Quotes about swing (250 quotes, page 3)

“If in later life she has mastered her hunger drive by ego control, she may assume that she can control her fate herself. But that ego may in fact be very weak, because it has been built by cutting herself off from the mainstream of life through severe dieting. It is built on negative rather than positive need. In a real life crisis, such an ego may fail to operate because she does not know consciously what her own needs are. […] An ego which sets itself up against Fate is attempting to usurp the power of the Self; it swings from light to dark, from inflation to depression. Only when her ego is firmly rooted in her own feminine feeling can a woman be released from her compulsive behavior.”

Marion Woodman (1928–2018) Canadian writer

Source: The Owl Was a Baker's Daughter (1980), p. 33

Life , Hunger , Fate , Behavior

“This country is merciless to good small talents. A writer who doesn't take chances and swing for the fences (whether or not he has a prayer of reaching them) is less than a man.”

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

"Letters of E. B. White" (1976), p. 251
The Good Word & Other Words (1978)

Chance , Country

“I look now at the very moment
Even the Buddha is dumbfounded.
All turns with a swing.
I land on the plain of nothingness.”

Tetto Giko (1295–1369)

Japanese Death Poems. Compiled by Yoel Hoffmann. ISBN 978-0-8048-3179-6

“Here's the pitch…Swing and a fly ball, you want another winner here? Coleman going to it … YOU GOT IT! That's a winner! 6–0 Cardinals!”

Jack Buck (1924–2002) American sportscaster

Calling the final out of the 1987 National League Championship Series as the Cardinals advanced to the 1987 World Series.
1980s

Flying

“My enduring feeling about René Lévesque is that if he had chosen to hang me, even as he tightened the rope round my neck, he would have complained about how humiliating it was for him to spring the trapdoor. And then, once I was swinging in the wind, he would blame my ghost for having obliged him to murder, thereby imposing a guilt trip on a sweet, self-effacing, downtrodden Francophone.”

Mordecai Richler (1931–2001) Canadian author, screenwriter and essayist

Reported in Donald Smith, D'une nation à l'autre: des deux solitudes à la cohabitation (Montreal: Éditions Alain Stanké, 1997), p. 61.
Other

Feeling , Spring

“People have accused me of being so far up Tiger's arse that he can barely make a full swing, but I maintain that he is a special person.”

David Feherty (1958) professional golfer, broadcaster, writer

Feherty on his respect towards Woods. ( The Telegraph http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/golf/ustour/2315083/Feherty-finally-as-dry-as-his-humour.html, Jun 12, 2007 )

People , Personality

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

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

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

People , World , Art , Guy

“Your right to swing your arms ends just where the other man's nose begins.”

Zechariah Chafee (1885–1957) American judicial philosopher and civil libertarian

"Freedom of Speech in Wartime", 32 Harvard Law Review 932, 957 (1919). (Various permutations of this quote have been incorrectly attributed to Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.).
" Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/13pdf/13-354_olp1.pdf" dissent by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

“I hear people say I swing at bad pitches. What is a bad pitch? If I can hit it, it's not a bad pitch.”

Roberto Clemente (1934–1972) Puerto Rican baseball player

As quoted in "SPORTS BEAT: Bucco Ship Needs Clemente's Big Bat" by Wendell Smith in The New Pittsburgh Courier (April 10, 1965), p. 15
Baseball-related, <big><big>1960s</big></big>, <big>1965</big>

People

“She thought no v'ice hed sech a swing
Ez hisn in the choir;
My! when he made Ole Hunderd ring
She knowed the Lord was nigher.”

James Russell Lowell (1819–1891) American poet, critic, editor, and diplomat

The Courtin' .
The Biglow Papers (1848–1866), Series II (1866)

“I was not trying to be smart when I did that. I was trying to tell them that they could do whatever they want. The fans of Pittsburgh have cheered me a lot through the years. There’s always a first time for booing. But I don’t say to hell with the fans because of this. I am not swinging the bat the way I should. It is just one of those things. I am not the way I should be. I do not feel sure when I swing. I am trying to adjust so that I will swing well even though my shoulder still hurts. If a player doesn’t try hard, he deserves to be booed. I try hard. Maybe I was booed today because I have not played that bad before.”

Roberto Clemente (1934–1972) Puerto Rican baseball player

As quoted in “Clemente Still Loves Pirate Fans” https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=kWwqAAAAIBAJ&sjid=VlAEAAAAIBAJ&pg=3630%2C5689009 by Bill Christine, in The Pittsburgh Press (Monday, April 14, 1969), p. 32
Baseball-related, <big><big>1960s</big></big>, <big>1969</big>

Way , Feeling , Hell , Time

“I have mood swings, but I can deal with that by watching Netflix and eating pickles.”

Abby Stein (1991) Trans activist, speaker, and educator

Interview with Haaretz, February 14, 2017 http://www.haaretz.com/jewish/features/.premium-1.771440
2017

Mood

“Off the stretch, Orosco, here's the pitch…swing and a long one into left field! Way back in the corner…GRAND SLAMMMMMAAHHH! A grand slam home run by Herr! And that's a winner! Twelve to eight!”

Jack Buck (1924–2002) American sportscaster

Calling Tom Herr's game-winning grand slam home run on Seat Cushion Night against the New York Mets in April 1987.
1980s

Way , Home

“They pay for their ticket, let them do what they want to do. I get mad. One of these days, I’ll leave my uniform on the field and keep on walking. If I don’t hustle or something like that, I’d say that it would be good for me to be booed. The problem with me is hitting. You hit.280, it’s a pretty good average. But I used to hit.350, so.280 is not good enough. A lot of times in my career, I play when I shouldn’t play. I say as long as I can run and swing a bat, I play. That was my biggest mistake. One time I play with a shoulder – it hurts so bad, I can’t lift it. I hit into a double play. Then they hit a ball to the outfield and I can’t bend down to pick it up, so they boo me. The season start, I hurt my finger the last weekend of spring training. I couldn’t grip the bat right and I was trying to pull everything. They would like for you to start every year from the beginning, right on top, boom, boom, boom. Now I start a season a little bit slowly, so they boo.”

Roberto Clemente (1934–1972) Puerto Rican baseball player

As quoted in ".280 Not Good Enough: Clemente's Bat Answers Boos" https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=TpcuAAAAIBAJ&sjid=kKEFAAAAIBAJ&pg=2309%2C1919830 by Ian McDonald, in The Montreal Gazette (Friday, May 21, 1971), p. 17
Baseball-related, <big><big>1970s</big></big>, <big>1971</big>

Spring , Problem , Time , Hurt

“It is not inappropriate to describe the function of the teacher as that of acting to compel awareness. This is not to say that such compulsion contrives to bring a subject to act in the way in which the teacher believes the free man ought to act. It aspires only to assure that the subject is acting for himself and not as the mere instrument of unmediated impulses. There is even a compulsory quality about the Socratic method for, by asking questions, by enquiring in the reasons and grounds for doing this or that, it forces a man to conceive of himself in terms of intentions; it thereby forces him to be free.
It does not force him, however, to act in a manner substantively different from this original impulses. … The man who swings at his enemy in blind rage may, after lengthy consideration of creative alternatives, swing at him with cool deliberation. The intentionalist cannot accept the tradition of Kant, Green, and Bosanquet which polarizes conscious duty and preconscious desire and presupposes that reflective awareness will always produce substantive changes in the character of our goals, for to him it is the qualitative change that turns mere impulses into goals that is significant for freedom.”

Benjamin R. Barber (1939–2017) US political scientist

Source: Forced to be Free (1971), p. 78-79

Way , Question , Freedom , Teachers

“(James) Anderson has a gift from the gods: he could swing an orange.”

Geoff Boycott (1940) cricket player of England

The Guardian, 2008 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/cricket/international/england/2302798/Job-well-done-England-against-New-Zealand.-But-the-really-hard-work-starts-now.html

God

“The mutation of bacteria and viruses are merely hereditary fluctuations around a median position; a swing to the right, a swing to the left, but no final evolutionary effect.”

Pierre-Paul Grassé (1895–1985) French zoologist

Pierre Paul Grassé¨(1973). L'évolution du vivant: matériaux pour une nouvelle théorie transformiste. A. Michel,. p. 151
Evolution of living organisms: evidence for a new theory of transformation (1977)
Original: En somme, les mutations des Bactéries et des virus ne sont que des fluctuations héréditaires, autour d'une position moyenne, oscillation à droite, oscillation à gauche: effet évolutif final nul.

“The Revolution was in full swing. The struggle was becoming increasingly irreconcilable and bloodier, much of what was happening did not fit in with my outlook. But after all there was still the unfinished task, women's liberation. Women, of course, had received all rights but in practice, of course, they still lived under the old yoke: without authority in family life, enslaved by a thousand menial household chores, bearing the whole burden of maternity, even the material cares, because many women now found life alone as a result of the war and other circumstances.”

Alexandra Kollontai (1872–1952) Soviet diplomat

The Autobiography of a Sexually Emancipated Communist Woman (1926)

Life , Women , War , Family

“At the alley that night, I was fascinated and a bit awed by what I had witnessed. Here was the social structure in action right on the bowling alleys. It held the individual members in their places—and me along with them. I did not stop to reason then that, as a close friend of Pecci, Frank, and Gillo, I held a position that was close to the top of the gang and therefore was expected to excel. I simply felt myself buoyed up by the situation. My friends were for me, had confidence in me, believed I would bowl well. I felt supremely confident. I have never felt quite that way before—or since. I was feeling the impact of the group structure upon me. It was a strange feeling, as if something larger than myself was controlling the ball as I went through my swing and released it toward the pins.”

William Foote Whyte (1914–2000) American sociologist

Source: Participant observer, 1994, p. 38; As cited in: Ickis (2014)

Way , Feeling , Confidence , Night

“The new American finds his challenge and his love in the traffic-choked streets, skies nested in smog, choking with the acids of industry, the screech of rubber and houses leashed in against one another while the townlets wither a time and die. This is not offered in criticism but only as observation. And I am sure that, as all pendulums reverse their swing, so eventually will the swollen cities rupture like dehiscent wombs and disperse their children back to the countryside.”

John Steinbeck (1902–1968) American writer

Pt. 2
Travels With Charley: In Search of America (1962)

Love , Children , Time , Housing

“I swing as hard as I can, and I try to swing right through the ball.”

Babe Ruth (1895–1948) American baseball player

As quoted in Go for the Gold: Thoughts on Achieving Your Personal Best (2001) by Ariel Books
Context: I swing as hard as I can, and I try to swing right through the ball. In boxing, your fist usually stops when you hit a man, but its possible to hit so hard that your fist doesn't stop. I try to follow through in the same way. The harder you grip the bat, the more you can swing it through the ball, and the farther the ball will go. I swing big, with everything I've got. I hit big or I miss big. I like to live as big as I can.

“I always swing at the ball with all my might. I hit or miss big”

Babe Ruth (1895–1948) American baseball player

From "'Keep Your Eye On the Ball'; No, Not Golf, It's Babe Ruth," http://archives.chicagotribune.com/1920/08/13/page/11/ by Ruth (as told to Pegler), in The Chicago Tribune (August 13, 1920), p. 11; reprinted as "How to Hit Home Runs," https://books.google.com/books?id=SAAlxi-0EZYC&pg=PA29&dq=%22I+always+swing%22+%22hit+or+miss+big%22&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjZzNH7oM3QAhWJ4iYKHUCwC8wQ6AEIFDAA#v=onepage&q=%22I%20always%20swing%22%20%22hit%20or%20miss%20big%22&f=false in Playing the Game: My Early Years in Baseball, p. 29
Context: I always swing at the ball with all my might. I hit or miss big and when I miss I know it long before the umpire calls a strike on me, for every muscle in my back, shoulders and arms is groaning, "You missed it." And believe me, it is no fun to miss a ball that hard. Once I put myself out of the game for a few days by a miss like that.

“Joe's swing was purely natural, he was the perfect hitter.”

Ty Cobb (1886–1961) American baseball player

On Shoeless Joe Jackson, as quoted in Shoeless Joe and Ragtime Baseball (2008) by Harvey Frommer, p. 72
Context: Joe's swing was purely natural, he was the perfect hitter. He batted against spitballs, shineballs, emeryballs and all the other trick deliveries. He never figured anything out or studied anything with the same scientific approach I gave it. He just swung. If he'd ever had any knowledge of batting, his average would have been phenomenal. … he seemed content to just punch the ball, and I can still see those line drives whistling to the far precincts. Joe Jackson hit the ball harder than any man ever to play baseball.

Nature , Perfection

“The history of human thought recalls the swinging of a pendulum which takes centuries to swing. After a long period of slumber comes a moment of awakening.”

Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921) Russian zoologist, evolutionary theorist, philosopher, scientist, revolutionary, economist, activist, geogr…

Anarchist Morality http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/anarchist_Archives/kropotkin/AM/anarchist_moralitytc.html (1890)
Context: The history of human thought recalls the swinging of a pendulum which takes centuries to swing. After a long period of slumber comes a moment of awakening. Then thought frees herself from the chains with which those interested — rulers, lawyers, clerics — have carefully enwound her.
She shatters the chains. She subjects to severe criticism all that has been taught her, and lays bare the emptiness of the religious political, legal, and social prejudices amid which she has vegetated. She starts research in new paths, enriches our knowledge with new discoveries, creates new sciences.
But the inveterate enemies of thought — the government, the lawgiver, and the priest — soon recover from their defeat. By degrees they gather together their scattered forces, and remodel their faith and their code of laws to adapt them to the new needs.

History

“All the colours look brighter now.
Everything they say seems to sound new.
Slipping into tomorrow too quick,
Yesterday always too good to forget.
Stop the swing of the pendulum! Let us through!”

Kate Bush (1958) British recording artist; singer, songwriter, musician and record producer

Song lyrics, The Kick Inside (1978)

“It seems so hard for some of us to grow up mentally just enough to realize that there are other persons of flesh and bone, just like us, on this great, big earth. And if they don't ever stand still, move, or "swing," they are as right as we are, even if they are as wrong as hell by our standards. Yes, Miles, I am apologizing for my stupid "Blindfold Test."”

Charles Mingus (1922–1979) American jazz double bassist, composer and bandleader

I can do it gladly because I'm learning a little something. No matter how much they try to say that Brubeck doesn't swing — or whatever else they're stewing or whoever else they're brewing — it's factually unimportant.
Not because Dave made Time magazine — and a dollar — but mainly because Dave honestly thinks he's swinging. He feels a certain pulse and plays a certain pulse which gives him pleasure and a sense of exaltation because he's sincerely doing something the way he, Dave Brubeck, feels like doing it. And as you said in your story, Miles, "if a guy makes you pat your foot, and if you feel it down your back, etc.," then Dave is the swingingest by your own definition, Miles, because at Newport and elsewhere Dave had the whole house patting its feet and even clapping its hands....
An Open Letter To Miles Davis (1955)

Hell , Personality

“Human thought is like a monstrous pendulum: it keeps swinging from one extreme to the other.”

Eugene Field (1850–1895) American writer

The Writings in Prose and Verse of Eugene Field: The love affairs of a Bibliomaniac (1896), Ch. IV : The Mania of Collecting Seizes Me, p. 44
Context: Human thought is like a monstrous pendulum: it keeps swinging from one extreme to the other. Within the compass of five generations we find the Puritan first an uncompromising believer in demonology and magic, and then a scoffer at everything involving the play of fancy.

“You do not ask what is the value, or what is the use, of this feeling. Of what use is the universe? What is the practical application of a million galaxies? Yet just because it has no use, it has a use—which may sound like a paradox, but is not. What, for instance, is the use of playing music? If you play to make money, to outdo some other artist, to be a person of culture, or to improve your mind, you are not really playing—for your mind is not on the music. You don't swing. When you come to think of it, playing or listening to music is a pure luxury, an addiction, a waste of valuable time and money for nothing more than making elaborate patterns of sound.”

Alan Watts (1915–1973) British philosopher, writer and speaker

Source: The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are (1966), p. 92

Money , Music , Feeling , Thinking

“I swing big, with everything I've got. I hit big or I miss big. I like to live as big as I can.”

Babe Ruth (1895–1948) American baseball player

As quoted in Go for the Gold: Thoughts on Achieving Your Personal Best (2001) by Ariel Books
Context: I swing as hard as I can, and I try to swing right through the ball. In boxing, your fist usually stops when you hit a man, but its possible to hit so hard that your fist doesn't stop. I try to follow through in the same way. The harder you grip the bat, the more you can swing it through the ball, and the farther the ball will go. I swing big, with everything I've got. I hit big or I miss big. I like to live as big as I can.

“Even in every day living you're continually interpreting experience via your emotions instead of being the experience direct. "This is good, that's bad," your feelings swing subtly to and fro all day long obscuring the reality, the sensational knowledge or gnosis that it's not bad at all”

Barry Long (1926–2003) Australian spiritual teacher and writer

Love is not a feeling ~ The Article (1995)
Context: Okay, so you don't have drugs, alcohol and sex but you love someone, as a feeling. Then it won't be long before you'll be experiencing one or more of the painful feelings I've mentioned above - and thinking it's natural! Wait and see. Even in every day living you're continually interpreting experience via your emotions instead of being the experience direct. "This is good, that's bad," your feelings swing subtly to and fro all day long obscuring the reality, the sensational knowledge or gnosis that it's not bad at all; it's simply life as it is.

Feeling , Knowledge , Reality

“I do not oscillate in Emerson's rainbow, but prefer rather to hang myself in mine own halter than swing in any other man's swing. Yet I think Emerson is more than a brilliant fellow.”

Herman Melville (1818–1891) American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and poet

Letter to Evert Augustus Duyckinck (3 March 1849); published in The Letters of Herman Melville (1960) edited by Merrell R. Davis and William H. Gilman, p. 78; a portion of this is sometimes modernized in two ways:
Context: I do not oscillate in Emerson's rainbow, but prefer rather to hang myself in mine own halter than swing in any other man's swing. Yet I think Emerson is more than a brilliant fellow. Be his stuff begged, borrowed, or stolen, or of his own domestic manufacture he is an uncommon man. Swear he is a humbug — then is he no common humbug. Lay it down that had not Sir Thomas Browne lived, Emerson would not have mystified — I will answer, that had not Old Zack's father begot him, old Zack would never have been the hero of Palo Alto. The truth is that we are all sons, grandsons, or nephews or great-nephews of those who go before us. No one is his own sire. — I was very agreeably disappointed in Mr Emerson. I had heard of him as full of transcendentalisms, myths & oracular gibberish; I had only glanced at a book of his once in Putnam's store — that was all I knew of him, till I heard him lecture. — To my surprise, I found him quite intelligible, tho' to say truth, they told me that that night he was unusually plain. — Now, there is a something about every man elevated above mediocrity, which is, for the most part, instinctuly perceptible. This I see in Mr Emerson. And, frankly, for the sake of the argument, let us call him a fool; — then had I rather be a fool than a wise man. —I love all men who dive. Any fish can swim near the surface, but it takes a great whale to go down stairs five miles or more; & if he don't attain the bottom, why, all the lead in Galena can't fashion the plumet that will. I'm not talking of Mr Emerson now — but of the whole corps of thought-divers, that have been diving & coming up again with bloodshot eyes since the world began.
I could readily see in Emerson, notwithstanding his merit, a gaping flaw. It was, the insinuation, that had he lived in those days when the world was made, he might have offered some valuable suggestions. These men are all cracked right across the brow. And never will the pullers-down be able to cope with the builders-up. And this pulling down is easy enough — a keg of powder blew up Block's Monument — but the man who applied the match, could not, alone, build such a pile to save his soul from the shark-maw of the Devil. But enough of this Plato who talks thro' his nose.

Thinking

“I, myself, came to enjoy the players who didn't only just swing but who invented new rhythmic patterns, along with new melodic concepts.”

Charles Mingus (1922–1979) American jazz double bassist, composer and bandleader

What Is A Jazz Composer? (1971)
Context: Now, whether there is feeling or not depends upon what your environment or your association is or whatever you may have in common with the player. If you feel empathy for his personal outlook, you naturally feel him musically more than some other environmental and musical opposite who is, in a way. beyond you.
I, myself, came to enjoy the players who didn't only just swing but who invented new rhythmic patterns, along with new melodic concepts. And those people are: Art Tatum, Bud Powell, Max Roach, Sonny Rollins, Lester Young, Dizzy Gillespie and Charles Parker, who is the greatest genius of all to me because he changed the whole era around. But there is no need to compare composers. If you like Beethoven, Bach or Brahms, that's okay. They were all pencil composers. I always wanted to be a spontaneous composer. I thought I was, although no one's mentioned that. I mean critics or musicians. Now, what I'm getting at is that I know I'm a composer. I marvel at composition, at people who are able to take diatonic scales, chromatics, 12-tone scales, or even quarter-tone scales. I admire anyone who can come up with something original. But not originality alone, because there can be originality in stupidity, with no musical description of any emotion or any beauty the man has seen, or any kind of life he has lived.

“The larger picture is really to swing people's awareness of what really is moral. …”

Lily Tomlin (1939) American actress, comedian, writer, and producer

The Advocate interview (2005)
Context: The larger picture is really to swing people's awareness of what really is moral.... There are great clergy-people who absolutely do not agree with this. It's not whether God is on our side or whether we're doing God's will, it's being so narcissistic as to think that God is telling you what to do.

People

“The American political system is like a gigantic Mexican Christmas fiesta. Each political party is a huge piñata — a papier-mâché donkey, for example. The donkey is filled with full employment, low interest rates, affordable housing, comprehensive medical benefits, a balanced budget and other goodies. The American voter is blindfolded and given a stick. The voter then swings the stick wildly in every direction, trying to hit a political candidate on the head and knock some sense into the silly bastard.”

P. J. O'Rourke book Parliament of Whores

Parliament of Whores (1991)

Sense , Christmas , Housing

“We are going on swinging bravely forward along the grand high road and already behind the distant mountains is the promise of the sun.”

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

Speech at Kinnaird Hall, Dundee, Scotland ("Unemployment"), October 10, 1908, in Liberalism and the Social Problem (1909), Churchill, Echo Library (2007), p. 87
Early career years (1898–1929)
Context: What is the use of living, if it be not to strive for noble causes and to make this muddled world a better place for those who will live in it after we are gone? How else can we put ourselves in harmonious relation with the great verities and consolations of the infinite and the eternal? And I avow my faith that we are marching towards better days. Humanity will not be cast down. We are going on swinging bravely forward along the grand high road and already behind the distant mountains is the promise of the sun.

Mountain , Distant , Sun

“Your right to swing your arms ends just where the other man's nose begins.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (1841–1935) United States Supreme Court justice

Various permutations of this quote have been attributed to Holmes, but its was actually written by Zechariah Chafee, "Freedom of Speech in Wartime", 32 Harvard Law Review 932, 957 (1919).
Misattributed

“I didn’t swing hard at all. I think I’m going to do the same thing this year. We have two good hitters behind me now and I don’t have to swing so hard.”

Roberto Clemente (1934–1972) Puerto Rican baseball player

On his chances for a third consecutive NL batting title; as quoted and paraphrased in "Clemente Not Thinking of Batting Title" by Milton Richman, in The Cumberland Evening Times (Tuesday, March 15, 1966), p. 12
Baseball-related, <big><big>1960s</big></big>, <big>1966</big>
Context: “I never think about that before the season. Toward the end of the year I start thinking about it. Not before. I did it last year by just meeting the ball,” he said. “I didn’t swing hard at all. I think I’m going to do the same thing this year. We have two good hitters behind me now and I don’t have to swing so hard.” He means Donn Clendenon and Willie Stargell. The two hit a total of 41 homers to Clemente’s 10 last year. “They always say we need someone to hit home runs. We got some guys who can now. I don’t care for home runs. I showed ’em I could do it when I hit 23 in 1961. Home runs aren’t that important, though. Not to me, anyway.”

Thinking

“The predicted great Armageddon of our race is in full swing... victory is always with the forces of Light, but dreadful cataclysms are unavoidable... the destiny of the world is in the hands of humanity. The planet can be saved only if there is a resurrection of the spirit, only if the consciousness is liberated from the phantoms of the past and directed toward the construction of the New World on the basis of a new understanding of cooperation and knowledge.”

Helena Roerich (1879–1955) Russian philosopher

16 July 1935
Armageddon

Understanding , Light , Past , Victory

“Whitepeople believed that whatever the manners, under every dark skin was a jungle. Swift unnavigable waters, swinging screaming baboons, sleeping snakes, red gums ready for their sweet white blood. In a way, he thought, they were right. The more coloredpeople spent their strength trying to convince them how gentle they were, how clever and loving, how human, the more they used themselves up to persuade whites of something Negroes believed could not be questioned, the deeper and more tangled the jungle grew inside. But it wasn’t the jungle blacks brought with them to this place from the other (livable) place. It was the jungle whitefolks planted in them. And it grew. It spread. In, through and after life, it spread, until it invaded the whites who had made it. Touched them every one. Changed and altered them. Made them bloody, silly, worse than even they wanted to be, so scared were they of the jungle they had made. The screaming baboon lived under their own white skin; the red gums were their own.”

Toni Morrison book Beloved

Beloved (1987)

Sleep , Question , Water , Way

“Look at the scenes to be met with in our great cities! They are sufficient to horrify any being susceptible enough to the sufferings of others to be rated as one-fifth civilized. An army of butchers standing in blood ankle-deep and plunging great knives into writhing, shrieking living beings; helpless swine swinging by their hinders with their blood gushing from their slashed jugulars; unsuspecting oxen with trustful eyes looking up at the deadly pole-ax, and a moment later lying aquiver under its relentless thud; an atmosphere in perpetual churn with the groans and screams of the dying; streets thronged with unprocessioned funerals; dead bodies dangling from sale hooks or sprawling on chopping blocks; men and women going about praying and preaching, and sitting down two or three times a day and pouncing on the uncoffined remains of some poor creature cut down for them by the callous hands of hired cutthroats—such are the sights in all our streets and stockyards, and such are the crimes inflicted day after day by Christian cannibals on the defenseless dumb ones of this world.”

J. Howard Moore (1862–1916)

Source: The New Ethics (1907), Human Attitude Toward Others, p. 44

Time , Swine , Dead , Suffering

“Well may we be dazed by the horrific metamorphosis. Dark days are upon us. The pendulum of civilization trembles, as if to swing back to the inglorious twilight of the past. Imperialistic tendencies are laying their damning clutches on the unsuspecting form of the republic. Fearful questions confront us. Whether we are to be compelled henceforth to read with downcast gaze the matchless axioms of Jefferson and to mumble in confusion the heroic history of our dead—whether the Fourth of July is to be henceforth a day of embarrassment and shame instead of, as hitherto, an occasion for spontaneous and boundless pride—whether Yorktown and Monmouth are to become events which, instead of inspiring a continent to eulogy and song, shall provoke no higher eloquence than that which gutturals from the limping lips of apology—whether the political wisdom of the founders of the republic, gleaned in terrible hours, by anxious eyes, from the travail of ages past, shall be swept away by the heartless levity of upstart statesmen—whether, in short, we shall turn our backs inexorably upon the past—a past glorious achievement and unrivaled in precept—and become the wretched exemplars of a policy, ruinous to ourselves and to our children, repulsive to every truly civilized mind and destructive of the fairest hopes of humanity—these.”

J. Howard Moore (1862–1916)

are questions that assail with relentless emphasis the consciences of a great people.
"America's Apostasy", Chicago Chronicle, 6 Mar. 1899

Reading , History , Question , Past

“Undoubtedly, looking back, we nearly all allowed ourselves, for decades, to be frozen into rates of personal taxation which were ludicrously high…That frozen framework has been decisively cracked, not only by the prescripts of Chancellors but in the expectations of the people. It is one of the things for which the Government deserve credit…However, even beneficial revolutions have a strong tendency to breed their own excesses. There is now a real danger of the conventional wisdom about taxation, public expenditure and the duty of the state in relation to the distribution of rewards, swinging much too far in the opposite direction…I put in a strong reservation against the view, gaining ground a little dangerously I think, that the supreme duty of statesmanship is to reduce taxation.”

Roy Jenkins (1920–2003) British politician, historian and writer

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/lords/1988/feb/24/opportunity-and-income-social-disparities in the House of Lords (24 February 1988)
1980s

Personality , Strong , People , Thinking

“We all travel the milky way together, trees and men; but it never occurred to me until this storm-day, while swinging in the wind, that trees are travelers, in the ordinary sense. They make many journeys, not very extensive ones, it is true; but our own little comes and goes are only little more than tree-wavings — many of them not so much.”

John Muir (1838–1914) Scottish-born American naturalist and author

" A Wind Storm in the Forests of the Yuba http://books.google.com/books?id=zj2gAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA55", Scribner's Monthly, volume XVII, number 1 (November 1878) pages 55-59 (at page 59); modified slightly and reprinted in The Mountains of California http://www.sierraclub.org/john_muir_exhibit/writings/the_mountains_of_california/ (1894), chapter 10: A Wind-Storm in the Forests
1890s, The Mountains of California (1894)

Tree , Sense , Way , Travel