fully accomplished. Christ shall now have perfectly obtained the joy set before Him, for which He undertook those great sufferings in His state of humiliation. Now shall all the hopes and expectations of the saints be fulfilled. The state of the church before was progressive and preparatory; but now she is arrived at her most perfect state of glory. All the glory of the church on earth is but a faint shadow of this her consummate glory in heaven.”

Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758) Christian preacher, philosopher, and theologian

A History of the Work of Redemption including a View of Church History (1839).

God, World, Hope, Suffering

“To be sure, Protestant theology presents a different, supposedly unpolitical doctrine, conceiving of God as the "wholly other," just as in political liberalism the state and politics are conceived of as the "wholly other." We have come to recognize that the political is the total, and as a result we know that any decision about whether something is unpolitical is always a political decision, irrespective of who decides and what reasons are advanced. This also holds for the question whether a particular theology is a political or an unpolitical theology.”

Carl Schmitt (1888–1985) German jurist, political theorist and professor of law

Political Theology (1922), Preface to Second Edition (1934)

God, Question, Decision

“The ruling power within, when it is in its natural state, is so related to outer circumstances that it easily changes to accord with what can be done and what is given it to do.”

Marcus Aurelius book Meditations

IV, 1
Meditations (c. 121–180 AD), Book IV

Nature, Change

“The law of 1790 providing that no one could become a citizen of the United States except free Whites was the law until the aftermath of the Civil War added the word "black" or "of African descent" to those who could be naturalized. This last provision should be repealed and the blacks with the South American and Central American Indians put on the same footing as the Orientals.”

Madison Grant (1865–1937) American lawyer, eugenicist, and conservationist

The Conquest of a Continent (1933)

War, Law, Nature

“By a ‘spontaneous disturbance’ we shall mean any change in the underlying conditions, the cause of which we are prepared to take for granted and do not wish to examine, but the effect of which on the domestic and external position of our two countries we wish to examine. By a ‘policy’ change we shall mean a change which the State or some public authority brings about as a result of a definite decision of State policy in order to achieve some given end of general economic policy and in particular to offset some of the effects of a ‘spontaneous disturbance’. Finally, by an ‘induced’ change is meant a change in some quantity which occurs on purely commercial principles because of the repercussions of some previous ‘spontaneous’ or ‘policy’ change.”

James Meade (1907–1995) British economist

Source: The balance of payments, 1951, p. 43; As cited in: Metaxas, Phillip Edmund, and Ernst Juerg Weber. Australia's contribution to international trade theory: The dependent economy model. (2013), p. 18

Decision, Change, Country

“Wijetunga was quickly and unanimously chosen by a stunned Parliament to take over from Premadasa as acting President for the remaining 18 months of his term of office. Press and trade union freedoms, curtailed by the authoritarian Premadasa under a state of emergency, were restored, if only temporarily. Sri Lanka seemed to breathe easier now that the combative Premadasa was no longer in power.”

Dingiri Banda Wijetunga (1916–2008) President of Sri Lanka

Quoted on Asian Tribune, "D.B.Wijetunga – A Man Who Restored Democracy Back In Sri Lanka" http://www.asiantribune.com/node/13389, September 26, 2008. About

Freedom

“Peace is not so much a political mandate as it is a shared state of consciousness that remains elevated and intact only to the degree that those who value it volunteer their existence as living examples of the same. It does not end when jetliners are used as bombs to decimate skyscrapers, nor does it end when a father shoots to death his adolescent son and daughter. Peace ends with the unraveling of individual hope and the emergence of the will to worship violence as a healer of private and social dis-ease. It is, after all, not only nations and communities that need peace so desperately but individuals divided against other individuals and within themselves.”

Aberjhani (1957) author

(p. 257, The American Poet Who Went Home Again).
Book Sources, The American Poet Who Went Home Again (2008)

Death, Peace, Hope, Communication

“Boston State-house is the hub of the solar system. You couldn't pry that out of a Boston man if you had the tire of all creation straightened out for a crow-bar.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809–1894) Poet, essayist, physician

The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (1858)

Housing

“In its application to natural science Grosseteste based his method of verification and falsification on two assumptions about the nature of reality. (a) The first was the principle of the uniformity of nature, meaning that forms are always uniform in their operations…. In support of this principle he quoted 'Aristotles II de Generat.:…'the same cause, provided it remains in the same condition, cannot produce anything but the same effect.' (b) The second assumption Grosseteste made was that of the principle of economy, or lex parsimoniae. This he also derived from Aristotle, who stated it as a pragmatic principle.”

Alistair Cameron Crombie (1915–1996) Australian zoologist, historian of science

Robert Grosseteste and the Origins of Experimental Science 1100-1700 (1953)

Quotes, Support, Nature, Reality

“The unwritten motto of United States Robot and Mechanical Men Corp. was well-known: “No employee makes the same mistake twice. He is fired the first time.””

Isaac Asimov book I, Robot

“Catch That Rabbit”, p. 65
I, Robot (1950)

Men, Time

“The centralized state power that is peculiar to bourgeois society came into being in the period of the fall of absolutism. Two institutions are most characteristic of this state machine: bureaucracy and a standing army.”

Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) Russian politician, led the October Revolution

2.2, Essential Works of Lenin (1966)
(1917)

“[W]hat Reconstruction succeeded in doing: it helped us avoid a renewed outbreak of civil war (which, considering the history of civil conflicts, is no small achievement); it laid the legal and constitutional foundations for a more egalitarian America, foundations that it took only sixty-five years to revitalize into the Civil Rights Movement; it restored the original balance of constitutional federalism, putting aside the states’ rights absolutism of the pre-war Southern aristocracy. But I do not say this to encourage any historical Pollyannaism about Reconstruction. That restored federal balance permitted the emergence of the first women’s voting rights legislation, the curtailing of municipal corruption, and the introduction of widespread public schooling; it also permitted the emergence of Jim Crow. But as Lincoln said, “this is a world of compensation.””

Allen C. Guelzo (1953) American historian

The historical good and the evil, even in Reconstruction, do not come unmixed.
2010s, Interview with Sara Gabbard (2018)

Women, War, World, School

“I am very pleased to be here in Israel, the land of our friends, friends who are going through a complex period like their neighbors. We are convinced that the efforts of all countries and governments in the region will find a way to reach peace and long-term security. I have arrived here after visiting Beirut and Damascus and I want to tell the Prime Minister and all other ministers that today, everyone wants peace more than ever, peace and security.Now, the preferred position is that of those who do not want to live amidst endless arguments about who was right first and last. Everybody wants to sit around the negotiating table. Everyone aspires to reach decisions that will be acceptable to all and certainly to Israel. We always point out the Russian Federation’s full agreement that the State of Israel has the full right to peace and security. We are convinced that that there is no other way to resolve this problem except through peace.We are certain that UN Security Council Resolution #1701, that we all worked on together, will be carried out in full by all sides. We think that the abductees should be released as soon as possible and we are also convinced that the military blockade of Lebanon must be lifted and that the Lebanese army needs to deploy in southern Lebanon in order to facilitate the Israeli army’s withdrawal as quickly as possible. But we are convinced that peace is attainable only if an international conference - with the participation of all sides - convenes. Lastly, I would like to point out that we are very much looking forward to the Prime Minister’s visit to Moscow in order to discuss bilateral relations.”

Sergey Lavrov (1950) Russian politician and Foreign Minister

In Israel, where he meets the Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, {{September 2006)) http://www.mfa.gov.il/MFA/Government/Communiques/2006/PM+Olmert+meets+Russian+FM+Lavrov+7-Sept-2006.htm

Peace, Way, Problem, Thinking

“We're in a state of crisis where our nation is literally ripping apart at the seams right now, and lawlessness is occurring from one ocean to the other. And we're seeing the fulfillment of the Book of Judges here in our own time, where every man doing that which is right in his own eyes—in other words, anarchy.”

Michele Bachmann (1956) American politician

2000s

Books, Time

“A Christianity split into a diversity of ecclesiastical streams, the dualism implicit within its political agenda – nation-forming on the one side, universalism on the other was further accentuated. The classical eastern orthodox form stressing the power of the emperor was in principle universalist enough in its vision of Constantinople as the New Rome, but in practice Byzantium became a rather thoroughly Greek empire, alienating non-Greeks in Egypt, Syria or the west. This combined with its considerable degree of Caesaropapism led to the generation of a type of church-state relationship characteristic of eastern autocephalous churches of a highly nationalist type.”

Adrian Hastings (1929–2001) Roman Catholic priest, historian and author

Source: The construction of nationhood: ethnicity, religion, and nationalism (1997), p. 202; As cited in: Cristian Romocea (2011) Church and State: Religious Nationalism and State Identification in Post-Communist Romania . p. 90.

Universe

“As for some countries’ concerns about Russia's possible aggressive actions, I think that only an insane person and only in a dream can imagine that Russia would suddenly attack NATO. I think some countries are simply taking advantage of people’s fears with regard to Russia. They just want to play the role of front-line countries that should receive some supplementary military, economic, financial or some other aid. Therefore, it is pointless to support this idea; it is absolutely groundless. But some may be interested in fostering such fears. I can only make a conjecture.

For example, the Americans do not want Russia's rapprochement with Europe. I am not asserting this, it is just a hypothesis. Let’s suppose that the United States would like to maintain its leadership in the Atlantic community. It needs an external threat, an external enemy to ensure this leadership. Iran is clearly not enough – this threat is not very scary or big enough. Who can be frightening? And then suddenly this crisis unfolds in Ukraine. Russia is forced to respond. Perhaps, it was engineered on purpose, I don’t know. But it was not our doing.

Let me tell you something – there is no need to fear Russia. The world has changed so drastically that people with some common sense cannot even imagine such a large-scale military conflict today. We have other things to think about, I assure you.”

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

2015-06-06, Interview to the Italian newspaper Il Corriere della Sera. http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/49629 2011 - 2015

People, World, Fear, Dreams

“Control of thought is more important for governments that are free and popular than for despotic and military states. The logic is straightforward: a despotic state can control its domestic enemies by force, but as the state loses this weapon, other devices are required to prevent the ignorant masses from interfering with public affairs, which are none of their business.”

Noam Chomsky book Deterring Democracy

Deterring Democracy (1992), p. 357 http://books.google.com/books?id=uZui06DXqmcC&pg=PA357. Quotes 1990s, 1990-1994

Business

“Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power.”

Benito Mussolini (1883–1945) Duce and President of the Council of Ministers of Italy. Leader of the National Fascist Party and subsequen…

This quote spread rapidly in the United States after appearing in a column by Molly Ivins (24 November 2002). It is repeated often and sometimes attributed to the "Fascism" entry in the 1932 Enciclopedia Italiana. However hard copies of the 1932 Enciclopedia Italiana exist in numerous libraries and the alleged quote is not in the text, nor is there anything that would support the alleged quote. A vaguely similar statement does appear in Doctrine of Fascism. We are, in other words, a state which controls all forces acting in nature. We control political forces, we control moral forces, we control economic forces, therefore we are a full-blown Corporative state. The same document explains that the "corporations" (corporazioni) on which the Fascist state rested were its own creations, modeled on guild associations and not private companies, which Italian normally calls società. For details see "Mussolini on the Corporate State" http://www.publiceye.org/fascist/corporatism.html by Chip Berlet. Attributed

“In his recent book, 'Welcome to the Desert of the Real', famed Slovenian socialist intellectual Slavoj Zizek tackles the Palestinian question in a most unoriginal manner. What concerns him most is not the foundational racism of Zionism and its concrete offspring, a racist Jewish state, nor the racist curricula of Israeli Jewish schools, the racist Israeli Jewish media representations of Palestinians, the racist declarations of Israeli Jewish leaders on the right and on the left, or the Jewish supremacist rights and privileges guiding Zionism and Israeli state laws and policies -- all of which seem of little concern to him -- but rather Arab 'anti-Semitism' which should not be 'tolerated.”

Joseph Massad (1963) Associate Professor of Arab Studies

Arabs are in fact reacting to Zionist Jewish colonialism and its commitment to European white supremacy in Jewish guise.
Ibid.
"The legacy of Jean-Paul Sartre"

Books, School, Law, Question

“Accessions have continually been made to the Republican Party, ever since its organization, it has won to the support of its principles good men, from time to time, from all the other parties, until it now embraces the best men of the country. It has become a compact and overshadowing organization, sufficiently powerful to take possession of and to administer the Government, upon the great principles of liberty, equality, and justice, as embodied in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States.”

Elbridge G. Spaulding (1809–1897) American politician

Remarks on the Republican platform (1860)

Men, Justice, Support, Time

“If the Bill of Rights was intended to place strict limits on federal power and protect individual and locality from the national government—the 14th Amendment effectively defeated that purpose by placing the power to enforce the Bill of Rights in federal hands, where it was never intended to be. Put differently, matters previously subject to state jurisdiction have been pulled into the orbit of the judiciary.”

Ilana Mercer South African writer

"Whodunit? Who Meddled With Our Democracy?" Part 2 http://american-exceptionalism.org/whodunit-who-meddled-with-our-american-democracy/, The Heartland Institute, May 18, 2018. 2010s, 2018

“(Tagore is) 'making a statement of fact, just as the remembered lines from a child’s primer (jal pare/pata nare’; rain falls/the leaf trembles) that first drew Tagore to poetry state a fact. Here, Tagore seems to be telling us that no afflatus or elaboration is necessary, because the world is at its most compelling as it is.”

Amit Chaudhuri (1962) contemporary Indian-English novelist

Calcutta: Two Years in The City (2013)

World

“Talk of secularism is meaningful when it refers to the weakness of traditional religious belief or the lack of power of churches and other religious bodies. That is what is meant when we say Britain is a more secular country than the United States, and in this sense secularism is an achievable condition. But if it means a type of society in which religion is absent, secularism is a kind of contradiction, for it is defined by what it excludes. Post-Christian secular societies are formed by the beliefs they reject, whereas a society that had truly left Christianity behind would lack the concepts that shaped secular thought.”

John Gray book Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia

Post-Apocalypse: After Secularism (pp. 267-8)
Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia (2007)

Religion, Sense, Country

“The chief difference between free capitalism and State socialism seems to be this: that under the former a man pursues his own advantage openly, frankly and honestly, whereas under the latter he does so hypocritically and under false pretenses.”

H.L. Mencken (1880–1956) American journalist and writer

397
1940s–present, Minority Report : H.L. Mencken's Notebooks (1956)

Falseness

“On the assumption that the shoot-down was central to the larger plan of Hutu Power and genocide, this would have required a miracle of Hutu incompetence; but it would be entirely understandable if it was carried out by Kagame’s force as part of their planned program to seize state power.”

Edward S. Herman (1925–2017) American journalist

Peterson and Herman, “Genocide Denial and Genocide Facilitation: Gerald Caplan and The Politics of Genocide” https://mronline.org/2010/07/04/genocide-denial-and-genocide-facilitation-gerald-caplan-and-the-politics-of-genocide/, MR Online, July 4, 2010. 2010s

Understanding, Parting

“Your ultimate allegiance is not to the government, not to the state, not to nation, not to any man-made institution. The Christian owes his ultimate allegiance to God, and if any earthly institution conflicts with God's will it is your Christian duty to take a stand against it. You must never allow the transitory evanescent demands of man-made institutions to take precedence over the eternal demands of the Almighty God.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

“ Paul's Letter to American Christians http://mlk-kpp01.stanford.edu/index.php/encyclopedia/documentsentry/doc_pauls_letter_to_american_christians/", Sermon delivered at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Montgomery, Alabama (4 November 1956) 1950s, Paul's Letter to American Christians (1956)

God

“[Barack] Obama is a radical communist and I think it is becoming clear. That is what I told people in Illinois and now everybody realizes it is coming true. He is going to destroy this country and we are either going to stop him or the United States of America is going to cease to exist.”

Alan Keyes (1950) American politician

Interview with KHAS-TV, Hastings, Nebraska, February 19, 2009. http://new.khastv.com/modules/news/article.php?storyid=16300 2009

People, Thinking, Country

“Again, it should be borne in mind that the mere text, and only the text, and not any commentaries or creeds written by those who wished to give the text a meaning apart from its plain reading, was adopted as the Constitution of the United States. It should also be borne in mind that the intentions of those who framed the Constitution, be they good or bad, for slavery or against slavery, are so respected so far, and so far only, as we find those intentions plainly stated in the Constitution. It would be the wildest of absurdities, and lead to endless confusion and mischiefs, if, instead of looking to the written paper itself, for its meaning, it were attempted to make us search it out, in the secret motives, and dishonest intentions, of some of the men who took part in writing it. It was what they said that was adopted by the people, not what they were ashamed or afraid to say, and really omitted to say.”

Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman

1860s, The Constitution of the United States: Is It Pro-Slavery or Anti-Slavery? (1860)

Men, People, Secret, Search

“The regulatory chill caused by the mere existence of investor-State dispute settlements has effectively dissuaded many States from adopting much-needed health and environmental protection measures.”

Alfred de Zayas (1947) American United Nations official

Report of the Independent Expert on the promotion and protection of all human rights, civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights, including the right to development https://documents-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/G16/151/19/PDF/G1615119.pdf?OpenElement. 2016, Report submitted to the UN Human Rights Council

Health

“The people in every state in this country should have the right to determine who they want as president and what the agenda of the Democratic Party should be. That’s why we are in this race until the last vote is cast. That is why this campaign is going to the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia with as many delegates as possible to fight for a progressive party platform that calls for a $15 an hour minimum wage, an end to our disastrous trade policies, a Medicare-for-all health care system, breaking up Wall Street financial institutions, ending fracking in our country, making public colleges and universities tuition free and passing a carbon tax so we can effectively address the planetary crisis of climate change.”

Bernie Sanders (1941) American politician, senator for Vermont

Statement on his candidacy (27 April 2016) http://www.mediaite.com/online/sanders-emphasizes-fight-for-progressive-party-platform-in-primary-night-statement/ 2010s, 2016

People, Health, Universe, Change

“All of our conscious states, without exception, are caused by lower level neurobiological processes in the brain, and they are realized in the brain as higher level, or system features. It's about as mysterious as the liquidity of water, right? The liquidity is not an extra juice squirted out by the H2O molecules, it's a condition that the system is in; and just as the jar full of water can go from a liquid to solid, depending on the behavior of the molecules, so your brain can go from a state of being conscious to a state of being unconscious, depending on the behavior of the molecules. The famous mind body problem is that simple.”

John Rogers Searle (1932) American philosopher

"Our shared condition — consciousness" (May, 2013)

Behavior, Problem, Water, Dependency

“For my own part, I find it best to assume that a good sound scolding or castigation has some latent and strengthening influence on my Grandson's Configuration; though I own that I have no grounds for thinking so. At all events I am not alone in my way of extricating myself from this dilemma; for I find that many of the highest Circles, sitting as Judges in law courts, use praise and blame towards Regular and Irregular Figures; and in their homes I know by experience that, when scolding their children, they speak about "right" or "wrong" as vehemently and passionately as if they believed that these names represented real existences, and that a human Figure is really capable of choosing between them.Constantly carrying out their policy of making Configuration the leading idea in every mind, the Circles reverse the nature of that Commandment which in Spaceland regulates the relations between parents and children. With you, children are taught to honour their parents; with us — next to the Circles, who are the chief object of universal homage — a man is taught to honour his Grandson, if he has one; or, if not, his Son. By "honour", however, is by no means meant "indulgence", but a reverent regard for their highest interests: and the Circles teach that the duty of fathers is to subordinate their own interests to those of posterity, thereby advancing the welfare of the whole State as well as that of their own immediate descendants.”

Edwin Abbott Abbott book Flatland

Source: Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (1884), PART I: THIS WORLD, Chapter 12. Of the Doctrine of our Priests

Children, Law, Way, Home

“Large-scale riots in East Pakistan have compelled over two lakh Hindus and other minorities to come over to India. Indians naturally feel incensed by the happenings in East Bengal. To bring the situation under control and to prescribe the right remedy for the situation it is essential that the malady be properly diagnosed. And even in this state of mental agony, the basic values of our national life must never be forgotten. It is our firm conviction that guaranteeing the protection of the life and property of Hindus and other minorities in Pakistan is the responsibility of the Government of India. To take a nice legalistic view about the matter that Hindus in Pakistan are Pakistani nationals would be dangerous and can only result in killings and reprisals in the two countries, in greater or lesser measure. When the Government of India fails to fulfill this obligation towards the minorities in Pakistan, the people understandably become indignant. Our appeal to the people is that this indignation should be directed against the Government and should in no case be given vent to against the Indian Muslims. If the latter thing happens, it only provides the Government with a cloak to cover its own inertia and failure, and an opportunity to malign the people and repress them. So far as the Indian Muslims are concerned, it is our definite view that, like all other citizens, their life and property must be protected in all circumstances. No incident and no logic can justify any compromise with truth in this regard. A state, which cannot guarantee the right of living to its citizens, and citizens who cannot assure safety of their neighbours, would belong to the barbaric age. Freedom and security to every citizen irrespective of his faith has indeed been India’s sacred tradition. We would like to reassure every Indian Muslim in this regard and would wish this message to reach every Hindu home that it is their civic and national duty to ensure the fulfillment of this assurance.”

Deendayal Upadhyaya (1916–1968) RSS thinker and co-founder of the political party Bharatiya Jana Sangh

Joint statement for the Indo-Pak confederation that D Upadhyaya signed, on 12 April 1964, with Dr Lohia, quoted in L.K. Advani, My Country My Life (2008)

Life, People, Truth, Age

“Bly is a poet, he is a big cat, so to speak, and not some chipmunk from the how-to culture. But it is the how-to culture that has picked up on his book. … And yet, for a while Iron John transformed male consciousness in the United States. The wild men weekends and initiation, adventure holidays and whatnot, which were big business, may prove to be ephemeral. But what does one make of the unabashed references in the press to "men's liberation" and the men's movement and the fact that there are now at least half a dozen magazines devoted to nothing else? Changing men, journeymen, man. … Bly's average reader is not a poet and a critic, but a weightlifter from Brooklyn.”

Martin Amis (1949) Welsh novelist

"Political Correctness: Robert Bly and Philip Larkin" (1997)

Men, Books, Cats, Business

“For the state to wither away completely, complete communism is necessary.”

Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) Russian politician, led the October Revolution

Source: (1917), Ch. 3

Communication

“What I did was restate the law. I was talking about a situation in which the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms comes smashing into a house, doesn't say who they are, and their guns are out, they're shooting, and they're in the wrong place. This has happened time and time again. The ATF has gone in and gotten the wrong guy in the wrong place. The law is that if somebody is shooting at you, using deadly force, the mere fact that they are a law enforcement officer, if they are in the wrong, does not mean you are obliged to allow yourself to be killed so your kinfolk can have a wrongful death action. You are legally entitled to defend yourself and I was speaking of exactly those kind of situations. If you're going to do that, you should know that they're wearing body armor so you should use a head shot. Now all I'm doing is stating the law, but all the nuances in there got left out when the story got repeated.”

G. Gordon Liddy (1930) American lawyer in Watergate scandal

On his 1994 comments on taking head shots at ATF agents, as quoted in a 2003 interview at Right Wing News http://www.rightwingnews.com/interviews/liddy.php

Death, Alcohol, Law, Guy

“Most local imams in Dagestan shun radical views, but they have found it hard to counter the appeal of radical ideas promoted by the Islamic State. Some imams who spoke against radical Islam have been killed.” Why have they “found it hard to counter the appeal of radical ideas promoted by the Islamic State”? To Western leaders such as David Cameron, John Kerry, Joe Biden, Pope Francis, the U. S. Catholic bishops, and a host of others, it is patently obvious that the Qur’an teaches peace and that Islam is a religion of peace. So it ought to be child’s play for these imams in Dagestan to refute the twisted, hijacked version of Islam presented by the Islamic State. Here’s an idea: why doesn’t Barack Obama send Kerry to Dagestan to explain to young Muslims how the Islamic State is misunderstanding and misrepresenting Islam? Or maybe Pope Francis could go there, or he could send some Arabic-speaking Eastern Catholic bishop — say, one who knows that Islam is at its core a peaceful religion and who moves actively to silence and ostracize those who say otherwise — to the Islamic State, straight to Raqqa, to explain to the caliph how he is misunderstanding Islam. That would clear up this problem in a hurry. I volunteer to pay the bishop’s airfare.”

Robert Spencer (1962) American author and blogger

Jihad Watch - Islamic State on recruitment spree in Russia, “moderate” imams can’t counter the jihadis’ appeal http://www.jihadwatch.org/2015/10/islamic-state-on-recruitment-spree-in-russia-moderate-imams-cant-counter-the-jihadis-appeal (29 October 2015)

Peace, Religion, Idea, Problem

“In the disposition of capital cases in the United States, the median elapsed time between sentence and execution is approximately seventeen months. […] However, even an attorney of moderate talent can postpone doomsday year after year, for the system of appeals that pervades American jurisprudence amounts to a legalistic wheel of fortune […].”

Truman Capote book In Cold Blood

Part 4
In Cold Blood (1965)

Time

“Since the late 19th century, aging has been the normal state of all industrial societies; it is a sustained trend. Societies designed to cater to the needs of aging populations will soon become the accepted political condition of our species. Acknowledging that fact will, at some point, slide so smoothly into the conventional wisdom that future generations may not realize that this is a major new feature of modern life, this is different, this is not what human culture was ever meant to be—and it all started now.”

Theodore Roszak (1933–2011) American social historian, social critic, writer

The Making of an Elder Culture (2009)

Life, Wisdom, Age, Future

“Shine, ye stars of heaven,
On a world of pain!
See old Time destroying
All our hoarded gain;
All our sweetest flowers,
Every stately shrine,
All our hard-earned glory,
Every dream divine! Shine, ye stare of heaven,
On the rolling years!
See how Time, consoling,
Dries the saddest tears,
Bids the darkest storm-clouds
Pass in gentle rain,
While upspring in glory
Flowers and dreams again!”

Adelaide Anne Procter (1825–1864) English poet and songwriter

"Shining Stars".
Legends and Lyrics: A Book of Verses (1858)

Pain, World, Dreams, Star

“People can live without a giant state. We've proven that already. But a giant state cannot live without dependent people. We feed the beast that puts us in shackles of our own creation. They are dependent on us. We think of revolutions as gunfire in the streets. But a soft and creeping tyranny can be beaten with a soft and creeping revolution. Think about it. Think about all the ways the totalitarian state is dependent on your personal actions. Think about what you do every day to help feed this beast and then stop doing that!”

Bill Whittle (1959) author, director, screenwriter, editor

Afterburner with Bill Whittle: Dependence Day https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mqZkTsmv4kw (3 July 2013) 2010s

People, Way, Thinking, Help

“Thus, though the Fascist conception of property refused to countenance collective possession as such, individual ownership rights were understood to be strictly subordinate to collective discipline. It was not the individual ownership of property that concerned Fascists, but it subordination to collective control. Property was understood to perform social functions rather than to manifest individual rights. It was clear that the conception of property as a social function was broad enough to include socialization of the means of production, should that be required by the national interests as interpreted by the state.”

A. James Gregor (1929–2019) American political scientist

Source: The Ideology of Fascism: The Rationale of Totalitarianism, (1969), p. 305

“When I came to the states in the mid 1960s — 1964, 1964 — I didn't think I'd be here maybe a couple years, going to have a great experience in the United States and then go back to Canada. Well, here we are 40 years later.”

Peter Jennings (1938–2005) News anchor

Larry King Interview (8 September 2003)

Thinking

“What I have to express is not handled with words. It must 'come' tot the observer. It must carry its influence over the mind of the individual into that region of him which is more than the mind. The pictures must reach inwards into the deeper experiences of the beholder – and mind you they care in no sense religious tracts – there is no story to them or literature – no morals – they are merely artistic expressions of mystical states – these in themselves being my own personal motives as drawn from either special experiences or aggregate ones.”

Marsden Hartley (1877–1943) American artist

letter to Alfred Stieglitz, September 28, 1913, Hartley Archive, Yale University; as quoted in Marsden Hartley, by Gail R. Scott, Abbeville Publishers, Cross River Press, 1988, New York p. 9
1908 - 1920

Literature, Motivation, Sense, Personality

“The "Great Society" has not worked and it's put us into the modern welfare state. If you look at China, they don't have food stamps. If you look at China, they're in a very different situation. They save for their own retirement security… They don't have the modern welfare state and China's growing. And so what I would do is look at the programs that LBJ gave us with the Great Society and they'd be gone.”

Michele Bachmann (1956) American politician

CBS Republican Debate, 2011-11-12, quoted in * 2011-11-12
Bachmann: America Should Be Less Socialist… Like China
Benjy
Sarlin
Talking Points Memo
http://2012.talkingpointsmemo.com/2011/11/bachmann-america-should-be-more-like-china.php
2011-11-14
2010s, 2012 Presidential campaign

Food

“Poetry is an art form that demands heightened attention and retention. It both invites and rewards more intense involvement than we normally give to other kinds of speech. Poetic technique, therefore, is never esoteric but eminently practical. It serves at least two purposes. First, it announces that a poem differs from other kinds of speech, that it requires the audience's special attention. A poem begins by attracting our attention through its sound, shape, typography, syntax, texture, or tone. Second, the technique maintains the audience's involvement. All poetic form is a way of keeping the audience's attention beyond what ordinary language requires. Meter, for example, creates a gentle trance state in the auditor. Since poetry is more intense, condensed, and expressive than ordinary language, it needs these techniques to carry the burden of its message.”

Dana Gioia (1950) American writer

"Paradigms Lost," interview with Gloria Brame, ELF: Eclectic Literary Forum (Spring 1995)
Interviews

Art, Way

“Analogies with the past are never properly accurate and analogies especially with the rising fascism can be easily misleading, but in pure chronology I sometimes wonder if we're not in the 1920s or 1930s again… This ideology now has a state, Iran, that is prepared to back and finance terror in the pursuit of destabilising countries whose people wish to live in peace.”

Tony Blair (1953) former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

[Martin Hodgson, Blair accuses Iran of fuelling 'deadly ideology' of militant Islam, http://www.guardian.co.uk/iran/story/0,,2195043,00.html, The Guardian, 2007-10-19, 2007-10-19]
2000s

People, Peace, Past, Country

“He thought back on his family with deep emotion and love. His conviction that he would have to disappear was, if possible, even firmer than his sister's. He remained in this state of empty and peaceful reflection until the tower clock struck three in the morning. He still saw that outside the window everything was beginning to grow light. Then, without his consent, his head sank down to the floor, and from his nostrils streamed his last weak breath.”

Franz Kafka book The Metamorphosis

The Metamorphosis (1915)

Love, Family, Peace, Sister

“To state a timetable now would simply paralyze the proper working of government, put at risk the changes we are making for Britain and damage the country.”

Tony Blair (1953) former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Prime Minister's monthly press conference May 2006 http://web.archive.org/20061001142642/www.number10.gov.uk/output/Page9400.asp, Prime Minister's website. 8 May 2006, refusing to set a date for his retirement. 2000s

Change, Country

“To Marx any talk of rights possessed by people equally, unalienably, absolutely, and universally would have to await the communist epoch when all persons will have reached a common nature, total equality and perfection. Until then people are in a state of incompletion and imperfection, incapable of justifying equal human rights.”

Tibor R. Machan (1939–2016) Hungarian-American philosopher

Source: Human Rights and Human Liberties: A Radical Reconsideration of the American Political Tradition, (1975), p. 41

People, Nature, Universe, Personality

“The head of state
Has called for me by name
But I don't have time for him
It's gonna be a glorious day
I feel my luck could change”

Thom Yorke (1968) English musician, philanthropist and singer-songwriter

"Lucky"
Lyrics, OK Computer (1997)

Feeling, Change, Time

“I painted these 'Variations' [of landscapes] for some years and then I found it necessary to find form for the face, because I had come to understand that great art can only be painted with religious feeling. And that, I could only bring to the human face. I understood that the artist must express through his art, in forms and colours, the divine in him. Therefore a work of art is God made visible and art is 'a longing for God'.
I painted 'faces' for many years. I sat in my studio and painted, and I did not need nature to prompt me. It was enough for me to immerse myself in myself, to pray and prepare my soul to attain a religious state..”

Alexej von Jawlensky (1864–1941) Russian painter

In a letter to the Dutch Fauvist painter Father Verkade, 12 June 1938; as quoted in Alexej Jawlensky, Jürgen Schultze; M. DuMont Schauberg, Cologne 1970, p. 39
1936 - 1941

God, Art, Feeling, Soul

“I think my appointment is the example and answer for those who accuse Israel of being an apartheid state. It shows minorities have equal rights and we are part of the government, the state and the parliament.”

Majalli Wahabi (1954) Israeli politician

http://www.librariansforfairness.org/news_post.asp?NPI=160

Thinking, Parting

“I've got to give you some straight talk: Some of the jobs that have left the state of Michigan are not coming back. They are not. And I am sorry to tell you that.”

John McCain (1936–2018) politician from the United States

, http://boston.com/news/nation/articles/2008/01/14/same_state_different_message_for_michigans_economy/ 2000s, 2008

“A child that knows nothing of God’s earth, of green fields, or sparkling brooks, of breezy hill and springy heather, and whose mind is stored with none of the beauties of nature, but knows only the drunkenness prevalent in the hideous slum it is forced to live in, and whose walks abroad have never extended beyond the corner public-house and the pawnshop, cannot be benefited by education. Such children grow up to depraved, and become a danger and terror to the State; wealth-destroyers instead of wealth-producers.”

William Lever, 1st Viscount Leverhulme (1851–1925) English industrialist, philanthropist, and politician

"Land for House," 1898

God, Children, Education, Beauty

“If the Catholic Church hadn't so consistently and virulently condemned the Jews for killing Jesus, there would have been no Holocaust. There would have been no reason for anyone to think about picking on Jews. And that means today there might be no Jewish state, and no Middle East conflict. That's quite a lot to have on your conscience, isn't it? How fortunate for the Catholic Church that it doesn't possess a conscience, but at least it gives ordinary Catholics an opportunity to feel guilty about something real for a change, if they feel so inclined, and to reflect on the reality that the Jews didn't kill Jesus at all. The Catholic Church killed Jesus, and has spent the last two thousand years dragging his entrails through the dirt. And if he came back tomorrow, he'd be the first to say so. You know it's true. We all do.”

Pat Condell (1949) Stand-up comedian, writer, and Internet personality

"Is Satan a Catholic?" (27 March 2010) http://youtube.com/watch?v=LKg4HLsu5gE 2010

Feeling, Thinking, Reality, Change

“When [Friedrich] Krohn and Hitler first met around the time that Hitler first attended a meeting of what was to become the Nazi Party, Hitler told him that he favored a ‘socialism’ that took the form of a ‘national Social Democracy’ that was loyal to the state, not dissimilar to that of Scandinavia, England, and prewar Bavaria.”

Thomas Weber (historian) (1974) German historian

Source: Becoming Hitler: The Making of a Nazi (2017), pp. 66-67

Democracy, Time

“Now, state socialism, by objecting to one form of ownership, mainly the right of individual ownership over the means of production, in effect, placed the lives and liberty of all its citizens in the hands of a government clique and does this very simply because no liberty could be achieved in society. If the state apparatus alone has control over means of production like printing presses and the broadcast medium of the airwaves, this control of the means of production is a control over the ends that people in society can seek.”

Roy A. Childs, Jr. (1949–1992) American libertarian essayist and critic

Roy A. Childs, Jr. “Property Rights/Civil Liberties: Two Sides of One Coin,” lecture presented at Stanford University for Cato Institute’s Summer Seminars on Political Economy (August 6, 1978). Reprinted in Liberty Against Power, San Francisco: CA, Fox & Wilkes (1994) p. 210

People

“I dislike it when instead of saying Jew they say Hebrew or Israelite, or Semite, I do not like it and why should a Negro want to be called colored. Why should we want to lose being a Negro… I have stated that a noun to me is a stupid thing, if you know a thing and its name why bother about it but you have to know its name to talk about it. Well its name is Negro if it is a Negro and Jew if it is a Jew and both of them are nice strong names and so let us keep them.”

Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) American art collector and experimental writer of novels, poetry and plays

Source: Everybody’s Autobiography (1937), Ch. 4

Stupidity, Color, Strong

“[T]he hallmarks of Lincoln's greatness were his ability to grow and his willingness to change his mind. During the war, he had come to embrace the Radical position on immediate emancipation and the enlistment of black soldiers. In 1864 he privately suggested to Governor Hahn that Louisiana allow some blacks to vote under its new constitution, singling out the educated, propertied free blacks of New Orleans and those who had served in the Union army. In April 1865, shortly before his death, Lincoln for the first time publicly stated his support for this kind of limited black suffrage.”

Eric Foner (1943) American historian

2000s, If Lincoln Hadn't Died (2009)

Death, War, Education, Support

“The sight of the Yazidis driven up the arid, exposed mountain range, chased by the militant Sunni of the Islamic State (ISIS), conjures Masada, A. D. 73, where Jews chose to die on their own terms.”

Ilana Mercer South African writer

“Das Kurdische Masada,” http://jungefreiheit.de/allgemein/2014/das-kurdische-masada Junge Freiheit (in German), August 21, 2014. 2010s, 2014

Mountain

“As for lawyers, they seemed to grow up spontaneously; many of the first name and note in that profession were men without any education, and totally illiterate. Such a state of society was peculiar, and could not but have peculiar effects; for no other body of men, nor all the other bodies of men put together, had half so much influence as the lawyers….”

Jonathan Boucher (1738–1804) English minister

"Reminiscences of an American Loyalist" (first published serially in "Notes and Queries", 1874-)

Men, Education

“The machine itself has begun to do the work of revolution. The State is now generating forces that will accomplish what no revolutionaries could accomplish by themselves.”

Charles A. Reich book The Greening of America

Source: The Greening of America (1970), Chapter VIII : The Machine Begins To Self-Destruct, p. 189-190

“• Again in keeping with the Supreme Court ruling on Augmentation, the committee proposed the insertion of the following statement in Sec. 70 entitled “Rules in the Realignment of Allotment Classes and Reprioritization of Items of Appropriations which states that: “In all cases of realignment, the existence of an appropriation in the Object of Expenditure and Allotment Class is necessary for realignment.””

Francis Escudero (1969) Filipino politician

2014, Speech: Sponsorship Speech for the FY 2015 National Budget

“McKinsey and Company has a new study that shows that the persistent gap in academic achievement between children in the United States and their counterparts in other countries deprived the U. S. economy of as much as $2.3 trillion in economic output in 2008 alone. Can we imagine how much that academic gap has cost us in potential income?”

Francis Escudero (1969) Filipino politician

2009, Speech: The Socio-Economic Peace Program of Senator Francis Escudero

Children, Imagination, Study, Country

“We need to tranquilize our neighbors. State officials ought to remain in ignorance. Let the Armenians wait, opportunities will certainly come our way too. Turkey belongs only to the Turks.”

Mehmed Talat (1874–1921) Grand Vizier of the Ottoman Empire and Minister of the Interior

Quoted in "Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination" - Page 405 - by Ben Kiernan - Social Science - 2007

Way, Waiting

“There are people into whose heads it never enters to conceive of any better state of society than that which now exists.”

Henry George book Progress and Poverty

Book IX, Ch. 3
Progress and Poverty (1879)

People

“America was founded by men who understood that the threat of domestic tyranny is as great as any threat from abroad. If we want to be worthy of their legacy, we must resist the rush toward ever-increasing state control of our society. Otherwise, our own government will become a greater threat to our freedoms than any foreign terrorist.”

Ron Paul (1935) American politician and physician

Freedom vs. Security: A False Choice
2004-05-31
http://www.house.gov/paul/tst/tst2004/tst053104.htm
2000s, 2001-2005

Men, Freedom

“And as every present state of a simple substance is naturally a consequence of its preceding state, so its present is pregnant with its future.”

Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716) German mathematician and philosopher

Et comme tout présent état d'une substance simple est naturellement une suite de son état précédent, tellement, que le présent y est gros de l'avenir.
La monadologie (22).
The Monadology (1714)

Nature, Future

“[…] Because the Egoist is to himself the warder of the human, and has nothing to say to the state except: "Get out of my sunshine!"”

Max Stirner book The Ego and Its Own

Tucker 1907, p. 307
The Ego and Its Own (1844)

“Thea: Didja make your quota, Lois?
Lois: Yup. Kissed a woman from every state in the union. Rhode Island was a drag queen, though. Do you think that counts?”

Alison Bechdel book Dykes to Watch Out For

#161, "Afterglow" (1993), collected in Spawn of DTWOF (1993).
Dykes to Watch Out For

Kiss, Thinking

“The main problem with current neo-liberal globalisation is that it detaches economic and political power from locality, tradition and interpersonal relationships. That’s because it makes a fundamental assumption about human nature: that we are essentially selfish, greedy, isolated individuals who seem to maximise our own individual happiness or short-term pleasure. Purely individual interests ultimately clash. This conflict is then supposedly resolved by the ‘invisible hand’ of the market and the visible hand of the state. In consequence we are left with an increasing centralisation of power, a growing concentration of wealth and an ever-more atomised society.”

Jon Cruddas (1962) British politician

The Common Good in an Age of Austerity Lecture, 9 July 2014 http://joncruddas.org.uk/sites/joncruddas.org.uk/files/ebor%20a.pdf

Happiness, Pleasure, Nature, Problem

“By 'socialism' I mean a classless society in which the State has disappeared, production is cooperative, and no man has political or economic power over another. The touchstone would be the extent to which each individual could develop his own talents and personality.”

Dwight Macdonald (1906–1982) journalist

"The Root is Man" (1946).

Personality

“Make something, a kind of object, which as it changes or falls apart (dies as it were) or increases in its parts (grows as it were) offers no clue as to what its state or form or nature was at any previous time. Physical and Metaphysical. Obstinacy. Could this be a useful object?”

Jasper Johns (1930) American artist

Book A (sketchbook), p 9, c 1960: as quoted in Jasper Johns, Writings, sketchbook Notes, Interviews, ed. Kirk Varnedoe, Moma New York, 1996, p. 50
1960s

Nature, Change, Time, Parting

“The exclusion of true or esoteric religion has been the business of the State since ancient times. At first this was done via the establishment of the popular idealism of exoteric religious institutions in league with the State. But in modern times the same process is done by the strategic exclusion of conventional religious cultism, mystical idealism, and higher evolutionary Wisdom from the mechanisms of popular culture.”

Adi Da Samraj (1939–2008) American writer

http://www.firmstand.org/articles/separation_of_church_and_state.html

Wisdom, Religion, Business, Time

“We might easily pursue these contrasts between bourgeois of the Jansenist school and those of the Jesuit school. One, of upright and rigid character, was himself in the various occupations of daily life; the other had the personality of his state, which would make of him less a moral personality than a socially determined being, subject to rules which it would be improper and unChristian not to observe, the "first duty of probity" always being, as Père Bourdaloue puts it, to "submit to authority." So that while the disciple of the Jesuit Fathers might be a reliable man, who most probably would always remain prudently within the confines of mediocrity, the disciple of the Jansenists might sometimes indulge in eccentricities. He was less reliable; he might take the counsels of perfection literally, and not be so docile. Under a middle-class exterior, he might often conceal a romantic spirit, preserving a predilection for the heroic feats of olden times.”

Bernard Groethuysen (1880–1946) French literary historian, translator and writer

Source: The Bourgeois: Catholicism vs. Capitalism in Eighteenth-Century France (1927), p. 163

Life, School, Time, Personality

“The discarnate TV user lives in a world between fantasy and dream, and is in a typically hypnotic state, which is the ultimate form and level of participation.”

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

"A Last Look at the Tube." New York Magazine, 17 March 1978, p. 45-48
1970s

World, Dreams

“I am far from wishing to treat lightly or inconsiderately the evils attendant upon a standing army. The history of those countries where standing armies have been allowed to usurp an ascendancy over the civil authorities, is a volume pregnant with instruction to every one. We may look at France, for instance, and derive a lesson of eternal importance. But when it is said, that in ancient Rome twelve thousand praetorian bands were potent enough to dispose of that empire according to their will and pleasure, it should be remembered that that was the result of a number of pre-disposing causes, which have no existence in England. Before the civil constitution of any country can be overturned by a standing army, the people of that country must be lamentably degenerate; they must be debased and enervated by all the worst excesses of an arbitrary and despotic government; their martial spirit must be extinguished; they must be brought to a state of political degradation, I may almost say of political emasculation, such as few countries experience that have once known the blessings of liberty.”

Henry Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston (1784–1865) British politician

Speech in the House of Commons (8 March 1816), quoted in George Henry Francis, Opinions and Policy of the Right Honourable Viscount Palmerston, G.C.B., M.P., &c. as Minister, Diplomatist, and Statesman, During More Than Forty Years of Public Life (London: Colburn and Co., 1852), p. 12.
1810s

People, Pleasure, History, Evil

“Peter Sissons: The single currency, a United States of Europe, was all that in your mind when you took Britain in?
Edward Heath: Of course, yes.”

Edward Heath (1916–2005) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (1970–1974)

On BBC's Question Time (1 November 1990), quoted in Peter Sissons, When One Door Closes (Biteback, 2012).
Post-Prime Ministerial

“In its present state of development psychology must be thought of as a young science. There is only one field in which it is relatively well established and in which it has advanced steadily: this is the psychology of sensation and perception. The scientific character of this field is fully recognized. Its findings are based almost entirely on experimental evidence, and even when its theories are in conflict one feels that as far as method is concerned it stands on relatively firm ground. The situation is different with the psychology of will, of needs, and of personality despite the fact that these fields have always attracted popular interest. As recently as fifteen years ago it was assumed that they, by their very nature, were not amenable to scientific methods. The little experimental work that had been done seemed too artificial and abstract to give an insight into the real processes. It was generally accepted that experimental investigations of these elusive and highly complicated processes were intrinsically impossible, at least in so far as human beings are concerned. Thus in Europe these problems were treated in a half-literary, half-philosophical way, and in America the tendency was to study individual differences by means of tests.”

Kurt Lewin (1890–1947) German-American psychologist

Source: 1930s, Principles of topological psychology, 1936, p. 3.

Way, Feeling, Nature, Problem

“Only a year after the collapse of the Third Reich a strangely conclusive piece of evidence can be advanced to support the claim that "fanatical", this key National Socialist term, never really had the sting taken out of it by excessive use. For although scraps of the LTI surface all over the place in contemporary language, "fanatical" has disappeared. From this one can safely conclude that either consciously or subconsciously people remained aware of the real facts of the case all through those twelve years, namely, that a confused state of mind, equally close to sickness and criminality, was for twelve years [of Nazi rule] held to be the greatest virtue.”

Victor Klemperer book LTI – Lingua Tertii Imperii

Source: LTI – Lingua Tertii Imperii (The Language of the Third Reich) (1947), p. 61.

People, Support

“The answer is to let Israel say it will recognize a Palestinian state along the 1967 borders, release the prisoners, and recognize the rights of the refugees to return to Palestine. Hamas will have a position if this occurs.”

Ismail Haniyeh (1963) Palestinian politician

Interview with Washington Post. "We Do Not Wish to Throw Them Into the Sea" http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/24/AR2006022402317_pf.html. Washington Post. February 26, 2006

“But it will always be impossible to harmonize justice and war. It is always possible to purchase materials with money, but patriotism can not be purchased. Unless the people are willing to defend their country because of their belief in it, because of their affection for it, and because it is representative of their home, their country can not be defended. If we are looking for a more complete reign of justice, a more complete supremacy of law, a more complete social harmony, we must seek it in the paths of peace. Progress in these directions under the present order of the world is not likely to be made except during a state of domestic and international tranquility. One of the great questions before the nations to-day is how to promote such tranquility.”

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

1920s, Toleration and Liberalism (1925)

Money, War, People, World

“In many different fields, empirical phenomena appear to obey a certain general law, which can be called the Law of Large Numbers. This law states that the ratios of numbers derived from the observation of a very large number of similar events remain practically constant, provided that these events are governed partly by constant factors and partly by variable factors whose variations are irregular and do not cause a systematic change in a definite direction.”

Siméon Denis Poisson (1781–1840) French mathematician, mechanician and physicist

Statement of Poisson's law also known as the Law of Large Numbers (1837), as quoted by [Richard Von Mises, Probability, Statistics and Truth, Allen and Unwin, 1957, 104-105]

Law, Appearance, Change

“We chose to march in the streets demanding the resignation of President Ali Abdullah Saleh, an end to his corrupt and failed regime and the establishment of a modern democratic state…Yemen is now facing a complete vacuum of authority; we are without a president or parliament. Mr. Saleh may be gone, but authority has not yet been transferred to a transitional presidential council endorsed by the people.”

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

2010s, Yemen’s Unfinished Revolution, 2011

People

“Anarchism is the only philosophy which brings to man the consciousness of himself; which maintains that God, the State, and society are non-existent, that their promises are null and void, since they can be fullfilled only through man's subordination.”

Emma Goldman book Anarchism and Other Essays

Anarchism: What it Really Stands For http://books.google.com/books?id=U5ZYAAAAMAAJ&q=&quot;Anarchism+is+the+only+philosophy+which+brings+to+man+the+consciousness+of+himself+which+maintains+that+God+the+State+and+society+are+non-existent+that+their+promises+are+null+and+void+since+they+can+be+fullfilled+only+through+man's+subordination&quot;&pg=PA58#v=onepage (1910)

God