Quotes about street
page 14

“In the street the rain was little more than a fine mist which softened the outlines of the houses and even lent a touch of poetry to a neighbourhood unlikely to evoke tender emotions. He raised his eyes to a roofline bristling with television aerials, lowered them again to windows still blank before the evening lights were lit.”

Anita Brookner (1928–2016) British novelist and art historian.

Making Things Better (2002)

Light, Housing

“In a brahmin house
where they feed the fire as a god
when the fire goes wild and burns the house
they splash on it
the water of the gutter and the dust of the street,
beat their breasts
and call the crowd.
These men then forget their worship
and scold their fire,
O lord of the meeting rivers!”

Basava (1134–1196) a 12th-century Hindu philosopher, statesman, Kannada Bhakti poet of Lingayatism

Basava’s saying in his “The Lord of the Meeting Rivers: Devotional Poems of Basavanna” quoted in The Lord of the Meeting Rivers Quotes, 23 November 2013, Goodreads.com http://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/3772282-the-lord-of-the-meeting-rivers-devotional-poems-of-basavanna,

Men, God, Water, Housing

“A t that moment, a Colonel of Sanitation came striding by, in his green uniform. “You there!” he cried. “Ho, dragon, stop and patter for a bit. Quickly, quickly—haven’t got all day! There are Mr. Goodbar wrappers in the streets still, after all my efforts, and the efforts of my men, day in day out—people, people, if we could just do something about the people, then perhaps an end to the endlessness. One could go home of a Friday night, and wipe the brow, and doff the uniform, and thank God for a day well squandered. But you—you have a strange aspect. What kind of a thing are you? Are you disposable? Biodegradable? Ordinary citizen out for a stroll? Looking for work? Member of a conspiracy? Vegetable? Mineral? Two-valued? Hostile to the national interest of the Department of Sanitation? Thrill-crazed kid? Objet d’art? Circus in town?””

Donald Barthelme (1931–1989) American writer, editor, and professor

“The Dragon”, p. 216.
The Teachings of Don. B: Satires, Parodies, Fables, Illustrated Stories, and Plays of Donald Barthelme (1992)

Men, God, Hostility, People

“There is a community of the spirit
Join it, and feel the delight
of walking in the noisy street,
and being the noise.”

Rumi (1207–1273) Iranian poet

"A Community of the Spirit" in Ch. 1 : The Tavern, p. 2
Disputed, The Essential Rumi (1995)

Feeling, Communication

“It is not with a view of overturning our institutions that I advocate these reforms in our representative system. It is because I believe that we may carry out these reforms from time to time, by discussions in this House, that I take my part in advocating them in this legitimate manner. They must be effected in this mode, or as has been the case on the Continent, by bayonets, by muskets, and in the streets. Now, I am no advocate for such proceedings. I conceive that men of political standing in this country—any Members of this House for instance—who join in advocating the extension of the suffrage at this moment, are the real conservators of peace.”

Richard Cobden (1804–1865) English manufacturer and Radical and Liberal statesman

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1848/jul/06/national-representation-adjourned-debate in the House of Commons (6 July 1848) in favour of a Reform Bill that would have extended the vote to middle class men. 1840s

Men, Peace, Time, Parting

“Now, whether or not in a place like Chicago you do stop and frisk, which worked very well, Mayor Giuliani is here, worked very well in New York. It brought the crime rate way down. But you take the gun away from criminals that shouldn't be having it. We have gangs roaming the street. And in many cases, they're illegally here, illegal immigrants. And they have guns. And they shoot people. And we have to be very strong. And we have to be very vigilant.”

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

2010s, 2016, September, First presidential debate (September 26, 2016)

People, Way, Strong

“And so I decided to actually start a street exhibition to show the images of the violence across the country and get people talking about it. We traveled the country and showed the images, and this was a journey that has started me to the activist path, where I decided to become silent no more, to talk about those things. … And what is most powerful is that the images have been picked by the media and amplified across the country, across the continent.”

Boniface Mwangi (1983) Kenyan photojournalist

The day I stood up alone

People, Travel, Country

“Listen, don't look so depressed, old fellow. This is what all of Heine's poems are like, it's only peasants who don't laugh at them; or rather, perhaps, Calvinists. Abroad, it's the normal practice that if someone is looking really sad in the street, a horde of fat men comes running over waving checkbooks and hire him for a circus; they teach people like that to ride a bicycle that disintegrates when they try to mount it, or else make them play a stringless fiddle with a broomstick.”

Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) Icelandic author

Garðar Hólm
Brekkukotsannáll (The Fish Can Sing) (1957)

Men, People, Sadness

“People are just people
They shouldn't make you nervous
The world is everlasting, it's coming and it's going
If you don't toss your plastic
The streets won't be so plastic
And if you kiss somebody then both of you get practice”

Regina Spektor (1980) American singer-songwriter and pianist

Ghost Of Corporate Future
Soviet Kitsch (2004)

People, World, Kiss

“When I was younger I used to go out looking for squalid brawls in the streets of Newpest. This got a couple of people stabbed, neither of them me, and led in turn to my apprenticeship in one of the Harlan’s World gangs, Newpest chapter. Later on I upgraded this kind of retreat by joining the military: brawling with a purpose, and with more extensive weaponry, but as it turned out, just as squalid. I don’t suppose I should have been as surprised as I was—the only thing the Marine Corps recruiter had really wanted to know was how many fights I had won.”

Richard K. Morgan book Altered Carbon

Source: Altered Carbon (2002), Chapter 11 (pp. 136-137)

People, World, Fight

“All the walls of a city, which, by family tradition, seemed so mine, witnessed the martyrdom and the inhumane repression inflicted on our people. Cultural memories stressed its urgency. All the archaeological information I have absorbed, the advice of Leonardo da Vinci, the destruction brought about by Dada, the photographs of Brassaï, all contributed, unsurprisingly, to the fact that my first works of 1945 had something to do with street graffiti and a universe of repressed protest, clandestine yet full of life, as one could find on the walls of my country.”

Antoni Tàpies (1923–2012) Catalan painter, sculptor and art theorist

Tàpies is referring to the Franco-repression in Spain.
1945 - 1970, A Report on the Wall' 1970

Life, People, Family, Universe

“Camel caravans bear
witness guns to Caesar.
Hordes crawl and seep inside
the walls. The streets
flow stone. Life goes
on absorbing war. Violence
kills the temple of no sex.”

Jim Morrison (1943–1971) lead singer of The Doors

The Lords and the New Creatures: Poems (1969), The New Creatures

Life, War, Sex

“It is not acceptable for people to completely cover themselves on the street. It [the Islamic veil] threatens public order and security. Plus it is a terrifying sight. Get rid of that woman-humiliating Islamic symbol.”

Geert Wilders (1963) Dutch politician

BBC News - In quotes: Geert Wilders (2010) http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-11469579 2010s

People

“I want my street to be crazy, I want my avenues, shops and buildings, to enter into a crazy dance, and this is why I deform and distort their outlines and colours. However I always come up against the same difficulty, that if all the elements were one by one deformed and distorted excessively, if in the end nothing remained of their real outlines, I would have totally effaced the location that I intended to suggest, that I wished to transform.”

Jean Dubuffet book Prospectus et tous écrits suivants

Source: 1960-70's, Prospectus et tous écrits suivants, 1967, p. 483

Dance

“When I was born 20.6. [18]87, I was influenced by Picasso to cry. When I could walk and speak I still stood under Picasso's influence and said to my mother: 'Tom' or 'Happening', meaning the entrances of the canal under the street. My lyrical time was when I lived in the Violet Street. I never saw a violet. That was my influence by Matisse because when he painted rose I did not paint violet. As a boy of ten I stood under Mondrian's influence and built little houses with little bricks. Afterwards I stood under the influence of the Surrealists... I never stood under the influence of Dadaism because whereas the Dadaist created Spiegel-dadaismus (Mirror-Dada) on the Zurich Lake, I created MERZ on the Leine-river, under the influence of Rembrandt. Time went on, and when Hans Arp made concrete Art, I stayed Abstract. Now I do concrete Art, and Marcel Duchamp went over to the Surrealists.... and at all I have much fun about Art.”

Kurt Schwitters (1887–1948) German artist

Source: 1940s, I is Style (2000), p. 100 : in 'My art and My live' (1940 – 1946), Kurt Schwitters.

Art, Boy, Time, Painting

“These battles shall not be mere street fights with stones against tear-gas bombs, or of pacific general strikes; neither shall it be the battle of a furious people destroying in two or three days the repressive scaffolds of the ruling oligarchies; the struggle shall be long, harsh, and its front shall be in the guerrilla's refuge, in the cities, in the homes of the fighters — where the repressive forces shall go seeking easy victims among their families — in the massacred rural population, in the villages or cities destroyed by the bombardments of the enemy.”

Ernesto Che Guevara (1928–1967) Argentine Marxist revolutionary

Message to the Tricontinental (1967)

People, Family, Home, Tear

“We've shipped millions of jobs overseas and we have a strange situation because we have a process in Washington where after you've served for a while you cash in and become a foreign lobbyist, make $30,000 a month; then take a leave, work on Presidential campaigns, make sure you got good contacts, and then go back out. Now if you just want to get down to brass tacks, the first thing you ought to do is get all these folks who've got these one-way trade agreements that we've negotiated over the years and say, "Fellows, we'll take the same deal we gave you." And they'll gridlock right at that point because, for example, we've got international competitors who simply could not unload their cars off the ships if they had to comply -- you see, if it was a two-way street -- just couldn't do it. We have got to stop sending jobs overseas.”

Ross Perot (1930–2019) American businessman

Cars, Way

“For one cannot serve the national spirit merely by getting a lump in the throat whenever one catches sight of the Union Jack, or by seeing red when a newspaper reports that some foreign power has acted aggressively towards England. These reactions bear the same relation to true love of country that a chance encounter between a man and a woman who meet in the street bears to a happy marriage.”

Rebecca West (1892–1983) British feminist and author

"The Necessity and Grandeur of the International Ideal" (1935)

Love, Marriage, Happiness, Chance

“I mean, look, no matter how you feel about Bush, watching him speak is difficult. It's like— it's like watching a drunk man cross an icy street.”

Tucker Carlson (1969) American political commentator

Real Time with Bill Maher, 1 October 2004

Feeling

“These ten commandments come to us as a Divine Revelation, as a document signed by God Himself [-] But these books contain a higher wisdom besides. Not the wisdom of the street corners, nor the wisdom of the learned schools, but the conduct which God requires of us”

Michael von Faulhaber (1869–1952) German Roman Catholic Cardinal

Sermon Two

Wisdom, God, Books, School

“The life that I aspire to live
No man proposeth me—
No trade upon the street
Wears its emblazonry.”

Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) 1817-1862 American poet, essayist, naturalist, and abolitionist

“Independence”

Life

“The man in the street does not know a star in the sky.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

1840s, Essays: First Series (1841), Self-Reliance

Star

“The Rev. Jesse Jackson once said, “There is nothing more painful for me at this stage in my life than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robbery—then look around and see somebody white and feel relieved.”

Walter E. Williams (1936) American economist, commentator, and academic

2010s, American Contempt for Liberty (2015)

Life, Pain, Feeling, Thinking

“At the moment the world is restless. Only in the time of the system of the Mahdi all the streets will attain peace and tranquility.”

Harun Yahya (1956) Turkish author

29 April 2013.
A9 TV addresses, 2013

World, Peace, Time

“I want to tell you that, when the army of Egypt came down the streets, came to protect you, and stayed for 18 months, none of the soldiers harmed you, Our hands must be cut if they would harm you. I am repeating this for you to know, during those 18 months, there were 150,000 soldier in the streets. it means for 500 days with 150,000 soldier in the street there were 7.5 million possibilities, we were struggling not to harm any Egyptian!”

Abdel Fattah el-Sisi (1954) Current President of Egypt

Remarks by el-Sisi on Sinai liberation celebrations day (28 April 2013) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-x1xN8LUYG4. 2013

“Back and forth the fantastic tableaux would spin, past his cruel plebe hazing, the self-discovery at the West Texas Military Academy, the patriarchal Judge MacArthur, all beard and cigar smoke, presiding over dynastic feats at Washington's 1201 N Street; the chimes of the drawing-room clock there telling off the quarters; the ceremonial changing of the guard at Leavenworth; his father's tales of Sherman's dauntless Boys in Blue; his mother's imperious commands to fight and fight and never lower his blade short of victory; the clean crack of Krag rifles and the warm prickling of desert sand as he played with his brother outside the fort stockade; the rumbling of the sunset gun and Pinky's face tilting downward, her lambent smile gilding the child's upturned features while he clutched at her cascading skirts; the yellow notes of the bugles as he stirred in his cradle; the chant of sergeants hawking cadence on the parade ground outside; and, snapping proudly in the overarching sky above him, the flag, and the flag, and the flag.”

William Manchester (1922–2004) (April 1, 1922 – June 1, 2004) American author, journalist and historian

Source: American Caesar: Douglas MacArthur 1880-1964 (1978), p. 709

Smile, Boy, Change, Past

“Convince yourself. Kovno is a treasure-trove for artists. It is gloomy, the lamps don't make it lighter and the streets are getting darker. Their violet windows hover threateningly in the darkness. The elusive lines of low houses, on them - the glimmer of green and red flames - illuminating rows of shops. Bright green bright red stripes [all] fall on the violet sidewalk. And all those shadows are full of people who only speak about one thing, about love, in the dialect, Polish or broken Russian. Whispers and loud words touch the silence, like the green and red bands of light - the darkness of the night. Something terrible, terrible lies over everything, I feel a shudder, it seems I am in another world, far away from real life.”

Marianne von Werefkin (1860–1938) expressionist painter

Quote from Werefkin's letter to Alexej von Jawlensky, between December 1909 and Spring 1910; as cited in 'Ambiguity of Home: Identity and Reminiscence in Marianne Werefkin's Return Home, c. 1909', Adrienne Kochman http://www.19thc-artworldwide.org/spring06/52-spring06/spring06article/171-ambiguity-of-home-identity-and-reminiscence-in-marianne-werefkins-return-home-c-1909 1906 - 1911

Love, Life, People, World

“I think it is well also for the man in the street to realise that there is no power on earth that can protect him from being bombed. Whatever people may tell him, the bomber will always get through.”

Stanley Baldwin (1867–1947) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1932/nov/10/international-affairs in the House of Commons (10 November 1932). 1932

People, Thinking

“With silent strides Odysseus then shot back the bolt,
passed lightly through the courtyard and sped down the street.
Some saw him take the graveyard's zigzag mountain path,
some saw him leap on rocks that edged the savage shore,
some visionaries saw him in the dead of night
swimming and talking secretly with the sea-demons,
but only a small boy saw him in a lonely dream
sit crouched and weeping by the dark sea's foaming edge.”

Nikos Kazantzakis (1883–1957) Greek writer

Book II, line 457
The Odyssey : A Modern Sequel (1938)

Dreams, Mountain, Boy, Sea

“In our Father s house it will not be the pearl gate or the streets of gold that will make us happy. But oh, how tran-scendently glad shall we be when we see our Lord. Perhaps in that "upper room," also, He may show us His hands and His side, and we may cry out with happy Thomas, "My Lord and my God!"”

Theodore L. Cuyler (1822–1909) American minister

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 303.

God, Happiness, Housing, Cry

“Mr. Trump didn’t create this economic swan dive to the street. Our politicians did.”

Ted Nugent (1948) American rock musician

Give Trump the Medal of Freedom (August 7, 2015)

“I performed at a show at the MoMA. There was this big dinner there, and I was seated in this hall with the mayor of New York and all these extremely wealthy art-supporting and art-buying people. There was a piece of work hanging in the hall-it was a fan. This fan was supposed to swing by the momentum of its own propeller. So, while we were having dinner, the fan was stopped, and the guy next to me, a curator at P. S.1, said, "Look, this is what art symbolizes today." Like, that piece of art is supposed to be moving, but just to have dinner we've stopped the art. That's what New York is like today. You can't have real art happen in an institution because rich people can make the world stop. The stuff on the street is a lot more interesting.”

M.I.A. (1975) British recording artist, songwriter, painter and director

Interview http://www.interviewmagazine.com/art/kehinde-wiley/#page2 with Kehinde Wiley on the "recycled object" for Interview magazine (2008) Sourced quotes

People, World, Art, Guy

“Great and Little Wild Streets are called respectively Old and New Weld Streets by Strype. Weld House stood on the site of the present Wild Court, and was during the reign of James II occupied by the Spanish Embassy. In Great Wild Street Benjamin Franklin worked as a journeyman printer.”

Walter Besant (1836–1901) English novelist and historian

The Fascination of London: Holborn and Bloomsbury (with Geraldine Mitton), 1903 http://books.google.com/books?id=SqAKAAAAYAAJ&pg=PR18, p. 29

Housing

“What was this dream we had, a dream of music,
Music that rose from the opening earth like magic
And shook its beauty upon us and died away?
The long cold streets extend once more before us.
The red sun drops, the walls grow grey.”

Conrad Aiken (1889–1973) American novelist and poet

The House of Dust (1916 - 1917)

Beauty, Dreams, Music, Sun

“I recommend that you provide the resources to carry forward, with full vigor, the great health and education programs that you enacted into law last year. I recommend that we prosecute with vigor and determination our war on poverty. I recommend that you give a new and daring direction to our foreign aid program, designed to make a maximum attack on hunger and disease and ignorance in those countries that are determined to help themselves, and to help those nations that are trying to control population growth. I recommend that you make it possible to expand trade between the United States and Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. I recommend to you a program to rebuild completely, on a scale never before attempted, entire central and slum areas of several of our cities in America. I recommend that you attack the wasteful and degrading poisoning of our rivers, and, as the cornerstone of this effort, clean completely entire large river basins. I recommend that you meet the growing menace of crime in the streets by building up law enforcement and by revitalizing the entire federal system from prevention to probation. I recommend that you take additional steps to insure equal justice to all of our people by effectively enforcing nondiscrimination in federal and state jury selection, by making it a serious federal crime to obstruct public and private efforts to secure civil rights, and by outlawing discrimination in the sale and rental of housing. I recommend that you help me modernize and streamline the federal government by creating a new Cabinet-level Department of Transportation and reorganizing several existing agencies. In turn, I will restructure our civil service in the top grades so that men and women can easily be assigned to jobs where they are most needed, and ability will be both required as well as rewarded. I will ask you to make it possible for members of the House of Representatives to work more effectively in the service of the nation through a constitutional amendment extending the term of a Congressman to four years, concurrent with that of the President. Because of Vietnam we cannot do all that we should, or all that we would like to do. We will ruthlessly attack waste and inefficiency. We will make sure that every dollar is spent with the thrift and with the commonsense which recognizes how hard the taxpayer worked in order to earn it. We will continue to meet the needs of our people by continuing to develop the Great Society. Last year alone the wealth that we produced increased $47 billion, and it will soar again this year to a total over $720 billion. Because our economic policies have produced rising revenues, if you approve every program that I recommend tonight, our total budget deficit will be one of the lowest in many years. It will be only $1.8 billion next year. Total spending in the administrative budget will be $112.8 billion. Revenues next year will be $111 billion. On a cash basis—which is the way that you and I keep our family budget—the federal budget next year will actually show a surplus. That is to say, if we include all the money that your government will take in and all the money that your government will spend, your government next year will collect one-half billion dollars more than it will spend in the year 1967. I have not come here tonight to ask for pleasant luxuries or for idle pleasures. I have come here to recommend that you, the representatives of the richest nation on earth, you, the elected servants of a people who live in abundance unmatched on this globe, you bring the most urgent decencies of life to all of your fellow Americans.”

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

1960s, State of the Union Address (1966)

Life, Women, Men, Money

“Once there ruled in the distant city of Wirani a king who was both mighty and wise. And he was feared for his might and loved for his wisdom. Now, in the heart of that city was a well, whose water was cool and crystalline, from which all the inhabitants drank, even the king and his courtiers; for there was no other well. One night when all were asleep, a witch entered the city, and poured seven drops of strange liquid into the well, and said, “From this hour he who drinks this water shall become mad.” Next morning all the inhabitants, save the king and his lord chamberlain, drank from the well and became mad, even as the witch had foretold. And during that day the people in the narrow streets and in the market places did naught but whisper to one another, “The king is mad. Our king and his lord chamberlain have lost their reason. Surely we cannot be ruled by a mad king. We must dethrone him.” That evening the king ordered a golden goblet to be filled from the well. And when it was brought to him he drank deeply, and gave it to his lord chamberlain to drink. And there was great rejoicing in that distant city of Wirani, because its king and its lord chamberlain had regained their reason.”

Khalil Gibran (1883–1931) Lebanese artist, poet, and writer

The Madman (1918)

Love, Wisdom, People, Fear

“At a certain age children are greatly intrigued by the possibility of locating themselves on a map. It appears strange that one's familiar life should actually have all occurred in an area delineated by a set of quite impersonal (and hitherto unfamiliar) coordinates on the surface of the map. The child's exclamations of "I was there" and "I am here right now" betray the astonishment that the place of last summer's vacation, a place marked in memory by such sharply personal events as the ownership of one's first dog or the secret assembling of a collection of worms, should have specific latitudes and longitudes devised by strangers to one's dog, one's worms, and oneself. This locating of oneself in configurations conceived by strangers is one of the important aspects of what, perhaps euphemistically, is called "growing up". One participates in the real world of grown-ups by having an address. The child who only recently might have mailed a letter addressed "To my Granddaddy" now informs a fellow worm-collector of his exact address – street, town, state and all – and finds his tentative allegiance to the grown-up world view dramatically legitimated by the arrival of the letter.”

Peter L. Berger (1929–2017) Austrian-born American sociologist

Source: Invitation to Sociology (1963), p. 81

Life, Children, Secret, Age

“Oh, and some nasty stuff in there! It looked to be a bite, almost. Holyfield is very unhappy, look at this! It looked as if Tyson bared his teeth at one stage in the exchange. He bit his ear! Well, feelings are running very, very hot indeed in there. Holyfield was outraged by that. Now what is the referee going to do about that? One point deduction for Tyson! One point deducted from Mike Tyson, for biting Holyfield's ear. Now, let's take a look again. Well, this is getting like a street fight.”

Ian Darke (1950) British association football and boxing commentator

Evander Holyfield vs. Mike Tyson II https://listenonrepeat.com/watch/?v=xlIOqypvT-g#Mike_Tyson_Bites_Holyfields_Ear_Clean_Off (28 June 1997). 1990s, 1997, Evander Holyfield vs. Mike Tyson II (June 1997)

Feeling, Fight

“A remarkable challenge to Milosevic unfolded in the street of Belgrade in December [1996], led by three politicians who banded together in a movement called Zajedno, or the Together Movement. For weeks, hundreds of thousands of Belgrade citizens braved subfreezing weather to call for democracy. But Washington missed a chance to affect events; except for one ineffectual trip to Washington, Zajedno had no contact with senior American government officials, and the Administrations sent no senior officials to Belgrade for fear that their visits would be used by Milosevic to show support. For the first time in eighteen months, Milosevic felt no significant American pressure, and turned back towards the extreme nationalists, including Karadzic, for support. His tactical skills saved him again, and within weeks, the Together Movement was together no more, as its leaders split among themselves.”

Richard Holbrooke (1941–2010) American diplomat

Source: 1990s, To End a War (1998), p. 345

Fear, Democracy, Support, Chance

“Parking is such street sorrow.”

Herb Caen (1916–1997) American newspaper columnist

Byrne, Robert. The 2,548 Wittiest Things Anybody Ever Said, page 554. http://books.google.com/books?id=odz2rZirMAkC&pg=PT554 Simon and Schuster, 2012. ISBN 145164891X Attributed

“That holy, humble, meek, modest, retiring Form, sometimes called the Spirit of Prayer, has been dragged from the closet, and so rudely handled by some of her professed friends, that she has not only lost all her wonted loveliness, but is now stalking the street, in some places, stark mad.”

Asahel Nettleton (1783–1844) American theologian

Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 193.

Madness

“Profits and prices are the street signs of the economy. Only fools flout them. The much–maligned price system works not only to secure supply but to conserve.”

Ilana Mercer South African writer

"The Goods on Gas," http://www.ilanamercer.com/phprunner/public_article_list_view.php?editid1=7 WorldNetDaily.com, July 13, 2008. 2000s, 2008

Fools

“We bore round the point toward the old anchoring ground of the hide ships, and there, covering the sand hills and the valleys… flickering all over with the lamps of its streets and houses, lay a city of one hundred thousand inhabitants. The dock into which we drew, and the streets about it, were densely crowded with express wagons and handcarts… Though this crowd I made my way, along the well-built and well-light streets, as alive as by day, where boys in high-keyed voices where already crying the latest New York papers. When I awoke in the morning, and looked from my windows over the city of San Francisco, with its storehouses, towers, and steeples; its courthouses, theaters, and hospitals, its daily journals, its well-filled learned professions, its fortresses and lighthouses; its wharves and harbor… when I saw all these things, and reflected on what I once saw here, and what now surrounded me, I could scarcely keep my hold on reality at all, or the genuineness of anything.”

Richard Henry Dana Jr. (1815–1882) United States author and lawyer

Twenty-Four Years After (1869)

Way, Boy, Reality, Light

“Mouthpiece for a racist, imperialistic American foreign policy controlled by generals and corporate elites. Black people did not vote for Barack Obama for him to bomb an African country, Libya. They elected him to stand up like a man against the forces of imperialism. They voted for him to bail out Harlem, where there is 50 percent Black male unemployment, like they bailed out Wall Street.”

Charles Barron (1950) American politician

On Obama. http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/2011/04/obama_a_mouthpi.php

People, Country

“The back streets of Fulham, Yorkshiremen in pub gardens, a laboratory rabbit, office friendships, a cutting, a quotation – anything can start him off, and when he brings us back from the outing we are usually either shaken or stirred, and sometimes both, reflecting that there is really nothing, however surreal, extravagant, improper or mundane, that Ewart could not write a poem about.”

Gavin Ewart (1916–1995) English poet

Philip Larkin "Horn of Plenty", in Further Requirements ([2001] 2002) p. 320.
Criticism

Friendship

“This fact, the surfacing of structure in an undeliberate action, is too big to take on here, but it was enough to convince me that the structuralists—the advocates of planning music before you hear or care what the plan gives you—were right: do not rely on unplanned music; it comes out as though it were planned, but planned by someone you cross the street to avoid.”

Robert Ashley (1930–2014) American composer

liner notes to Automatic Writing (1996), referring to both automatic writing and the piece Automatic Writing.

Music

“Starting with the Swadeshi Movement in Bengal, this flattering of Muslims by praising Islam culminated in Mahatma Gandhi’s sarva-dharma-samabhava - the opiate which lulled the Hindus into a deep slumber such as they had never known vis-à-vis Muslim aggression…. Anyone who questioned the pious proposition that the Quran was as good as the Vedas and the Puranas, ran the risk of being nailed down as an “enemy of communal harmony”….. That part of the “Muslim minority” which had voted for Pakistan but had chosen to stay in India, restarted the old game when India was proclaimed a secular state pledged to freedom of propagation for all religions. It revived its tried and tested trick of masquerading as a “poor and persecuted minority”. It cooked up any number of Pirpur Reports. The wail went up that the “lives, liberties and honour of the Muslims were not safe” in India, in spite of India’s “secular pretensions”. At the same time, street riots were staged on every possible pretext. The “communal situation” started becoming critical once again. …. And once again, the political leadership came out with a make-belief. The big-wigs from all political parties were collected in a “National Integration Council”. It was pointed out by the leftist professors that the major cause of “communal trouble” was the “bad habit” of living in the past on the part of “our people”. Most of the politicians knew no history and no religion for that matter. They all agreed with one voice that Indian history, particularly that of the “medieval Muslim period”, should be re-written. That, they pleaded, was the royal road to “national integration.””

Sita Ram Goel book The Calcutta Quran Petition

The Calcutta Quran Petition (1986)

People, Religion, History, Game

“Dear Miss Manners: What is the proper way to eat potato chips?
Gentle Reader: With a knife and fork. A fruit knife and an oyster fork, to be specific. Good heavens, what is the world coming to? Miss Manners does not mind explaining the finer points of gracious living, but she feels that anyone without the sense to pick up a potato chip and stuff it in their face should probably not be running around loose on the streets.”

Judith Martin (1938) American etiquette expert

Miss Manners' Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior

World, Way, Feeling, Sense

“And, what is worse, the reader often shares the writer's prejudices, and is far too well pleased with his conclusions to examine either his premises or his reasoning. Stand on a barrel in the streets of Bagdad, and say in a loud voice, 'Twice two is four, and ginger is hot in the mouth, therefore Mohammed is the prophet of God', and your logic will probably escape criticism; or, if anyone should by chance criticise it, you could easily silence him by calling him a Christian dog.”

A.E. Housman (1859–1936) English classical scholar and poet

"The Application of Thought to Textual Criticism", a lecture delivered on August 4, 1921

God, Dogs, Silence, Chance

“These are the gentry who are today wrapped up in the American flag, who shout their claim from the housetops that they are the only patriots, and who have their magnifying glasses in hand, scanning the country for evidence of disloyalty, eager to apply the brand of treason to the men who dare to even whisper their opposition to Junker rule in the United Sates. No wonder Sam Johnson declared that "patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel." He must have had this Wall Street gentry in mind, or at least their prototypes, for in every age it has been the tyrant, the oppressor and the exploiter who has wrapped himself in the cloak of patriotism, or religion, or both to deceive and overawe the people.”

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

The Canton, Ohio Speech, Anti-War Speech (1918)

Men, People, Age, Religion

“Right and left; the hothouse and the street. The Right can only live and work hermetically, in the hothouse of the past, while outside the Left prosecute their affairs in the streets manipulated by mob violence. And cannot live but in the dreamscape of the future.”

Thomas Pynchon book V.

Epilogue
V. (1963)

Past, Future

“One, a caliphate is a global government, and you know that's where we're headed. Everybody is headed now towards a global government. Well, so are the Islamic extremists, except theirs is Sharia law and infidels will be beheaded. The Shiite Muslims, the ones in Iran, believe in — and not all of them, not the people necessarily on the street — but the real radicals, the revolutionaries and the people at the very top are called Twelvers. They believe in the Twelfth Imam. And that will — that Twelfth Imam, when he returns, he will set up a global caliphate in ancient Babylon. This one should gravely concern you because he has all of the earmarks — in their own writings — of an antichrist, or the Antichrist. I don't know if he is or not. But there are those who will just claim, you know, he's the Twelfth Imam, et cetera et cetera. And the way to get there is global chaos.”

Glenn Beck (1964) U.S. talk radio and television host

2011-02-01
The Glenn Beck Program
Premiere Radio Network
Beck Warns Of The Coming "Caliphate," "Global Government," "Marxists," "Global Chaos" And "The Anti-Christ"
Media Matters for America
http://mediamatters.org/mmtv/201102010012
2011-02-28
2010s, 2011

People, Law, Way

“He knew what she'd be reading first as she started from the beginning, reading what he'd had to say when he was younger, and then growing older, stories at first about tiny mice who lived in families in back of the wall, and stories about school, and apartments in Greenpoint and Carnasie and Flatbush, elves in Ireland that he'd pictured as Pop had told him about them, and the woman with lace on her sleeves.
She kept turning pages, and then halfway through, she whispered, "Water Street."
Thomas knew she was reading now about a boy who listened at a register, thinking about a family, and a lighthouse, and then she turned the next page and took a breath.
It was the story he really wanted her to see: a story about a girl who though less of herself than everyone else did, who worried about everyone, even when she didn't want to, even when it made her irritable. A girl who was afraid, and who hardly knew it yet, but was on her way to being a healer like her mother, because there'd never be anything else for her, and how lucky they were just to know her.”

Patricia Reilly Giff (1935) American children's writer

Source: Water Street (2006), Chapters 21-29, p. 135-136

School, Family, Way, Girl

“With the completion of Shepherd’s Grosvenor Square houses, about 1730, the development of urban design in London ceases, for a time, to be of much interest. The story, however, continues and reaches its climax in Bath where street design developed in a most important way for a matter of forty years.”

John Summerson (1904–1992) British architectural historian

Architecture in Britain, 1530–1830

Way, Time, Housing

“Wall Street, as you already know, is part of Marshall McLuhan's vision of the world in the Electric Age, that is, a global village dependent on oral-aural communication.”

George Goodman (1930–2014) American author and economics commentator

Source: The Money Game (1968), Chapter 10, Can Footprints Predict The Future?, p. 128

Age, World, Communication, Parting

“The bliss of murder! The relief, the soaring ecstasy from the shedding of another’s blood! Wese, old nightbird, friend, alehouse crony, you are oozing away into the dark earth below the street. Why aren’t you simply a bladder of blood so that I could stamp on you and make you vanish into nothingness? Not all we want comes true, not all the dreams that blossomed have borne fruit, your solid remains lie here, already indifferent to every kick. What’s the good of the dumb question you are asking?”

Franz Kafka book A Fratricide

"A Fratricide" (1917)

Lie, Dreams, Question, Indifference

“The attempt to revive styles that have existed in former ages, may for a time appear to be successful, but experience may now surely teach us its impossibility. I might put on a suit of Claude Lorraine's clothes and walk into the street, and the many who knew Claude but slightly would pull off their hats to me, but I should at last meet with some one, more intimately acquainted with him, who would expose me to the contempt I merited.It is thus in all the fine arts. A new Gothic building, or a new missal, is in reality little less absurd than a new ruin.”

John Constable (1776–1837) English Romantic painter

Quote from Constable's Lecture at the Literary and Scientific Institution, Hampstead, (25 July 1836), from notes, taken by C.R. Leslie
1830s, his lectures History of Landscape Painting (1836)

Age, Art, Reality, Appearance

“Parade magazine announces that 40 million Soviet men were killed between 1914 and 1945. The magazine’s headline reads ‘Short End of the Stick’. Because men died? No. The women were seen as getting the short end of the stick because they were stuck with factory and street-cleaner positions the men weren’t around to do.”

Warren Farrell book The Myth of Male Power

Source: The Myth of Male Power (1993), Part II: The Glass Cellars of the disposable sex, p. 145.

Women, Men, Reading

“To-day, artists and those who love artists seem like fossils. Imagine a megatherium or a diplodocus stalking the streets of Paris! There you have the impression that we must make upon our contemporaries. Ours is an epoch of engineers and of manufacturers, not one of artists.”

Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) French sculptor

Source: Art, 1912, Preface, p. 6-7

Love, Imagination

“Welcome back! If you're wondering where our good friend -- Kevin Eubanks couldn't be here. Kevin is on tour. He's in France right now. He called me today and he's over there and he wouldn't be back until next week. So if you're wondering where Kevin Eubanks is, he's with us in spirit certainly.
Okay. Boy, this is the hard part. I want to thank you, the audience. You folks have been just incredibly loyal. (emotionally) This is tricky. (laughs) We wouldn't be on the air without you people. Secondly, this has been the greatest 22 years of my life. (applause)
I am the luckiest guy in the world. I got to meet presidents, astronauts, movie stars, it's just been incredible. I got to work with lighting people who made me look better than I really am. I got to work with audio people who made me sound better than I really do. (voice breaking) And I got to work with producers! And writers! (choked pause) And just all kinds of talented people who make me look a lot smarter than I really am.
I'll tell you something. First year of this show, I lost my mom. Second year, I lost my dad. Then my brother died. And after that, I was pretty much out of family. And the folks here became my family. Consequently, when they went through rough times, I tried to be there for them. The last time we left the show, you might remember we had the 64 children that were born among all our staffers that married. That was a great moment.
And when people say to me, hey why don't you go to ABC? Why don't you go to FOX? Why don't you go…? I didn't know anybody over there. These are the only people I have ever known. I'm also proud to say this is a a union show. And I have never worked (applause) -- I have never worked with a more professional group of people in my life. They get paid good money and they do a good job.
And when the guys and women on this show would show me the new car they bought or the house up the street here in Burbank that one of the guys got, I felt I played a bigger role in their success as they played in mine. That was just a great feeling.
And I'm really excited for Jimmy Fallon. You know, it's fun to kind of be the old guy and sit back here and see where the next generation takes this great institution, and it really is. It's been a great institution for 60 years. I am so glad I got to be a part of it, but it really is time to go, hand it off to the next guy; it really is.
And in closing, I want to quote Johnny Carson, who was the greatest guy to ever do this job. And he said, I bid you all a heartfelt good night. Now that I brought the room down, hey, Garth, have you got anything to liven this party up? Give it a shot! Garth Brooks!”

Jay Leno (1950) American comedian, actor, writer, producer, voice actor and television host

Farewell speech, February 6, 2014
The Tonight Show

Life, Women, Money, Children

“De Bellaigue is at pains to portray Mossadegh as — in the words of the jacket copy — “one of the first liberals of the Middle East, a man whose conception of liberty was as sophisticated as any in Europe or America.” But the trouble is, there is nothing in Mossadegh’s career — spanning half a century, as provincial governor, cabinet minister, and finally prime minister — to portray him as even remotely a lover of liberty. De Bellaigue quotes Mossadegh as saying that a trusted leader is “that person whose every word is accepted and followed by the people.” To which de Bellaigue adds: “His understanding of democracy would always be coloured by traditional ideas of Muslim leadership, whereby the community chooses a man of outstanding virtue and follows him wherever he takes them.” Word for word, that could have been the late Ayatollah Khomeini’s definition of a true leader. Mossadegh also made a habit of appearing in his street meetings with a copy of the Koran in hand. According to de Bellaigue, Mossadegh liked to say that “anyone forgetting Islam is base and dishonourable, and should be killed.” During his premiership, Mossadegh demonstrated his dictatorial tendency to the full: Not once did he hold a full meeting of the council of ministers, ignoring the constitutional rule of collective responsibility. He dissolved the senate, the second chamber of the Iranian parliament, and shut down the Majlis, the lower house. He suspended a general election before all the seats had been decided and chose to rule with absolute power. He disbanded the high council of national currency and dismissed the supreme court. During much of his tenure, Tehran lived under a curfew while hundreds of his opponents were imprisoned. Toward the end of his premiership, almost all of his friends and allies had broken with him. Some even wrote to the secretary general of the United Nations to intervene to end Mossadegh’s dictatorship. But was Mossadegh a man of the people, as de Bellaigue portrays him? Again, the author’s own account provides a different picture. A landowning prince and the great-great-grandson of a Qajar king, Mossadegh belonged to the so-called thousand families who owned Iran. He and all his children were able to undertake expensive studies in Switzerland and France. The children had French nannies and, when they fell sick, were sent to Paris or Geneva for treatment. (De Bellaigue even insinuates that Mossadegh might have had a French sweetheart, although that is improbable.) On the one occasion when Mossadegh was sent to internal exile, he took with him a whole retinue, including his cook… As a model of patriotism, too, Mossadegh is unconvincing. According to his own memoirs, at the end of his law studies in Switzerland, he had decided to stay there and acquire Swiss citizenship. He changed his mind when he was told that he would have to wait ten years for that privilege. At the same time, Farmanfarma secured a “good post” for him in Iran, tempting him back home.”

Amir Taheri (1942) Iranian journalist

"Myths of Mossadegh" https://www.nationalreview.com/nrd/articles/302213/myths-mossadegh/page/0/1, National Review (June 25, 2012).

Pain, Children, People, Family

“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

“Something had changed—but it was not the street—
The street was just the same—it was himself.”

Conrad Aiken (1889–1973) American novelist and poet

The House of Dust (1916 - 1917)

Change

“Law enforcement ranks are filled with people like my grandfather. But, to be clear, although I am from a law enforcement family, and have spent much of my career in law enforcement, I’m not looking to let law enforcement off the hook. Those of us in law enforcement must redouble our efforts to resist bias and prejudice. We must better understand the people we serve and protect—by trying to know, deep in our gut, what it feels like to be a law-abiding young black man walking on the street and encountering law enforcement. We must understand how that young man may see us. We must resist the lazy shortcuts of cynicism and approach him with respect and decency.”

James Comey (1960) American lawyer and the seventh director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)

2010s, Hard Truths: Law Enforcement (2015)

People, Family, Law, Feeling

“Wickham is not an upwardly mobile community. It's dingy and gray as only a mill town can be. The streets are the color of a shoe bottom, and the only way to tell the difference between the bars and the homes is to look for the neon signs in the windows. The roads and sidewalks are uneven, the tar cracked and pale. Many of the people, especially the workers as they trudge home from the mills in the dying light, have the look of those who've long ago gotten used to the fact that no one remembers them. It's a place where the people are grateful for the seasons, because at least they confirm that time is actually moving on.”

Dennis Lehane book A Drink Before the War

Source: A Drink Before the War (1994), Ch. 8.

People, Color, Shoe, Way

“I want to be naked running through the streets,
I want to invite this so-called chaos that you think I dare not be.”

Alanis Morissette (1974) Canadian-American singer-songwriter

So Called Chaos
So-Called Chaos (2004)

Thinking

“The London office of the International Council for University Development was in Queen Street. Edwin hesitated outside, adjusting his cap, tightening the knot of his tie, smoothing his pyjama collar. The portals, a naked sculptural group above them emblematic of the Tutorial System, were designed to intimidate. The doors were all glass and hence appeared to be ever-open; this again must be emblematic of something.”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Fiction, The Doctor is Sick (1960)

Universe, Appearance

“Let us explain again by examples. In painting a person on a balcony, seen from inside the room do not limit the scene to what the square of the window renders visible; we try to render the sum total of visual sensations which the person on the balcony has experienced; the sun-baked throng in the street, the double row of houses which stretch to right and left, the beflowered balconies etc. This implies the simultaneity of the ambient, and, therefore, the dislocation and the dislocation and dismemberment of objects, the scattering and fusion of details, freed from accepted logic and independent from one another. In order to make the spectator live in the center of the picture, as we express it in our manifesto the picture must be the synthesis of what one remembers and what one sees. You must render the invisible which stirs lives beyond intervening obstacles, what we have on the right, or the left, or behind us, and not merely the small square of life artificially compressed, as it were, by the wings of a stage set. We have declared in our manifesto that what must be rendered is the dynamic sensation, that is to say, the particular rhythm of each object, its inclination, its movement, or more exactly, its interior force.”

Umberto Boccioni (1882–1916) Italian painter and sculptor

Boccioni is referring in this quote to the 'Manifesto of Futurist Painters' of 1910, and its core Futurist concept of dynamic sensation; p. 47.
1912, Les exposants au public', 1912

Life, Sun, Painting, Housing

“The problem, if anything, was precisely the opposite. I had too much to write: too many fine and miserable buildings to construct and streets to name and clock towers to set chiming, too many characters to raise up from the dirt like flowers whose petals I peeled down to the intricate frail organs within, too many terrible genetic and fiduciary secrets to dig up and bury and dig up again, too many divorces to grant, heirs to disinherit, trysts to arrange, letters to misdirect into evil hands, innocent children to slay with rheumatic fever, women to leave unfulfilled and hopeless, men to drive to adultery and theft, fires to ignite at the hearts of ancient houses.”

Michael Chabon book Wonder Boys

Wonder Boys (1995)

Women, Men, Children, Secret

“When we examine the moments, acts, and statements of all kinds of people- not only the grief and ecstasy of the greatest poets, but also the huge unhappiness of the average soul, as evidenced by the innumerable strident words of abuse, hatred, contempt, mistrust, and scorn that forever grate upon our ears as the manswarm passes us in the streets -- we find, I think, that they are all suffering from the same thing. The final cause of their complaint is loneliness.”

Thomas Wolfe (1900–1938) American writer

The Anatomy of Loneliness (1941)

People, Soul, Thinking, Suffering

“Islam uses the notion of taqiyya, where Muslims, consciously or unconsciously, hide their true opinion as they are not in the majority. If I ask a Muslim in the street what he thinks about homosexuality, he will either remain silent or give a politically correct answer. As the number of Muslims increases, even when they are not violent, the ideology of Islam will become more prominent and society will change.”

Geert Wilders (1963) Dutch politician

"Geert Wilders: an interview with the Netherlands' controversial politician." http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Geert+Wilders%3A+an+interview+with+the+Netherlands'+controversial...-a0205111713 Contemporary Review (22 March 2009) 2000s

Thinking, Change