Quotes about subject (3377 quotes, page 28)

“Facet analysis consists in an analysis of a subject in its entirety into a certain number of facets or categories of things; within each category, the subject headings enumerated all possess the same relationship vis-&-vis the subject in its entirety.”

Douglas John Foskett (1918–2004)

Foskett Classification and indexing in Science, p. 42; As cited in: Eric de Grolier (1962) A study of general categories applicable to classification and coding in documentation http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0002/000250/025055eo.pdf. p. 15

“This does not mean that scientists can't be religious. We can encompass irrational beliefs without regret and without obligation—I can, actually, look at my kids in a different way than I would an experimental subject under my microscope. I also do not pretend that I view my children rationally and objectively, untainted by emotion or history, and I'm not ashamed of that at all. So, a scientist should have no problem demanding one standard of logic and evidence in the lab, and dropping that demand when they go to church on Sunday.”

PZ Myers (1957) American scientist and associate professor of biology

An essay talking about religious scientists: * http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2006/06/what_should_a_scientist_think.php
What should a scientist think about religion?
Pharyngula
2006-06-29

Children , Way , History , Problem

“This is where I would like to bring up the subject of equity. Economic statistics show that although there has been GDP growth over the past 23 years, the number of families living in poverty has increased - up to about 5 million families or 27.6 million people. This demonstrates that benefits of that growth have accrued to the wealthy. The rich have gotten richer and the poor have gotten poorer. This is clearly unacceptable to all of us.”

Francis Escudero (1969) Filipino politician

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

People , Family , Past

“Rebels, especially successful rebels, were of necessity bad subjects and worse governors.”

T. E. Lawrence book Seven Pillars of Wisdom

Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1922)

Success

“Intermediate between mathematics, statistics, and economics, we find a new discipline which, for lack of a better name, may be called econometrics. Econometrics has as its aim to subject abstract laws of theoretical political economy or "pure" economics to experimental and numerical verification, and thus to turn pure economics, as far as possible, into a science in the strict sense of the word.”

Ragnar Frisch (1895–1973) Norwegian economist

Ragnar Frisch (1926) "On a Problem in Pure Economics: Translated by JS Chipman." Preferences, Utility, and Demand: A Minnesota Symposium. 1926."
Original in French:
Intermediaire entre les mathematiques, la statistique et l'economie politique, nous trouvons une discipline nouvelle que ion peut, faute de mieux, designer sous le nom de reconometrie. L'econometrie se pose le but de soumettre les lois abstraites de l'economie politique theorique ou l'economie 'pure' A une verification experimentale et numeriques, et ainsi de constituer, autant que cela est possible, l'economie pure en une science dans le sens restreint de ce mot.
1920

Law , Mathematics , Sense , Science

“It is the lone worker who makes the first advance in a subject: the details may be worked out by a team, but the prime idea is due to the enterprise, thought, and perception of an individual.”

Alexander Fleming (1881–1955) Scottish biologist, pharmacologist and sexiest man

biographyonline.net http://www.biographyonline.net/scientists/alex-fleming.html

Idea

“We never have any understanding of any subject matter except in terms of our own mental constructs of "things" and "happenings" of that subject matter.”

Douglas T. Ross (1929–2007) American computer scientist

Source: Structured analysis (SA): A language for communicating ideas (1977), p. 19.

Understanding

“A scholar is committed to building on knowledge that others have gathered, correcting it, confirming it, enlarging it. But I have always wanted to think my own thoughts about a subject without being overly influenced by what others have thought before me.”

Parker Palmer (1939) American theologian

Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation (1999)

Knowledge , Thinking

“The severe restrictions which Wundt placed on introspection also manifest themselves in the types of judgment that his experimental subjects were required to make. In accordance with the precept that internal perception can only become observation insofar as it is linked to controllable external stimuli, the introspective reports from his laboratory are very largely limited to judgments of size, intensity, and duration of physical stimuli, supplemented at times by judgments of their simultaneity and succession.”

Kurt Danziger (1926) German academic

Source: "The history of introspection reconsidered." 1980, p. 247

Time , Success

“I remained there [in The Netherlands, 1914-18] for the duration of the war, continuing my work of abstraction in a series of church. facades, trees, houses, etc. But I felt that I still worked as an Impressionist and was continuing to express particular feelings, not pure reality. Although I was thoroughly conscious that we can never be absolutely 'objective', I felt that one can become less and less subjective, until the subjective no longer predominates in one's work. More and more I excluded from my painting all curved lines, until finally my compositions consisted only of vertical and horizontal lines which formed crosses, each separate and detached from the other. Observing sea, sky and stars, I sought to indicate their plastic function through a multiplicity crossing verticals and horizontals.”

Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) Peintre Néerlandais

Source: Quote of Mondrian about 1914-1918; in 'Mondrian, Essays' ('Plastic art and pure plastic art', 1937 and his other essays, (1941-1943) by Piet Mondrian; Wittenborn-Schultz Inc., New York, 1945, p. 10; as cited in De Stijl 1917-1931 - The Dutch Contribution to Modern Art, by H.L.C. Jaffé http://www.dbnl.org/tekst/jaff001stij01_01/jaff001stij01_01.pdf; J.M. Meulenhoff, Amsterdam 1956, p. 43

War , Feeling , Star , Reality

“Beliefs about how you live your life, matters of private decision, views best kept for private enjoyment, prejudice or entertainment, can't be imposed by the operation of criminal law. Attempts to enforce such views can only make the government the subject of ridicule.”

John Mortimer (1923–2009) English barrister, dramatist, screenwriter and author

Source: Where There's a Will: Thoughts on the Good Life (2003), Ch. 6 : The Domino Theory and the Tyranny of Majorities

Life , Law , Decision

“That's what the Nazis did, isn't it? Treated those "others" they thought subhuman by making them lab subjects and so on. Even the Nazis didn't eat the objects of their derision.”

Ingrid Newkirk (1949) British-American activist

"Mother Nature", The Observer 2003 June 22 http://observer.guardian.co.uk/magazine/story/0,11913,982402,00.html

“Certainly the people's insistence that their candidates should present themselves ungirt and without a tunic had nothing to do with any suspicion of bribery, for it was not until long afterwards that the abuse of buying and selling votes crept in and money began to play an important part in determining the elections. Later on, however, this process of corruption spread to the law courts and to the army, and finally, when even the sword became enslaved by the power of gold, the republic was subjected to the rule of the emperors. For it has rightly been said that the man who first offers banquets and bribes to the people is the first to destroy their liberties.”

Plutarch book Parallel Lives

Gaius Marcius (Coriolanus) 14.2, translated by Ian Scott-Kilvert, Makers of Rome: Nine Lives by Plutarch (Harmondsworth : Penguin Books 1965) ISBN 0140441581, p. 27
Parallel Lives

Money , People , Law , Parting

“In other branches of science, where quick publication seems to be so much desired, there may possibly be some excuse for giving to the world slovenly or ill-digested work, but there is no such excuse in mathematics. The form ought to be as 102 perfect as the substance, and the demonstrations as rigorous as those of Euclid. The mathematician has to deal with the most exact facts of Nature, and he should spare no effort to render his interpretation worthy of his subject, and to give to his work its highest degree of perfection. “Pauca sed matura” was Gauss’s motto.”

James Whitbread Lee Glaisher (1848–1928) English mathematician and astronomer

Source: "Presidential Address British Association for the Advancement of Science," 1890, p. 467 : On the perfection of math. productions

World , Mathematics , Nature , Effort

“The human brain performs the function of thinking as involuntarily as the chest the function of breathing. However, we can, by our will, stop breathing for a while, and accelerate or retard the breathing movements. In the same way, the will can control the thoughts. We may choose any object as the subject matter of our thought, and yet we may quickly convince ourselves that the power of our will and the freedom of the mind are not any greater than the freedom of the chest in breathing.”

Joseph Dietzgen (1828–1888) german philosopher

Letter 2
Letters on Logic: Especially Democratic-Proletarian Logic (1906)

Way , Thinking , Freedom

“The scraping subjects, ruled by fear, they told mewhiskey works better than beer.”

Elliott Smith (1969–2003) American singer-songwriter

King's Crossing.
Lyrics, From a Basement on the Hill (posthumous, 2004)

Fear , Beer

“But I am unable to reach the lofty theme; — yet I do not think that the smallest fish that swims in the boundless ocean ever complains of the immeasurable vastness of the deep. So it is with me, I can plunge with my puny capacity, into a subject, the immensity of which I shall never be able fully to comprehend.”

Rowland Hill (preacher) (1744–1833) British preacher

P. 269.

Thinking , Fish

“Creationists contend that they don’t believe in magic. But “speaking” anything into existence is an incantation, and the Bible is full of spells of one sort or another. Animating golems, or conjuring interdependent systems, and causing complex organisms to appear out of thin air -are each logically implausible and physically impossible according to everything we know about anything at all, yet this is exactly what religiously-motivated pseudoscientists actually promote! How do we test these ideas? How can we tell them apart from any of the thousands of fables men have concocted for the ghosts and gods of other religions? How can we tell whether any of this is even real, and not something someone just made up? Because despite anyone’s assertions of personal conviction, it is impossible to distinguish miracles from subjective impressions imagined out of nothing. In the realm of fantasy, it’s easy to demonstrate psionic talents, astral entities, and magical manifestations. Until they do that in reality too, then science has nothing but nature to work with.”

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

"12th Foundational Falsehood of Creationism" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2TkY7HrJOhc Youtube (April 19, 2008)
Youtube, Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism

Men , God , Religion , Imagination

“I have chosen for the subject of this lecture Self-culture, or the care which every man owes to himself, to the unfolding and perfecting of his nature.”

William Ellery Channing (1780–1842) United States Unitarian clergyman

Self-Culture (1838)

Nature , Perfection

“I for one would never be a party, unless the law were clear, to saying to any man who put forward his views on those most sacred things, that he should be branded as apparently criminal because he differed from the majority of mankind in his religious views or convictions on the subject of religion. If that were so, we should get into ages and times which, thank God, we do not live in, when people were put to death for opinions and beliefs which now almost all of us believe to be true.”

John Coleridge, 1st Baron Coleridge (1820–1894) British lawyer, judge and Liberal politician

Reg. v. Bradlaugh and others (1883), 15 Cox, C.C. 230.

Death , God , People , Age

“For I consider that the sufferings of the present time do not amount to anything in comparison with the glory that is going to be revealed in us. For the creation is waiting with eager expectation for the revealing of the sons of God. For the creation was subjected to futility, not by its own will, but through the one who subjected it, on the basis of hope that the creation itself will also be set free from enslavement to corruption and have the glorious freedom of the children of God. For we know that all creation keeps on groaning together and being in pain together until now.”

Paul of Tarsus book Epistle to the Romans

Romans 8:18-22 http://www.jw.org/en/publications/bible/nwt/books/romans/8/, NWT
Epistle to the Romans

God , Pain , Children , Hope

“I am one of those men who never enter into controversies but I shall certainly speak my views to anybody whom I may meet on the subject.”

Edward German (1862–1936) English musician and composer

In a letter to Sir Seymour Hicks (December 1910)

Men

“The adjective “political” in “political philosophy” designates not so much the subject matter as a manner of treatment; from this point of view, I say, “political philosophy” means primarily not the philosophic study of politics, but the political, or popular, treatment of philosophy, or the political introduction to philosophy—the attempt to lead qualified citizens, or rather their qualified sons, from the political life to the philosophic life.”

Leo Strauss (1899–1973) Classical philosophy specialist and father of neoconservativism

Source: What is Political Philosophy (1959), p. 93

Life , Study

“Good taste is either that which agrees with my taste or that which subjects itself to the rule of reason. From this we can see how useful it is to employ reason in seeking out the laws of taste.”

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–1799) German scientist, satirist

E 69
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook E (1775 - 1776)

Law

“The wise do not sanction a fourth delivery even in a season of distress. The woman having intercourse with four different men is called a Swairini (heanton), while she having intercourse with five becometh a harlot. Therefore, O learned one, as thou art well-acquainted with the scripture on this subject, why dost thou, beguiled by desire of offspring, tell me so in seeming forgetfulness of the ordinance”

Kunti character from Indian epic Mahabharata

Kunti addressing Pandu who wanted her to beget more children.
The Mahabharata/Book 1: Adi Parva/Section CXXIII

Men , Art , Learning , Forgetting

“That religion in which I must know in advance that something is a divine command in order to recognize it as my duty, is the revealed religion (or the one standing in need of a revelation); in contrast, that religion in which I must first know that something is my duty before I can accept it as a divine injunction is the natural religion. … When religion is classified not with reference to its first origin and its inner possibility (here it is divided into natural and revealed religion) but with respect to its characteristics which make it capable of being shared widely with others, it can be of two kinds: either the natural religion, of which (once it has arisen) everyone can be convinced through his own reason, or a learned religion, of which one can convince others only through the agency of learning (in and through which they must be guided). … A religion, accordingly, can be natural, and at the same time revealed, when it is so constituted that men could and ought to have discovered it of themselves merely through the use of their reason, although they would not have come upon it so early, or over so wide an area, as is required. Hence a revelation thereof at a given time and in a given place might well be wise and very advantageous to the human race, in that, when once the religion thus introduced is here, and has been made known publicly, everyone can henceforth by himself and with his own reason convince himself of its truth. In this event the religion is objectively a natural religion, though subjectively one that has been revealed.”

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) German philosopher

Book IV, Part 1
Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone (1793)

Men , Truth , Religion , Nature

“My family and I left Yokohoma in June, 1939, in time for me to enter the Army War College in what turned out to be the last class before the school closed for World War II. As we left Japan, I would have said that war between the two countries was certainly possible but I had no premonition that it was only two years away. On the opening day of the war college, a number of senior officers from the War Department attended to welcome the new class. The first man to speak I had never seen before, but he was just as impressive at first glance as he remained in my eyes in later life- George Marshall, the new Army Chief of Staff. What he said that day I do not remember, but the way he said it, I do. General Marshall never spoke anywhere without receiving the undivided attention of every listener to the words of a man who obviously knew what he was talking about. One could never imagine questioning the accuracy of his facts or challenging the soundness of his conclusions on any subject he undertook to discuss. He did not give the impression of great brilliance of mind, as General MacArthur did, but of calm strength and unshakeable will. I was to owe much to him- my service on his staff at the outbreak of the war, later the command of a division in Europe, and assignment as the Superintendent of West Point following the war. Bu my greatest privilege was the opportunity to see General Marshall in action at close range at the outbreak of World War II.”

Maxwell D. Taylor (1901–1987) United States general

Source: Swords and Plowshares (1972), p. 37

Life , War , World , School

“… From the age of 13, I was attracted to physics and mathematics. My interest in these subjects derived mostly from popular science books that I read avidly. Early on I was fascinated by theoretical physics and determined to become a theoretical physicist. I had no real idea what that meant, but it seemed incredibly exciting to spend one's life attempting to find the secrets of the universe by using one's mind.”

David Gross (1941) American particle physicist and string theorist

"David J. Gross - Biographical" http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/2004/gross-bio.html, Nobel Prize in Physics, nobelprize.org (2004)

Life , Secret , Books , Age

“May those men who are animated by the true scientific spirit cease to believe that they are obliged to consider only subjects of public utility; …because, one must not hide it, the field of applications, so rich and fertile today, would not take long to be blighted by sterility if it ceased to be fertilized and revivified by the beneficial light which theoretical research radiates and pours incessantly upon it.”

Léon Foucault (1819–1868) French physicist

As quoted in The Life and Science of Léon Foucault : The Man Who Proved the Earth Rotates (2003) by William Tobin, p. 93.

Men , Light , Animals

“You well know … for which reason I began searching for a number of demonstrations proving a statement due to the ancient Greeks … and which passion I felt for the subject … so that you reproached me my preoccupation with these chapters of geometry, not knowing the true essence of these subjects, which consists precisely in going in each matter beyond what is necessary. … Whatever way he [the geometer] may go, through exercise will he be lifted from the physical to the divine teachings, which are little accessible because of the difficulty to understand their meaning … and because the circumstance that not everybody is able to have a conception of them, especially not the one who turns away from the art of demonstration.”

Al-Biruni (973–1048) Persian scholar and polymath

Book on the Finding of Chords.

Art , Way , Exercises , Search

“It must be confessed that the new quantum mechanics is far from satisfying the requirements of the layman who seeks to clothe his conceptions in figurative language. Indeed, its originators probably hold that such symbolic representation is inherently impossible. It is earnestly to be hoped that this is not their last word on the subject, and that they may yet be successful in expressing the quantum postulate in picturesque form.”

H. Stanley Allen (1873–1954) English Physicist

[1928, April 14, Introduction to Niels Bohr's The quantum postulate and recent developments of quantum theory, Nature, Suppl. No. 3050, 6, 52] As quoted by K. V. Laurikainen, The Origin and Development of the Idea of Complementarity, 1980.

Hope , Success , Clothes

“The creation of crimes after the commission of the fact, or, in other words, the subjecting of men to punishment for things which, when they were done, were breaches of no law, and the practice of arbitrary imprisonments, have been, in all ages, the favorite and most formidable instruments of tyranny.”

Alexander Hamilton Federalist Papers

No. 84
The Federalist Papers (1787–1788)

Men , Age , Law

“Music has no subject beyond the combinations of notes we hear, for music speaks not only by means of sounds, it speaks nothing but sound.”

Eduard Hanslick (1825–1904) austrian musician and musicologist

Eduard Hanslick, quoted by Wolfgang Sandberger (1996) in the liner notes to the Juilliard String Quartet's Intimate Letters. Sony Classical SK 66840.

Music

“Totalitarian art must be a form of classicism: the state which is founded on order and subordination demands an art with a similar basis. Romantic painting, however popular, expresses the revolt of the individual. The State also requires an art of reason by which appropriate works may be produced as required. Inspiration is outside state control. The classic attitude toward subject matter — that it should be clear and unequivocal — supports the attitude of unquestioning belief. Add the fact that totalitarian art must be real enough to please the ignorant, ideal enough to commemorate a national hero, and well enough designed to present a memorable image, and one sees how perfectly The Death of Marat fills the bill. That it happens also to be a great work of art makes it dangerously misleading.”

Kenneth Clark (1903–1983) Art historian, broadcaster and museum director

Source: The Romantic Rebellion (1973), Ch. 1: David

Death , Art , Support , Painting

“A metaphysics of morals is therefore indispensably necessary, not merely because of a motive to speculation — for investigating the source of the practical basic principles that lie a priori in our reason — but also because morals themselves remain subject to all sorts of corruption as long as we are without that clue and supreme norm by which to appraise them correctly…”

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) German philosopher

Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785)

Lie , Motivation

“Economists tell us that the 'price' of an object and its 'value' have very little or nothing to do with one another. 'Value' is entirely subjective — economic value, anyway — while 'price' reflects whatever a buyer is willing to give up to get the object in question, and whatever the seller is willing to accept to give it up. Both are governed by the Law of Marginal Utility, which is actually a law of psychology, rather than economics. For government to attempt to dictate a 'fair price' betrays complete misunderstanding of the entire process.”

L. Neil Smith (1946) American writer

Ceres, Chapter Eighteen http://www.bigheadpress.com/lneilsmith/?page_id=235, 2009.

Law , Question

“In conformity with the recommendation of Congress, a proposition was early made to the British Government to abolish the mixed courts created under the treaty of April 7, 1862, for the suppression of the slave trade. The subject is still under negotiation.”

Ulysses S. Grant (1822–1885) 18th President of the United States

1860s, First State of the Union Address (1869)

“[Freud’s] concepts are radical in their pursuit of society where it allegedly does not exist: in the privacy of the individual. Freud undid the primal bourgeois distinction between private and public, the individual and society. … Freud exposed the lie that subject was inviolate; he showed that at every point is was violated.”

Russell Jacoby (1945) American historian

Source: Social Amnesia: A Critique of Conformist Psychology from Adler to Laing (1975), p. 26

Lie

“There was a plea from honourable Members relating to the need for formal Gross National Product figures. Such figures are very inexact even in the most sophisticated countries I think they do not have a great deal of meaning, even as a basis of comparison between economies. That other countries make use of them is not, I think, necessarily a good reason to suppose that we need them. But, although I am not entirely clear what practical purpose they would serve in Hong Kong, I am sure they would be of interest. I suspect myself, however, that the need arises in other countries because high taxation and more or less detailed Government intervention in the economy have made it essential to be able to judge (or to hope to be able to judge) the effect of policies, and of changes in policies, on the economy. One of the honourable Members who spoke on this subject, said outright, as a confirmed planner, that he thought that they were desirable for the planning of our future economic policy. But we are in the happy position, happier at least for the Financial Secretary where the leverage exercised by Government on the economy is so small that it is not necessary, nor even of any particular value, to have these figures available for the formulation of policy. We might indeed be right to be apprehensive lest the availability of such figures might lead, by a reversal of cause and effect, to policies designed to have a direct effect on the economy. I would myself deplore this.”

John James Cowperthwaite (1915–2006) British colonial administrator

March 25, 1970, page 495.
Official Report of Proceedings of the Hong Kong Legislative Council

Hope , Exercises , Thinking , Change

“Necessary truth is merely the subject-matter of mathematics, not the reward we get for doing mathematics. The object of mathematics is not, and cannot be, mathematical certainty. It is not even mathematical truth, certain or otherwise. It is, and must be, mathematical explanation.”

David Deutsch book The Fabric of Reality

The Fabric of Reality (1997)

Truth , Mathematics

“In the following work, I have endeavoured to exhibit the full extent of the Military and Naval Forces which the government of Great Britain can bring into the field, or launch upon the ocean. I have likewise described the connection of these forces with the government of the country, and also the discipline usually exercised in order to produce a hardihood in battle, invulnerable to fear and unassailable by cowardice. My observations on these subjects were derived from a residence of five years in England; during which time I was constantly employed in visiting and viewing every object and institution worthy of notice relative to the British Army and Navy.”

Charles Dupin (1784–1873) French mathematician

Source: A Tour Through the Naval and Military Establishments of Great Britain, 1822, p. iii; Introduction, lead paragraph

Fear , Exercises , Time , Country

“Every man of the commonalty (excepting infants, insane persons, and criminals) is, of common right, and by the laws of God, a freeman, and entitled to the free enjoyment of liberty. …liberty or freedom consists in having an actual share in the appointment of those who are to frame the laws and who are to be the guardians of every man's life, property, and peace. For the all of one man is as dear to him as the all of another; and the poor man has an equal right, but more need to have representatives in the Legislature than the rich one. …they who have no voice or vote in the electing of representatives, do not enjoy liberty, but are absolutely enslaved to those who have votes and their representatives; for to be enslaved is to have governors whom other men have set over us, and to be subject to laws made by the representatives of others, without having had representatives of our own to give consent in our behalf.”

Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790) American author, printer, political theorist, politician, postmaster, scientist, inventor, civic activist, …

"Some Good Whig Principles. Declaration of those Rights of the Community of Great Britain, without which they cannot be Free," as quoted in Memoirs of the Llife and Writings of Benjamin Franklin https://books.google.com/books?id=jmMFAAAAQAAJ (1818) by Benjamin Franklin and William Temple Franklin
Attributed

Life , Men , God , Peace

“Maalik! You must create in your mind kindness, compassion and love for your subjects. Do not behave towards them as if you are a voracious and ravenous beast and as if your success lies in devouring them.
Remember, Maalik, that amongst your subjects there are two kinds of people: those who have the same religion as you have; they are brothers to you, and those who have religions other than that of yours, they are human beings like you. Men of either category suffer from the same weaknesses and disabilities that human beings are inclined to, they commit sins, indulge in vices either intentionally or foolishly and unintentionally without realizing the enormity of their deeds. Let your mercy and compassion come to their rescue and help in the same way and to the same extent that you expect Allah to show mercy and forgiveness to you.”

Ali book Nahj al-Balagha

Variant translation:
Awaken your heart to kindness and mercy for the people and love and tenderness for them. Never, never act with them like a predatory beast which seeks to be satiated by devouring them, for the people fall into two categories: they are either your brethren in faith or your kindred in creation.
Nahj al-Balagha, Letter 53: An order to Malik Al-Ashtar

Love , Men , People , Religion

“Sometimes captured from the great arboreal freedom of their jungle homes, monkeys are closely confined in cages only three or four feet square. … They can never sit or lie down on a flat, soft or yielding surface. Little wonder that by the time they are needed for the knife or the needle they are so crazed or inert that they are no longer representative examples of animal life. Psychologists who study the behaviour of thousands of such creatures annually, rarely make allowances for the fact that their pathetic subjects have been so deprived that they have become more like monsters than animals. Many people who have experienced close affectionate relationships with individuals of other species testify to the considerable potential for emotional and intellectual development that animals have. When properly cared for a pet dog or cat can develop great subtleties of behaviour that the laboratory animal never shows. Those who have been fortunate enough to closely observe unfrightened animals living in the wild are often struck by the complexity and richness of the life they lead. These positive pleasures the laboratory animal never knows; for him the same four white walls and the smell of disinfectant.”

Richard D. Ryder (1940) British psychologist

Experiments on Animals (1971)

Life , People , Pleasure , Lie

“On the subject of biblical texts and examples to why you can't do certain things with your body that you wish to, I find that absolutely absurd. I've always been extremely uncomfortable with the idea in any society that the belief is based on revealed truth, that's to say on a text like a Bible or a Qur'an, or whatever it is. It seems to me that the greatness of our culture, for all its incredible faults, is that we have grown up on the Greek ideal of discovering the truth, discovering by looking around us, by empirical experiment, by the combination of the experience of generations of ancestors who have contributed to our sum knowledge of the way the world works, and so on. And to have that snatched away and to be told what to think by a book, however great it may be in places, this is a book that says you can sell your daughter into slavery, it's a book that bans menstruating women from within miles of temples. The fact that it also says that for one man to lie with another man is an abomination, is no more made relevant or important than the fact that you can't eat shellfish.”

Stephen Fry (1957) English comedian, actor, writer, presenter, and activist

Interview with Simon Callow.[citation needed]
2000s

Women , Truth , Lie , Books

“Universities are good at producing engineers, doctors, lawyers, and such, but they often gloss over difficult moral and philosophical subjects such as the meaning of life, love, prejudice, war, and peace.”

Newton Lee American computer scientist

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

Love , Life , War , Peace

“This is generally true: any sizeable piece of program, or even a complete program package, is only a useful tool that can be used in a reliable fashion, provided that the documentation pertinent for the user is much shorter than the program text. If any machine or system requires a very thick manual, its usefulness becomes for that very circumstance subject to doubt!”

Edsger W. Dijkstra (1930–2002) Dutch computer scientist

Dijkstra, "On the reliability of programs" https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD03xx/EWD303.html (EWD 303).
Unknown date

Fashion

“Philosophy is not the owl of Minerva that takes flight after history has been realized in order to celebrate its happy ending; rather, philosophy is subjective proposition, desire, and praxis that are applied to the event.”

Antonio Negri book Empire

49
Empire

History , Happiness

“Indeed, our society, which has seemed so freedom-giving and passive in its attitudes toward the artist really makes extraordinary demands upon him: on the one side, to be free in some vague spiritual sense, free to act only as an artist, and yet on the other side to be rigorously tested as to whether the freedom he has achieved is great enough to be more solidly dependable than a government's financial structure... No wonder that modern painters, in view of these curious relations to society, have taken art matters into their own hands, decides for themselves what art is, what its subjects are to be, and how they are to be treated. Art like love is an active process of growth and development.”

Robert Motherwell (1915–1991) American artist

Source: 1950s, The painter and the audience' (1954), p. 108

Love , Art , Sense , Freedom

“So, I was to talk about "Opera as Related to Literature", was I not? And because the subject is so vast, I have wandered here and there, trying to illuminate, as if with a candle, a vast chamber full of fascinating corners, mysterious with mirrors, and echoing with some of the loveliest music ever written. I have not succeeded on any high level, but then, I never expected to do so. But perhaps I have thrown out an idea or two which you would like to consider for yourselves.”

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

Opera for the Man Who Reads Hamlet (1989).

Music , Literature , Idea

“Magister Adler was deeply moved by something higher, but now when he wants to express his thoughts in words, wants to communicate, he confuses the subjective with the objective, his altered subjective state with an external event, the dawning of a light upon him with the coming into existence of something new outside him, the falling of the veil from his eyes with his having had a revelation. Subjectively his emotion is carried to the extreme; he wants to select the most powerful expression to describe it and by means of a mental deception grasps the objective qualification: having had a revelation.”

Sören Kierkegaard (1813–1855) Danish philosopher and theologian, founder of Existentialism

The Book of Adler, by Søren Kierkegaard, Hong 1998 p. 117
1840s, The Book on Adler (1846-1847)

Communication , Light

“Margaret Sanger: Well I suppose a subject like that is really so personal that it is entirely up to the parents to decide, but from my view, I believe there should be no more babies in starving countries for the next ten years.”

Margaret Sanger (1879–1966) American birth control activist, educator and nurse

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_BG11OHrCDk http://www.britishpathe.com/video/one-minute-news-8/query/margaret+slee
Ban on Babies is All Wet, Cry Angry Britons, Chicago Tribune, July 4, 1947, p. 9. https://www.google.com/search?q=MS+to+Robert+C.+Nowe%2C+Aug.+22%2C+1947&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8#q=%22Ban+on+Babies+is+All+Wet%22
Granny Sanger' Drops a Bomb - A Ten Year Moratorium on Births, Margaret Sanger Papers, Newsletter #65 (Fall 2013) http://www.nyu.edu/projects/sanger/articles/grannysanger.php
One Minute News (1947), interview with British Pathé's John Parsons

Parent , Baby , Personality , Country

“In Calvinism and sectarianism man became more and more transformed into an abstract moral subject, as in Descartes he was considered an epistemological subject.”

Paul Tillich book The Courage to Be

Source: The Courage to Be (1952), p. 133

“The war may present or force a subject; it may bring out a poet, or shock him onto a sensibility of silence. It may kill him. Or germinate the best war poems for exfoliation years after the event.”

Richard Eberhart (1904–2005) American poet

The War Poets ed. Oscar Williams. New York 1945
The War Poets

War , Silence

“The writer of these lines has nothing whatsoever to teach anyone; his words are just his contribution to our common discussion of what must inevitably be for us the most important subject which could be discussed by sentient beings.”

Wei Wu Wei (1895–1986) writer

Introduction to Open Secret (1965)

“The edifice of my educational thought is almost entirely beholden to the views of Kerschensteiner. At later stages, however, Gandhiji’s influence and his elaboration of some of the finest points on the subject provided the much needed depth and expansion. Words turned into projects and a mere conceptual and transient framework became an insuperable part of my life.”

Zakir Hussain (politician) (1897–1969) 3rd President of India

Source: Quest for Truth (1999), p. 145.

Life , Education , Parting

“Those subjects have the greatest educational value, which are richest in incentives to the noblest self-activity.”

John Lancaster Spalding (1840–1916) Catholic bishop

Source: Aphorisms and Reflections (1901), p. 84

Education

“What I dream of is an art of balance, of purity and serenity, devoid of troubling or disturbing subject matter, an art which could be for every mental worker, for the businessman was well as the man of letters, for example, a soothing, calming influence on the mind, something like a good armchair which provides relaxation from physical fatigue.”

Henri Matisse (1869–1954) French artist

1905 - 1910, Notes of a Painter' (1908)

Dreams , Art

“According to the technical language of old writers, a thing and its qualities are described as subject and attributes; and thus a man’s faculties and acts are attributes of which he is the subject. The mind is the subject in which ideas inhere. Moreover, the man’s faculties and acts are employed upon external objects; and from objects all his sensations arise. Hence the part of a man’s knowledge which belongs to his own mind, is subjective: that which flows in upon him from the world external to him, is objective.”

William Whewell (1794–1866) English philosopher & historian of science

Part 1, Book 1, ch. 2, sect. 7.
Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences (1840)

World , Idea , Knowledge , Parting

“[Kelley argued that OS's judgment of an inverse relation between inducement magnitude and attitude inference] is probably associated with assumptions (unchecked in Bern’s work, as far as I know) that there is a distribution of opinion toward the task, and only the more favorable subjects complied in the $1 case and almost all, favorable or not, complied in the $20 case.”

Harold Kelley (1921–2003) American psychologist & academic

Source: "Attribution theory in social psychology." 1967, p. 226; as cited in: Yaacov Trope, "Inferential processes in the forced compliance situation: A Bayesian analysis." Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 10.1 (1974): 1-16.

“"Another situation generally exposed to ressentiment danger is the older generation's relation with the younger. The process of aging can only be fruitful and satisfactory if the important transitions are accompanied by free resignation, by the renunciation of the values proper to the preceding stage of life. Those spiritual and intellectual values which remain untouched by the process of aging, together with the values of the next stage of life, must compensate for what has been lost. Only if this happens can we cheerfully relive the values of our past in memory, without envy for the young to whom they are still accessible. If we cannot compensate, we avoid and flee the “tormenting” recollection of youth, thus blocking our possibilities of understanding younger people. At the same time we tend to negate the specific values of earlier stages. No wonder that youth always has a hard fight to sustain against the ressentiment of the older generation. Yet this source of ressentiment is also subject to an important historical variation. In the earliest stages of civilization, old age as such is so highly honored and respected for its experience that ressentiment has hardly any chance to develop. But education spreads through printing and other modern media and increasingly replaces the advantage of experience. Younger people displace the old from their positions and professions and push them into the defensive. As the pace of “progress” increases in all fields, and as the changes of fashion tend to affect even the higher domains (such as art and science), the old can no longer keep up with their juniors. “Novelty‟ becomes an ever greater value. This is doubly true when the generation as such is seized by an intense lust for life, and when the generations compete with each other instead of cooperating for the creation of works which outlast them. “Every cathedral,” Werner Sombart writes, “every monastery, every town hall, every castle of the Middle Ages bears testimony to the transcendence of the individual's span of life: its completion spans generations which thought that they lived for ever. Only when the individual cut himself loose from the community which outlasted him, did the duration of his personal life become his standard of happiness.” Therefore buildings are constructed ever more hastily—Sombart cites a number of examples. A corresponding phenomenon is the ever more rapid alternation of political regimes which goes hand in hand with the progression of the democratic movement. But every change of government, every parliamentary change of party domination leaves a remnant of absolute opposition against the values of the new ruling group. This opposition is spent in ressentiment the more the losing group feels unable to return to power. The “retired official” with his followers is a typical ressentiment figure. Even a man like Bismarck did not entirely escape from this danger."”

Max Scheler (1874–1928) German philosopher

Das Ressentiment im Aufbau der Moralen (1912)

Life , People , Youth , Age

“And for the authentical truth of either person or actions, who (worth the respecting) will expect it in a poem, whose subject is not truth, but things like truth? Poor envious souls they are that cavil at truth's want in these natural fictions; material instruction, elegant and sententious excitation to virtue, and deflection from her contrary, being the soul, limbs, and limits of an authentical tragedy.”

George Chapman The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois

The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois (1613)

Truth , Soul , Nature , Personality

“As to the issues on which we part ways with the Committee, I have already stated that our reviews indicate that the detention and interrogation program produced useful intelligence that helped the United States thwart attack plans, capture terrorists, and save lives. But let me be clear. We have not concluded that it was the use of EITs (Enhanced interrogation techniques) within that program that allowed us to obtain useful information from detainees subjected to them. The cause and effect relationship between the use of EITs and useful information subsequently provided by the detainee is, in my view, unknowable.”

John O. Brennan (1955) 7th Director of the Central Intelligence Agency

Remarks as Prepared for Delivery CIA Director John O. Brennan Response to SSCI Study on the Former Detention and Interrogation Program https://www.cia.gov/news-information/speeches-testimony/2014-speeches-testimony/remarks-as-prepared-for-delivery-cia-director-john-o-brennan-response-to-ssci-study-on-the-former-detention-and-interrogation-program.html

Way , Intelligence , Help , Parting

“The public examination of homosexuality in our contemporary life is still so coated with distasteful moral connotations that even a reviewer is bound to wonder uneasily why he was selected to evaluate a book on the subject, and to assert defensively at the outset that he is happily married, the father of four children and the one-time adornment of his college boxing, track and tennis teams.”

Sydney J. Harris (1917–1986) American journalist

On Jess Stearn’s The Sixth Man, Saturday Review (April 22, 1961)

Life , Children , Books , Time

“So black people, you are subjects of white people. Even under ANC, even under the so-called democracy, you are subject, you are servant of white people. No white man will be served by me. I do not serve white masters. … I am here to disturb the white man's peace. … The white man has been too comfortable for too long. We are here unashamedly to disturb the white man's peace, because we have never known peace. We don't know what peace looks like. … They have been swimming in a pool of privilege. They have been enjoying themselves because they always owned our land. We, the rightful owners, our peace was disturbed by white man's arrival here. They committed a black genocide. They killed our people during land dispossession. … They found peaceful Africans here. They killed them. They slaughtered them like animals. We are not calling for the slaughtering of white people, at least for now. What we are calling for is for peaceful occupation of the land. And we don't owe anyone apology about that. … Revolution is about making those who are comfortable uncomfortable. … Revolution is about disturbing the peace of those who are swimming in a peaceful environment through exploitation of the working class. … Our strategic objective is the defeat of white monopoly capital. And that defeat […] means the ownership of property must change and be transferred into the hands of the people. Their mines must be nationalized, the banks must be nationalized, the land must be expropriated without compensation. … But white minority be warned, we will take our land no matter what.”

Julius Malema (1981) South African political activist

To EFF supporters after appearing in the Newcastle Magistrates court on 7 November 2016, for allegedly contravening the Riotous Assemblies Act, “We are not calling for the slaughtering of white people, at least for now.” Malema http://www.thesouthafrican.com/we-are-not-calling-for-the-slaughtering-of-white-people-at-least-for-now-malema/, Ezra Claymore, The South African, 8 November 2016, and a video https://twitter.com/tshidi_lee/status/795572416290443264/video/1 by Matshidiso Madia. See also: Malema addresses supporters after appearing in court, 7 November 2016 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjBi3z-1yAs, SABC News, YouTube

People , Peace , Democracy , Change

“Justice is closely connected to respect for rights. Modern writers discuss both subjects together with no suggestion that one might discuss one with the other. It was not always so. Greek political theory and Roman Law had sophisticated ideas about justice in its various aspects, but did not embrace our conception of individual rights. This may seem counter-intuitive. How could a society recognize someone as the owner of a piece of property without acknowledging an individual right? How does legitimate one-man rule, monarchy, differ from its illegitimate parody, tyranny, unless the lawful king has a right to the authority he exercises that the tyrant does not?
The answer is that property and authority were defined by law rather than our notion of individual rights. To own property was to be the person to whom the law accorded the privileges and immunities that locally defined ownership. To be a legitimate ruler was to be the person the law designated to rule. It is a commonplace that ancient notions of law accorded far more power over property to the family and other groups than modern notions of private property do. Even under the Roman Law, where ownership had an 'absolute' and sovereign character, property was not understood in the modern way; when the law told the judge to give a man his ius, this primarily meant that he should be treated as the law required. The 'subjective' understanding of rights, whereby the right-holder may stand on his rights or not as he chooses, was not a Roman notion.”

Alan Ryan (1940) British philosopher

Justice (1993)

Family , Justice , Law , Way

“Negro art contains more ideas than Greek art. Its strange inventiveness of form is astonishing, and its imagination and extraordinary sense of decoration are difficult to explain. We dare not take such liberties; but the Negroes have succeeded. We are too much the subjects of our own past..”

Aristide Maillol (1861–1944) sculptor from France

Source: Conversations with Judith Cladel (1939–1944), p. 407

Art , Imagination , Idea , Sense

“Dr. James Gow did a great service by the publication in 1884 of his Short History of Greek Mathematics, a scholarly and useful work which has held its own and has been quoted with respect and appreciation by authorities on the history of mathematics in all parts of the world. At the date when he wrote, however, Dr. Gow had necessarily to rely upon the works of the pioneers Bretschneider, Hankel, Allman, and Moritz Cantor (first edition). Since then the subject has been very greatly advanced… scholars and mathematicians… have thrown light on many obscure points. It is therefore high time for the complete story to be rewritten.”

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

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

World , Quotes , History , Mathematics

“We may observe, that, notwithstanding the dogmatical, imperious style of all superstition, the conviction of the religionists, in all ages, is more affected than real, and scarcely ever approaches, in any degree, to that solid belief and persuasion, which governs us in the common affairs of life. Men dare not avow, even to their own hearts, the doubts which they entertain on such subjects: They make a merit of implicit faith; and disguise to themselves their real infidelity, by the strongest asseverations and most positive bigotry. But nature is too hard for all their endeavours, and suffers not the obscure, glimmering light, afforded in those shadowy regions, to equal the strong impressions, made by common sense and by experience. The usual course of men's conduct belies their words, and shows, that their assent in these matters is some unaccountable operation of the mind between disbelief and conviction, but approaching much nearer to the former than to the latter.”

David Hume The Natural History of Religion

Part XII - With regard to doubt or conviction
The Natural History of Religion (1757)

Life , Men , Age , Faith

“Teachers frequently talk about moments in which they became students again and how much that made them better teachers. For me, there has been no better way to improve my teaching, specifically my teaching in the composition classroom, than to take up a subject at which I am abysmal.”

Adrianne Wadewitz (1977–2014) academic and Wikipedian

Wadewitz, Adrianne. (August 12, 2013). "What I learned as the worst student in the class" http://www.hastac.org/blogs/wadewitz/2013/08/12/what-i-learned-worst-student-class. HASTAC: Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Alliance Collaboratory. — reprinted and cited in: "How Adrianne Wadewitz learnt to embrace failure" http://www.smh.com.au/world/how-adrianne-wadewitz-learnt-to-embrace-failure-20140425-zqzgx.html. The Sydney Morning Herald. April 25, 2014. Retrieved April 25, 2014.

Way , Teachers

“Do not imagine that there is any bird more easily caught by decoy, nor any fish sooner fixed on the hook by wormy bait, than are all these poor fools neatly tricked into servitude by the slightest feather passed, so to speak, before their mouths. Truly it is a marvelous thing that they let themselves be caught so quickly at the slightest tickling of their fancy. Plays, farces, spectacles, gladiators, strange beasts, medals, pictures, and other such opiates, these were for ancient peoples the bait toward slavery, the price of their liberty, the instruments of tyranny. By these practices and enticements the ancient dictators so successfully lulled their subjects under the yoke, that the stupefied peoples, fascinated by the pastimes and vain pleasures flashed before their eyes, learned subservience as naïvely, but not so creditably, as little children learn to read by looking at bright picture books.”

Étienne de La Boétie book Discourse on Voluntary Servitude

Part 2
Discourse on Voluntary Servitude (1548)

Children , People , Pleasure , Books

“Numerous geographers writing in recent years concerning the nature and scope of their subject have described the relation of their field to other fields of science in terms of a concept said to stem from Immanuel Kant and from Alexander von Humboldt. Whatever may be the original source of the concept, its importance in the current geographic thought stems from the writing of Alfred Hettner, the German master of the methodology of geography.”

Richard Hartshorne (1899–1992) American Geographer

Hartshorne (1958) "The concept of geography as a science of space, from Kant and Humboldt to Hettner" in: Annals of the Association of American Geographers Vol 48 (2). p. 97

Nature , Science

“he took a few, the tribe of Abraham. He established a perfect despotism—with no schools, with no philosophy, with no art, with no music—nothing but the sacrifices of dumb beasts—nothing but the abject worship of a slave. Not a word upon geology, upon astronomy; nothing, even, upon the science of medicine. Thus God spent hours and hours with Moses upon the top of Sinai, giving directions for ascertaining the presence of leprosy and for preventing its spread, but it never occurred to Jehovah to tell Moses how it could be cured. He told them a few things about what they might eat—prohibiting among other things four-footed birds, and one thing upon the subject of cooking. From the thunders and lightnings of Sinai he proclaimed this vast and wonderful fact: “Thou shalt not seethe a kid in its mother’s milk.””

Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–1899) Union United States Army officer

Some Reasons Why (1881)

God , School , Art , Music

“I would like to have been present, if I could have my choice of all moments in music history, when Stokowski suddenly became conscious of his beautiful hands. That must have been a moment. Like stout Cortez [sic] on a peak in Darien (I know it was Balboa) he saw before him a limitless expanse, a whole uncharted sea that might be subjected to his influence, free from the encumbrance of a baton.”

Oscar Levant (1906–1972) American comedian, composer, pianist and actor

In "Music in Aspic," Harper's Magazine (October 1939) and A Smattering of Ignorance (1940); as quoted in "Lightning Wit Plays On American Musical Scene; Oscar Levant Answers Unspoken Request for 'Information, Please' With Uncensored Comments on Exalted Persons" by Ray C. B. Brown, in The Washington Post (January 14, 1940), p. E4

Beauty , Music , History , Sea

“In terms of language, we do know what a scientific theory or conceptual system must be: it is a thematic pattern of semantic relationships in a subject, one that is reconstructed again and again in nearly the same ways by members of a community.”

Jay Lemke (1946) American academic

Source: Talking Science: Language, Learning, and Values. 1990, p. 99

Way , Communication

“I have left the obvious, essential fact till this point, namely, that it is the Russian Armies who have done the main work in tearing the guts out of the German army. In the air and on the oceans we could maintain our place, but there was no force in the world which could have been called into being, except after several more years, that would have been able to maul and break the German army unless it had been subjected to the terrible slaughter and manhandling that has fallen to it through the strength of the Russian Soviet Armies.”

Winston S. Churchill book The Second World War

Speech in the House of Commons, August 2, 1944.
The Second World War (1939–1945)
Source: [Churchill, Winston, The Dawn of Liberation, 1945, Rosetta Books, 2013, 9780795329494]

World , Tear

“The Buddhists maintain that there is no Creator but an infinitude of creative powers, which collectively form the one eternal substance, the essence of which is inscrutable — hence not a subject for speculation for any true philosopher. Socrates invariably refused to argue upon the mystery of universal being, yet no one would ever have thought of charging him with atheism, except those who were bent upon his destruction. Upon inaugurating an active period, says the Secret Doctrine, an expansion of this Divine essence, from within outwardly, occurs in obedience to eternal and immutable law, and the phenomenal or visible universe is the ultimate result of the long chain of cosmical forces thus progressively set in motion. In like manner, when the passive condition is resumed, a contraction of the Divine essence takes place, and the previous work of creation is gradually and progressively undone. The visible universe becomes disintegrated, its material dispersed; and "darkness," solitary and alone, broods once more over the face of the "deep." To use a metaphor which will convey the idea still more clearly, an outbreathing of the "unknown essence" produces the world; and an inhalation causes it to disappear. This process has been going on from all eternity, and our present universe is but one of an infinite series which had no beginning and will have no end.”

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky book Isis Unveiled

Source: Isis Unveiled (1877), Volume II, Chapter VI

Secret , World , Law , Idea

“A Wise man knows that much of what he says and does is commonplace and trivial. His thoughts are not all solemn and sacred in his own eyes. He is able to laugh at himself and is not offended when others make him a subject whereon to exercise their wit.”

John Lancaster Spalding (1840–1916) Catholic bishop

Source: Aphorisms and Reflections (1901), p. 270

Exercises

“There is reason, however, to think that the author would have rendered it much more interesting, and have carried it to si higher degree of perfection, had he lived in an age more enlightened and better informed in regard to the mathematics and natural philosophy. Since the death of that mathematician, indeed, the arts and sciences have been so much improved, that what in his time might have been entitled to the character of mediocrity, would not at present be supportable. How many new discoveries in every part of philosophy? How many new phenomena observed, some of which have even given birth to the most fertile branches of the sciences? We shall mention only electricity, an inexhaustible source of profound reflection, and of experiments highly amusing. Chemistry also is a science, the most common and slightest principles of which were quite unknown to Ozanam. In short, we need not hesitate to pronounce that Ozanam's work contains a multitude of subjects treated of with an air of credulity, and so much prolixity, that it appears as if the author, or rather his continuators, had no other object in view than that of multiplying the volumes.
To render this work, then, more worthy of the enlightened agt in which we live, it was necessary to make numerous corrections and considerable additions. A task which we have endeavoured to discharge with all diligence”

Jean-Étienne Montucla (1725–1799) French mathematician

Source: Preface to Recreations in Mathematics and Natural Philosophy. (1803), p. vi; As cited in: Tobias George Smollett. The Critical Review: Or, Annals of Literature http://books.google.com/books?id=T8APAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA412, Volume 38, (1803), p. 412

Death , Age , Art , Mathematics

“The mechanism by which the interaction of democratic decisions and their implementation by the experts often produces results which nobody has desired is a subject which would deserve much more careful attention than it usually receives.”

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

Lecture I. Freedom and the Rule of Law: A Historical Survey - 1. Principles and Drift in Democratic Process
1940s–1950s, The Political Ideal of the Rule of Law (1955)

Decision

“Mr. Grey said, that he was prepared to defend the country, not only against an invasion of a foreign enemy, wishing to inculcate their own dangerous principles, which were clearly most subversive of civil society, but he would defend it, at the risk of his life, against the subjects of any government, if it was the best that human wisdom could devise; he did not however think it was candid, or by any means conciliatory, in the right hon. gentleman, on every occasion that presented itself to introduce the words "just and necessary" war. He declared he was much obliged to an hon. gentleman who had done him the honour to remember his words. He had declared, and he would declare again, that he would rather live under the most despotic monarchy, nay, even under that of the king of Prussia, or the empress of Russia, than under the present government of France. He wished the chancellor of the exchequer had descended a little from his high and haughty tone of prerogative, and had informed the House, in plain, simple, intelligible language his real opinion of the legality of the measure which ministers had thought to pursue with respect to voluntary subscriptions. As for himself, he would insist, that to raise money without the authority of parliament, for any public purpose whatsoever, was illegal; and if right hon. gentleman should insist on contrary, it would give a deeper wound the constitution than any that it had received even from that right hon. gentleman.”

Charles Grey, 2nd Earl Grey (1764–1845) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland

Speech in the House of Commons (26 March 1794), reported in The Parliamentary History of England, from the Earliest Period to the Year 1803. Vol. XXXI (London: 1818), pp. 94-95.
1790s

Life , Wisdom , Money , War

“.. though I'm a rogue in talking upon Painting and love to seem to take things wrong I can be serious and honest upon any subject thoroughly pleasing to me.”

Thomas Gainsborough (1727–1788) English portrait and landscape painter

Quote in Gainsborough's letter,from Bath 2 Sept. 1767, to his friend William Jackson of Exeter; as cited in The Letters of Thomas Gainsborough, ed. Mary Woodall, 1961
1755 - 1769

Love , Painting

“It seems disingenuous for the intellectual elite of the first world to dwell on the subject of too many babies being born in the second- and third-world nations while virtually ignoring the overpopulation of cattle and the realities of a food chain that robs the poor of sustenance to feed the rich a steady diet of grain-fed meat. The transition of world agriculture from food grain to feed grains represents a new form of human evil, whose consequences may be far greater and longer-lasting than any past examples of violence inflicted by men against their fellow human beings.”

Jeremy Rifkin book Beyond Beef: The Rise and Fall of the Cattle Culture

Source: Beyond Beef: The Rise and Fall of the Cattle Culture (1992), pp. 159-160

Men , World , Food , Reality

“There is one living spirit prevalent over this world, (subject to certain contingencies of organic matter & chiefly heat), which assumes a multitude of forms each having acting principle according to subordinate laws. — There is one thinking sensible principle, intimately allied to one kind of organic matter—have & which thinking principle seems to be given a assumed according to a more extended relations of the individuals, whereby choice with memory or reason? is necessary—which is modified into endless forms bearing a close relation in degree & kind to the endless forms of the living beings.”

Charles Darwin (1809–1882) British naturalist, author of "On the origin of species, by means of natural selection"

" Notebook C http://darwin-online.org.uk/EditorialIntroductions/vanWyhe_notebooks.html" (1838) page 210e http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?pageseq=186&itemID=CUL-DAR122.-&viewtype=side
quoted in
also quoted in
Other letters, notebooks, journal articles, recollected statements

World , Law , Thinking , Memory

“I present, for what it is worth, and may prove to be worth, the following bill of axioms or aphorisms on public administration, as fitting this important occasion.
# The continuous and fairly efficient discharge of certain functions by government, central and local, is a necessary condition for the existence of any great society.
# As a society becomes more complicated, as its division of labor ramifies more widely, as its commerce extends, as technology takes the place of handicrafts and local self-sufficiency, the functions of government increase in number and in their vital relationships to the fortunes of society and individuals.
# Any government in such a complicated society, consequently any such society itself, is strong in proportion to its capacity to administer the functions that are brought into being.
# Legislation respecting these functions, difficult as it is, is relatively easy as compared with the enforcement of legislation, that is, the effective discharge of these functions in their most minute ramifications and for the public welfare.
# When a form of government, such as ours, provides for legal changes, by the process of discussion and open decision, to fit social changes, then effective and wise administration becomes the central prerequisite for the perdurance of government and society — to use a metaphor, becomes a foundation of government as a going concern.
# Unless the members of an administrative system are drawn from various classes and regions, unless careers are open in it to talents, unless the way is prepared by an appropriate scheme of general education, unless public officials are subjected to internal and external criticism of a constructive nature, then the public personnel will become a bureaucracy dangerous to society and to popular government.
# Unless, as David Lilienthal has recently pointed out in an address on the Tennessee Valley Authority, an administrative system is so constructed and operated as to keep alive local and individual responsibilities, it is likely to destroy the basic well-springs of activity, hope, and enthusiasm necessary to popular government and to the following of a democratic civilization.”

Charles A. Beard (1874–1948) American historian

Administration, A Foundation of Government (1940)

Education , Hope , Way , Spring

“We see ourselves confronted with pure abstraction. Small problems and highly obscure subjects are, if you will, always grand in intention, and the layman would casually and quite undisparagingly trample on them if they were to serve as carpet motifs.”

Joan Miró (1893–1983) Catalan painter, sculptor, and ceramicist

in a review of his Bernheim show, G. J. Gros, Fall 1933; as quoted in Calder Miro, ed. Elizabeth Hutton Turner / Oliver Wick; Philip Wilson Publishers, London 2004, p. 81 note 10
1915 - 1940

Problem

“The work in question, painting the peasants, is such laborious work that the extremely weak would never even embark on it. And I have at least embarked on it... And I've grasped some solid and useful things in drawing and in painting, more firmly than you think, my dear friend. But I keep on making what I can't do yet in order to learn to be able to do it... We have in common with each other that we seek our subjects in the heart of the people, and then we have in common a need — either as an objective or as a means — to take our studies from reality.”

Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890) Dutch post-Impressionist painter (1853-1890)

Quote in his letter to Anthon van Rappard, from Nuenen, The Netherlands, September 1885, in 'Van Gogh Letters' http://vangoghletters.org/vg/letters/let528/letter.html
1880s, 1885

People , Question , Thinking , Reality

“And this in turn makes it plain that the Right Man problem is a problem of highly dominant people. Dominance is a subject of enormous importance to biologists and zoologists because the percentage of dominant animals — or human beings — seems to be amazingly constant. Bernard Shaw once asked the explorer H. M. Stanley how many other men could take over leadership of the expedition if Stanley himself fell ill; Stanley replied promptly: "One in twenty." "Is that exact or approximate?" asked Shaw. "Exact." And biological studies have confirmed this as a fact. For some odd reason, precisely five per cent — one in twenty — of any animal group are dominant — have leadership qualities. During the Korean War, the Chinese made the interesting discovery that if they separated out the dominant five per cent of American prisoners of war, and kept them in separate compound, the remaining ninety-five per cent made no attempt to escape.”

Colin Wilson (1931–2013) author

Source: About, p. 216

Men , War , People , Problem

“The people who do make big discoveries are the ones who somehow manage to free themselves from conventional ways of thinking and to see the subject from a new perspective.”

Anthony James Leggett (1938) British physicist

Interview http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/2003/leggett-interview.html 2003 Nobel Laureates in Physics, 9 December 2003 (8:02).

People , Way , Thinking

“A space of frequency of intermarriage among ethnic groups.
These conceptual and abstracted spaces do not have the same characteristics and are not subject to the same constraints as physical space. Each has characteristics and constraints of its own. These spaces may be either conceived of by a human being or learned about from others”

James Grier Miller (1916–2002) biologist

Source: Living Systems: Basic Concepts (1969), p. 53; About conceptual or abstracted spaces

Learning

“Though I cannot claim to be an authority on the subject, I myself have been horrified at the way in which reputable historians have accepted as evidence isolated statements by one peasant extracted under interrogation and torture.”

Arthur Guirdham (1905–1992) British physician, psychiatrist and writer

Source: The Cathars and Reincarnation (1970), p. 108

Way

“If from the wilderness the righteous and honest John were actually to come who, clothed in skins and living on locusts and untouched by all the terrible mischief, were meanwhile to apply himself with a pure heart and in all seriousness to the investigation of truth and to offer the fruits thereof, what kind of reception would he have to expect from those businessmen of the chair, who are hired for State purposes and with wife and family have to live on philosophy, and whose watchword is, therefore, Primum vivere, deinde philosophari [first live and then philosophize]? These men have accordingly taken possession of the market and have already seen to it that here nothing is of value except what they allow; consequently merit exists only in so far as they and their mediocrity are pleased to acknowledge it. They thus have on a leading rein the attention of that small public, such as it is, that is concerned with philosophy. For on matters that do not promise, like the productions of poetry, amusement and entertainment but only instruction, and financially unprofitable instruction at that, that public will certainly not waste its time, effort, and energy, without first being thoroughly assured that such efforts will be richly rewarded. Now by virtue of its inherited belief that whoever lives by a business knows all about it, this public expects an assurance from the professional men who from professor’s chairs and in compendiums, journals, and literary periodicals, confidently behave as if they were the real masters of the subject. Accordingly, the public allows them to sample and select whatever is worth noting and what can be ignored. My poor John from the wilderness, how will you fare if, as is to be expected, what you bring is not drafted in accordance with the tacit convention of the gentlemen of the lucrative philosophy? They will regard you as one who has not entered in the spirit of the game and thus threatens to spoil the fun for all of them; consequently, they will regard you as their common enemy and antagonist. Now even if what you bring were the greatest masterpiece of the human mind, it could never find favor in their eyes. For it would not be drawn up ad normam conventionis [according to the current pattern]; and so it would not be such as to enable them to make it the subject of their lectures from the chair in order to make a living from it. It never occurs to a professor of philosophy to examine a new system that appears to see whether it is true; but he at once tests it merely to see whether it can be brought into harmony with the doctrines of the established religion, with government plans, and with the prevailing views of the times.”

Arthur Schopenhauer book Parerga and Paralipomena

Sämtliche Werke, Bd. 5, pp. 160-161, E. Payne, trans. (1974) Vol. 1, pp. 148-149
Parerga and Paralipomena (1851), On Philosophy in the Universities

Men , Truth , Family , Religion

“Suppose then I want to give myself a little training in the art of reasoning; suppose I want to get out of the region of conjecture and probability, free myself from the difficult task of weighing evidence, and putting instances together to arrive at general propositions, and simply desire to know how to deal with my general propositions when I get them, and how to deduce right inferences from them; it is clear that I shall obtain this sort of discipline best in those departments of thought in which the first principles are unquestionably true. For in all 59 our thinking, if we come to erroneous conclusions, we come to them either by accepting false premises to start with—in which case our reasoning, however good, will not save us from error; or by reasoning badly, in which case the data we start from may be perfectly sound, and yet our conclusions may be false. But in the mathematical or pure sciences,—geometry, arithmetic, algebra, trigonometry, the calculus of variations or of curves,—we know at least that there is not, and cannot be, error in our first principles, and we may therefore fasten our whole attention upon the processes. As mere exercises in logic, therefore, these sciences, based as they all are on primary truths relating to space and number, have always been supposed to furnish the most exact discipline. When Plato wrote over the portal of his school. “Let no one ignorant of geometry enter here,” he did not mean that questions relating to lines and surfaces would be discussed by his disciples. On the contrary, the topics to which he directed their attention were some of the deepest problems,—social, political, moral,—on which the mind could exercise itself. Plato and his followers tried to think out together conclusions respecting the being, the duty, and the destiny of man, and the relation in which he stood to the gods and to the unseen world. What had geometry to do with these things? Simply this: That a man whose mind has not undergone a rigorous training in systematic thinking, and in the art of drawing legitimate inferences from premises, was unfitted to enter on the discussion of these high topics; and that the sort of logical discipline which he needed was most likely to be obtained from geometry—the only mathematical science which in Plato’s time had been formulated and reduced to a system. And we in this country [England] have long acted on the same principle. Our future lawyers, clergy, and statesmen are expected at the University to learn a good deal about curves, and angles, and numbers and proportions; not because these subjects have the smallest relation to the needs of their lives, but because in the very act of learning them they are likely to acquire that habit of steadfast and accurate thinking, which is indispensable to success in all the pursuits of life.”

Joshua Girling Fitch (1824–1903) British educationalist

Source: Lectures on Teaching, (1906), pp. 291-292

Life , God , Truth , World

“It's complicated, being an American,
Having the money and the bad conscience, both at the same time.
Perhaps, after all, this is not the right subject for a poem.”

Louis Simpson (1923–2012) Jamaican poet

On the Lawn at the Villa (l. 14-16) (1980) It is not your job to like me, it is mine.
Poetry quotes

Money , Time

“Symbolic castration - the final moment of analysis is reached when the subject is ready to accept this fundamental loss, to consent to symbolic castration as a price to be paid for access to his desire.”

Slavoj Žižek book The Sublime Object of Ideology

147
The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989)

Loss

“1. To us art is an adventure into an unknown world, which can be explored only by those willing to take the risks.
2. This world of imagination is fancy-free and violently opposed to common sense.
3. It is our function as artists to make the spectator see the world our way not his way.
4. We favor the simple expression of the complex thought. We are for the large shape because it has the impact of the unequivocal. We wish to reassert the picture plane. We are for flat forms because they destroy illusion and reveal truth.
5. It is a widely accepted notion among painters that it does not matter what one paints as long as it is well painted. (Rothko said this is the essence of academicism.)
6. There is no such thing as a good painting about nothing.
7. We assert that the subject is crucial and only that subject matter is valid which is tragic and timeless. That is why we profess spiritual kinship with primitive and archaic art.”

Adolph Gottlieb (1903–1974) American artist

June 13, 1943 edition of the New York Times, brief manifesto: Adolph Gottlieb with Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman.
1940s

Truth , World , Art , Way

“Zuko saysThermodynamics is a funny subject. The first time you go through it, you don't understand it at all. The second time you go through it, you think you understand it, except for one or two small points. The third time you go through it, you know you don't understand it, but by that time you are so used to it, so it doesn't bother you any more.”

Arnold Sommerfeld (1868–1951) physicist

As quoted in: J.Muller, Physical Chemistry in Depth (Springer Science & Business Media, 1992), p. 1. No primary source is given in that book.
Disputed

Understanding , Thinking , Time

“Australia became a full-blooded democracy in the late 1850s, achieving it with lightning speed. Only 30 years previously it had consisted of two convict colonies, ruled by governors whose personal power was magnified because most of their subjects were prisoners or ex-prisoners. Moreover, the governors were so remote geographically that Britain’s control of them and their decisions was loose. One year might elapse between the governor writing an urgent dispatch to London, and the arrival of an official reply. And yet, from this prison-like regime, democracy speedily emerged. This was an exceptional outcome.”

Geoffrey Blainey (1930) Australian historian

"After the gold rush, the colonial cradle of democracy," http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/inquirer/after-the-gold-rush-the-colonial-cradle-of-democracy/news-story/5cf7a3bd7dd077c91a282b4a8c0efa65, The Australian (August 27, 2016)

Democracy , Decision , Personality , Speed

“I trust you will bear in mind the deeply-held fears and insecurities Fijian have as an ethnic community. This is a subject I dwell on repeatedly because, while I do not share them, I am sufficiently Fijian to appreciate the depths of these emotions.”

Joni Madraiwiwi (1957–2016) Fijian politician

Speech to the Lautoka Rotary Club (Centenary Dinner), 12 March 2005 http://www.fiji.gov.fj/publish/printer_4326.shtml.

Fear , Communication

“It tackles a wonderful subject without preening, and brings it off unassertively — so unassertively that the movie is in danger of being overlooked. (Variety has already dismissed it as something "for a very limited audience.") We're getting to the point where the press assumes that movie audiences won't be willing to bring anything to a picture, and warns them off.”

Pauline Kael book State of the Art

"Circus," review of Moscow on the Hudson (1984-04-16), p. 160.
State of the Art (1985)

Quotes about subject page 28

Quotes about subject
page 28