Quotes about styling
page 6

“Obama’s manner in dealing with other people and acting in the world fully exemplifies the cheerful impersonal friendliness—the middle distance—that marks American sociability. (Now allow me to speak as a critic. Remember Madame de Staël’s meetings that deprive us of solitude without affording us company? Or Schopenhauer’s porcupines, who shift restlessly from getting cold at a distance to prickling one another at close quarters, until they settle into some acceptable compromise position?) The cheerful impersonal friendliness serves to mask recesses of loneliness and secretiveness in the American character, and no less with Obama than with anyone else. He is enigmatic—and seemed so as much then as now—in a characteristically American way…. Moreover, he excelled at the style of sociability that is most prized in the American professional and business class and serves as the supreme object of education in the top prep schools: how to cooperate with your peers by casting on them a spell of charismatic seduction, which you nevertheless disguise under a veneer of self-depreciation and informality. Obama did not master this style in prep school, but he became a virtuoso at it nevertheless, as the condition of preferment in American society that it is. As often happens, the outsider turned out to be better at it than the vast majority of the insiders…. Together with the meritocratic educational achievements, the mastery of the preferred social style turns Obama into what is, in a sense, the first American elite president—that is the first who talks and acts as a member of the American elite—since John Kennedy …. Obama's mixed race, his apparent and assumed blackness, his non-elite class origins and lack of inherited money, his Third-World childhood experiences—all this creates the distance of the outsider, while the achieved elite character makes the distance seem less threatening.”

Roberto Mangabeira Unger (1947) Brazilian philosopher and politician

Quoted in David Remnick, The Bridgeː The Life and Rise of Barack Obama (2010), p. 185-6
On Barack Obama

Money, People, Secret, World

“I say, therefore, that he who would write history well must be possessed of these two principal qualifications, a fine understanding and a good style: one is the gift of nature, and cannot be taught; the other may be acquired by frequent exercise, perpetual labour and an emulation of the ancients.”

Lucian (120) ancient Greek writer

How to Write History

Exercises, History, Understanding, Nature

“The essence of good House of Commons speaking is the conversational style, the facility for quick, informal interruptions and interchanges. Harangues from a rostrum would be a bad substitute for the conversational style in which so much of our business is done. But the conversational style requires a fairly small space, and there should be on great occasions a sense of crowd and urgency. There should be a sense of the importance of much that is said and a sense that great matters are being decided, there and then, by the House. … It has a collective personality which enjoys the regard of the public, and which imposes itself upon the conduct not only of individual Members but of parties.”

Winston S. Churchill book The Second World War

Speech in the House of Commons, October 28, 1943 "House of Commons Rebuilding" http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1943/oct/28/house-of-commons-rebuilding#column_403. The Second World War (1939–1945)

Business, Sense, Housing, Personality

“Bill Finger was a contributing force on Batman right from the beginning. He wrote most of the great stories and was influential in setting the style and genre other writers would emulate … I made Batman a superhero-vigilante when I first created him. Bill turned him into a scientific detective.”

Bob Kane (1915–1998) American comic book artist, the creator of Batman

[Bob Kane and Tom Andrae, Batman & Me, Eclipse Books, Forestville, CA, 1989, 1-56060-017-9, 43]

“When they started bumping me off in every film, it became difficult for me to die in different styles. But now I have to start thinking of different ways of getting drunk.”

Amitabh Bachchan (1942) Indian actor

Quotable quotes by Amitabh Bachchan.

Way, Thinking

“The question of what is good acting has got to be paramount in order to keep developing. If you cease to think about it, you cease to develop. There's the showy style and the acting that doesn't look like acting. I go for the latter.”

Timothy Dalton (1944) British actor of stage, film and television

On acting. [Several Interviews with Timothy Dalton on his 007 portrayal, including ‘Licence to Act: Timothy Dalton Uses James Bond To Get What He Wants’ by Marshall Fine, taken from ‘Lifestyle’ magazine, 11 July 1989., http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Film/7518/Bond_Eng/Bond_Eng.htm, http://web.archive.org/20000304095759/www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Film/7518/Bond_Eng/Bond_Eng.htm, 2000-03-04].
Attributed

Question, Thinking

“Kuhn had the genius to find the words and sketch the concepts that made important old philosophical problems relevant to the public and newly discussable by philosophers. He had the strength of mind and commitment to lead the discussion. He could speak the truly incommensurable languages of physics, philosophy, and history, all necessary to frame and advance his epistemological quest. He wrote, as one of his admirers, Margaret Masterman, put it, in a "quasi-poetic style," sometimes veiled, sometimes with "rhetorical exaggeration," but always after careful and even painful thought. Or, to switch metaphors, he drew the portrait of science in the manner of the Impressionists. At a distance, where most viewers stand, the portrait appears illuminating, persuasive, and inspiring; close in, where historians and philosophers stare, it looks sketchy, puzzling, and richly challenging.”

John L. Heilbron (1934) American historian

Thomas Samuel Kuhn: 18 July 1922-17 June 1996 (1998)

Pain, History, Problem, Appearance

“I project on the surface; that is, the essence of the subject must always become visible, even if this is impossible in nature, which is not adapted to this relief style. The absence of foreshortening also plays a crucial part in the process... For I have discovered a very small, undisputed, personal possession: a particular sort of three-dimensional representation on the flat surface... I am my style.”

Paul Klee (1879–1940) German Swiss painter

Quote (July 1902), # 425, in The Diaries of Paul Klee, translation: Pierre B. Schneider, R. Y. Zachary and Max Knight; publisher, University of California Press, 1964
1895 - 1902

Nature, Parting, Personality

“On September 28 the fleet hove in sight, and all came safely to anchor in Pevensey Bay. There was no opposition to the landing. The local "fyrd" had been called out this year four times already to watch the coast, and having, in true English style, come to the conclusion that the danger was past because it had not yet arrived had gone back to their homes.”

Winston S. Churchill book A History of the English-Speaking Peoples

On the landing of William the Conqueror at Pevensey; Vol I; The Birth of Britain.
A History of the English-Speaking Peoples (1956–58)

Home, Time, Past

“Homer is the most simple in his style of all the great poets, and resembles most the style of the poetical parts of the Old Testament. They can have no conception of his manner, who are acquainted with him in Mr. Pope's translation only. An excellent poetical performance that translation is, and faithful in the main to the original. In some places, it may be thought to have even improved Homer. It has certainly softened some of his rudenesses, and added delicacy and grace to some of his sentiments. But withal, it is no other than Homer modernised. In the midst of the elegance and luxuriancy of Mr. Pope's language, we lose sight of the old bard's simplicity. I know indeed no author, to whom it is more difficult to do justice in a translation, than Homer.”

Hugh Blair (1718–1800) British philosopher

Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1784), Lecture XLIII: Homer's Iliad and Odyssey—Virgil's Aeneid.

Faith, Justice, Parting

“The end of the occupation. The right of return of the Palestinian people. These are critical dividing lines in human rights. We have to be here. No American would put up with an Israeli-style occupation of their hometown for 53 days let alone 54 years. US tax dollars are funding violence against people of color inside the US borders and outside the US borders.”

Van Jones (1968) American environmental advocate and civil rights activist

Wartimes : Reports From The Opposition (2003) a CD financed, produced and featuring the voice of Jones, as quoted at "Cool... But, Yes, Communist" by Marty Peretz, in The New Republic (10 September 2009) http://www.tnr.com/blog/the-spine/cool-yes-communist

People, Color

“Then, seek a poet who your way does bend,
And choose an author as you choose a friend;
United by this sympathetic bond,
You grow familiar, intimate and fond;
Your thoughts, your words, your styles, your souls agree,
No longer his interpreter, but he.”

Wentworth Dillon, 4th Earl of Roscommon (1637–1685) Irish poet

Source: Essay on Translated Verse (1684), Line 95.

Way, Soul

“It is written in an all but totally unintelligible style, and this is constued as prima-facie evidence of profundity.”

Peter Medawar (1915–1987) scientist

1960s, Review of Teilhard de Chardin's "The Phenomenon of Man", 1961

“The old writer, like the old actor, is a master of his craft. Youthfulness of style is no more than a matter of technique.”

André Maurois (1885–1967) French writer

The Art of Writing

Youth

“Chopin absolutely was influenced by Bach. We know that before Chopin himself performed in concert, he didn’t play anything other than Bach. His own Preludes are a reference to the Well-Tempered Clavier of Bach, and all Chopin’s students had to play Bach. In whole, Chopin admired Bach most of all composers, and it was nothing less than the Well-Tempered Clavier itself that was his musical diary. I also have said that Chopin is the crowning and climax of piano-playing. It’s something so unique, all-affecting in emotionalism, musical architecture, and structure, that all past giants are present in it: Bach and Mozart. Chopin’s elegance is so singular, that again you need much experience to convey his music in the real and original style. The question of rubato is very sensitive: It’s nothing arbitrary, but much more something well calculated and well proportioned, something that is integrated in the classical strength of form, which is constructed on the profound knowledge of the polyphonic and contrapuntal structures of Bach and Mozart. Whether the Goldbergs may relate to this question? Absolutely! I again want to mention a certain and special term: jeu perlé.”

Burkard Schliessmann classical pianist

Without this you can’t play Chopin, you can’t play Mozart, and lastly absolutely not the Goldbergs.
Talkings on Bach

Music, Question, Knowledge, Past

“You got to learn to wait people out. Hear what they got to say. Not enough to have a majority rule, y’know. Otherwise, the minority won’t be convinced and they won’t support the plan. No point havin’ people at your elbow who’re against what you’re doin’. So we just got to talk it out Quaker-style till ever’body agrees. More efficient in the long run.”

Gregory Benford (1941) Science fiction author and astrophysicist

Part 5 “Coming Home”, Chapter 3 (p. 179)
Against Infinity (1983)

People, Support, Learning, Waiting

“So it's entirely fair to say, and I've said it before, that the way Neuromancer-the-novel "looks" was influenced in large part by some of the artwork I saw in 'Heavy Metal'. I assume that this must also be true of John Carpenter's 'Escape from New York', Ridley Scott's 'Blade Runner'", and all other artefacts of the style sometimes dubbed 'cyberpunk.'”

William Gibson book Neuromancer

Those French guys, they got their end in early. William Gibson http://brmovie.com/FAQs/BR_FAQ_BR_Influence.htm Neuromancer (1984), About Neuromancer

Way, Guy, Parting

“De Mille's bang-them-on-the-head-with-wild-orgies-and-imperilled-virginity style is at its ripest; the film is just about irresistible.”

Pauline Kael (1919–2001) American film critic

"The Sign of the Cross," p. 680.
5001 Nights at the Movies (1982)

“The ALGOL compiler was probably one of the nicest pieces of code to come out at that time. I spent hours trying to fix and change the compiler. Working with it so closely affected the way I think about programming and had a profound influence on my style.”

Gary Kildall book Programmers at Work: Interviews with 19 Programmers who Shaped the Computer Industry

Programmers at Work (1986)

Time, Thinking, Way, Change

“The young people who now proposed to devote themselves to intellectual studies no longer took the term to mean attending a university and taking a nibble of this or that from the dainties offered by celebrated and loquacious professors who without authority offered them the crumbs of what had once been higher education. Now they had to study just as stringently and methodically as the engineers and technicians of the past, if not more so. They had a steep path to climb, had to purify and strengthen their minds by dint of mathematics and scholastic exercises in Aristotelian philosophy. Moreover, they had to learn to renounce all those benefits which previous generations of scholars had considered worth striving for: rapid and easy money-making, celebrity and public honors, the homage of the newspapers, marriages with daughters of bankers and industrialists, a pampered and luxurious style of life.”

Hermann Hesse book The Glass Bead Game

The Glass Bead Game (1943)

Life, Money, Marriage, People

“"Prefer the familiar word to the far-fetched. Prefer the concrete word to the abstract. Prefer the single word to the circumlocution. Prefer the short word to the long. Prefer the Saxon word to the Romance." … What excellent advice it is, and how it was beaten into my generation of schoolboys… But one may tire of even the best advice, as one may tire of writing according to these precepts. Would we wish to be without the heraldic splendour and torchlight processions that are the sentences of Sir Thomas Browne? Would we wish to sacrifice the orotund, Latinate pronouncements of Samuel Johnson? Would we wish that Dickens had written in the style recommended by the brothers Fowler, who framed the rules I have quoted; what would then have happened to Seth Pecksniff, Wilkins Micawber, and Sairey Gamp, I ask you?”

Robertson Davies (1913–1995) Canadian journalist, playwright, professor, critic, and novelist

Writing (1990), he here quotes from The King's English (1906) by Henry Watson Fowler & Francis George Fowler

Quotes

“Against all the retrogressive endeavors (Bohm, Schrödinger etc. and in some sense also Einstein) I am sure that the statistical character of the ψ-function and hence of nature’s laws – on which you insisted from the very beginning against Schrödinger’s resistance – will define the style of the laws at least for some centuries. It may be that later, e. g. in connection with the living processes, one will find something entirely new, but to dream of a way back, back to the classical style of Newton-Maxwell (and these are just dreams these gentlemen are giving themselves up to) seems to me hopeless, digressive, bad taste. And, we could add, it is not even a beautiful dream.”

Wolfgang Pauli (1900–1958) Austrian physicist, Nobel prize winner

Letter to Max Born, December 1954, in Wissenschaftlicher Briefwechsel mit Bohr, Einstein, Heisenberg u.a, Springer, 1999, p. 887, as translated in J. Kofler and A. Zeilinger, "Quantum Information and Randomness", European Review, Vol. 18, No. 4, 2010, pp. 469–480

Law, Beauty, Dreams, Way

“The outstanding personalities of Euclid and Archimedes demand chapters to themselves. Euclid, the author of the incomparable Elements, wrote on almost all the other branches of mathematics known in his day. Archimedes's work, all original and set forth in treatises which are models of scientific exposition, perfect in form and style, was even wider in its range of subjects. The imperishable and unique monuments of the genius of these two men must be detached from their surroundings and seen as a whole if we would appreciate to the full the pre-eminent place which they occupy, and will hold for all time, in the history of science.”

Thomas Little Heath (1861–1940) British civil servant and academic

Preface p. viii
A History of Greek Mathematics (1921) Vol. 1. From Thales to Euclid

Men, History, Mathematics, Science

“Observe leaders closely, learn as much as you can from their leadership styles.”

C. N. R. Rao (1934) Indian chemist

How I made it: CNR Rao, Scientist (2010)

Learning

“Allowing, therefore, the great usefulness of the Government Schools, the Exhibitions, and the Museums both public and private, the question now arises as to what are the impediments to our future progress. The principal ones appear to me to be three.
# A want of a distinctive architecture, which is fatal to art generally.
# The want of a good costume, which is fatal to colour; and
# The want of a sufficient teaching of the figure, which is fatal to art in detail.
It will perhaps be as well to take these one by one.
The most fatal impediment of the three is undeniably the want of a distinctive architecture in the nineteenth century. Architecture is commonly called the mother of all the other arts, and these latter are all more or less affected by it in their details. In almost every age of the world except our own only one style of architecture has been in use, and consequently only one set of details. The designer had accordingly to master, 1. the figure, and the great principles of ornament; 2. those details of the architecture then practised which were necessary to his trade; and 3. the technical processes. Now what is the case in the present day? If we take a walk in the streets of London we may see at least half-a-dozen sorts of architecture, all with different details; and if we go to a museum we shall find specimens of the furniture, jewellery, &c., of these said different styles all beautifully classed and labelled. The student, instead of confining himself to one style as in former times, is expected to be master of all these said half-dozen, which is just as reasonable as asking him to write half-a-dozen poems in half-a-dozen languages, carefully preserving the idiomatic peculiarities of each. This we all know to be an impossibility, and the end is that our student, instead of thoroughly applying the principles of ornament to one style, is so bewildered by having the half-dozen on his hands, that he ends by knowing none of them as he ought to do. This is the case in almost every trade; and until the question of style gets gets settled, it is utterly hopeless to think about any great improvement in modern art.”

William Burges (1827–1881) English architect

Source: Art applied to industry: a series of lectures, 1865, p. 8-9; Partly cited in: Journal of the Royal Society of Arts. Vol. 99. 1951. p. 520

Age, World, School, Art

“Vladimir Voevodsky and his collaborators have provided us with a very interesting candidate-category of motives: a category (of sheaves relative to an extraordinarily fine Grothendieck-style topology on the category of schemes) which in some intuitive sense “softens algebraic geometry” so as to allow for a good notion of homotopy in an algebro-geometric setup and is sufficiently directly connected to concrete algebraic geometry to have already yielded some extraordinary applications. The quest for a full theory of motives is a potent driving force in complex analysis, algebraic geometry, automorphic representation theory, the study of L functions, and arithmetic. It will continue to be so throughout the current century.”

Barry Mazur (1937) American mathematician

"WHAT IS...a Motive?" 2004

Motivation, Sense, Study

“Even the managers. It was all a feudal style of management. If we had accepted that style, we would not have grown. It was simply not a scalable model. Of course, the easiest thing would have been to follow it. But we had a disruptive style of management. So we said, 'we don't want people carrying their wisdom in notebooks as if it is some kind of secretive operation.”

Mukesh Ambani (1957) Indian business magnate

Mukesh Ambani on how Reliance was built

Wisdom, People, Secret

“Rapping and my style, we're brothers. If you go round now and ask rappers about Shabba, they know me as well as I know them. It's similar. The only difference is that they're using a funky beat. I'm on a reggae beat. I don't use the amount of lyrics that they use but it's definitely rapping.”

Shabba Ranks (1966) Jamaican dancehall musician

[Rap Attack 2, New York, Serpent's Tail, ISBN 1852422432, 1991, Toop, David]

“I think there is an incredible crisis now of how we train performers. Their training encourages them to behave as though they are back in the 19th century, and they are not allowed to get out of that box very much. 'If they play a tiny bit of contemporary music, it's looked on as a bit eccentric, and it's sort of tolerated instead of absolutely encouraged. And they certainly can't improvise, and they find it difficult to encounter jazz or jazz styles. 'I think they're all waking up to this, and it's very difficult for them, because the training and the value systems that get put on them go against what we all know to be the real world. Musicians do want to break out of these constraints. It's slightly boring to just play the same cycle of pieces over and over again.”

Joanna MacGregor (1959) British musician

Denver Post, 18/02/2005
On Classical Music

World, Music, Thinking, Training

“This folks, reminds me of when Saddam attacked Kuwait and President Bush said ‘I warn you, I warn you, I warn you, do not.’ Well folks, if you think American-style politics is nasty, you guys have just attacked Kuwait.”

Rob Ford (1969–2016) Canadian politician, 64th Mayor of Toronto

Comparing city council vote that stripped him of more powers to Saddam Hussein attacking Kuwait http://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/he-said-what-quotes-from-toronto-mayor-rob-ford-on-day-of-council-vote-1.1549474#ixzz2l7Nq3YQ9 (18 November 2013) 2010s, 2013

Guy, Thinking

“It is most true, stylus virum arguit,—our style bewrays us.”

Robert Burton book The Anatomy of Melancholy

The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), Democritus Junior to the Reader

“There is always this criticism that the lyricism and the poetry and the language and the dialogues of the past, the written word, is not so prevailing now. To some extent, yes. For somebody that has lived through those years and come back, I feel that when I go to concerts and when I go to public events, nobody asks me to recite dialogues from Baghban or Paa (laughs), they say ‘can we have Deewar?’ or ‘Can we have Agneepath?’ or whatever. So I’m assuming, therefore, that there was a lot more strength and value in those dialogues than what we have now. But I think that, in defense of today’s generation, maybe they don’t want it. They don’t like too many words. This generation is very cryptic in the way it communicates, they’ll have just one or two words where we used to use four of five sentences in our time. That attention span has become very short. So they use one or two words, ‘it’s cool’ or ‘you’re rocking’, to describe the whole feeling. That is the style of the younger generation and if this is what they want, we must make films that follow it.”

Amitabh Bachchan (1942) Indian actor

Quotable quotes by Amitabh Bachchan.

Way, Feeling, Communication, Thinking

“We have probably already passed a “singularity,” a point of no return, in the use of networked information warfare. It took some time for employers to reach a consensus that the old corporate liberal labor regime no longer served their interests, and to take note of and fully exploit the union-busting potential of Taft-Hartley. But once they began to do so, the implosion of Wagner-style unionism was preordained. Likewise, it will take time for the realization to dawn on workers that things are only getting worse, that there’s no hope in traditional unionism, and that in a networked world they have the power to bring the employer to his knees by their own direct action. But when they do, the outcome is also probably preordained. The twentieth century was the era of the giant organization. By the end of the twenty-first, there probably won’t be enough of them left to bury.”

Kevin Carson (1963) American academic

Organization Theory: A Libertarian Perspective (2008), Chapter 9
Organization Theory: A Libertarian Perspective (2008)

World, Hope, Time

“One cannot, however, avoid saying a few words about individuals who lay down the law to art in the name of art history. Art criticism today is beset by art historians turned inside out to function as prophets of so-called inevitable trends. A determinism similar to that projected into the evolution of past styles is clamped upon art in the making. In this parody of art history, value judgments are deduced from a presumed logic of development, and an ultimatum is issued to artists either to accommodate themselves to these values or be banned from the art of the future.”

Harold Rosenberg (1906–1978) American writer and art critic

Source: Art on the Edge, (1975), p. 147, "Criticism and Its Premises"

Law, Art, History, Past

“No matter how close and familiar the temple or cathedral were to the people who lived around them, they remained in terrifying or elevating contrast to the daily life of the slave, the peasant, and the artisan—and perhaps even to that of their masters. Whether ritualized or not, art contains the rationality of negation. In its advanced positions, it is the Great Refusal—the protest against that which is. The modes in which man and things are made to appear, to sing and sound and speak, are modes of refuting, breaking, and recreating their factual existence. But these modes of negation pay tribute to the antagonistic society to which they are linked. Separated from the sphere of labor where society reproduces itself and its misery, the world of art which they create remains, with all its truth, a privilege and an illusion. In this form it continues, in spite of all democratization and popularization, through the nineteenth and into the twentieth century. The “high culture” in which this alienation is celebrated has its own rites and its own style. The salon, the concert, opera. theater are designed to create and invoke another dimension of reality. Their attendance requires festive-like preparation; they cut off and transcend everyday experience. Now this essential gap between the arts and the order of the day, kept open in the artistic alienation, is progressively closed by the advancing technological society. And with its closing, the Great Refusal is in turn refused; the “other dimension” is absorbed into the prevailing state of affairs. The works of alienation are themselves incorporated into this society and circulate as part and parcel of the equipment which adorns and psychoanalyzes the prevailing state of affairs.”

Herbert Marcuse book One-Dimensional Man

Source: One-Dimensional Man (1964), pp. 63-64

Life, People, Truth, World

“Duckbills were supposedly croc-style swimmers, moving by strong, easy, side-to-side flexures of their tail. Therefore, the optimal design would feature vertical tail spines. But duckbill spines all slanted strongly backward, exactly as in land-living lizards, not in swimmers.
Another problem in the duckbill's swimming equipment lies in the profile of the tail. The deepest part of the croc's tail is close to the end, because the end swings through a wider arc than does the base in moving side to side. Thus the tail is deepest where it can do the most good in pushing against the water. All powerful tail-scullers have such deep tail ends. But duckbill tails were deepest at the hips and become progressively narrower from top-to-bottom toward the tip - another caudal feature nearly totally maladapted for its primary function.”

Robert T. Bakker book The Dinosaur Heresies

The Dinosaur Heresies: A Revolutionary View of Dinosaurs (1986), Longman Scientific & Technical, p. 153
The Dinosaur Heresies (1986)

Optimism, Problem, Strong, Water

“Objectively, class differences in accent, dress, manners, and general style of life are very much smaller; and one cannot, strolling about the street or travelling on a train, instantly identify a person’s social background as one can in England. Subjectively, social relations are more natural and egalitarian, and less marked by deference, submissiveness, or snobbery, as one quickly discovers from the cab-driver, the barman, the air-hostess and the drug-store assistant.”

Anthony Crosland book The Future of Socialism

The Future of Socialism by Anthony Crosland.
The Future of Socialism (1956)

Life, Travel, Nature, Personality

“Skidelsky tells us, Keynes was also practical, absorbed in questions of economic policy, argumentative, benevolent and intolerant, often rude, and had an intellectual arrogance that would allow positions previously held with great passion to be calmly abandoned. Well, that is exactly what the Cambridge faculty was like in the 1960s. Not only did the ghost of Keynes dominate the content of economics education at Cambridge, it also dominated the style. That style could be sustained with substance only by the extraordinarily gifted. So it is not surprising that the Cambridge faculty, although still very "Keynesian," looks much more conventional these days.”

John Eatwell, Baron Eatwell (1945) British economist

"Citizen Keynes", 1994

Education, Question, Passion

“I’m very interested in the ‘Culture of Interpretation.’ I’m convinced that each great artist has his own personal style, but it is his artistic responsibility in developing this style to respond other interpretations, either prior or at the same time. I’m convinced that Rubinstein would have presented us another Chopin if Cortot had not existed. Cortot presented very romantic Chopin interpretations - really masterly, outstanding, but confused. Rubinstein’s immediate answer was a very classical Chopin. He was really the first to point out the classical line and structure in his oeuvre.”

Burkard Schliessmann classical pianist

Talkings about Chopin and Schumann

Time, Personality

“The intense interest aroused in the public by what was known at the time as “The Styles Case” has now somewhat subsided. Nevertheless, in view of the world-wide notoriety which attended it, I have been asked, both by my friend Poirot and the family themselves, to write an account of the whole story. This, we trust, will effectually silence the sensational rumours which still persist.”

Agatha Christie book The Mysterious Affair at Styles

Captain Arthur Hastings, first paragraph
The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920)

World, Family, Silence, Time

“This test thought out and proposed by Professor Ebbinghaus of Berlin, varies in significance according to its mode of use. It consists essentially in this: a word of a text is omitted and the subject is asked to replace it. The nature of the intellectual work by which the gap is filled, varies according to the case. This may be a test of memory, a test of style, or a test of judgment. In the sentence: ‘Louis IX was born in ——‘ the gap is filled by memory. ‘The crow —– his feathers with his beak’; in this the idea of the suppressed word is not at all obscure, and the task consists in finding the proper word. We may say in passing, that according to the opinion of several teachers before whom we have tried it, this kind of exercise furnishes excellent scholastic training. Lastly, in sentences of the nature of those we have chosen, the filling of the gaps requires an attentive examination and an appreciation of the facts set forth by the sentence. It is therefore an exercise of judgment.”

Alfred Binet (1857–1911) French psychologist and inventor of the first usable intelligence test

Source: The development of intelligence in children, 1916, p. 64

Exercises, Idea, Nature, Teachers

“[Concerning all painters] working in what is known as the abstract style: [the abstract form] is a living thing…. a carrier of the awesome feelings he felt before the unknowable [common quote of Barnett Newman, Clifford Still, and Mark Rothko, 1947]”

Barnett Newman (1905–1970) American artist

1940 - 1950
Source: the catalogue of the 'Ideographic Picture' show, New York, 1947

Feeling, Quotes

“Remember that the style of music that is popular right now might not be popular by the time you have learned to master that music style. So always stay true to yourself and the kind of music you enjoy listening to and working on.”

Jesper Kyd (1972) musician

citation needed

Music, Learning, Time

“One gloomy and pessimistic writer with a powerful style affects a whole generation of writers, who in turn affect almost every educated person in the country.”

Colin Wilson book The Mind Parasites

Source: The Mind Parasites (1967), p. 79

Education, Personality, Country

“Orientation of members toward others [is] a cognitive and affective orientation toward the objects of work, which is manifested in a person's interpersonal style.”

Paul R. Lawrence (1922–2011) American business theorist

Source: Organization and environment: Managing differentiation and integration, 1967, p. 7

Personality

“What is needed is a noticeable unnoticeable style,… a directness of speech that seems to one judging easily imitable, to one trying it nothing less so.”

J. V. Cunningham (1911–1985) American writer

The Problem of Style, Fawcett, New York 1966
General

“Personal computers will make our future adult population simultaneously more mathematically able and more visually literate. Ten years from now, teenagers are likely to enjoy a much richer panorama of options because the pursuit of intellectual achievement will not be tilted so much in favor of the bookworm, but instead cater to a wider range of cognitive styles, learning patterns, and expressive behaviors.”

Nicholas Negroponte book Being Digital

Being Digital (1995)

Behavior, Mathematics, Learning, Future

“Natural historians tend to avoid tendentious preaching in this philosophical mode (although I often fall victim to such temptations in these essays). Our favored style of doubting is empirical: if I wish to question your proposed generality, I will search for a counterexample in flesh and blood. Such counterexamples exist in abundance, for they form a staple in a standard genre of writing in natural history — the “wonderment of oddity” or “strange ways of the beaver” tradition.”

Stephen Jay Gould book Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms

"Reversing Established Orders", p. 394
Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms (1998)

Way, History, Search, Question

“I'd never malign another performer, but the style is not good enough. They've done away with laugh pay-offs. We were given nine minutes or eight minutes. Now they wander wherever they like, they don't get to any jokes before they've been on for two minutes. We had to make an impact in ten seconds.”

Max Bygraves (1922–2012) Singer, comedian, actor

Deprecating modern comedians; Metro, 2002 http://www.metro.co.uk/showbiz/interviews/202-max-bygraves#ixzz1hg6bdBeK

“Artistic responsibility? (Schliessmann answers using Bach performance as his example): After the rediscovery of Bach by Mendelssohn, Bach was interpreted in a very romantic style. This had nothing to do with Bach. Leopold Stokowski made arrangements for orchestra. O. K., the public had a chance to know the works, but it also had nothing to do with Bach. So Tureck and Gould - despite their substantial differences - came and made something completely radical. Only in this way was there a chance to ‘correct’ the ‘picture’ of interpretation and move in the right direction.”

Burkard Schliessmann classical pianist

Talkings about Chopin and Schumann

Way, Chance

“I have just concluded my series of paintings, I look at them constantly. I who made them often find them horrible. I understand them only at rare moments, when I have forgotten all about them, on days when I feel kindly disposed and indulgent to their poor maker. Sometimes I am horribly afraid to turn round canvases which I have piled against the wall; I am constantly afraid of finding monsters where I believed there were precious gems!… Thus it does not astonish me that the critics in London relegate me to the lowest rank. Alas! I fear that they are only too justified! - However, at times I come across works of mine which are soundly done and really in my style, and at such moments I find great solace. But no more of that. Painting, art in general, enchants me. It is my life. What else matters?”

Camille Pissarro (1830–1903) French painter

Quote in a letter, 20 Nov. 1883; as quoted in Painting Outside the lines, Patterns of Creativity in Modern Art, ed. David W. Galenson, Harvard University Press, 30 Jun 2009, p. 84
1880's

Life, Fear, Art, Feeling

“Overconsumption by US citizens, US buy-outs of foreign companies and dollars the Pentagon spends abroad all end up in foreign central banks. These governments face a hard choice: either recycle the dollars back to America by buying US Treasury bonds or let the “free market” force up their currencies relative to the dollar – thereby pricing their exports out of world markets, creating domestic unemployment and business failures. US-style free markets hook them into a system that forces them to accept unlimited dollars. Now they want out. … The US is the world’s largest debtor, yet has avoided the pain of “structural adjustments” imposed on other debtor nations. US interest rate and tax reductions in the face of exploding trade and budget deficits are seen as the height of hypocrisy in view of the austerity programmes that Washington has forced on other countries via the International Monetary Fund and other vehicles.”

Michael Hudson (economist) (1939) American economist

Washington cannot call all the shots http://michael-hudson.com/2009/06/washington-cannot-call-all-the-shots/ (June 14, 2009) Michael-Hudson.com, 1998-

Pain, World, Failure, Business

“Maynard Keynes was born into a certain civilisation at a particular moment of history, and was one of its foremost products. He inherited both its aspirations and its tensions. He grew up in the shadow of its great figures, notably Henry Sidgwick and Alfred Marshall, the teachers and colleagues of is father. His style of thought and way of life both bear Cambridge's unmistakable imprint.”

Robert Skidelsky (1939) Economist and author

John Maynard Keynes: 1883-1946: Economist, Philosopher, Statesman (2003), Ch. 2. Cambridge Civilisation: Sidgwick and Marshall

Life, Way, History, Teachers

“Actually, the father of mixed martial arts, if you will, was Bruce Lee. If you look at the way Bruce Lee trained, the way he fought, and many of the things he wrote, he said the perfect style was no style. You take a little something from everything. You take the good things from every different discipline, use what works, and you throw the rest away.”

Dana White (1969) President of the UFC

Dana White and the future of UFC (2004)

Art, Way, Perfection, Training

“On Charley Patton's voice and music style: I heard this fella, and his voice sounded like my voice. I’d always thought, ‘Well, I could never be a singer with this horrible voice’. I hated it. Absolutely hated it. Still do. But he sounded like the same kind of thing. I didn’t know black American terms: a boll weevil or turnpike blues. But there was an emotion that clicked with me. I became fascinated with gospel blues. I still play more gospel than Chicago. I very rarely go anywhere near that speed, aggression, Clapton thing. Someone once reviewed me, saying the testosterone was missing from my blues solos, because I don’t do Chicago. It’s just alien to me.”

Chris Rea (1951) English singer-songwriter

2015

Hate, Music, Speed

“The vitality of the individual… depends on his success in fashioning a character resistant to the narrowing of experience, to the rigidity of response, and to the consequent constriction of possibility that surrender to a hardened version of what the self implies. "He was so extremely natural," said Santayana of William James, "that there was no way of telling what his nature was, or what came next." It is an observation that states an ideal, suitable to the ambitions of personality under democracy. The point is not to make war against habit or to make war against one self. It is to fashion a style of existence, a mode of the self, in which we lower our defenses enough to strengthen our readiness for the new, our attachment to life, and our love of the world.”

Roberto Mangabeira Unger book The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound

Source: The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound (2007), p. 130

Love, Life, War, World

“Mannerism came so late into the foreground of research on the history of art, that the depreciatory verdict implied in its very name is often still taken to be adequate, and the unprejudiced conception of this style as a purely historical category has be.”

Arnold Hauser (1892–1978) Hungarian art historian

Source: The Social History of Art', Volume II. Renaissance, Mannerism, Baroque, 1999, Chapter 5. The Concept of Mannerism

Art, History

“Intense study of the Bible will keep any writer from being vulgar, in point of style.”

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

Specimens of the table talk of the late Samuel Taylor Coleridge, June 14, 1830, (1835) p. 177

Study

“The duty of the artist is not to be calculating in any sense, so that he may be free himself of human emotions while carried by the universal forces of life. Only then does one not think about making art, or about styles, or directions. Something comes about, something happens.”

Karel Appel (1921–2006) Dutch painter, sculptor, and poet

Karel Appel – the complete sculptures,' (1990) not-paged

Life, Art, Thinking, Sense

“Depraved these styles are called, the one with its ever broken and twisted mouldings, the other with its rich crowded carving, and depraved we may count them, if we are of the school that thinks the purpose of architectural ornament is always to state some fact of construction. The Mexican architects and their workmen were certainly not of this school. They broke their mouldings, turned and curved them and multiplied their ornament for the pure joy it gave them to see the sparkle of the sunlight on their white walls.”

Clarence Stein (1882–1975) American architect

A Triumph of Spanish Colonial Style (1916)

School, Thinking, Joy

“The most important victory, in fact, was in Indonesia. In 1965 there was a military coup, which instantly carried out a Rwanda-style slaughter, and it's not an exaggeration. Rwanda-style slaughter, which wiped out the only mass-based political organization, killed mostly landless peasants, and instituted a brutal and murderous regime. There was total euphoria in the United States. So happy, they couldn't contain it. When you read the press, it was just ecstatic. It's kind of suppressed now because it doesn't look pretty in retrospect, but it was understood. Years later, McGeorge Bundy, who was the national security advisor, recognized that, he said, and I think he's right, the U. S. should have stopped the war in Vietnam in 1965, because we basically won. By 1965 South Vietnam was largely destroyed, most of the rest was going to quickly be destroyed, and we had saved the major prize, Indonesia. The rot wasn't going to spread to Indonesia after this delightful Rwanda-style slaughter.”

Noam Chomsky (1928) american linguist, philosopher and activist

Teach-in on the 25th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War, in New York, April 2000 https://www.democracynow.org/2000/5/12/noam_chomsky_on_vietnam Quotes 2000s, 2000

War, Thinking, Reading, Victory

“These new green laws, organizations and personal styles show understanding that, no matter how super our computers, we will never invent substitutes for food, water and air, that our nation will progress or erode with its soil, that ultimately the land is the law of the land.”

Paul Glover (1947) Community organizer in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; American politician

http://www.paulglover.org/8702.html (“Where Does Ithaca’s Food Come From?”), The Grapevine, cover story 1987-02-20

Law, Food, Understanding, Water

“Like so much of cool hunting, Hilfiger's marketing journey feeds off the alienation at the heart of America's race relations: selling white youth on their fetishization of black style, and black youth on their fetishization of white wealth.”

Naomi Klein (1970) Canadian author and activist

Source: No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies 1999, Chapter Five: "The Patriarchy Gets Funky"

Youth, Heart, Wealth

“Whatever may be the defects of Gibbon's history, none can deny him a proud precision and a style in marching order.”

Walter Bagehot (1826–1877) British journalist, businessman, and essayist

[ART. I—Edward Gibbon, National Review, 2, January 1856, 1–42, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=nyp.33433081643169;view=1up;seq=40] (quote p. 28)
Edward Gibbon (1856)

History

“Every poet depends upon generations who wrote in his native tongue; he inherits styles and forms elaborated by those who lived before him. At the same time, though, he feels that those old means of expression are not adequate to his own experience.”

Czeslaw Milosz (1911–2004) Polish, poet, diplomat, prosaist, writer, and translator

Nobel lecture http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1980/milosz-lecture-en.html (8 December 1980)

Feeling, Time, Dependency

“Arakawa: The manga artist that I look up to the most is Suiho Tagawa, the author of Norakuro. He is the root of my style as an artist. I also love Rumiko Takahashi and Kinnikuman or Ultimate Muscle by Yudetamago. As far as composition and how to draw, I learned that when I was apprenticed to Hiroyuki Eto, the author of Mahoujin Guru Guru for Shonen GanGan.”

Hiromu Arakawa (1973) award winning Japanese manga artist

Interview with mobuta.com (2004)

Love, Learning, Drawing

“I was surprised by photography, which we all use so massively every day. Suddenly, I saw it in a new way, as a picture that offered me a new view, free of all the conventional criteria I had always associated with art. It had no style, no composition, no judgment. It freed me from personal experience. For the first time, there was nothing to it: it was pure picture. That's why I wanted to have it, to show it - not use it as a means to painting, but use painting as a means to photography.”

Gerhard Richter (1932) German visual artist, born 1932

after 2000, Gerhard Richter: An Artist Beyond Isms' (2002)

Art, Way, Time, Painting

“Pseudo-modernists pursue individual style because they know they cannot make a name without it; but if they had lived in the eighteenth century their sole object would have been to write correctly, to conform to the manner of the period. In practice, their conforming individualism means an imitation, studiously concealed, of the eccentricities of poems which really are individual.”

Laura Riding Jackson (1901–1991) poet, critic, novelist, essayist and short story writer

Laura Riding and Robert Graves from A Survey of Modernist Poetry (London: Heinemann, 1927)

“A man is free to go up as high as he can reach up to; but I, with all my style and pep, can't get a man my equal because a girl is always judged by her mother.”

Anzia Yezierska (1880–1970) American writer

The Fat of the Land, from Hungry Hearts and Other Stories (1920)

Girl

“The demand of the day is for a higher standard and style of Christian life. Every follower of Christ must represent His religion purely, loftily, impressively, before that multitude of "Bible-readers" whose only Bible is the Christian.”

Theodore L. Cuyler (1822–1909) American minister

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 115.

Life, Religion, Christ

“The heroic virtues of some great men have been the cause of the corruption of eloquence, or have, at least, enervated the style of most preachers. Instead of joining with the people in rendering thanks to Heaven for the extraordinary gifts it has bestowed on those great men, these very preachers have enrolled themselves among authors and poets, and become panegyrists; they have even uttered more extravagant praises than are found in dedications, verses, or prologues; they have turned the Word of God into a whole warp of praises, which, though well deserved, are out of place, bestowed from selfish motives, not required, and ill-suited to their calling. It is fortunate indeed, if, while they are celebrating their heroes in the sanctuary, they even mention the name of that God or of that religion they ought to preach. Some have wished to preach the Gospel, which is for all men, only to one person, and have been so disconcerted when by accident that person was kept away, that they were unable to pronounce a Christian discourse before an assembly of Christian men, because it was not prepared for them, so that other orators have been obliged to take their places, who had only sufficient leisure to praise God in an extemporary exhortation.!”

Jean de La Bruyère book Les Caractères

Of the Pulpit (13)
Les Caractères (1688)

Men, God, People, Religion

“Palestinians and Arabs were not the only ones cast as Nazis. Israel was also accused — by Israelis as well as by Palestinians — of Nazi-style crimes. In the context of Israeli massacres of Palestinians in 1948, a number of Israeli ministers referred to the actions of Israeli soldiers as "Nazi actions," prompting Benny Marshak, the education officer of the Palmach, to ask them to stop using the term. Indeed, after the massacre at al-Dawayima, Agriculture Minister Aharon Zisling asserted in a cabinet meeting that he "couldn't sleep all night… Jews too have committed Nazi acts." Similar language was used after the Israeli army gunned down forty-seven Israeli Palestinian men, women, and children at Kafr Qasim in 1956. While most Israeli newspapers at the time played down the massacre, a rabbi rote that "we must demand of the entire nation a sense of shame and humiliation… that soon we will be like Nazias and the perpetrators of pogroms." The Palestinians were soon to level the same accusation against the Israelis. Such accusations increased during the intifada. One of the communiqués issued by the Unified National Leadership of the Uprising defined the intifada as consisting of "the children and young men of the stones and Molotov cocktails, the thousands of women who miscarried as a result of poison gas and tear gas grenades, and those women whose sons and husbands were thrown in the Nazi prisons." The Israelis were always outraged by such accusations, even when the similarities were stark. When the board of Yad Vashem, for example, was asked to condemn the act of an Israeli army officer who instructed his soldiers to inscribe numbers on the arms of Palestinians, board chairman Gideon Hausner "squelched the initiative, ruling that it had no relevance to the Holocaust."”

Joseph Massad (1963) Associate Professor of Arab Studies

Massad, in Palestinian and Jewish History: Recognition or Submission? in the Autumn 2000 issue of the Journal of Palestine Studies.
On Comparisons of Israel to Nazi Germany

Women, Men, Children, Education

“But somewhere [during the 1950's, in East-Germany at the Art Academy] along the way we all began to notice that there was something wrong. We saw a few art magazines from the West and got a sense of another world. We began to talk about a third way between capitalism and Communism in art. I saw the work of graphic designers from Poland, the only ones [in communist area] I came across who seemed to be doing something for society but in a style that was more modern.”

Gerhard Richter (1932) German visual artist, born 1932

after 2000, Gerhard Richter: An Artist Beyond Isms' (2002)

World, Art, Way, Communication

“If Vasari really knew the nature of the Greek style of which he speaks, he would deal with it differently in what he says. He compares it with Giotto, but what Giotto did is simple in comparison, because the Greek style is full of ingenious difficulties.”

El Greco (1541–1614) Greek painter, sculptor and architect

full of ingenious difficulties [= translation of Greek art historian Nicos Hadjinicolau] / full of deceptive difficulties [= translation of Spanish art historians Xavier de Salas and Fernando María] Quote of El Greco, as cited in 'Hand-written Note Shows El Greco Defending Byzantine Style In Face Of Western Art', Dec. 2008 https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/12/081218132252.htm the different translation by Nicos Hadjinicolau leads him to the conclusion that El Greco was defending Byzantine art; which is rejected by Fernando María

Nature, Art

“He had great zest for life, and a lot of style - he belonged to an age of elegance.”

Ian Carmichael (1920–2010) actor

Anne Reid, BBC News 6 February 2010 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/8502006.stm About

Life, Age

“The geometrical spirit is not so tied to geometry that it cannot be detached from it and transported to other branches of knowledge. A work of morals or politics or criticism, perhaps even of eloquence, would be better (other things being equal) if it were done in the style of a geometer. The order, clarity, precision and exactitude which have been apparent in good books for some time might well have their source in this geometric spirit. …Sometimes one great man gives the tone to a whole century; [Descartes], to whom one might legitimately be accorded the glory of having established a new art of reasoning, was an excellent geometer.”

Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle (1657–1757) French writer, satirist and philosopher of enlightenment

"The Utility of Mathematics," i.e. "Préface sur l'utitlité des mathématiques et de la physique et sur les travaux de le Académie des Sciences," Œuvres de Monsieur de Fontenelle (1753) Vol. 6, pp.37-50, as quoted by Herbert Butterfield, The Origins of Modern Science 1300-1800 (1949).

Books, Art, Knowledge, Time

“Cicero’s style is a key to the success of De officiis, and not just the literary style, but the political and intellectual style. Regulus aside, the demands of duty generally stretch only as far as the well-educated, well-to-do man is likely to follow. Thus, he insists, in a famous metaphor that Machiavelli later stood on its head, that courage is necessary but the courage of a human being is not the ferocity of the lion, just as wisdom is necessary but the intelligence of the human being is not the cunning of the fox.”

Alan Ryan (1940) British philosopher

On Politics: A History of Political Thought: From Herodotus to the Present (2012), Ch. 4 : Roman Insights: Polybius and Cicero

Wisdom, Education, Intelligence, Courage

“Her style looks absurdly simple — an effortless act of projection, a serpentine lasso whereby her voice casually winds itself around our most vulnerable fantasies. But it is not easy. It is what remains when ingratiation, sentimentality and the manifold devices of heart-warming crap have been ruthlessly pared away. Steel and silk are left, shining and durable.”

Kenneth Tynan (1927–1980) English theatre critic and writer

"Marlene Dietrich" (1967), p. 215
Profiles (1990)

Heart

“Time spent in labouring to perfect one’s style, or to make of it an instrument for the production of imaginative effects, is, Mr. Read tells us, just so much time wasted. Indeed Mr. Middleton Murry says it is worse than this, for nothing could be more dangerous than the notion that the more poetic is prose, the finer it is; this is a heresy that cannot be too much deplored and combated. ‘The terrible attraction of words, the impulse to use them for anything more than exact symbols of the things they stand for, is another danger; any sacrifice of sense to euphony being, these critics tell us, the beginning of decadence: ‘it is a step on the downward path.’ The histories and associations of words, are, Mr. Read says, entirely irrelevant to prose-style, their face-value in current usage being their only value. The young writer is also warned against rhythmical effects and the use of images, and is told that any conscious care for such devices, any playing, like Stevenson, of the sedulous ape to the masters of this technique, must be carefully eschewed.”

Logan Pearsall Smith (1865–1946) British American-born writer

“Fine Writing,” p. 304
Reperusals and Recollections (1936)

Imagination, History, Sense, Time

“I don't like records that are the same from beginning to end, that are too styled and slick. Everything is so designed and airbrushed and Botoxed, it makes us think, 'Oh, everybody's perfect except me. Everything's smooth except me.”

Björk (1965) Icelandic singer-songwriter

But nothing is smooth."
From Newsweek, September 6 2004 issue, defending a song claimed to be "really hard to listen to" ("Ancestors") from her album Medúlla
Other quotes

Thinking, Perfection

“I've got maybe five or ten jean jackets with jeans. I can pack three to four pairs of denim jeans, five T-shirts, ten Western-style shirts, and two ties and just buy socks when I get there. That, a Walkman, two books, and some records, and I'm out the door for a year. Not a problem. Doesn't freak me out at all. Usually, if you're thinking about your clothes too much, you're probably not high enough.”

Ryan Adams (1974) American alt-country/rock singer-songwriter

GQ (April 2002)

Books, Problem, Thinking, Clothes

“In art progress does not consist in extension, but in the knowledge of limits.
Limitation of means determines style, engenders new form, and give impulses to creation.
Limited means often constitute the charm and force of primitive painting. Extension, on the contrary, leads the arts to decadence.
New means, new subjects.
The subject is not the object; it is a new unity, a lyricism which grows completely from the means.”

Georges Braque (1882–1963) French painter and sculptor

Source: 1908 - 1920, quotes from Artists on Art...(1972), p. 423 - short quotes by Georges Braque on 'Means' - Paris, 1917

Art, Knowledge, Painting

“He had a way, that Hackmuth; he had a style; he had so much to give, even his commas and semi-colons had a way of dancing up and down. I used to tear the stamps off his envelopes, peel them off gently, to see what was under them.”

John Fante book Ask the Dust

Ask the Dust (1939)

Way, Tear, Dance

“The iPad is the ultimate Steve Jobs device – so hypnotic that not only do people buy one without knowing what it's good for, they keep feeling like they ought to use it even when they have better alternatives for everything it does. It's a triumph of style over substance, cool over utility, form over actual function.”

Eric S. Raymond (1957) American computer programmer, author, and advocate for the open source movement

Apple, postmodern consumerism and the iPad http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1931 in Armed and Dangerous (22 April 2010)

People, Feeling

“I think we were all more interested in being honest than in being modern. That's why there could be such great differences between the styles of the various members of our group... They had great faith in each other. I think that each of them knew that the other, as an artist, was absolutely honest. Whenever Kubín came to Munich from his nearby country retreat, they [Kandinsky and Kubin] spent many hours together, and I wish I had been able to take down in shorthand some of their conversations. Their ideas about art and life were so different.”

Gabriele Münter (1877–1962) German painter

Source: Interview by Edouard Roditi (1958), p. 118

Life, Faith, Art, Idea

“How much longer are we English to assist foreign nations in misunderstand us, by holding up that ridiculous lay-figure of our race known by the style and title of John Bull?”

Charles Dickens All the Year Round

"One Grand Tour Deserves Another" in All the Year Round: A Weekly Journal (27 December 1862) http://books.google.com/books?id=13VdAAAAcAAJ&pg=PA378

“She's got style and she's got her own money
So she's not another honey you can quickly disarm
She's got the eyes that make you realize
She won't be hypnotized by your usual charm.
You've got your plan of attack
That won't attract the modern woman
When you're an old fashioned man
She understands the things you're doin'
She's a modern woman.”

Billy Joel (1949) American singer-songwriter and pianist

Modern Woman.
Song lyrics, The Bridge (1986)

Money, Fashion, Understanding

“I don't want to change my music, but I like to play around with my style of music. I've always been a big fan of guitars. The beats are still quite hard and the riffs are still Basshunter, but I wanted to do something special. The lyrics are from a true story as well. It's based on me dating a girl who I thought was the one, but it didn't work out. I woke up one morning and she was doing something in the kitchen and then came through with a cup of coffee for me. I just went, 'Wow! I have to write a song now!”

Basshunter (1984) Swedish singer, record producer and DJ

Bass Generation

Music, Girl, Coffee, Change

“Every age has its pleasures, its style of wit, and its own ways.”

Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux (1636–1711) French poet and critic

Chaque âge a ses plaisirs, son esprit et ses mœurs.
Canto III, l. 374
The Art of Poetry (1674)

Pleasure, Age, Way

“The drug user evokes an immediate gut reaction, while most criminals are immediately understandable in both motives and life style. For the criminal is merely cheating at the rules of a game which the policeman himself plays, whereas the bohemian is sceptical of the validity of the game itself and casts doubts on the world-view of both policeman and criminal.”

Jock Young (1942–2013) British sociologist and criminologist

“The role of the police as amplifiers of deviancy,” Images of Deviance (1971), p. 31

Life, World, Game, Motivation

“He adapted the words to the capacity of the Germans, often at the expense of accuracy. He cared more for the substance than the form. He turned the Hebrew shekel into a Silberling, He used popular alliterative phrases as Geld und Gut, Land und Leute, Rath und That, Stecken und Stab, Dornen und Disteln, matt und müde, gäng und gäbe. He avoided foreign terms which rushed in like a flood with the revival of learning, especially in proper names (as Melanchthon for Schwarzerd, Aurifaber for Goldschmid, Oecolampadius for Hausschein, Camerarius for Kammermeister). He enriched the vocabulary with such beautiful words as holdselig, Gottseligkeit.
Erasmus Alber, a contemporary of Luther, called him the German Cicero, who not only reformed religion, but also the German language.
Luther's version is an idiomatic reproduction of the Bible in the very spirit of the Bible. It brings out the whole wealth, force, and beauty of the German language. It is the first German classic, as King James's version is the first English classic. It anticipated the golden age of German literature as represented by Klopstock, Lessing, Herder, Goethe, Schiller,—all of them Protestants, and more or less indebted to the Luther-Bible for their style. The best authority in Teutonic philology pronounces his language to be the foundation of the new High German dialect on account of its purity and influence, and the Protestant dialect on account of its freedom which conquered even Roman Catholic authors.”

Philip Schaff (1819–1893) American Calvinist theologian

Notable examples of Luther's renderings of Hebrew and Greek words

Age, Religion, Beauty, Literature

“Some people did not like this ceremonious style. But after all when you have to kill a man it costs nothing to be polite.”

Winston S. Churchill book The Second World War

Churchill ended his December 8, 1941 letter to the Japanese Ambassador, declaring that a state of war now existed between the United Kingdom and Japan, with the courtly flourish "I have the honour to be, with high consideration, Sir, Your obedient servant".
The Second World War, Volume III : The Grand Alliance (1950) Chapter 32 (Pearl Harbor).
Post-war years (1945–1955)

People

“Obedient to the primary impulse of adequate expression, the style of a complex subject should be complex; of a technical subject, technical; of an abstract subject, abstract; of a familiar subject, familiar; of a pictorial subject, picturesque.”

George Henry Lewes (1817–1878) British philosopher

The Principles of Success in Literature (1865)

“The ancient Greek philosopher, Democritus, propounded an hypothesis of the constitution of matter, and gave the name of atoms to the ultimate unalterable parts of which he imagined all bodies to be constructed. In the 17th century, Gassendi revived this hypothesis, and attempted to develope it, while Newton used it with marked success in his reasonings on physical phenomena; but the first who formed a body of doctrine which would embrace all known facts in the constitution of matter, was Roger Joseph Boscovich, of Italy, who published at Vienna, in 1759, a most important and ingenious work, styled Theoria Philosophiæ Naturalis ad unicam legem virium, in Natura existentium redacta. This is one of the most profound contributions ever made to science; filled with curious and important information, and is well worthy of the attentive perusal of the modern student. In more recent days, the theory of Boscovich has received further confirmation and extension in the researches of Dalton, Joule, Thomson, Faraday, Tyndall, and others.”

Roger Joseph Boscovich (1711–1787) Croat-Italian physicist

Alfred Marshall Mayer, Lecture-notes on Physics (1868) Part 1 https://books.google.com/books?id=hqsLAAAAYAAJ

Imagination, Science, Success, Parting

“Since the 1970s, thanks to a North Korean-style cult of personality, the [Syrian] presidency has been a kind of supranational institution, above anything as vulgar as the competition for power. But now it has lost its mystique: The president is a lonely man who dares not venture beyond his palace in the outskirts of a besieged capital. Syria’s history since independence in 1947 shows that whenever a ruler calls in the army to crush the street, he ends up the loser. It happened three times in 1949 alone, when the army staged three coups, each time after being ordered to crush the street.”

Amir Taheri (1942) Iranian journalist

"The loneliest man in Syria" http://nypost.com/2011/05/10/the-loneliest-man-in-syria/, New York Post (May 10, 2011). New York Post

History, Time, Personality

“.. we didn't have the intention at all of founding a new style... What we wanted, was a refusal of the outmoded, overly-cultivated art practices.”

Karl Schmidt-Rottluff (1884–1976) German artist

as quoted in Ernst Ludwig Kirchner und Die 'Brücke: Selbstbildnisse, Künstlerbildnisse, Jutta Hülsewig-Johnen & Egging Björn; Kerber, Bielefeld 2005, p. 174; as quoted by Louise Albiez https://www.researchgate.net/publication/272168564Claire (incl. translation), Brücke und Berlin: 100 Jahre Expressionismus; submitted to the Division of Humanities New College of Florida, Sarasota, Florida, May, 2013 p. 9

Art

“One has no notion of him as making use of a fine pen, but a great mutton-fist; his style stuns readers…He is too much for any single newspaper antagonist; "lays waste" a city orator or Member of Parliament, and bears hard upon the government itself. He is kind of fourth estate in the politics of the country.”

William Hazlitt (1778–1830) English writer

"On the Character of Cobbett" Table Talk: Essays On Men And Manners http://www.blupete.com/Literature/Essays/TableHazIV.htm (1821-1822)

Country

“There is one expanding horror in American life. It is that our long odyssey toward liberty, democracy and freedom-for-all may be achieved in such a way that utopia remains forever closed, and we live in freedom and hell, debased of style, not individual from one another, void of courage, our fear rationalized away.”

Norman Mailer (1923–2007) American novelist, journalist, essayist, playwright, film maker, actor and political candidate

Review of the book My Hope for America
Cannibals and Christians (1966)

Life, Fear, Way, Democracy

“In doing good, we are generally cold, and languid, and sluggish; and of all things afraid of being too much in the right. But the works of malice and injustice are quite in another style. They are finished with a bold, masterly hand; touched as they are with the spirit of those vehement passions that call forth all our energies, whenever we oppress and persecute.”

Edmund Burke (1729–1797) Anglo-Irish statesman

Speech at Bristol Previous to the Election http://books.google.com/books?id=DAAUAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA435&dq=%22we+are+generally+cold,+and+languid,+and+sluggish%22&hl=en&sa=X&ei=D4TSUuXqDYrekQe6uoH4Cw&ved=0CFAQ6AEwBQ#v=onepage&q=%22we%20are%20generally%20cold%2C%20and%20languid%2C%20and%20sluggish%22&f=false (6 September 1780) 1780s

Passion

“How few people, even among the supposedly well educated, can give an intelligent explanation of the qualities of a design! …the essential ones …are necessary in order that the design may be worthy to be classed at all as a work of art. Among the essential qualities are reason, unity, harmony, clarity, and variety. Among the desirable qualities are imagination, interest, refinement, simplicity, dignity, and style.”

Ernest Flagg (1857–1947) American architect

Small Houses: Their Economic Design and Construction (1922)

People, Education, Art, Imagination

Quotes about styling page 6

Quotes about styling
page 6