Quotes about status
page 7

“Reform is never easy and there are municipalities fighting to maintain the status quo. They are surviving on borrowed time. We continue to fight these bureaucrats and are confident that taxation by citation will soon be coming to an end. Our efforts in Missouri are rooted in the belief that government is supposed to work for the people and not to grow government’s reach and influence by abusive schemes.”

Eric Schmitt (1975) American politician, lawyer

No more taxation by citation in Ferguson: Column https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2016/08/09/taxation-ferguson-police-reform-michael-brown-shooting-column/88445780/ (August 9, 2016)

People, Confidence, Effort, Time

“There is a notion that complete impartiality is the most fitting and indeed the normal disposition for true exegesis, because it guarantees complete absence of prejudice. For a short time, around 1910, this idea threatened to achieve almost a canonical status in Protestant theology. But now, we can quite calmly describe it as merely comical.”

Karl Barth book Church Dogmatics

1:2
Church Dogmatics (1932–1968)

Idea, Time

“After all, enforced national bilingualism in this country isn’t mere policy. It has attained the status of a religion. It’s a dogma which one is supposed to accept without question.…Make no mistake. Canada is not a bilingual country. In fact it is less bilingual today than it has ever been…As a religion, bilingualism is the god that failed. It has led to no fairness, produced no unity, and cost Canadian taxpayers untold millions.”

Stephen Harper (1959) 22nd Prime Minister of Canada

Calgary Sun, May 6, 2001.
2001

God, Religion, Question, Country

“In every human being, there are dormant memories which suddenly rise to the surface of the conscious mind. Niobe, for instance, developed out of one of my most remote childhood recollections. A cholera epidemic had broken out in the Smolensk area, and there were many casualties. One day, on the top of a hill, I saw a giant of a peasant with arms raised toward the sky crying out his grief at having lost his children. From this image, which emerged from my subconscious mind many years later, came the statue of Niobe.”

Ossip Zadkine (1890–1967) French sculptor

As quoted in: 'The Work of Zadkine', (excerpt), Ionel Jianou, 1964; for the Zadkine Research Center https://www.zadkine.com/writing 1960 - 1968

Children, Memory, Childhood, Cry

“The reasons why the adoption of a system of central planning necessarily produces a totalitarian system are fairly simple. Whoever controls the means must decide which ends they are to serve. As under modern conditions control of economic activity means control of the material means for practically all our ends, it means control over nearly all our activities. The nature of the detailed scale of values which must guide the planning makes it impossible that it should be determined by anything like democratic means. The director of the planned system would have to impose his scale of values, his hierarchy of ends, which, if it is to be sufficient to determine the plan, must include a definite order of rank in which the status of each person is laid down. If the plan is to succeed or the planner to appear successful, the people must be made to believe that the objectives chosen are the right ones. Every criticism of the plan or the ideology underlying it must be treated as sabotage. There can be no freedom of thought, no freedom of the Press, where it is necessary that everything should be governed by a single system of thought. In theory Socialism may wish to enhance freedom, but in practice every kind of collectivism consistently carried thought must produce the characteristic features which Fascism, Nazism, and Communism have in common. Totalitarianism is nothing but consistent collectivism, the ruthless execution of the principle that 'the whole comes before the individual' and the direction of all members of society by a single will supposed to represent the 'whole.”

Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992) Austrian and British economist and Nobel Prize for Economics laureate

" Planning, Science and Freedom http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v148/n3759/abs/148580a0.html", Nature 148 (15 November 1941), also available as " Planning, Science, and Freedom https://mises.org/library/planning-science-and-freedom," Mises Daily (Auburn, AL: The Ludwig von Mises Institute, 27 September 2010) 1940s–1950s

People, Communication, Nature, Freedom

“[A] paradox arises at the level of the subject's relationship to the community to which he belongs: the situation of the forced choice consists in the fact that the subject must freely choose the community to which he already belongs, independent of his choice - he must choose what is already given to him… The subject who thinks he can avoid this paradox and really have a free choice is a psychotic subject, one who retains a kind of distance from the symbolic order - who is not really caught in the signifying network. The totalitarian subject is closer to this psychotic position: the proof would be the status of the enemy in totalitarian distance (the Jew in Fascism, the traitor in Stalinism) - precisely the subject supposed to have made a free choice and to have freely chosen the wrong side. This is also the basic paradox of love: not only of one's country, but also of a woman or a man. If I am directly ordered to love a woman, it is clear that this does not work: in a way, love must be free. But on the other hand, if I proceed as if I really have a free choice, if I start to look around and say to myself 'Let's choose which of these women I will fall in love with,' it is clear that this also does not work, that it is not real love. The paradox of love is that it is a free choice, but a choice which never arrives in the present - it is always already made …I can only state retroactively that I've already chosen … [Stated by Kant], 'Wickedness does not simply depend upon circumstances but is an integral part of his eternal nature.”

Slavoj Žižek book The Sublime Object of Ideology

In other words, wickedness appears to be something which is irreducibly given: the person in question can never change it, outgrow it via his ultimate moral development.
186-187
The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989)

Love, Women, Way, Communication

“By thee do seers the inward light discern;
By thee the statue lives, the Gods return.”

Hilaire Belloc (1870–1953) writer

Heroic Poem in Praise of Wine (1932)

God, Light

“Hard systems thinking is also accused of conservatism. It privileges the values and interests of its clients and customers, and lends its apparent expertise to their realization. It thus gives the facade of objectivity to changes that help to secure the status quo. In general terms, despite its many strengths and achievements, hard systems thinking is today thought of as having a limited domain of application.”

Mike Jackson (1951) systems scientist

Michael C. Jackson (2007) Systems Thinking: Creative Holism for Managers. p. 62

Thinking, Change, Help

“Preaching the gospel is not easy in a church defined by the denominational interests of status-seeking clergy and laypersons. Doing Christian theology is difficult in a seminary or university determined by the academic interests of privileged professors and students. Speaking the truth can be politically dangerous in a society defined according to the socio-economic interests of the rich. Preaching the gospel, doing Christian theology, and speaking the truth are interrelated, and neither can be correctly understood apart from the liberation struggles of the poor and marginalized.”

James H. Cone (1938–2018) American theologian

Source: Speaking the Truth: Ecumenism, Liberation, and Black Theology (1986), p. v

Truth, Universe

“The source of totalitarianism is a dogmatic attachment to the official word: the lack of laughter, of ironic detachment. An excessive commitment to Good may in itself become the greatest Evil: real Evil is any kind of fanatical dogmatism, especially exerted in the name of supreme Good… Consider only Mozart's Don Giovanni at the end of the opera, when he is confronted with the following choice: if he confesses his sins, he can still achieve salvation; if he persists, he will be damned forever. From this viewpoint of the pleasure principle, the proper thing to do would be to renounce his past, but he does not, he persists in his Evil, although he knows that by persisting he will be damned forever. Paradoxically, with his final choice of Evil, he acquires the status of an ethical hero - that is, of someone who is guided by fundamental principles beyond the pleasure principle and not just by the search for pleasure or material gain.”

Slavoj Žižek book The Sublime Object of Ideology

23
The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989)

Pleasure, Search, Laughter, Evil

“The systems view of nature and man is clearly non- anthropocentric, but it is not non-humanistic for all that. It allows us to understand that man is one species of system in a complex and embracing hierarchy of nature, and at the same time it tells us that all systems have value and intrinsic worth. They are goal-oriented, self-maintaining, and self-creating expressions of nature's penchant for order and adjustment. The status of man is not lessened by admitting the amoeba as his kin, nor by recognizing that sociocultural systems are his supersystems. Seeing himself as a connecting link in a complex natural hierarchy cancels man's anthropocentrism, but seeing the hierarchy itself as an expression of self-ordering and self-creating nature bolsters his self-esteem and encourages his humanism.”

Ervin László (1932) Hungarian musician and philosopher

Source: Introduction to Systems Philosophy (1972), p. 118.

Understanding, Nature, Time

“No society can function as a society, unless it gives the individual member social status and function, and unless the decisive social power is legitimate.”

Peter F. Drucker (1909–2005) American business consultant

Source: 1930s- 1950s, The Future of Industrial Man (1942), p. 28

Decision

“In spite of such limitations, the New Institutional Economics research programme, given its willingness to acknowledge the central role played by information in the economic process, constitutes a marked advance over what is on offer from the neoclassical orthodoxy. There, information retains the status of the luminiferous ether of classical physics before Einstein: a ubiquitous medium that admitted of a mechanical account of action at a distance and kept the world conveniently Newtonian.
Institutional economics, however, needs a more explicit and dynamic theory of information flows if it is to make more than a dent in the neoclassical defences. Having established that there exists credible institutional alternatives to markets, it needs to show how information production and exchange underpins them all, shaping their internal evolution as well as how they collaborate and compete. In effect, what is needed is a theory of social learning that extends beyond the individual or the organization to encompass more complex institutional settings. Such as theory, I believe, is foreshadowed in Douglas North’s historical studies of institutions. It now needs further development.”

Max Boisot (1943–2011) British academic and educator

Source: Information Space, 1995, p. 290; As cited in: Ortiz et al. (2006)

World, Study, Learning

“Paul was a stockholder in Rome's world corporation. And that stock by slow degrees had blinded him to the injustice of a social system in whose dividends he himself shared. This explains in large part why he accepted the political status quo, and preached its acceptance by others.”

Bouck White (1874–1951) American author and novelist

Source: The Call of the Carpenter (1914), p. xxi

World, Parting

“You are fifty years old and would worship a day old statue!”

Abraham (-1813–-1638 BC) Biblical patriarch

Abraham in Genesis Rabbah 38.13 R. Hiyya and the Idol Shop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_and_the_Idol_Shop|Abraham Talmud

“I want to found a free school for creativity and interdisciplinary research in Düsseldorf [where Beuys was teaching at the Art Academy]. I hope that I will succeed. Everyone can come to me. This school has a legal status... First a school is there to develop ability, that is consciousness, then the children will recognize what a future social structure should look like; that means that one can learn a social feeling or a social sense…”

Joseph Beuys (1921–1986) German visual artist

1970's, Every Man an Artist: Talks at Documenta 5', 1972

Children, School, Hope, Art

“Whether Canada ends up as one national government or two national governments or several national governments, or some other kind of arrangement is, quite frankly, secondary in my opinion… And whether Canada ends up with one national government or two governments or ten governments, the Canadian people will require less government no matter what the constitutional status or arrangement of any future country may be.”

Stephen Harper (1959) 22nd Prime Minister of Canada

Speech to the Colin Brown Memorial Dinner, National Citizens Coalition, 1994.
1990s

People, Future, Country

“In the making both of lace and of statues, the remuneration to the artists can only be reduced by producing a larger number of them through more extended education. The expense of the raw material is small in both. The expense of labour in lacemaking is very large, and it is perhaps considerable also in sculpture. The discovery of more convenient localities yielding marble, may make some diminution in its cost; and the improved manufacture of thread may slightly reduce the price of lace. A reduction in the price of labour may to a very moderate extent reduce the cost of the raw material of both. But it is evident that any very great reduction is not to be expected.
Let us now contrast this possible reduction with the past history of some industrial art. The plain lace made at Nottingham, called patent net, will supply us with a good example. In the year 1813 that lace was sold in the piece at the rate of 218. a-yard. At the present time lace of the same kind, but of a better quality, is sold under the same circumstances at 3d. per yard. Thus, in less than forty years the price of the industrial produce has diminished to one eighty-fourth part of its original price.”

Charles Babbage (1791–1871) mathematician, philosopher, inventor and mechanical engineer who originated the concept of a programmable c…

Source: The Exposition of 1851: Views Of The Industry, The Science, and the Government Of England, 1851, p. 51-52

Education, Art, History, Time

“If we look at the parpens piled up on the building site or at the block of bronze, nothing about them manifests that they are suited to being a house or a statue. … Aristotle speaks of the materials considered as such in terms of "the buildable" (I, 201a 16, b Bf), coining an adjective whose suffix expresses capacity (what he calls dunamis). This capacity, as we have seen, cannot be grasped after the manner of that with which perception provides us (color, hardness, etc.); it requires a gaze capable of probing more deeply, of proceeding from the real to the possible—as when Michelangelo "sees" a David in the formless block abandoned by other sculptors.”

Rémi Brague (1947) French historian

"Aristotle's Definition of Motion and its Ontological Implications," Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal, vol. 13, no. 2, p. 12

Color, Housing

“I’d go back to 1975. I commented elsewhere, recently, that pressing the “rewind” button would be a good idea, as long as it was done across the board, and not piecemeal or in stealth mode, a la “Birthright.” Take all the characters back to their status quo circa 1975, but set the stories now. Since the most anal-retentive fanboys need “explanations” for everything, have the Shaper of Worlds do it at M*****. Not sure who’d be up for the job at DC.”

John Byrne (1950) American author and artist of comic books

2004
https://web.archive.org/web/20090207020226/http://www.network54.com/Forum/248951/thread/1082467515/last-1082574445/Complete+DCU+And+M%2A%2A%2A%2A%2A++Universe++Overhauls.
On taking comics back to the basics; ‘rewinding’ or ‘resetting’ to the status quo

World, Idea

“I’m clearly a small-minded person, with my own petty grievances. Hopefully, my work transcends my own petty grievances and small-minded nature. It’s best for me to remain small-minded on an emotional level and broad-minded on a conceptual level. It doesn’t matter whatever it is that makes me do my work. Neurosis, obsession, wanting people to like me, wanting my parents to feel bad for underrating me, making a lot of money, power, social status, wanting girls to like me or just to meet one girl on a job. All of this doesn’t matter as long as the work that I do to achieve these small-minded needs is a lot more interesting than me and my reasons for making it”

Vincent Gallo (1961) American film director, writer, model, actor and musician

SOMA Interview

Money, People, Feeling, Girl

“This chapter [of the destruction of temples], however, though significant, was only a part of the Muslim behaviour-pattern as recorded by Muslim historians of medieval India. The other parts were:
1) mass slaughter of people not only during war but also after the armies of Islam had emerged victorious;
2) capture of large numbers of non-combatant men, women and children as booty and their sale as slaves all over the Islamic world;
3) forcible conversion to Islam of people who were in no position to resist;
4) reduction to the status of zimmis or non-citizens of all those who could not be converted and imposition of inhuman disabilities on them;
5) emasculation of the zimmis by preventing them from possessing arms;
6) impoverishment of the zimmis through heavy discriminatory taxes and misappropriation of a major part of what the peasants produced;
7) ruination of the native and national culture of the zimmis by suppressing and holding in contempt all its institutions and expressions.”

Sita Ram Goel (1921–2003) Indian activist

Hindu Temples – What Happened to Them, Volume I (1990)

Women, Men, War, Children

“Ricardo's theory is absolutely right—within its narrow confines. His theory correctly says that, accepting their current levels of technology as given, it is better for countries to specialize in things that they are relatively better at. One cannot argue with that. His theory fails when a country wants to acquire more advanced technologies—that is, when it wants to develop its economy. It takes time and experience to absorb new technologies, so technologically backward producers need a period of protection from international competition during this period of learning. Such protection is costly, because the country is giving up the chance to import better and cheaper products. However, it is a price that has to be paid if it wants to develop advanced industries. Ricardo's theory is, thus seen, for those who accept the status quo but not for those who want to change it.”

Ha-Joon Chang book Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism

Source: Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism (2008), Ch. 2: 'The double life of Daniel Defoe; How did the rich countries become rich?', The double life of the British economy, p. 47

Learning, Change, Chance, Time

“The citizen of today in every developed country is typically an employee. He works for one of the institutions. He looks to them for his livelihood. He looks to them for his opportunities. He looks to them for access to status and function in society, as well as for personal fulfillment and achievement.
The citizen of 1900 if employed worked for a small family-type operation; the small pop-and-mom store employing a helper or two; the family household; and so on. And of course, the great majority of people in those days, except in the most highly industrialized countries—such as Britain or Belgium—worked on the farm.
Our society has become an employee society. In the early 1900s people asked, “What do you do?””

Peter F. Drucker (1909–2005) American business consultant

Today they tend to ask, “Whom do you work for?”
Source: 1960s - 1980s, MANAGEMENT: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices (1973), p. 4

People, Family, Moms, Personality

“First of all, Theodore Roosevelt and Charles W. Fairbanks, candidates for President and Vice-President, respectively, deny the class struggle and this almost infallibly fixes their status as friends of capital and enemies of labor. They insist that they can serve both; but the fact is obvious that only one can be served and that one at the expense of the other. Mr. Roosevelt’s whole political career proves it.”

Eugene V. Debs (1855–1926) American labor and political leader

The Socialist Party and the Working Class (1904)

“In its Morgentaler decision of January 1988, the Supreme Court of Canada struck down the centrepiece of Canada's abortion law, section 251 of the Criminal Code. The court held that it conflicted with section 7 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which guarantees the 'security of the person'. This ruling radically changed the legal status quo; it was as if Parliament had repealed that section of the Criminal Code without passing a replacement amendment.”

Thomas Flanagan (political scientist) (1944) author, academic, and political activist

Source: Game Theory and Canadian Politics (1998), Chapter 8, Staying Power of the Status Quo, p. 120.

Law, Decision, Freedom, Change

“They are a very great boon to mankind, dentists,’ said Isabel. ‘And I’m not sure that we are grateful enough to them. I’m not sure that we even bother to thank them.’ She paused. Were there any statues of dentists? She thought not. And yet there should be.”

Alexander McCall Smith book The Careful Use of Compliments

The Careful Use of Compliments, chapter 8.
The Sunday Philosophy Club series

“What else would be as impressive as a status symbol than when you are visiting a billionaire for lunch and you and dozens of other refined guests are offered a glass of fresh milk to toast everybody’s health, instead of a glass of Chateau Rotschild Lafitte?”

Chip Tsao (1958) columnist, broadcaster, and writer

Politically Incorrect with Chip Tsao - The Vintage Year http://hk-magazine.com/feature/politically-incorrect-chip-tsao-vintage-year, HK Magazine

Health

“The wreck of the Titanic functions as a sublime object: a positive, material object elevated to the status of the impossible Thing. And perhaps all the effort to articulate the metaphysical meaning of the Titanic is nothing but an attempt to escape this terrifying impact of the Thing, an attempt to domesticate the Ting by reducing it to its symbolic status, by providing it with a meaning. We usually say that the fascinating presence of a Thing obscures its meaning; here, the opposite is true: the meaning obscures the terrifying impact of its presence.”

Slavoj Žižek book The Sublime Object of Ideology

77
The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989)

Effort

“As a boy I remember how terribly real the statues of the saints would seem at 7 o'clock Mass-before I'd had breakfast. From that I learned always to conduct hungry.”

Leopold Stokowski (1882–1977) British conductor

As quoted in The New York Times (18 April 1967)

Boy, Learning

“These inventors were elevating the formulation of entrepreneurial ideas to the status of a visionary activity. Though forced to justify their efforts in the pragmatic language of venture capital, they were at heart utopian thinkers intent on transforming the world.”

Alain de Botton (1969) Swiss writer

Source: The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work (2009), p. 281.

World, Idea, Effort, Heart

“I would have left all the Jews in Germany, but put them on an alien status, under alien law, and naturally closed them out of jobs like doctor or lawyer. But why execute them? In that way, strong Jewish influence would have been cast aside and there would be no need for atrocities. Whenever we would have discussions in our own circle, I would mention my solution, whereupon Himmler would say to me, 'Pohl, you are too soft.”

Oswald Pohl (1892–1951) Head of the SS Wirtschafts-Verwaltungshauptamt

Therefore, I did my best to keep out of the whole final solution of the Jewish problem.
"The Nuremberg Interviews"

Law, Way, Nature, Problem

“When we read what Goethe says about men we are ashamed of what we have said; when we read what he says about painting and statues we are ashamed of what Goethe has said.”

Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) poet, critic, novelist, essayist

“Malraux and the Statues at Bamberg”, p. 194
A Sad Heart at the Supermarket: Essays & Fables (1962)

Men, Reading, Painting

“Interviewer: what do you think about polygamy? Is this Egypt's method of family planning?
Ali Gum'a: This is a storm in a teacup. Our statistics show that cases of polygamy do not exceed two percent. That's one thing. Mistresses and adultery have become widespread throughout the world, beginning with the heads of state here and there – and I don't want to mention specific Western countries – and culminating with illegitimate children, who are recognized, due to the constraints of reality. I'd like to know if this is preferable to having a rate of two percent [polygamy] among marriages, according to the reliable official statistics? What is this? Are we supposed to allow adultery and ban marriages? In my opinion, this is preposterous.
[…]
Interviewer: In Judaism, a man is permitted to have four wives?
Ali Gum'a: Of course! Moses has four wives, and so did Abraham…
Interviewer: But today, it is not permitted.
Ali Gum'a: Today, yesterday…what's the difference? To this day, Judaism permits polygamy. The Hindus permit polygamy. The Buddhists permit polygamy. There is not a single religion on the face of the earth that bans polygamy, but all religions agree that women are not allowed to have more than one husband.
[…]
Ali Guma: …in Islam, Allah permits us – just like in all religions – to marry several wives, and have things done out in the open. For whose benefit is all this? For the benefit of the woman, because a woman who is taken as a mistress remains in the shadows, and loses all her rights. The man does not owe her anything. But since [Allah] permits marrying another wife, she gains respect, status, and rights.”

Ali Gomaa (1951) Egyptian imam

citation needed

Women, Marriage, Children, World

“But someone is bound to question … by what right I regard as Ideological State Apparatuses, institutions which for the most part do not possess public status, but are quite simply private institutions. As a conscious Marxist, Gramsci already forestalled this objection in one sentence. The distinction between the public and the private is a distinction internal to bourgeois law, and valid in the (subordinate) domains in which bourgeois law exercises its ‘authority’. The domain of the State escapes it because the latter is ‘above the law’: the State, which is the State of the ruling class, is neither public nor private; on the contrary, it is the precondition for any distinction between public and private. The same thing can be said from the starting-point of our State Ideological Apparatuses. It is unimportant whether the institutions in which they are realized are ‘public’ or ‘private’. What matters is how they function.”

Louis Althusser book Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays

Source: Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (1968), "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses", p. 97

Law, Exercises, Question, Parting

“Each look'd upon his comrade's face,
Pale as funereal stone;
Yet none could touch the other's hand,
For none could feel his own.
Like statues fixed, that gallant band
Stood on the dread deck to die;
The sleet was their shroud, the wind their dirge,
And their churchyard the sea and sky.”

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

The Vow of the Peacock (1835)

Feeling, Sea

“[On the attendees at the launch of Apollo 11] Those people were not a stampeding herd, nor a manipulated mob; they did not wreck the Florida communities, they did not devastate the countryside, they did not throw themselves, like whining thugs, at the mercy of their victims - they did not create any victims. They came as responsible individuals able to project the reality of two or three days ahead, and to provide for their own needs. There were people of every age, creed, color, educational level and economic status. They lived and slept in tents, or in their cars, some for several days, in great discomfort and unbearable heat; they did it gamely, cheerfully, gaily; they projected a general feeling of confident goodwill, the bond of a common enthusiasm; they created a public spectacle of responsible privacy - and they departed as they had come, without benefit of press agents.”

Ayn Rand (1905–1982) Russian-American novelist and philosopher

Apollo and Dionysus (1969)

People, Age, Education, Cars

“Civil liberty is the status of the man who is guaranteed by law and civil institutions the exclusive employment of all his own powers for his own welfare.”

William Graham Sumner (1840–1910) American academic

The Forgotten Man and Other Essays (corrected edition), “The Forgotten Man” 1883 http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/sumner-the-forgotten-man-and-other-essays-corrected-edition?q=Civil+liberty+is+the+status#Sumner_1225_701.

Law

“When women take their education and their abilities seriously and put them to use, ultimately they have to compete with men. It is better for a woman to compete impersonally in society, as men do, than to compete for dominance in her own home with her husband, compete with her neighbors for empty status, and so smother her son that he cannot compete at all.”

Betty Friedan book The Feminine Mystique

Source: The Feminine Mystique (1963), Ch. 14 "A New Life Plan for Women".

Women, Men, Education, Home

“Recently, John and I got to go to Selma and perform “Glory” on the same bridge that Dr. King and the people of the civil rights movement marched on 50 years ago. This bridge was once a landmark of a divided nation, but now is a symbol for change. The spirit of this bridge transcends race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, and social status. The spirit of this bridge connects the kid from the South Side of Chicago, dreaming of a better life, to those in France standing up for their freedom of expression, to the people in Hong Kong protesting for democracy. This bridge was built on hope, welded with compassion, and elevated by love for all human beings.”

Common (rapper) (1972) American rapper, actor and author from Illinois

The 87th Oscars ceremony, 22 February, 2015.
Interviews

Love, Life, People, Religion

“'Party,' in the general vocabulary of world intellectuals, is basically a unified social organization with a 'world-view,' an 'Ideology,' a 'philosophy of history,' and 'ideal social order,' a 'class foundation,' a 'class orientation,' a 'social leadership,' a 'political philosophy,' a 'political orientation,' a 'tradition,' a 'slogan,' a 'strategy,' a "tactic of struggle," and … a "hope" that wants to change the "status quo" in man, society, people, or a particular class, and establish the "desired status" in its stead.”

Ali Shariati (1933–1977) Iranian academic and activist

Ali Shariati, in: The Islamic Quarterly, Vol. 27-29, (1983), p. 215; as quoted in: Ali Mirsepassi (2000), Intellectual Discourse and the Politics of Modernization, p. 126.

People, World, Hope, History

“The President's Proclamation is in direct contradiction of the legal positivism reigning in the legal profession, a positivism held no less tenaciously by conservatives than liberals, a positivism that denies all constitutional status to the principles of the Declaration of Independence. The contrast between the President's Proclamation and this positivism reveals a profound alienation from the principles of the American Founding among our nation's intellectual elites.”

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

2000s, Bush's Lincolnian Challenge (2002)

“The Pythagoreans thought those who teach for the sake of reward show themselves worse than sculptors, or artists who perform the work sitting. For these, when someone orders wood to make a statue of Hermes, search for wood suited to receive the proper form; while those pretend that they can readily produce the works of virtue from every nature.”

Iamblichus (240–320) Syrian philosopher

Life of Pythagoras

Search, Nature

“India cricket team realised its number one status, we won the Twenty20 World Cup, The 50-over World Cup and the Champions Trophy. I am proud to be a part of the core group that laid the foundation.”

Anil Kumble (1970) Former Indian cricketer

India became a sporting nation in the last decade: Kumble

World, Parting

“Marxist fixation on an atheistic status quo … offers the human soul nothing but a more or less eudaimonistically furnished "heaven on earth" without the music we ought to hear from this effortlessly functioning economic and social mechanism.”

Ernst Bloch (1885–1977) German philosopher

... wenn der Marxismus atheistisch fix mit Status quo bleibt, um der Menschenseele nichts als einen mehr oder minder eudämonistisch eingerichteten »Himmel« auf Erden zu setzen - ohne die Musik, die aus diesem mühelos funktionierenden Mechanismus der Ökonomie und des Soziallebens zu ertönen hätte.
Source: Man on His Own: Essays in the Philosophy of Religion (1959), p. 38

Music, Soul

“Standing still as a statue in the October shadows, he looked, grotesquely, more like a patriot than anything usually seen on a baseball field. A trick of light perhaps. Yet what famous athlete last died for a cause bigger than himself? Clemente could sometimes seem like a pest, a nagging narcissist, with only his burningly serious play to deny it. Yet when that plane crashed carrying relief supplies to Nicaragua we saw what he had meant all along. It was like the old Clemente crashing into the right field wall in a losing game: the act of a totally serious man.
By chance I met Clemente once, in the humble role of autograph-seeker. He was doing wind sprints down at the Pirate training camp in Bradenton, Florida. And although I claimed I was getting an autograph for my son (true, for a change), he looked at me with a hidalgo’s contempt – at a grown man simpering over a blunt pencil; he turned his back abruptly and did another wind sprint, then slashed his name onto my scorecard and sauntered away. To hell with you, Clemente, I thought. But on the way out, I saw him funning with three old ladies from Allentown, Pennsylvania, and I have never seen sweeter courtesy.”

Wilfrid Sheed (1930–2011) English-American novelist and essayist

From the foreword to Clemente! (1973) by Kal Wagenheim

Way, Game, Hell, Light

“I would rather sit with the rural poor, the desperate children of urban blight, the victims of racism, and working people seeking a better life than with those whose religion is the status quo, whose goal is profit and whose hearts are cold.”

Douglas Fraser (1916–2008) American labor leader

Resignation letter from National Committee of Labor-Management Group http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/fraserresign.html, July 17, 1978; Published in: North Country Anvil, Nr. 28, (1978) p. 22

Life, Children, People, Religion

“One day I rode in company with ‘Alã-ul-mulk and arrived at a plain called Tarna at a distance of seven miles from the city. There I saw innumerable stone images and animals, many of which had undergone a change, the original shape being obliterated. Some were reduced to a head, others to a foot and so on. Some of the stones were shaped like grain, wheat, peas, beans and lentils. And there were traces of a house which contained a chamber built of hewn stone, the whole of which looked like one solid mass. Upon it was a statue in the form of a man, the only difference being that its head was long, its mouth was towards a side of its face and its hands at its back like a captive’s. There were pools of water from which an extremely bad smell came. Some of the walls bore Hindî inscriptions. ‘Alã-ul-mulk told me that the historians assume that on this site there was a big city, most of the inhabitants of which were notorious. They were changed into stone. The petrified human form on the platform in the house mentioned above was that of their king. The house still goes by the name of ‘the king’s house’. It is presumed that the Hindî inscriptions, which some of the walls bear, give the history of the destruction of the inhabitants of this city. The destruction took place about a thousand years ago…”

Ibn Battuta (1304–1377) Moroccan explorer

Lahari Bandar (Sindh) . The Rehalã of Ibn Battûta translated into English by Mahdi Hussain, Baroda, 1967, p. 10.
Travels in Asia and Africa (Rehalã of Ibn Battûta)

History, Water, Change, Animals

“In the most advanced areas of this civilization, the social controls have been introjected to the point where even individual protest is affected at its roots. The intellectual and emotional refusal “to go along” appears neurotic and impotent. This is the socio-psychological aspect of the political event that marks the contemporary period: the passing of the historical forces which, at the preceding stage of industrial society, seemed to represent the possibility of new forms of existence. But the term “introjection” perhaps no longer describes the way in which the individual by himself reproduces and perpetuates the external controls exercised by his society. Introjection suggests a variety of relatively spontaneous processes by which a Self (Ego) transposes the “outer” into the “inner.” Thus introjection implies the existence of an inner dimension distinguished from and even antagonistic to the external exigencies—an individual consciousness and an individual unconscious apart from public opinion and behavior. The idea of “inner freedom” here has its reality: it designates the private space in which man may become and remain “himself.” Today this private space has been invaded and whittled down by technological reality. Mass production and mass distribution claim the entire individual, and industrial psychology has long since ceased to be confined to the factory. The manifold processes of introjection seem to be ossified in almost mechanical reactions. The result is, not adjustment but mimesis: an immediate identification of the individual with his society and, through it, with the society as a whole. This immediate, automatic identification (which may have been characteristic of primitive forms of association) reappears in high industrial civilization; its new “immediacy,” however, is the product of a sophisticated, scientific management and organization. In this process, the “inner” dimension of the mind in which opposition to the status quo can take root is whittled down. The loss of this dimension, in which the power of negative thinking—the critical power of Reason—is at home, is the ideological counterpart to the very material process in which advanced industrial society silences and reconciles the opposition. The impact of progress turns Reason into submission to the facts of life, and to the dynamic capability of producing more and bigger facts of the same sort of life. The efficiency of the system blunts the individuals' recognition that it contains no facts which do not communicate the repressive power of the whole. If the individuals find themselves in the things which shape their life, they do so, not by giving, but by accepting the law of things—not the law of physics but the law of their society.”

Herbert Marcuse book One-Dimensional Man

Source: One-Dimensional Man (1964), pp. 9-11

Life, Law, Way, Behavior

“Many creative people have a certain degree of dissatisfaction with the status quo, the established way. If you look at things differently, you are thought of as 'different.' In turn, 'different' people are thought to be 'mad.”

Jim Henson (1936–1990) American puppeteer

Interview with The Boston Globe (1989)

People, Way, Madness

“I hope that no one is going to offer some kind of trade of (Serbia's) future status in the European Union for (recognising) Kosovo's independence. That would be a disaster, that would be an indecent proposal and … this is not the European spirit and way of thinking.”

Boris Tadić (1958) Serbian politician, President of Serbia 2004–2012

http://www.predsednik.yu/mwc/default.asp?c=304000&g=20070411122909&lng=eng&hs1=0

Hope, Way, Thinking, Future

“The Islamic claim to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem is even more transparently fraudulent… Any secularist willing to uphold this claim as historical? Or otherwise ready to show the courage of his conviction and demand that the Muslims relinquish their claim to the Temple Mount so as to be morally in a poistion to demand a similar abandonment of "mythical" claims from the Hindus?… In the case of Christians and Muslims, no one demands that they prove the historicity of the stories underlying the sacred status of their places of pilgrimage. Demanding the same of Hindus is an insulting display of double standards.”

Koenraad Elst (1959) orientalist, writer

K. Elst : The Ayodhya Demolition: an Evaluation, in India., & Dasgupta, S. (1995). The Ayodhya reference: The Supreme Court judgement and commentaries.
1990s, The Ayodhya Demolition: an Evaluation (1995)

Courage

“Since September 11, 2001, I have often thought that perhaps it was fortunate for the world that the attackers targeted the World Trade Center instead of the Statue of Liberty, for if they had destroyed our sacred symbol of democracy I fear we as Americans would have been unable to keep ourselves from indulging in paroxysms of revenge of a sort the world has never seen before. If that had happened, it would have befouled the meaning of the Statue of Liberty beyond any hope of subsequent redemption — if there were any people left to care. I have learned from my students that this upsetting thought of mine is subject to several unfortunate misconstruals, so let me expand on it to ward them off. The killing of thousands of innocents in the World Trade Center was a heinous crime, much more evil than the destruction of the Statue of Liberty would have been. And, yes, the World Trade Center was a much more appropriate symbol of al Qaeda's wrath than the Statue of Liberty would have been, but for that very reason it didn't mean as much, as a symbol, to us. It was Mammon and Plutocrats and Globalization, not Lady Liberty. I do suspect that the fury with which Americans would have responded to the unspeakable defilement of our cherished national symbol, the purest image of our aspirations as a democracy, would have made a sane and measured response extraordinarily difficult. This is the great danger of symbols — they can become too "sacred."”

Daniel Dennett book Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

An important task for religious people of all faiths in the twenty-first century will be spreading the conviction that there are no acts more dishonorable than harming "infidels" of one stripe or another for "disrespecting" a flag, a cross, a holy text.
Breaking the Spell (2006)

People, World, Fear, Faith

“The cedar and the juniper tree have the same uses and good qualities… from the cedar is produced an oil called cedar oil. Books as well as other things smeared with this are not hurt by worms or decay. …the grain of the wood is straight. The statue of Diana in the temple at Ephesus is made of it, and so are the coffered ceilings both there and in all other famous fanes, because that wood is everlasting.”

Vitruvius book De architectura

Source: De architectura (The Ten Books On Architecture) (~ 15BC), Book II, Chapter IX, Sec. 13

Books, Tree, Hurt

“Let us never forget that the deep things that are American are the soul and the spirit. The Statue of Liberty is not tired, and not because it is made of bronze. It is because no matter what happens, here the individual is dignified because he is created in the image of his God. Let us not forget it.”

Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890–1969) American general and politician, 34th president of the United States (in office from 1953 to 1961)

Source: 1950s, Speech to the B'nai B'rith (1953)

God, Soul, Forgetting

“Happiness is not defined by our wealth or our status, but by how we choose to live our lives. Only when we are not entangled in the pursuit of fame and wealth will we truly be liberated. A liberated life is a life truly worth living.”

Jun Hong Lu (1959) Australian Buddhist leader

New World Times, (29 June 2018)[citation needed].

Life, Happiness, Wealth

“Dominion status can certainly not be attained by a community which brands and treats sixty millions of its members, fellow human beings, toiling at their side, as 'Untouchables', whose approach is an affront and whose very presence is pollution. Dominion status can certainly not be attained while India is a prey to fierce racial and religious dissensions and when the withdrawal of British protection would mean the immediate resumption of mediaeval wars. It cannot be attained while the political classes in India represent only an insignificant fraction of the three hundred and fifty millions for whose welfare we are responsible.”

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

Article for the Daily Mail (16 November 1929), quoted in Martin Gilbert, Prophet of Truth: Winston S. Churchill, 1922–1939 (London: Minerva, 1990), pp. 356–357
Early career years (1898–1929)

War, Communication

“Brahmins cannot hope to claim a high and superior status forever. Times are changing. They have to come down. Then only they could survive with dignity. Otherwise they will one day be forfeiting their high status. It will not be by force. It will be just laws of the land and the people.”

Periyar E. V. Ramasamy (1879–1973) Tamil politician and social reformer

Veeramani, Collected Works of Periyar, p. 516.
Brahminism

People, Law, Hope, Change

“Art is complex, I said to Rodin, who smiled because he felt that I was struggling with nature.... the beauty of Rodin’s art is.... in the thoughts he embodied. As for me, I just take a walk on the beach. A young girl appears. From that girl walking there emanates a soul. That is That is at I want to give my statue, that thing alive, yet immaterial. In composing the figure of one young girl I must give the impression that there are all young girls. From the spirit, my feeling passes into my fingers”

Aristide Maillol (1861–1944) sculptor from France

Quote in 'Aristide Maillol', ed. Andrew C. Ritchie, Albright Art Gallery N. Y. 1945, p. 31 + 45; as cited by Angelo Carnafa, in 'A sculpture of interior Solitude', Associated University Presse, 1999, p. 167

Smile, Beauty, Art, Feeling

“Media manipulation is commonplace. For people who do not look outside their comfort zone, they will never learn the whole truth. If scientists had not challenged the status quo, we would not have enjoyed modern medicine and technological innovations today.”

Newton Lee American computer scientist

Counterterrorism and Cybersecurity: Total Information Awareness (2nd Edition), 2015

People, Truth, Learning

““Under it there can be only one faith, one people and one all overriding authority. The State is a religious trust administered solely by His people (the faithful) acting in obedience to the Commander of the Faithful, who was in theory, and very often in practice too, the supreme General of the Army of militant Islam (Janud). There could be no place for non-believers. Even Jews and Christians could not be full citizens of it, though they somewhat approached the Muslims by reason of their being ‘People of the Book’ or believers in the Bible, which the Prophet of Islam accepted as revealed… “As for the Hindus and Zoroastrians, they had no place in such a political system. If their existence was tolerated, it was only to use them as hewers of wood and drawers of water, as tax-payers, ‘Khiraj-guzar’, for the benefit of the dominant sect of the Faithful. They were called Zimmis or people under a contract of protection by the Muslim State on condition of certain services to be rendered by them and certain political and civil disabilities to be borne by them to prevent them from growing strong. The very term Zimmi is an insulting title. It connotes political inferiority and helplessness like the status of a minor proprietor perpetually under a guardian; such protected people could not claim equality with the citizens of the Muslim theocracy.”

Jadunath Sarkar (1870–1958) Indian historian

Jadunath Sarkar, cited in R.C. Majumdar (ed.), The History of the Indian People and Culture, Volume VI, The Delhi Sultanate, Bombay, 1960, pp. 617-18. Quoted in S.R.Goel, The Calcutta Quran Petition (1999) ISBN 9788185990583

People, Books, Faith, Strong

“What a scandal to hear nature deprecated in comparison to Greek statues by one who knows neither one nor the other without acknowledging that the smallest part of Nature confounds and amazes those who know most. What statue or cast of it might there be that is not copied from divine nature?”

Francisco De Goya (1746–1828) Spanish painter and printmaker (1746–1828)

In a report in 1792 - Goya wrote to the Academy of San Fernando, on 'teaching art'; as quoted in Francisco Goya y Licientis, Janis Tomlinson, Phaodon 1999, p. 70
1790s

Nature, Parting

“The cult of the Virgin, Mariolatry, which by the gradual elevation of the divine element in the Virgin has led almost to her deification, answers merely to the feeling that God should be a perfect man, that God should include in his nature the feminine element. The progressive exaltation of the Virgin Mary, the work of Catholic piety, having its beginning in the expression Mother of God, …has culminated in attributing to her the status of co-redeemer and in the dogmatic declaration of her conception without the stain of original sin. Hence she now occupies a position between Humanity and Divinity and nearer Divinity than Humanity. And it has been surmised that in course of time she may perhaps even come to be regarded as yet another personal manifestation of the Godhead.”

Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936) 19th-20th century Spanish writer and philosopher

The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), VIII : From God to God

God, Feeling, Nature, Time

“Traditionally, economic analysis treats the economic system as one of the givens. The term "design" in the title is meant to stress that the structure of the economic system is to be regarded as an unknown. An unknown in what problem? Typically that of ﬁnding a system that would be, in a sense to be speciﬁed, superior to the existing one. The idea of searching for a better system is at least as ancient as Plato’s Republic, but it is only recently that tools have become available for a systematic, analytical approach to such search procedures. This new approach refuses to accept the institutional status quo of a particular time and place as the only legitimate object of interest and yet recognizes constraints that disqualify naive Utopias.”

Leonid Hurwicz (1917–2008) Russian-American economist and mathematician

Leonid Hurwicz, " The design of mechanisms for resource allocation http://www.econ.ucsb.edu/~tedb/Courses/UCSBpf/readings/hurwiczaer.pdf," The American Economic Review, (1973): 1-30.

Search, Idea, Problem, Sense

“Larry poured himself a coffee. "I hate when they come in here with computers. They sit forever at their tables, and they don't talk to nobody, it's like having a place full of statues or zombies."”

Cory Doctorow Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town

Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town (2005)

Hate, Coffee

“being invisible means you can immerse yourself in a crowd and start clasping boobs and buttocks, then leap aside and laugh as some poor chap gets a clip round the ear. Laugh quietly obviously. And changing rooms! You can sneak into changing rooms and sit right there in the middle of the place while pretty girls get wet and take all their clothes off. You could go and hide in the showers themselves, but since the water on your body wouldn't be invisible you'd have to rely on them not noticing a semi-transparent man appear in the corner. You could pretend to be a novelty glass statue, but you wouldn't be able to explain the developing glass stiffy.”

Ben Croshaw (1983) English video game journalist

Why it would kick arse to be invisible http://www.fullyramblomatic.com/essays/invis.htm Fully Ramblomatic, Essays

Girl, Water, Appearance, Change

“Reading conventional notions of class struggle and anti-colonialism into bin Laden, the Taliban, and radical Islam is not just solipsistic. It is nonsense. If poverty and destitution, colonialism and capitalism are animating radical Islam, explain this: In March, the Taliban went to the Afghan desert where stood great monuments of human culture, two massive Buddhas carved out of a cliff. At first, Taliban soldiers tried artillery. The 1,500-year-old masterpieces proved too hardy. The Taliban had to resort to dynamite. They blew the statues to bits, then slaughtered 100 cows in atonement-for having taken so long to finish the job. Buddhism is hardly a representative of the West. It is hardly a cause of poverty and destitution. It is hardly a symbol of colonialism. No. The statues represented two things: an alternative faith and a great work of civilization. To the Taliban, the presence of both was intolerable.”

Charles Krauthammer (1950–2018) American journalist

2000s, 2001, The Enemy is not Islam. It is Nihilism (2001)

Faith, Reading, Animals

“My figures at least are not a bunch of clothes with a head and hands sticking out but more nearly resemble the strong living bodies that most pictures show. And in the latter end of a life so spent in study, you at least can imagine that painting is with me a very serious study. That I have but little patience with the false modesty which is the greatest enemy to all figure painting. I see no impropriety in looking at the most beautiful of Nature's works, the naked figure. If there is impropriety, then just where does such impropriety begin? Is it wrong to look at a picture of a naked figure or at a statue? English ladies of the last generation thought so and avoided the statue galleries, but do so no longer. Or is it a question of sex? Should men make only the statues of men to be looked at by men, while the statues of women should be made by women to be looked at by women only? Should the he-painters draw the horses and bulls, and the she-painters like Rosa Bonheur the mares and cows? Must the poor old male body in the dissecting room be mutilated before Miss Prudery can dabble in his guts?Such indignities anger me. Can not anyone see into what contemptible inconsistencies such follies all lead? And how dangerous they are? My conscience is clear, and my suffering is past.”

Thomas Eakins (1844–1916) American painter

Letter of resignation to Edward Hornor Coates, Chairman of the Committee on Instruction, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (1886-02-15).

Life, Women, Men, Beauty

“Only drunks stare at statues …. I never liked the statues keeping vigil, primarily because they were too close to life.”

Amit Chaudhuri (1962) contemporary Indian-English novelist

Friend of My Youth (2017)

Life

“It is only as the temporary representatives and servants of the people that we meet here, we bring no hereditary status or gift of infallibility, and none follows us from this place.”

Gerald Ford (1913–2006) American politician, 38th President of the United States (in office from 1974 to 1977)

State of the Union Address (12 January 1977)
1970s

People

“Nobody, I think, ought to read poetry, or look at pictures or statues, who cannot find a great deal more in them than the poet or artist has actually expressed.”

Nathaniel Hawthorne book The Marble Faun

Source: The Marble Faun (1860), Chapter XLI: Snowdrops and Maidenly Delights

Thinking, Reading

“If the Hindus sang Vande Mãtaram in a public meeting, it was a ‘conspiracy’ to convert Muslims into kãfirs. If the Hindus blew a conch, or broke a coconut, or garlanded the portrait of a revered patriot, it was an attempt to ‘force’ Muslims into ‘idolatry’. If the Hindus spoke in any of their native languages, it was an ‘affront’ to the culture of Islam. If the Hindus took pride in their pre-Islamic heroes, it was a ‘devaluation’ of Islamic history. And so on, there were many more objections, major and minor, to every national self-expression. In short, it was a demand that Hindus should cease to be Hindus and become instead a faceless conglomeration of rootless individuals. On the other hand, the ‘minority community’ was not prepared to make the slightest concession in what they regarded as their religious and cultural rights. If the Hindus requested that cow-killing should stop, it was a demand for renouncing an ‘established Islamic practice’. If the Hindus objected to an open sale of beef in the bazars, it was an ‘encroachment’ on the ‘civil rights’ of the Muslims. If the Hindus demanded that cows meant for ritual slaughter should not be decorated and marched through Hindu localities, it was ‘trampling upon time-honoured Islamic traditions’. If the Hindus appealed that Hindu religious processions passing through a public thoroughfare should not be obstructed, it was an attempt to ‘disturb the peace of Muslim prayers’. If the Hindus wanted their native languages to attain an equal status with Urdu in the courts and the administration, it was an ‘assault on Muslim culture’. If the Hindus taught to their children the true history of Muslim tyrants, it was a ‘hate campaign against Islamic heroes’. And the ‘minority community’ was always ready to ‘defend’ its ‘religion and culture’ by taking recourse to street riots.”

Sita Ram Goel (1921–2003) Indian activist

Muslim Separatism – Causes and Consequences (1987)

Hate, Children, Peace, Religion

“Whereas some consequences of our actions occur as planned, others are unanticipated; social actions are not context-free but are constrained, and their outcomes are shaped by the setting in which they occur. Especially significant are the constraints on action that arise from commitments enforced by institutionalization. Because organizations are social systems, goals and procedures tend to achieve an established, value impregnated status. We say that they become institutionalized.”

Philip Selznick (1919–2010) American sociologist

Source: TVA and the grass roots : a study in the sociology of formal organization, 1949, pp. 256-257

“Azerbaijan has exhausted the resources of trust in terms of autonomous status for minorities within its boundaries. It was not and is not capable of providing guarantees of even internal security to such autonomies. There was once another Armenian autonomy in Azerbaijan: Nakhijevan. What happened to it? Not a single Armenian is left in Nakhijevan.”

Serzh Sargsyan (1954) Armenian politician, 3rd President of Armenia

Speech by President Serzh Sargsyan in the Chatham House British Royal Institute of International Affairs http://www.president.am/events/news/eng/?search=Chatham+House&id=898 (February 10, 2010)

“Merely pointing to the fact that some people have a lot more than others is less compelling as a critique; it invites the response “So what? Those who have more aren’t hurting anybody; you’re just appealing to envy.” By contrast, being able to show that those who enjoy a higher socioeconomic status have to a considerable extent achieved and maintained that status by forcibly expropriating and oppressing the less affluent provides for a far more effective indictment.”

Roderick Long (1964) American philosopher

Source: "Left-libertarianism, market anarchism, class conflict and historical theories of distributive justice" (2012), p. 425

People, Envy, Hurt

“He is truly one of the most revolting humans (minions) I have ever seen. In a way, there is no more fitting spokesman for the Trump administration than an entitled, elitist arsehole who refuses to take responsibility for the messes he makes, and who can somehow pick a fight with the Statue of Liberty.”

John Oliver (1977) English comedian

" Stephen Miller https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQ2noQY5kRQ" (ff. 0:02:45), August 4, 2017; on Stephen Miller. Last Week Tonight (2014&ndash;present)

Way, Fight

“A boy in his teens! What did I know about death? This is a problem for Irish writers — our literary forebears are enormous. They stand behind us like Easter Island statues, and we keep trying to measure up to them, leaping towards heights we can't possibly reach. I suppose that's a good thing, but it makes for a painful early life for the writer. Anyway, hunched there over my Aunt Sadie's Remington, I was starting to learn how to write. Now, fifty years later, I'm still learning.”

John Banville (1945) Irish writer

John Banville, The Art of Fiction No. 200 (2009)

Life, Death, Pain, Boy

“Science is not about status quo. It’s about revolution.”

Leon M. Lederman (1922–2018) American mathematician and physicist

The God Particle: If the Universe Is the Answer, What Is the Question? (1993), p. 193

Science

“The same kind of logic holds in respect of Saudi Arabia. The regime might inflict punishments every bit as obscene as those enforced by the Islamic State. But it's a reliable ally, prepared to enforce the status quo in an oil rich region - and that matters more to the West than the life of a democracy protester.”

Jeff Sparrow (1969) Australian writer

Why the West turns a blind eye to Saudi Arabia's brutality (September 29, 2015)

Life, Democracy

“The period I'm going through now is a transition. You know when you're in the middle of puberty and you don't know what to do with yourself? I feel like that now, It will be a transition into something very good if I work hard enough at it. But it is a frustration and an emptiness and a lack of confidence now. I feel young and I feel old. I feel twenty years below zero and old. I put a lot of demands on myself to know this and that, to be here and there. I've got to really do one thing at a time all the way. I've got stop wanting to know and do everything at the same time. It's like you have a home stuffed with beautifull things - statues, books, lamps - that give a little bit, a little bit, a little bit, and you have nothing. And then you go into a house where there isn't a great light and one object and you could sit there all your life studying it, and one discovery about the object would give birth to the next, and it would be totally fulfilling. Right now my life is cluttered and you can't run away from it. If I weren't attached to this body I would have left it long ago.”

Nastassja Kinski (1961) German actress

As quoted in Denise Worrell (1989), Icons: Intimate Portraits.

Life, Books, Way, Feeling

“The Greeks, who were apparently strong on visual aids, originated the term stigma to refer to bodily signs designed to expose something unusual and bad about the moral status of the signifier. The signs were cut or burnt into the body and advertised that the bearer was a slave, a criminal, or a traitor — a blemished person, ritually polluted, to be avoided, especially in public places. Later, in Christian times, two layers of metaphor were added to the term : the first referred to bodily signs of holy grace that took the form of eruptive blossoms on the skin; the second, a medical allusion to this religious allusion, referred to bodily signs of physical disorder. Today the term is widely used in something like the original literal sense, but is applied more to the disgrace itself than to the bodily evidence of it. Furthermore, shifts have occurred in the kinds of disgrace that arouse concern. Students, however, have made little effort to describe the structural preconditions of stigma, or even to provide a definition of the concept itself. It seems necessary, therefore, to try at the beginning to sketch in some very general assumptions and definitions.”

Erving Goffman book Stigma

Source: 1950s-1960s, Stigma, 1963, p. 1-2 Lead paragraph

Sense, Effort, Strong, Time

“The General Theory is at once both a book of economic theory and a font of economic prejudices—there are probably few academics in economics and political science who do not have an opinion of it, whether they have read it or not. It has reached the status—which it obtained almost immediately—where the fact of its existence is as important, if not more important, than what it actually says.”

Alan O. Ebenstein (1959) American political scientist, educator and author

Hayek's Journey: The Mind of Friedrich Hayek (2003)

Books, Science, Reading

“Orientation in time, space, and status are the essentials of social existence, and the Balinese, although they make very strong spirits for ceremonial occasions, with a few startling exceptions resist alcohol, because if one drinks one loses one's orientation. Orientation is felt as a protection rather than as a strait jacket and its loss provokes extreme anxiety.”

Margaret Mead (1901–1978) American anthropologist

Source: 1940s, Balinese Character (1942), p. 11

Alcohol, Drink, Strong, Loss

“When Reagan fired the striking air traffic controllers in 1981, he told America he was literally willing to kill us all if we didn't give in to his wealth-transfer plan. It was so shocking that it worked. The air controller's union broke- and so did a whole way of life. Thanks to Ronald Reagan, we are all miserable wage slaves, or schoolyard wretches being pressed and prepared for life in the office world. There is no other choice but that, or death. The way this country supplicated before Reagan's corpse, elevating him to a kind of Khomeini status with the seven-day funeral and the endless orations about his humanity, his intelligence, and how wonderfully simple life was under his reign, only reinforced the most disturbing conclusion that I was reaching as I wrote this book: that Americans have become the perfect slaves, fools and suckers, while a small elite is cackling all the way to the offshore bank.”

Mark Ames (1965) American writer and journalist

Postscript, p. 241-242
Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion, From Reagan's Workplaces to Clinton's Columbine and Beyond (2005)

Life, Death, Books, World

“As cedars beaten with continual storms,
So great men flourish; and do imitate
Unskilful statuaries, who suppose,
In forging a Colossus, if they make him
Straddle enough, strut, and look big, and gape,
Their work is goodly: so men merely great
In their affected gravity of voice,
Sourness of countenance, manners' cruelty,
Authority, wealth, and all the spawn of fortune,
Think they bear all the kingdom's worth before them,
Yet differ not from those colossic statues,
Which, with heroic forms without o'erspread,
Within are naught but mortar, flint and lead.”

George Chapman Bussy D'Ambois

Act I, scene i.
Bussy D'Ambois (1607)

Men, Thinking, Wealth

“The moral elements are among the most important in war. They constitute the spirit that permeates war as a whole, and at an early stage they establish a close affinity with the will that moves and leads a whole mass of force, practically merging with it, since the will is itself a moral quantity. Unfortunately they will not yield to academic wisdom. They cannot be classified or counted. They have to be seen or felt. … It is paltry philosophy if in the old-fashioned way one lays down rules and principles in total disregard of moral values. As soon as these appear one regards them as exceptions, which gives them a certain scientific status, and thus makes them into rules. Or again one may appeal to genius, which is above all rules; which amounts to admitting that rules are not only made for idiots, but are idiotic in themselves.”

Carl von Clausewitz book On War

Ch 3 : Moral Factors, as translated by Michael Howard and Peter Paret.
On War (1832), Book 3

Wisdom, War, Way, Fashion

“It is generally acknowledged that the Government are running, in the Maze prison, one of the most liberal and humane prison regimes anywhere…What hunger strikers are asking for—the one who died last was in fact a murderer; let us not mince our words—is political status by easy stages. They cannot have it. They are murderers and people who use force and violence to obtain their ends. They have made perfectly clear what they want. They cannot and will not have it.”

Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013) British stateswoman and politician

Prime Minister's Questions (4 May 1981) http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/104649 regarding the 1981 Irish hunger strike. First term as Prime Minister

Hunger, People

“The Founders wrote in the Declaration of Independence that some truths are self-evident, and one of these is the fact that all men are created equal. Yet everyone knows that no two human beings are exactly alike in any respect. They are different when they are born. They plainly exhibit different natural skills. They acquire different tastes. They develop along different lines. They vary in physical strength, mental capacity, emotional stability, inherited social status, in their opportunities for self-fulfillment, and in scores of other ways. Then how can they be equal? The answer is, they can't, except in three ways. They can only be treated as equals in the sight of God, in the sight of the law, and in the protection of their rights. In these three ways all men are created equal. It is the task of society, as it is with God, to accept people in all their vast array of individual differences, but treat them as equals when it comes to their role as human beings. As members of society, all persons should have their equality guaranteed in two areas.”

W. Cleon Skousen (1913–2006) ex FBI agent, conservative United States author and faith-based political theorist

The 5,000 Year Leap (1981)

Men, God, People, Truth

“Truth is harder to bear than ignorance, and so ignorance is valued more— also because the status quo depends on it; but love depends on self-knowledge and self-knowledge depends on being able to bear the truth.”

Andrea Dworkin book Intercourse

Source: Intercourse (1987), Chapter 4

Love, Truth, Knowledge, Dependency

“Sartre, whose underground activities had never amounted to anything except a secret meeting on Wednesday to decide whether there should be another meeting the following Tuesday, not only claimed the status of Resistance veteran but called down vengeance on people whose behaviour had not really been all that much more reprehensible than his own.”

Clive James (1939–2019) Australian author, critic, broadcaster, poet, translator and memoirist

'Raymond Aron' p. 35
Essays and reviews, Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time (2007)

People, Secret

“Statues but known from shapes of the earth,
By being too lovely for mortal birth;
Paintings whose colours of life were caught
From the fairy tints in the rainbow wrought;
Music whose sighs had a spell like those
That float on the sea at the evening’s close
Language so silvery, that every word
Was like the lute’s awakening chord;”

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

Title Poem
The Improvisatrice (1824)

Love, Life, Music, Birth

“Young entrepreneurs tend to be fearless and have no respect for the status quo, and that’s exactly what you need in an environment where the status quo is going to put you out of business.”

Steve Blank (1953) American businessman

Forbes "Lean And Meaningful: What Founders Still Need To Fix In The 21st Century" https://www.forbes.com/sites/emilyinverso/2016/02/10/lean-and-meaningful-what-founders-still-need-to-fix-in-the-21st-century/#1a89897a2389. February 29, 2016 issue.

Business

“I think status is in fact a significant motivation even for me, and even the more "pure" motivations like intellectual curiosity can in some sense be traced back to status.”

Wei Dai Cryptocurrency pioneer and computer scientist

In response https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/a3aGosA987cZ4aRAB/online-discussion-is-better-than-pre-publication-peer-review#TkXmTc5Sxnt9GhyZS to someone suggesting that status is not a motivator for Dai, September 2017 Context: I think status is in fact a significant motivation even for me, and even the more "pure" motivations like intellectual curiosity can in some sense be traced back to status. It seems unlikely that [updateless decision theory] would have been developed without the existence of forums like extropians, everything-list, and LW, for reasons of both motivation and feedback/collaboration.

Motivation, Thinking, Sense

“It was the advent of the second plane, sharking in low over the Statue of Liberty: that was the defining moment.”

Martin Amis (1949) Welsh novelist

"Fear and loathing" (2001)
Context: It was the advent of the second plane, sharking in low over the Statue of Liberty: that was the defining moment. Until then, America thought she was witnessing nothing more serious than the worst aviation disaster in history; now she had a sense of the fantastic vehemence ranged against her.

“By the Eternal! there is a man whose form should be cast in deathless bronze and the statue placed in every college of the land.”

Elbert Hubbard book A Message to Garcia

A Message to Garcia (1899)
Context: The point I wish to make is this: McKinley gave Rowan a letter to be delivered to Garcia; Rowan took the letter & did not ask, "Where is he at?" By the Eternal! there is a man whose form should be cast in deathless bronze and the statue placed in every college of the land. It is not book-learning young men need, nor instruction about this and that, but a stiffening of the vertebrae which will cause them to be loyal to a trust, to act promptly, concentrate their energies: do the thing — "Carry a message to Garcia!"

“The worst crime of any type of state is just that it always tries to force the rich diversity of social life into definite forms and adjust it to one particular form, which allows for no wider outlook and regards the previously exciting status as finished.”

Rudolf Rocker book Anarcho-Syndicalism

Source: Anarcho-Syndicalism (1938), Ch. 1 "Anarchism: Its Aims and Purposes"
Context: Anarchism is no patent solution for all human problems, no Utopia of a perfect social order, as it has so often been called, since on principle it rejects all absolute schemes and concepts. It does not believe in any absolute truth, or in definite final goals for human development, but in an unlimited perfectibility of social arrangements and human living conditions, which are always straining after higher forms of expression, and to which for this reason one can assign no definite terminus nor set any fixed goal. The worst crime of any type of state is just that it always tries to force the rich diversity of social life into definite forms and adjust it to one particular form, which allows for no wider outlook and regards the previously exciting status as finished. The stronger its supporters feel themselves, the more completely they succeed in bringing every field of social life into their service, the more crippling is their influence on the operation of all creative cultural forces, the more unwholesomely does it affect the intellectual and social development of any particular epoch.

Life

“Ancient cultures did not worship idols. Their god-statues represented ideal states which, when meditated constantly upon, one might aspire to.”

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

What Is Reality?
Context: Ancient cultures did not worship idols. Their god-statues represented ideal states which, when meditated constantly upon, one might aspire to. Science proves there never was a mermaid, blue-skinned Krishna or a virgin birth in physical reality. Yet thought is real, and the domain of thought is the one place where gods inarguably exist, wielding tremendous power. If Aphrodite were a myth and Love only a concept, then would that negate the crimes and kindnesses and songs done in Love's name? If Christ were only ever fiction, a divine Idea, would this invalidate the social change inspired by that idea, make holy wars less terrible, or human betterment less real, less sacred?

God

“Leadership is a commitment to an idea, to a dream, and to a vision of what can be. And my dream is for my land and my people to cease fighting and allow our children to reach their full potential regardless of sex, status, or belief.”

Benazir Bhutto (1953–2007) 11th Prime Minister of Pakistan

"Reflections on Working Towards Peace" in Architects of Peace: Visions of Hope in Words and Images (2000) edited by Michael Collopy http://www.scu.edu/ethics/architects-of-peace/Bhutto/essay.html Context: To make peace, one must be an uncompromising leader. To make peace, one must also embody compromise. Throughout the ages, leadership and courage have often been synonymous. Ultimately, leadership requires action: daring to take steps that are necessary but unpopular, challenging the status quo in order to reach a brighter future. And to push for peace is ultimately personal sacrifice, for leadership is not easy. It is born of a passion, and it is a commitment. Leadership is a commitment to an idea, to a dream, and to a vision of what can be. And my dream is for my land and my people to cease fighting and allow our children to reach their full potential regardless of sex, status, or belief.

Children, People, Dreams, Sex

“To maintain the status quo will not do. We have set up a dynamic State, bent upon creation and reform, building and expansion.”

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

Rebirth and Destiny of Israel (1954), p. 419; a portion of this paragraph has sometimes been misquoted as: "To maintain the status quo will not do. We have to set up a dynamic state bent upon expansion."
Context: Our code must be framed to speed the absorption of immigrants into our economy, culture and society; to fuse the returning tribes into a homogeneous national and cultural unit; to forward our physical and moral healing and the cleansing of our lives from the trivia and dross which gathered upon us in dependence and exile. To maintain the status quo will not do. We have set up a dynamic State, bent upon creation and reform, building and expansion. Laws which lag behind development, merely a digest of experience and the lessons of the past, are useless to us. We need to anticipate the character of the times, discern embryonic forms emergent or renewed, and clear the path for circumstantial change.

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

Aleksandr Zinovyev (1922–2006) Russian writer

Katastroika (1988)

Quotes about status page 7

Quotes about status
page 7