Quotes about still
page 59

“It is only with total humility, and in absolute stillness of mind that we can know what indeed we are.”

Wei Wu Wei (1895–1986) writer

The Tenth Man : The Great Joke (1966)

“India calls upon all parties to abjure violence and the use of threat and force to resolve the differences. I think the need of the hour is cessation of armed conflict, air strikes will lead to harm to innocent civilians, foreign nationals and diplomatic missions and their personnel who are still in Libya.”

S. M. Krishna (1932) Indian politician

Condemning the military intervention in Libya, March 21, 2011. http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5hRlDpPNOeggu1Rkz8-vUd32INbLw?docId=CNG.26f4275431f3c791c245845a136980cf.1301

Thinking

“Our civil laws will never be supple enough to fit the immense and changing variety of facts. Laws change more slowly than custom, and though dangerous when they fall behind the times are more dangerous still when they presume to anticipate custom.”

Marguerite Yourcenar book Memoirs of Hadrian

Nos lois civiles ne seront jamais assez souples pour s'adapter à l'immense et fluide variété des faits. Elles changent moins vite que les moeurs; dangereuses quand elles retardent sur celles-ci, elles le sont davantage quand elles se mêlent de les précéder.
Source: Memoirs of Hadrian (1951), p. 113

Law, Change, Time

““Is it a wicked thing, then?”
“I should call it a misunderstanding, rather. A misunderstanding of life. Death and life are the same thing—like the two sides of my hand, the palm and the back. And still the palm and the back are not the same… They can be neither separated, nor mixed.””

Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) American writer

Source: Earthsea Books, The Farthest Shore (1972), Chapter 5, "Sea Dreams" (Arren and Ged)

Life, Death

“Experimentally she thinks about dumping toxic waste in pristine wilderness and killing the last great apes on earth with a club. She still finds both those thoughts disgusting. This is a relief; it seems to her that she’s just selfish, not evil.
She was always taught they’re the same thing. She hopes she remembers, when she gets out of all this, that they’re not.”

John Barnes book Mother of Storms

Source: Mother of Storms (1994), p. 298

Hope, Thinking, Evil, Selfishness

“Any man can face death but to be committed to bring it as close as possible while performing certain classic movements and do this again and again and again and then deal it out yourself with a sword to an animal weighing half a ton which you love is more complicated than just facing death. It is facing your performance as a creative artist each day and your necessity to function as a skillful killer. Antonio had to kill quickly and mercifully and still give the bull one full chance at him when he crossed over the horn at least twice a day.
Everyone in bullfighting helps everyone else in bullfighting in the ring. In spite of all rivalries and hatreds it is the closest brotherhood there is. Only bullfighters know the risks they run and what the bull can do with his horns to their bodies and their minds.”

Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) American author and journalist

Source: The Dangerous Summer (1985), Ch. 9

Love, Death, Chance, Help

“But instead I kept my tears inside,
cause I knew if I,
started I'd keep crying for the rest of my life with you,
I finally built up the strength to walk away,
don't regret it,
but I still live with the side effects.”

Mariah Carey (1970) American singer-songwriter

"Side Effects", "E=MC²", 2008
Lyrics

Life, Tear, Cry

“Loving—if the answering breast
Seem not to be thus possessed,
Still in hoping have a care;
If it do, beware, beware!
But if in yourself you find it,
Above all things—mind it, mind it!”

Arthur Hugh Clough Love, not Duty

Love, Not Duty, st. 5.

Love, Hope

“Maybe I’ve finally learned the bitter truth that I can’t beat them, even if I’ll never join them. But I’m not going to lose the one thing I can still call my own: my life. And you should wise up and do the same, especially with a new child on the way.”

Nick Drake (poet) (1961) British writer

Ch 4
The Rahotep series, Book 3: Egypt: The Book of Chaos (2011)

Life, Truth, Way, Learning

“My own first love was biology. I spent a great part of my adolescence in the Natural History museum in London (and I still go to the Botanic Garden almost every day, and to the Zoo every Monday). The sense of diversity—of the wonder of innumerable forms of life—has always thrilled me beyond anything else.”

Oliver Sacks (1933–2015) British neurologist and writer

Personal correspondence, quoted in Stephen Jay Gould, "Cabinet Museums: Alive, Alive, O!", Dinosaur in a Haystack (Harmony, 1995), p. 245

Love, Life, History, Nature

“Bookstore boss: [to Mo] The self-service kiosks have enabled us to cut down on staff, but some customers still feel the need to speak to an actual human. That's where you come in.
Customer: Excuse me, do you carry Jewish New Year cards?
Boss: I'm sorry, our New Years cards don't come in till November. But we'll be getting Jewish Christmas cards then, too!”

Alison Bechdel book Dykes to Watch Out For

#425, "Rites of Fall" (2003), collected in Invasion of the DTWOF (2005).
Dykes to Watch Out For

Feeling, Christmas

“There comes a day when people begin to say, 'Why doesn't that old duffer retire?' I want to get out while they're still saying Astaire is a hell of a dancer.”

Fred Astaire (1899–1987) American dancer, singer, actor, choreographer and television presenter

Fred Astaire in Time. "The New Pictures: 'Blue Skies'". October 14, 1946, p. 103. (M).

People, Hell

“The Working Man as yet sought only to know his craft; and educated himself sufficiently by ploughing and hammering, under the conditions given, and in fit relation to the persons given: a course of education, then as now and ever, really opulent in manful culture and instruction to him; teaching him many solid virtues, and most indubitably useful knowledges; developing in him valuable faculties not a few both to do and to endure,—among which the faculty of elaborate grammatical utterance, seeing he had so little of extraordinary to utter, or to learn from spoken or written utterances, was not bargained for; the grammar of Nature, which he learned from his mother, being still amply sufficient for him. This was, as it still is, the grand education of the Working Man. As for the Priest, though his trade was clearly of a reading and speaking nature, he knew also in those veracious times that grammar, if needful, was by no means the one thing needful, or the chief thing. By far the chief thing needful, and indeed the one thing then as now, was, That there should be in him the feeling and the practice of reverence to God and to men; that in his life's core there should dwell, spoken or silent, a ray of pious wisdom fit for illuminating dark human destinies;—not so much that he should possess the art of speech, as that he should have something to speak!”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

1850s, Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850), Stump Orator (May 1, 1850)

Life, Wisdom, Men, God

“John F. Kennedy … murdered in Dallas by some hapless geek named Oswald who worked for either Castro, the mob, Jimmy Hoffa, the CIA, his dominatrix landlady or the odious, degenerate FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover. The list is long and crazy — maybe Marilyn Monroe's first husband fired those shots from the grassy knoll. Who knows? A whole generation of American journalists is still embarrassed by their failure to answer that question. JFK's ghost will haunt the corridors of power in America for as long as the grass is green and the rivers run to the sea. Take my word for it, Bubba. I have heard his footsteps for 30 years and I still feel guilty about not being able to explain the biggest news story of my lifetime to my son.”

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

Better than Sex (22 August 1994)
1990s

Feeling, Failure, Question, Grass

“The emotional quality of what we moderns call our thought produces an extreme violence of conviction combined with extreme incoherence in our arguments. I refer here to ordinary people and not to an intellectual elite. We do not involve ourselves in studying the meaning and consequences of a fact calmly and objectively. The fact asserts itself through its image and associates itself in unchallengeable fashion with other images which, in this mode of thinking, are its true context. Emotions justify as well as provoke or command opinions, which still seem intellectual and reasoned.”

Jacques Ellul (1912–1994) French sociologist, technology critic, and Christian anarchist

J. Hanks, trans. (1985), p. 211
The Humiliation of the Word (1981)

People, Fashion, Thinking, Study

“(Sylvia) Rita! Is Bush still president? (Rita) Ma, I didn't want to tell you…You seemed so happy.”

Nicole Hollander (1939) Cartoonist

Source: Sylvia cartoon strip, p. 108

Happiness

“The social conditions that nourished and made use of this ideology can still revive; perhaps - who knows? - the virus is dormant, waiting for the next opportunity. Dreams about the perfect society belong to the enduring stock of civilization.”

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

New Preface, p. vi
Main Currents Of Marxism (1978)

Dreams, Waiting, Perfection

“Since all of the possibilities of a terrestrial origin have been either ruled out or seem improbable, and since the possibility of an extraterrestrial origin has not been able to be ruled out, I must conclude that an ETI (ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence) might have sent the signal that we received as the Wow! source. Of course, being a scientist, I await the reception of additional signals like the Wow! source that are able to be received and analyzed by many observatories. Thus, I must state that the origin of the Wow! signal is still an open question for me. There is simply too little data to draw many conclusions. In other words, as I stated above, I choose not to "draw vast conclusions from 'half-vast' data."”

Jerry R. Ehman American astronomer and astrophysicist

The Big Ear Wow! Signal : What We Know and Don't Know About It After 20 Years (1 September 1997); section: ETI

Intelligence, Question, Drawing

“the cluekey to a worldroom beyond the roomwhorld, for scarce one, or pathetically few of his dode canal sammenlivers cared seriously or for long to doubt with Kurt Iuld van Dijke (the gravitational pull perceived by certain fixed residents and the capture of uncertain comets chancedrifting through our system suggesting the authenticitatem of his aliquitudinis) he canonicity of his existence as a tesseract. Be still, O quick! Speak him dumb! Hush ye fronds of Ulma!”

James Joyce book Finnegans Wake

Source: Finnegans Wake (1939), p. 100

“Interviewer: You once said you had a drug problem…
Lily: Yeah, I still do. It's so hard to find good grass these days.”

Jane Wagner (1935) Playwright, actress

Other material for Lily Tomlin

Problem, Grass

“Contrary to the ecologists, nature does not stand still and does not maintain the kind of equilibrium that guarantees the survival of any particular species - least of all the survival of her greatest and most fragile product: man.”

Ayn Rand book The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution

Source: The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution (1971), p. 134

Nature

“I discover that some of the Eastern papers represent me as a great blasphemer, because I said, in my lecture on Marriage, at our last Conference, that Jesus Christ was married at Cana of Galilee, that Mary, Martha, and others were his wives, and that he begat children. All that I have to say in reply to that charge is this— they worship a Savior that is too pure and holy to fulfil the commands of his Father. I worship one that is just pure and holy enough "to fulfil all righteousness;" not only the righteous law of baptism, but the still more righteous and important law "to multiply and replenish the earth." Startle not at this! for even the Father himself honored that law by coming down to Mary, without a natural body, and begetting a son; and if Jesus begat children, he only "did that which he had seen his Father do."”

Orson Hyde (1805–1878) American Mormon leader

Journal of Discourses 2:210 (March 18, 1855).

Marriage, Children, Law, Nature

“Keepe pursed his lips, nodded. “We’re already in a very strong position in this country, of course. We’ve taken over all of the antigovernment militias, most of the religious groups who think of themselves as conservative, plus what’s left of the KKK and the American Nazi party, but they’re only pocket change. We now own the Republican party. Any moderates still hiding in there have been flushed out. We’ve been managing the press for over twenty years now, and the public is accustomed to our view of the world.”
Jagger paid attention. “I didn’t realize…”
“Oh, yes. People don’t want to absorb new information. They like predictability. So as long as we don’t surprise the public with the truth, we’re free to move as we like. Very shortly we won’t even have to be covert about it. And then, of course, people are sick of issues. Civil rights, human rights, women’s rights—people are tired of all that. You understand?””

Sheri S. Tepper (1929–2016) American fiction writer

Source: Gibbon's Decline & Fall (1996), Chapter 2 (p. 52; spoken by one of the leaders of a secretive neo-fascist organization)

Women, People, Truth, World

“Soon, if any envy still spreads clouds before you, it shall perish, and after me you shall be paid the honours you deserve.”
Mox, tibi si quis adhuc praetendit nubila livor, occidet, et meriti post me referentur honores.

Statius book Thebaid

Source: Thebaid, Book XII, Line 818

Envy

“No wonder that my remembrance fails me, for I shall complete my 70 years next Sunday (the 22); — and during these 70 years I have had a happy life; which still remains happy because of hope and content.”

Michael Faraday (1791–1867) English scientist

Letter of Faraday to Christian Friedrich Schönbein (19 September 1861); see also The Letters of Faraday and Schoenbein 1836-1862 (1899), edited by Georg W. A. Kahlbaum and Francis V. Darbishire, p. 349 http://www.archive.org/details/lettersoffaraday00fararich

Life, Happiness, Hope

“You know that weird cat dance that cats do late at night where they go completely stir-crazy and they run around the apartment and you don't know what the hell they're doing? I often feel like that. I dye my hair constantly because I can't sit still with one hair color. That's a perfect example of trying to satisfy some hunger. I want change; I want constant stimuli. I love to fly because I love the high. All of these are like itch kind of things. Sometimes I need to completely get away. I'll get in the car and I'll drive for as long as I can drive. Sometimes it's a sexual urge. I don't need to explain that; it's pretty self-explanatory. It's a craving, a desire. Sometimes it's food. I'm just a giant, big ol' consumer. I want, I need, I crave, I can't say no. I have no control and I'm a complete control freak. It's just crazy”

Colleen Fitzpatrick (1972) American singer and actress

laughs
Asked where her "itches" come from
Attributed

Love, Hunger, Food, Cars

“My reason will still not understand why I pray, but I shall still pray, and my life, my whole life, independently of anything that may happen to me, is every moment of it no longer meaningless as it was before, but has an unquestionable meaning of goodness with which I have the power to invest it.”

Leo Tolstoy book Anna Karenina

Pt. VIII, ch. 19
Anna Karenina (1875–1877; 1878)

Life, Understanding

“Today we have great laboratories and individual research projects employing thousands of scientists, but the interrelation between these giant laboratories, and between them and the myriad of individual investigators, is still one of voluntary, and almost unconscious, co-operation. It is not based on central planning or hierarchic organization. But as any economist knows, the fact that there is no one who can give commands does not mean that there is no social organization.”

Gordon Tullock (1922–2014) American economist

The Organization of Inquiry (1966) Ch 1. The Social Organization of Science

“I don't want you to become sad, I still live somewhere else, where you can't see me and can't hear me, but I will see you and know how you are. And I will wait for you until you come to me. Everybody has his time and will move sometime.”

Ziad Jarrah (1975–2001) September 11th hijacker

Letter to Aysel Şengün (2001)

Sadness, Time, Waiting

“Between going and staying the day wavers,
in love with its own transparency.
The circular afternoon is now a bay
where the world in stillness rocks.
All is visible and all elusive,
all is near and can't be touched.
Paper, book, pencil, glass,
rest in the shade of their names.
Time throbbing in my temples repeats
the same unchanging syllable of blood.
The light turns the indifferent wall
into a ghostly theater of reflections.
I find myself in the middle of an eye,
watching myself in its blank stare.
The moment scatters. Motionless,
I stay and go: I am a pause.”

Octavio Paz (1914–1998) Mexican writer laureated with the 1990 Nobel Prize for Literature

Between Going and Staying

Love, Books, World, Light

“Stellar wars are a sort of parallel reality in the filmic imagination, terrestrial wars are still today a harsh daily reality.”

Fausto Cercignani (1941) Italian scholar, essayist and poet

Examples of self-translation (c. 2004), Quotes - Zitate - Citations - Citazioni

War, Imagination, Reality

“For other peoples will, I do not doubt,
still cast their bronze to breathe with softer features,
or draw out of the marble living lines,
plead causes better, trace the ways of heaven
with wands and tell the rising constellations;
but yours will be the rulership of nations,
remember Roman, these will be your arts:
to teach the ways of peace to those you conquer,
to spare defeated peoples, tame the proud.”

Allen Mandelbaum (1926–2011) American poet and professor of literature, translator from Latin and Italian

Book VI, lines 1129–1137
The Aeneid of Virgil (1971)

People, Peace, Art, Way

“As to Duration, I still think it is absolutely impossible to conceive it without something that exists, and continues to exist, i. e. to endure. But how it should be a property of the thing existing is to me inconceivable. One thing… is absolutely certain, viz. that if eternal Duration be a property of the Supreme Being, Duration limited must be a property of inferior beings; so that we have here some common property.
I find you agree with Dr Clarke, in considering Time and Duration as the same. But this is an error that Dr Clarke has fallen into, by not being learned in the Ancient Metaphysics; for there he would have learned that time is only the measure of motion. It therefore could not exist, but with the material world; so that, if we could suppose nothing existing but the Supreme Mind, which is immoveable, there would in that case be Duration, or αίών,—as the Greek Philosophers call it—but not χρόνος, or Time. And the Doctor should not have rejected the common distinction, made by all Philosophers and Divines before him, betwixt Time and Eternity, without assigning better reasons than he has done.”

James Burnett, Lord Monboddo (1714–1799) Scottish judge, scholar of language evolution and philosopher

Letter to Richard Price (Sept. 15, 1780) as quoted by William Angus Knight, Lord Monboddo and Some of His Contemporaries https://books.google.com/books?id=GAEQAAAAYAAJ (1900).

World, Error, Thinking, Learning

“As in the case of the individual, not all the information which is available to the race at one time is accessible without special effort. There is a well-known tendency of libraries to become clogged by their own volume; of the sciences to develop such a degree of specialization that the expert is often illiterate outside his own minute specialty. Dr. Vannevar Bush has suggested the use of mechanical aids for the searching through vast bodies of material. These probably have their uses, but they are limited by the impossibility of classifying a book under an unfamiliar heading unless some particular person has already recognized the relevance of that heading for that particular book. In the case where two subjects have the same technique and intellectual content but belong to widely separated fields, this still requires some individual with an almost Leibnizian catholicity of interest.”

Norbert Wiener book Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine

VIII. Information, Language, and Society. p. 158.
Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (1948)

Books, Search, Effort, Science

“David Dimbleby: You couldn't - you couldn't set our minds at rest on the vexed question of what the Sunday Times did actually pay you for the book?
Harold Wilson: No, I don't think it's a matter of interest to the BBC or to anybody else.
Dimbleby: But why..
Wilson: If you're interested in these things, you'd better find out how people buy yachts. Do you ask that question? Did you ask him how he was able to pay for a yacht?
Dimbleby: I haven't interviewed …
Wilson: Have you asked him that question?
Dimbleby: I haven't interviewed him.
Wilson: Well, has the BBC ever asked that question?
Dimbleby: I don't know …
Wilson: Well, what's it got to do with you, then?
Dimbleby: I imagine they have..
Wilson: Why you ask these question, I mean why, if people can afford to buy £25,000 yachts, do the BBC not regard that as a matter for public interest? Why do you insult me with these questions here?
Dimbleby: It's only that it's been a matter of..
Wilson: All I'm saying, all I'm saying..
Dimbleby: … public speculation, and I was giving you an opportunity if you wanted to, to say something about it.
Wilson: It was not a matter of speculation, it was just repeating press gossip. You will not put this question to Mr. Heath. When you have got an answer to him, come and put the question to me. And this last question and answer are not to be recorded. Is this question being recorded?
Dimbleby: Well it is, because we're running film.
Wilson: Well, will you cut it out or not? All right, we stop now. No, I'm sorry, I'm really not having this. I'm really not having this. The press may take this view, that they wouldn't put this question to Heath but they put it to me; if the BBC put this question to me, without putting it to Heath, the interview is off, and the whole programme is off. I think it's a ridiculous question to put. Yes, and I mean it cut off, I don't want to read in the Times Diary or miscellany that I asked for it to be cut out. [pause]
Dimbleby: All right, are we still running? Can I ask you this, then, which I mean, I.. let me put this question, I mean if you find this question offensive then..
Wilson: Coming to ask if your curiosity can be satisfied, I think it's disgraceful. Never had such a question in an interview in my life before.
Dimbleby: I.. [gasps]
Joe Haines (Wilson's Press Secretary): Well, let's stop now, and we can talk about it, shall we?
Dimbleby: No, let's.. well, I mean, we'll keep going, I think, don't you?
Wilson: No, I think we'll have a new piece of film in and start all over again. But if this film is used, or this is leaked, then there's going to be a hell of a row. And this must be..
Dimbleby: Well, I certainly wouldn't leak it..
Wilson: You may not leak it but these things do leak. I've never been to Lime Grove without it leaking.”

Harold Wilson (1916–1995) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Exchange with BBC interviewer David Dimbleby recorded for a documentary called "Yesterday's Men" broadcast on 16 June 1971. The BBC did agree not to show this portion of the interview, but Wilson's fears of a leak were justified as a transcript was published on page 1 of The Times on June 18, 1971. A fuller transcript appeared in Private Eye during 1972.
Leader of the Opposition

Life, People, Books, Imagination

“Advice to students: Leap in and try things. If you succeed, you can have enormous influence. If you fail, you have still learned something, and your next attempt is sure to be better for it. Advice to graduates: Do something you really enjoy doing. If it isn’t fun to get up in the morning and do your job or your school program, you’re in the wrong field.”

Brian W. Kernighan (1942) Canadian computer scientist

"Leap In and Try Things: Interview with Brian Kernighan" https://web.archive.org/web/20110701151454/http://www.harmonyatwork.in/blog/2009/10/leap-in-and-try-things-brian-kernighan/ from Harmony at Work blog http://www.harmonyatwork.in/blog/.

School, Learning

“Still, if you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed; if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not too costly; you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival. There may even be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves.”

Winston S. Churchill book The Second World War

The Second World War, Volume I : The Gathering Storm (1948) Chapter 19 (Prague, Albania, and the Polish Guarantee).
Post-war years (1945–1955)

Hope, Chance, Victory, Fight

“It was times like these that she questioned the path she’d chosen—she wanted to do work that was important, that made a difference, and she was good at what she did, but she was still shocked and disheartened by the evil things people did to each other.”

Lis Wiehl (1961) American legal scholar

Source: Waking Hours: Book 1 in East Salem Trilogy with Pete Nelson (Thomas Nelson), p. 16

People, Question, Evil, Time

“So manifold, all pleasing in their kind,
All healthful, are the employs of rural life,
Reiterated as the wheel of time,
Runs round; still ending, and beginning still.”

William Cowper The Task

Source: The Task (1785), Book III, The Garden, Line 624.

Life, Health, Time

“The fact that we have not yet found the slightest evidence for life — much less intelligence — beyond this Earth does not surprise or disappoint me in the least. Our technology must still be laughably primitive, we may be like jungle savages listening for the throbbing of tom-toms while the ether around them carries more words per second than they could utter in a lifetime.”

Arthur C. Clarke (1917–2008) British science fiction writer, science writer, inventor, undersea explorer, and television series host

"Credo" (1991); also in Greetings, Carbon-Based Bipeds! : Collected Essays, 1934-1998 (1999), p. 360
1990s

Life, Disappointment, Intelligence

“The tragic situation of the modern liberalised Christian mind is just that. Having accepted with fervour the moral ideal as the Divine ideal, it still remains in bondage to the old mechanical conception of the great Divine operations called Regeneration and Creation. These it still thinks, at bottom, under the category of efficient causality. It takes their names literally, in accordance with the etymology, and thus the names themselves help the evil cause of prolonging conceptions that are hostile to the dearest insights of the moral spirit quickened in the school of Christ. Eminently is this true in the case of creation, into the current conception of which, so far as I can see, there as yet enters no gleam of the change that must be made if our relations to God in the basis of existence are to be stated consistently with the independence we must have of him in the moral world. This lack of a moral apprehension of creation is as characteristic, too, of historic philosophy as it is of historic theology, or even of ordinary opinion.”

George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) American philosopher

Source: The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905), The Harmony of Determinism and Freedom, p.342-3

God, Hostility, World, School

“I always look at everything with the eyes of a child. I feel enthusiastic for things today fort he same reasons as I was enthusiastic about them as a child... I remember one summer morning when I was twelve years old [1888], I was with my father. We were following a road which crossed the plain from Rueil to Croissy. The whole plain was a solid field of corn and the ears stood higher than my head. I still retain today the impression of the vast expanse, spangled with flowers and filled with the drone of insects. Often, later on, I have tried to recapture, to fix firmly in my mind once again, the impression of that world around me, of the sun which burns my face and hands... Every time a see a field of corn I an reminded of that morning.”

Maurice de Vlaminck (1876–1958) French painter

Source: Quotes dated, Dangerous Corner', 1929, p. 18-19

World, Feeling, Flowers, Time

“So then how have irony, irreverence, and rebellion come to be not liberating but enfeebling in the culture today’s avant-garde tried to write about? One clue’s to be found in the fact that irony is still around, bigger than ever after 30 long years as the dominant mode of hip expression. It’s not a rhetorical mode that wears well. As [Lewis] Hyde… puts it, "Irony has only emergency use. Carried over time, it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy the cage." This is because irony, entertaining as it is, serves an almost exclusively negative function. It’s critical and destructive, a ground-clearing. Surely this is the way our postmodern fathers saw it. But irony’s singularly unuseful when it comes to constructing anything to replace the hypocrisies it debunks. This is why Hyde seems right about persistent irony being tiresome. It is unmeaty. Even gifted ironists work best in sound bites. I find gifted ironists sort of wickedly funny to listen to at parties, but I always walk away feeling like I’ve had several radical surgical procedures. And as for actually driving cross-country with a gifted ironist, or sitting through a 300-page novel full of nothing by trendy sardonic exhaustion, one ends up feeling not only empty but somehow… oppressed.”

David Foster Wallace (1962–2008) American fiction writer and essayist

E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction
Essays

Way, Feeling, Time, Country

“Must Bantu and European in future develop as intermixed communities, or as communities separated from one another in so far as this is practically possible? If the reply is ‘intermingled communities’, then the following must be understood. There will be competition and conflict everywhere. So long as the points of contact are still comparatively few, as is the case now, friction and conflict will be few and less evident. The more this intermixing develops, however, the stronger the conflict will become. In such a conflict, the Europeans will, at least for a long time, hold the stronger position, and the Bantu be the defeated party in every phase of the struggle. This must cause to rise in him an increasing sense of resentment and revenge.”

Hendrik Verwoerd (1901–1966) Prime Minister of South Africa from 1958 until his assassination in 1966

Speech as Minister of Native Affairs on 5 December 1950, 10 quotes by Hendrik Verwoerd (Politics Web) https://www.sahistory.org.za/archive/hendrik-verwoerd-10-quotes-hendrik-verwoerd-politics-web-20-september-2016, sahistory.org.za (20 September 2016)

Communication, Revenge, Sense, Time

“We are socialists because we believe this income which we all cooperate in making isn’t divided as it ought to be. […] We do reward men according to deed. We do reward or give to people according to need. No religion would be possible in which that wasn’t done. There are the young, there are the old, there are many whom we have to reward according to their need. But in spite of improvements that have been made, and especially perhaps by my liberal friends who aren't just sure how far to go… we still have a society where there's a great deal of reward not according to deed, not according to need, but according to breed - the choice of your grandfather is very important. And according to the successful greed, which operates not in terms of great contributions to men, but in terms of manipulations of one sort of another.”

Norman Thomas (1884–1968) American Presbyterian minister and socialist

Debate with Barry Goldwater, University of Arizona campus, Tucson, Arizona, November 1961

Men, People, Religion, Success

“It’s premature to talk about working alongside General Musharraf at this stage, although in the past we have worked jointly on certain issues such as the Women’s Bill.
At the same time, I want you to know that we are also partners with Mr Nawaz Sharif in something called the charter for the restoration of democracy, so we are talking about a new democratic process in which the people of Pakistan are allowed to choose their leader and put together a coalition. And for that we are calling for a robust international monitoring team to ensure that these elections are fair and free because obviously if they’re not, the ruling party will still be in the driver’s seat and the creeping Talebanisation of Pakistan will continue.”

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

Destiny’s daughter (2007)

Women, People, Democracy, Time

“I was attending the American Society of Animal Science meetings when the flood occurred. I first learned about it when I read about it on the front page of USA Today, a national newspaper. I grieved for the "dead" books, the same way most people grieve for a dead relative. The destruction of books upset me because "thoughts died." Even though most of the books are still in other libraries, there are many people at the (Colorado State) university who will never read them. To me, Shakespeare lives if we keep performing his plays. He dies, when we stop performing them. I am my work. If the livestock industry continues to use equipment I have designed, then my "thoughts live" and my life has meaning. If my efforts to improve the treatment of cattle and pigs make real improvements in the world, then life is meaningful.”

Temple Grandin (1947) USA-american doctor of animal science, author, and autism activist

Life, People, Books, World

“I am ashamed of the polished words,
so I hide them
throwing rough and crude notes
like the Rondanini Pietà
still raw with matter
on the lines of crystal
like the soul that sparkles in one’s eyes.
…”

Caterina Davinio (1957) Italian writer

Waiting for the End of the World
Source: Caterina Davinio, Aspettando la fine del mondo / Waiting for the End of the World, with parallel English text, English translation by Caterina Davinio and David W. Seaman, Fermenti, Rome 2012, p. 61. </ref>

Soul

“In Daniel 7, Daniel had a vision where “the four winds of the heavens strove upon the great sea. And four beasts came up from the sea, diverse one from another” (vv. 2-3). In the vision, Daniel saw a lion with eagle’s wings, a bear with three ribs in its mouth, a leopard with four wings, and a terrible beast with iron teeth and ten horns (v. 7). Bible scholars have speculated on the meaning of this passage for centuries. Some think the four beasts in this chapter represent a rehash of the first four empires from Babylon to the Roman Empire; while others think it is all yet in the future. I’m no scholar but here is my opinion: I (and many Bible scholars) think the four beasts are four world powers that will “strive” for world power (domination?) at the end of time before the one with ten horns finally becomes dominant. I think the four beasts are interpreted as follows: The lion sometimes standing like a man with eagle’s wings (v. 4) represents England (whose symbol as always been the lion) and America (whose symbol is the eagle) united, as one of four major end-time powers. The eagle’s wings “were plucked” and “it was lifted up from the earth, and made to stand upon the feet as a man, and a man’s heart was given to it” (v. 4). My best guess is that America will soon cease to be a world power (wings plucked) but there will still be enough of a godly influence that the English/American alliance will have some “heart” or compassion and maybe even be able to finally “take a stand” for God in the wicked world. I think the bear (v. 5) is Russia (whose symbol is the bear) and the three ribs in its mouth represent three countries it has dominated or “eaten,” such as Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, or perhaps Ukraine, Belarus, and Georgia. The leopard with four wings (v. 6) could be some sort of oriental alliance between China, Japan, Korea, and a Southeast Asia alliance (Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia, India, etc.). Verse 6 says, “dominion was given to it.” Many certainly feel that China is soon to be the major economic (and military) power in the world. If they could get a military or economic alliance with some of the other oriental nations mentioned, they would indeed be a force to be reckoned with! No animal is named for the fourth beast. It is only described as being dreadful, terrible, strong exceedingly, having great iron teeth, different from all other beasts and having ten horns. As I said earlier there are three options from what I can see for this beast. It is either (A) the European Common Market or a future similar alliance; or (B) 10 world regions and (C) some sort of alliance of Muslim nations around the Middle East or the world. I tend to go with option (C)”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Source: What On Earth Is About To Happen… For Heaven’s Sake? (2013), p. 94-95

God, World, Feeling, Thinking

“Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work, driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for, in order to get to a job that you need so you can pay for the clothes, car and the house that you leave empty all day in order to afford to live in it.”

Ellen Goodman (1941) American journalist and writer

Attributed

Cars, Housing, Clothes

“In our first pilot study we talked with clerical and production workers as well as professional and managerial people. We discovered that the professional and managerial groups were more verbal, showed a quicker grasp of the technique, and gave more and better delineated sequences of events than the clerical and production groups.
The second pilot study was restricted to managerial and professional people. On the basis of our experiences in this work, we decided to concentrate in the major sample on engineers and accountants. It was apparent in the results of this second pilot that engineers were able to give exceptionally vivid accounts of their work experiences. Since our study was still in the nature of an exploratory project, it was vital to us that we mine where the metal was richest.”

Frederick Herzberg (1923–2000) American psychologist

Source: The motivation to work, 1959, p. 32

People, Nature, Study

“I got great voice training in St. Mary’s Church, Wavertree, in Liverpool, when I was a lad. Dressing up in cassocks was all part of the fun. I used to earn sixpence a week and although I don’t go to church very much any more, 'Once In Royal David’s City' is still my favourite hymn.”

Holly Johnson (1960) British artist

Frankie go bang! http://www.zttaat.com/article.php?title=989 by Paul Simper at zttaat.com, Accessed May 2014.

Parting, Training

“It would be an attempt to define the role, responsibility, and path of the performing musician. Our simple job is to bring beauty and inspiration to others and to do this through the most honest and humble search to find these qualities within our unique selves and then within our unique work; to painstakingly increase our knowledge and to refine and re-refine our results until we are certain that until some new enlightenment falls to us, we have done the best that we possibly can; and that as in any human endeavour which attempts to transcend its mortal bounds, we always know that we still do not know.”

Martin Berkofsky (1943–2013) American classical pianist

The Cristofori Foundation, cristofori.org http://www.cristofori.org

Beauty, Search, Knowledge

“He [Abbé Cénabre] had often reflected on the plight of even the most illustrious of those renegades who finish up engaged in a monotonous argument they can never quite extricate themselves from and seem to be insulting the God they have offended, dragging Him along with them like a fellow criminal shackled to them…. He thought, not without some justification, that where such tortured and anxious nihilists had made their greatest mistake was in having freed only their intellects, leaving belief to go on surviving and festering in the most hidden and least accessible parts of their sensibility. Such a deep and hidden contradiction is all the more destructive because they cannot form a clear idea of it, or indeed express it, except in terms of stammering, repeated, pointless, and childish expressions of hatred. They no longer have any part in a faith that still holds them in abject and slavering thrall. It matters little that they think they have destroyed it.”

Georges Bernanos (1888–1948) French writer

Source: L'imposture (The Impostor), 1927, pp.171–172

God, Faith, Idea, Thinking

“I want to decide between survival and bliss
And though I know who I'm not I still don't know who I am
But I know I won't keep on playing the victim”

Alanis Morissette (1974) Canadian-American singer-songwriter

Precious Illusions
Under Rug Swept

“The serious lesson of the antics in Argentina, then, is that the big issues of monetary economics--fixed vs. flexible exchange rates, whether countries should have independent currencies at all--are still wide open. It's an eternal controversy, and not even the pope can resolve it.”

Paul Krugman (1953) American economist

"Don't Laugh at Me, Argentina", Slate (July 20, 1999)

Country

“I still think of myself as I was 25 years ago. Then I look in a mirror and see an old bastard and realise it's me.”

Dave Allen (1936–2005) Irish comedian and satirist

Compilation by the BBC 11 March, 2005 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/film/4340205.stm

Thinking

“I always felt, in looking at [the Cuban] situation, that it was wrong. And I now know why. It came to me one night in Mexico. China is communist, the same as Cuba, and yet we have no problem trading with China. In fact, today we can't get over there quick enough. The difference is simple: China welcomes our corporations. Cuba threw them out. It's a basic decision of corporate America: We will punish Cuba because Castro stuck it to us by nationalizing everything after he came to power. What other reason could there be? China is far more powerful but we now welcome them into global trade with open arms—as we should—while we continue this bitter, hostile policy towards Cuba. It must be because there are still people alive in the corporate world who got hammered by Fidel's revolution.”

Jesse Ventura (1951) American politician and former professional wrestler

Source: Don't Start the Revolution Without Me! (2008), Ch. 6 (p. 111)

Hostility, People, World, Problem

“We have thus shown that 1799 began the period called the Time of the End; that in this time Papacy is to be consumed piece-meal; and that Napoleon took away not only Charlemagne's gifts of territory (one thousand years after they were made), but also, afterward, the Papacy's civil jurisdiction in the city of Rome, which was recognized nominally from the promulgation of Justinian's decree, A. D. 533, but actually from the overthrow of the Ostrogothic monarchy, A. D. 539 - just 1260 years before 1799. This was the exact limit of the time, times and a half of its power, as repeatedly defined in prophecy. And though in some measure claimed again since, Papacy is without a vestige of temporal or civil authority to-day, it having been wholly "consumed". The Man of Sin, devoid of civil power, still poses and boasts; but, civilly powerless, he awaits utter destruction in the near future, at the hands of the enraged masses (God's unwitting agency), as clearly shown in Revelation.
This Time of the End, or day of Jehovah's preparation, beginning A. D. 1799 and closing A. D. 1914, though characterized by a great increase of knowledge over all past ages, is to culminate in the greatest time of trouble the world has ever known; but it is nevertheless preparing for and leading into that blessed time so long promised, when the true Kingdom of God, under the control of the true Christ, will fully establish an order of government the very reverse of that of Antichrist.”

Charles Taze Russell (1852–1916) Founder of the Bible Student Movement

Source: Milennial Dawn, Vol. III: Thy Kingdom Come (1891), p. 59.

God, Age, World, Knowledge

“Having still in my recollection so many excellent men, to whose grandfathers, upon the same spots, my grandfather had yielded cheerful obedience and reverence, it is not without sincere sorrow that I have beheld many of the sons of these men driven from their fathers' mansions, or holding them as little better than tenants or stewards, while the swarms of Placemen, Pensioners, Contractors, and Nabobs…have usurped a large part of the soil.”

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

Political Register (21 December 1816), quoted in Karl W. Schweizer and John W. Osborne, Cobbett and His Times (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1990), p. 31.

Men, Parting, Sincerity

“Now I had the power, I want to realize the goals of the Vietnamese revolution back in 1945. The goals were and still be right now is, they uh, independence, that means national sovereignty, the uh, freedom, and the happiness of the whole population. It was the national aim, strategically, but when I had the power the country was divided in two parts on the 17th parallel, we had insurgency in South Vietnam and I want to uh, how to said it, integrate the Front of Liberation, the non-communist people and the Front of Liberation with me and then uh…to fight the North Vietnamese if at that time, the North Vietnamese do not uh, did not want to have a peaceful solution in North Vietnam, in South Vietnam.”

Nguyen Khanh (1927–2013) South Vietnamese soldier

Assumption of power and the prospect of a march north
1980s, Interview with Nguyen Khanh (1981)

Happiness, People, Peace, Freedom

“Every day, the New York Times carries a motto in a box on its front page. "All the News That's Fit to Print," it says. It's been saying it for decades, day in and day out. I imagine most readers of the canonical sheet have long ceased to notice this bannered and flaunted symbol of its mental furniture. I myself check every day to make sure that the bright, smug, pompous, idiotic claim is still there. Then I check to make sure that it still irritates me. If I can still exclaim, under my breath, why do they insult me and what do they take me for and what the hell is it supposed to mean unless it's as obviously complacent and conceited and censorious as it seems to be, then at least I know I still have a pulse. You may wish to choose a more rigorous mental workout but I credit this daily infusion of annoyance with extending my lifespan.”

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

2000s, 2001, Letters to a Young Contrarian (2001)

Imagination, Hell, Time, Box

“I married my best friend. I was still in awe after more than four years of being around her at how smart and strong and loving and caring she was. And I really hoped that her choosing me and rejecting my advice to pursue her own career was a decision she would never regret.”

Bill Clinton (1946) 42nd President of the United States

2010s, (July 26, 2016)

Love, Hope, Decision, Strong

“Gloria Estefan was a huge influence for me. Of course, she was one of the few Latina women around who had this major international success. She sang in Spanish and English, and she was very much the sort of woman I recognised from my culture. I go to her home, and I think that she is a woman who has got it just right. She has her music, she has her family, she has her relationship. I admire her so much because she has always put her family before everything. All her priorities are in place and she is still an amazingly creative artist.”

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

comment by "close friend" Jennifer Lopez, arts.guardian.co.uk (March 30, 2007)
2007, 2008

Women, Family, Music, Home

“I don't think the music is all that different, actually. It is produced and presented in a different way. I don't favour one type of music over another. I like music that is melodic, so I like what I am doing now. I haven't abandoned guitars, I am just a little less angry than I was then. I am still proud of Eve's Plum, and I think they could be Vitamin C songs, and some Vitamin C songs could be Eve's Plum songs. I really like this one, it is the best one of all.”

Colleen Fitzpatrick (1972) American singer and actress

Attributed

Music, Way, Thinking

“There is still a Castro in [Cuba]. And I think the status quo will not change until [Fidel] moves to the great beyond. [However, ] Raul Castro [recently installed as president of Cuba] is a more open-minded guy [than Fidel]. [Raul] lives a more capaitalistic lifestyle. And he has been somewhat more open with the press and allowing the sudents to speak up. But the reality is that he won't do much until Fidel is gone.”

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

news.bostronherald.com (March 12, 2008)
2007, 2008

Guy, Thinking, Reality, Change

“Marriage, which has been the bourne of so many narratives, is still a great beginning, as it was to Adam and Eve, who kept their honeymoon in Eden, but had their first little one among the thorns and thistles of the wilderness. It is still the beginning of the home epic — the gradual conquest or irremediable loss of that complete union which makes the advancing years a climax, and age the harvest of sweet memories in common.”

George Eliot book Middlemarch

Middlemarch (1871)

Marriage, Age, Home, Memory

“The force of the Virgin was still felt at Lourdes, and seemed to be as potent as X-rays, but in America neither Venus nor Virgin ever had value as force — at most as sentiment.”

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

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

“Sandinistas are a democratically elected government which originally led a popular revolution to overthrow a dictatorship based on slavery…
US foreign policy could be best defined as follows: kiss my arse or I'll kick your head in. It is as simple and as crude as that. It can hardly be said to be a complicated foreign policy. What is interesting about it is that it is so incredibly successful. It possesses the structures of disinformation, use of rhetoric, distortion of language, which are very persuasive, but are actually a pack of lies. It is very successful propaganda. They have the money, they have the technology, they have all the means to get away with it, and they do. I find the ignorance in this country, Britain, and certainly the US, really quite deep. It is not only the Republican Party and government in the US which are responsible for this state of affairs, but I see the Democrats as only differing by degrees. While they say "no more military aid to the Contras"… they are still referring to an innate and deeply embedded assumption that they are talking about a Marxist-Leninist totalitarian dictatorship; gangsters, thugs, instructed from Moscow.”

Harold Pinter (1930–2008) playwright from England

Quoted in an interview http://www.haroldpinter.org/politics/politics_america.shtml, conducted by Andrew Graham-Yooll, South Magazine (May 1988)

Money, Kiss, Success, Country

“As a military professional, I knew that the most important element is trust- the vision had to be built on trust. The very basis for why soldiers fight the way they do is the trust they have in their teammates, their fellow soldiers. It's usually less dramatic off the battlefield but still equally important. Without trust in each other and trust in the institution, you will not be able to realize your vision.”

Ann E. Dunwoody (1953) U.S. Army, first four-star general in U.S. military history

Source: A Higher Standard (2015), p. 191

Way, Fight

“Which are more full of fate:
The stars; or those sad eyes?
Which are more still and great:
Those brows; or the dark skies?”

Lionel Johnson (1867–1902) English poet

By the Statue of King Charles at Charing Cross (1895)

Fate, Sadness, Star

“If someone today had the Pentagon Papers, or the modern equivalent, would he still go to the press, as Daniel Ellsberg did nearly 40 years ago, and wait for the documents to be analyzed and published? Or would that person simply post them online immediately?”

Noam Cohen (1999) American journalist

[Noam, Cohen, The New York Times, April 18, 2010, What Would Daniel Ellsberg Do With the Pentagon Papers Today?, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/19/business/media/19link.html, October 30, 2014]

Waiting, Personality

“I don't want to be, and it isn't part of my personality. I'm still going to be the same until I was today but with more responsibilities.”

José Mourinho (1963) Portuguese association football player and manager

Chelsea FC, Doctorate Honoris Causa degree award (23 March 2009)

Parting, Personality

“Life, in a body whose order and state of affairs can make it manifest, is assuredly, as I have said, a real power that gives rise to numerous phenomena. This power has, however, neither goal nor intention. It can do only what it does; it is only a set of acting causes, not a particular being. I was the first to establish this truth at a time when life was still thought to be a principle, an archeia, a being of some sort.”

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744–1829) French naturalist

Système Analytique des Connaissances Positives de l'Homme (1820), as quoted in Lamarck, the Mythical Precursor: A Study of the Relations Between Science and Ideology (1982) by Madeleine Barthélemy Madaule, p. 102.

Life, Truth, Time

“In the desert, initially, everywhere is like everywhere else—sky, sand, mountains. So far, this was the extent of what I’d seen in my involuntary roost. Then the day began to ebb, the world turned to topaz and gold, and the color of the sky seemed to sink away into the disc of the sun. I found I really could touch the beauty of it then, as I had touched its beauty so long ago when I was free to travel where I wished, and the city still owned me. Now, tinged with my sorrow, the loveliness was bittersweet, but strong as wine.”

Tanith Lee book Drinking Sapphire Wine

Part 2, Chapter 3 (pp. 69-70)
Drinking Sapphire Wine (1977)

World, Beauty, Color, Travel

“Who owns the earth? Did we want the earth that we should wander on it? Did we need the earth that we were never still upon it? Whoever needs the earth shall have the earth: he shall be still upon it, he shall rest within a little place, he shall dwell in one small room for ever.”

Thomas Wolfe book Of Time and the River

Book 1. This excerpt is also cited in a short story "Forever and the Earth" (1950) by Ray Bradbury.
Of Time and the River (1935)

“One of the questions on which clarity of thinking is now most necessary is that of the relation between the methods of science and of Marxist philosophy. Although much has already been written on the subject, yet there is still an enormous amount of confusion and contradictory statement.”

John Desmond Bernal (1901–1971) British scientist

J.D. Bernal (1937) "Dialectical Materialism and Modern Science" in: Science and Society, Volume II, No. 1, Winter 1937; Online ( here http://www.marxists.org/archive/bernal/works/1930s/dsams.htm) on Marxists Internet Archive (2002).

Question, Thinking, Science

“So the failure of scripture to describe anything accurately is obfuscated by assuming the conclusion with confirmation bias. Once again it is God who leads the unbelievers astray, and not their desire to understand the world as it is. And even though several of the world’s richest and most successful, and even the most charitable people are unbelievers, they are still considered losers. Of course the Qur’an is wrong about all these things, and I’m glad to be back in a country where I am allowed to say that. But those are the sort of lies that religion needs to sell itself.”

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

Patheos, The Cow http://www.patheos.com/blogs/reasonadvocates/2016/01/22/the-cow/ (January 22, 2016)

God, People, World, Religion

“The first idea which all this impresses upon us is, that the formation of bodies in space is still and at present in progress. We live at a time when many have been formed and many are still forming.”

Robert Chambers (publisher, born 1802) book Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation

Source: Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), p. 20

Idea, Time

“You can be a doctor and I’ll still help you. You can be an engineer and I can help you. You can be a scientist and I’ll help you, whoever you are because I am not helping anything else. I am helping you! Peace on this Earth doesn’t begin by great ideas. Peace on Earth begins with you.”

Prem Rawat (1957) controversial spiritual leader

Kissimmee, Florida, November 10, 1978
1970s

Peace, Idea, Help

“Vienna. It means nothing to me but to Orson Welles, it was the setting for one of his finest performances - and a place to get huge plates of cheap rich food. I followed the footsteps of my hero, which are still visible in the concrete, to the world famous Ferris wheel.”

Derren Brown (1971) British illusionist

TV Series and Specials (Includes DVDs), Trick of the Mind (2004–2006)

World, Food

“To prevent the starving peasants from fleeing to the towns an internal passport system was introduced and unauthorized change of residence was made punishable with imprisonment. Peasants were not allowed passports at all, and were therefore tied to the soil as in the worst days of feudal serfdom: this state of things was not altered until the 1970s. The concentration camps filled with new hordes of prisoners sentenced to hard labour. The object of destroying the peasants’ independence and herding them into collective farms was to create a population of slaves, the benefit of whose labour would accrue to industry. The immediate effect was to reduce Soviet agriculture to a state of decline from which it has not yet recovered, despite innumerable measures of reorganization and reform. At the time of Stalin’ s death, almost a quarter of a century after mass collectivization was initiated, the output of grain per head of population was still below the 1913 level; yet throughout this period, despite misery and starvation, large quantities of farm produce were exported all over the world for the sake of Soviet industry. The terror and oppression of those years cannot be expressed merely by the figures for loss of human life, enormous as these are; perhaps the most vivid picture of what collectivization meant is in Vasily Grossman’ s posthumous novel Forever Flowing.”

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

pg. 39
Main Currents Of Marxism (1978), Three Volume edition, Volume III: The Breakdown

Life, Death, World, Change

“[Footnote:] Much still remains to be learned about his sex life because the Hummingbird is quicker than the eye.”

Will Cuppy (1884–1949) American writer

The Hummingbird
How to Tell Your Friends from the Apes (1931)

Life, Sex, Learning

“Our first appreciation of music comes through the sounds of the mother, especially her voice and her lullaby. Our earliest musical expression, of which speech is a part, is in a sense a duet with her. And later in life we should still be able to discern the voice of love in the music.”

John Diamond (doctor) (1934) Australian doctor

Source: The Life Energy in Music, Vol. 1 (1981), p. 25

Love, Life, Music, Sense

“From 'Anniversary Serenade'
The ring is closed. The rolling dice we cast
So long ago still roll, but not so fast.
The colours fade that we nailed to the mast.
We lose the future but we own the past.
We own the past?
From our first kiss, a lifetime to the last.”

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

Poems and song lyrics

Kiss, Past, Future

“[I]nfatuation with characters still pervades American classrooms and holds back essential improvement in instruction.”

John DeFrancis (1911–2009) American linguist

"The Prospects for Chinese Writing Reform" (2006, p. 25) http://sino-platonic.org/complete/spp171_chinese_writing_reform.pdf <br class="br">"The Prospects for Chinese Writing Reform" (2006)

“When I still find some parts of my body that I have not found before, I tell myself, yes I am progressing scientifically… I don't stretch my body as if it is an object. I do yoga from the self towards the body, not the other way around.”

B.K.S. Iyengar (1918–2014) Indian yoga teacher and scholar

Source: BBC News "India yoga guru BKS Iyengar dies"

Way, Parting

“No matter how liberal I am, I'm still outraged by crimes of violence. Regardless of whether I can sympathize with the causes that lead these individuals to do these crimes, the effects are outrageous.”

Sonia Sotomayor (1954) U.S. Supreme Court Justice

Reported in Sheryl Gay Stolberg, " Woman in the News: Sotomayor, a Trailblazer and a Dreamer http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/27/us/politics/27websotomayor.html?pagewanted=all", The New York Times (26 May 2009).

“Still an angel appear to each lover beside,
But still be a woman to you.”

Thomas Parnell (1679–1718) Anglo-Irish cleric, writer and poet.

When thy Beauty appears.

Angels, Lovers, Appearance

“This commitment to end world hunger, and my music and story songs, are ways of dealing with the world as I see it. I'm playing 200 concerts per year-- half of them benefits-- all of them attempts at getting across the footlights to people I would enjoy spending time with in non-concert situations. And over the past 4 years of musical fun, millions of dollars have been raised for things I believe in. Telling stories of our time, building a lasting body of work, new songs, new records, new audiences, new challenges, and still that painfully exciting process of growth that can make one's life into a richly woven tapestry.”

Harry Chapin (1942–1981) American musician

All My Life's a Circle, Autobiographical statement on a concert program, circa 1980 http://harrychapin.com/articles/bio.shtml

Life, Hunger, People, World

“Is this wide world not large enough to fill thee,
Nor Nature, nor that deep man's Nature, Art?
Are they too thin, too weak and poor to still thee,
Thou little heart?”

Mary Elizabeth Coleridge (1861–1907) British writer

Self-Question, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

World, Art, Nature, Heart

“The further we move our main force to the westward, and still be within supporting distance of this garrison, the better, both for the preservation of the provision and forage of this State, as well as to les sen the general expense of transportation. And the greater stock of provision and forage we can leave in this State, and upon the communications, the less difficulty we shall find in giving support to this place, should the enemy approach it. I should re commend, therefore, to quarter the army as far wesir ward as Morristown or Baskingridge. The country is strong, secure from a surprise, happily situated to receive supplies of provisions and forage, and not very inconvenient for giving protection and cover to the inhabitants. It is true, it is considerably removed from this place. But were we to take a position at Suffern's or Pompton, the consumption of forage would be so great that it would destroy the possibility of keeping up a communication with the Western States, however pressing the necessity, before the grass sea son. Suppose the enemy should move up, early in the spring, and lay siege to West Point, and the supplies of this State prove unequal to our support, should we not be obliged to abandon it to its fate?”

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

Letter to George Washington (November 1779)

Fate, Spring, Communication, Support

“We have never said that the fight against the Iranian aggression and against the expansionist Persian tendencies (which have been demonstrated by various means under successive regimes in Iran) is the decisive battle for the Arabs. What we have said, and still say, is that the fight against Zionism is the main decisive battle for the Arabs. This is a great objective reality, which cannot be denied or underestimated except by someone who would not only harm the Arab nation and its main causes, but would also overlook the main danger.”

Saddam Hussein (1937–2006) Iraqi politician and President

President Saddam Hussein's Speech on National Day (1981)

Reality, Decision, Success, Fight

“Classes still remain, and will remain everywhere for years after the proletariat's conquest of power.”

Vladimir Lenin book "Left-Wing" Communism: An Infantile Disorder

CH 5, "Left Wing Communism in Germany. The Leaders, the Party, the Class, the Mass"
"Left-Wing" Communism: An Infantile Disorder (1920)

“As I later thought about the bowling contest, I became convinced I had discovered something important: the relationship between individual performance and group structure. I believed then (and still believe now) that this relationship can be observed in all manner of group activities.”

William Foote Whyte (1914–2000) American sociologist

Source: Participant observer, 1994, p. 84; As cited in: Ickis (2014)

“When a tree is very old, yet still lives, sometimes the limbs are strangely twisted.”

Gene Wolfe book The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories and Other Stories

"The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories" (1970), Orbit 7, ed. Damon Knight, Reprinted in Gene Wolfe, The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories and Other Stories (1980), Reprinted in Gene Wolfe, The Wolfe Archipelago (1983), Reprinted in Gene Wolfe, The Best of Gene Wolfe (2009)
Fiction

Tree