Quotes about task (1421 quotes, page 8)

“But by far the greatest obstacle to the progress of science and to the undertaking of new tasks and provinces therein is found in this — that men despair and think things impossible.”

Francis Bacon book Novum Organum

Aphorism 92
Novum Organum (1620), Book I

Men , Thinking , Science , Despair

“Our task in conjunction with the Merchant Navies of the United Nations, and supported by the Allied Air Forces, is to carry the Allied Expeditionary Force to the Continent, to establish it there in a secure bridgehead and to build it up and maintain it at a rate which will outmatch that of the enemy. Let no one underestimate the magnitude of this task.”

Bertram Ramsay (1883–1945) Royal Navy admiral

Special Order of the Day http://heritagecalling.com/2014/06/04/70-years-on-the-remains-of-operation-neptune/, 31 May 1944 by Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsay KCB, KBE, MVO, Allied Naval Commander-in-Chief, Operation Neptune

Support

“I reproach myself for a gross error. But I would reproach myself more if I had persisted in an error after observations revealed it clearly to be that. I made a deal of money in the late 1940s on the bull side, ignoring Satchel Paige’s advice to Lot’s wife, “Never look back.” Rather I would advocate Samuelson’s Law: “Always look back. You may learn something from your residuals. Usually one’s forecasts are not so good as one remembers them; the difference may be instructive.” The dictum “If you must forecast, forecast often,” is neither a joke nor a confession of impotence. It is a recognition of the primacy of brute fact over pretty theory. That part of the future that cannot be related to the present’s past is precisely what science cannot hope to capture. Fortunately, there is plenty of work for science to do, plenty of scientific tasks not yet done.”

Paul A. Samuelson (1915–2009) American economist

February 1985, in William Breit and Roger W. Spencer (ed.) Lives of the laureates
1980s–1990s

Money , Law , Hope , Error

“Heaven says nothing, and the whole earth grows rich beneath its silent rule. Men, too, are touched by heaven's virtue; yet, in their greater part, they are creatures of deceit. They are born, it seems, with an emptiness of soul, and must take their qualities wholly from things without. To be born thus empty into this modern age, this mixture of good and ill, and yet steer through life on an honest course to the splendors of success — this is a feat reserved for paragons of our kind, a task beyond the nature of the normal man.”

Ihara Saikaku (1642–1693) Japanese writer

Book I, ch. 1.
The Japanese Family Storehouse (1688)

Life , Men , Age , Soul

“I am very happy and thankful to be 'here' [Switzerland] and to remain. Here I can at least work a little on my good days, and be at peace among these simple, kindly people. In this solitude I have fought my way through to the possibility of continuing to live, even suffering so much. My time for circuses, 'cocottes' and company is over [referring to his wild 'Brücke'-years in Berlin]. I made what I could out of it, and I do not think it had been done in that way before. Otherwise there is nothing to link me with those 'événements'. During my 7 years in Berlin I let the whole essence of that kind of thing seep into me so thoroughly that I now know it back to front, and can leave it. Now I have other tasks, and they lie here… I cannot go down again into the throng. I am more than ever afraid of crowds. But more still, my work here is only at the beginning of its possibilities.”

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880–1938) German painter, sculptor, engraver and printmaker

Quote in a letter to architect Henry van de Velde, from Frauenkirch, 5 July 1919; as cited in Letters of the great artists – from Blake to Pollock, Richard Friedenthal, Thames and Hudson, London, 1963, pp. 224-225
1916 - 1919

People , Lie , Peace , Way

“But when it comes to a relaxing of the religious ban in the loosest sense of the word, in which the justification of restricted women from certain religious responsibilities and actions, were quite fitting and earn the highest respect – however, today, where woman is clearly present in public life and accomplishes practical tasks in cooperation with men, contact has become casual.”

Regina Jonas (1902–1944) rabbi

Can a Woman Be a Rabbi According to Halachic Sources?

Life , Women , Men , Sense

“The task facing ARAs is daunting: we must empty the cages, not make them larger.”

Tom Regan book Empty Cages

Source: Empty Cages (2004), Ch. 4

“Rocking on a lazy billow
With roaming eyes,
Cushioned on a dreamy pillow,
Thou art now wise.
Wake the power within thee slumbering,
Trim the plot that's in thy keeping,
Thou wilt bless the task when reaping
Sweet labour's prize.”

John Stuart Blackie (1809–1895) Scottish scholar and man of letters

Address to the Edinburgh Students. Quoted by Lord Iddlesleigh, Desultory Reading; reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 756.

Art

“The big banks are the "state apparatus" which we need to bring about socialism, and which we take ready-made from capitalism' our task here is merely to lop off what capitalistically mutilates this excellent apparatus, to make it even bigger, even more democratic, even more comprehensive. Quantity will be transformed into quality. A single State Bank, the biggest of the big, with branches in every rural district, in every factory, will constitute as much as nine-tenths of the socialist apparatus.”

Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) Russian politician, led the October Revolution

"Can the Bolsheviks Retain State Power?", (1917), The Lenin Anthology
1910s

“The dissatisfaction with life and the world, felt more or less in the present state of society and intellect by every discerning and highly conscientious mind, gave in his case a rather melancholy tinge to the character, very natural to those whose passive moral susceptibilities are more than proportioned to their active energies. For it must be said, that the strength of will of which his manner seemed to give such strong assurance, expended itself principally in manner. With great zeal for human improvement, a strong sense of duty and capacities and acquirements the extent of which is proved by the writings he has left, he hardly ever completed any intellectual task of magnitude. He had so high a standard of what ought to be done, so exaggerated a sense of deficiencies in his own performances, and was so unable to content himself with the amount of elaboration sufficient for the occasion and the purpose, that he not only spoilt much of his work for ordinary use by over-labouring it, but spent so much time and exertion in superfluous study and thought, that when his task ought to have been completed, he had generally worked himself into an illness, without having half finished what he undertook. From this mental infirmity (of which he is not the sole example among the accomplished and able men whom I have known), combined with liability to frequent attacks of disabling though not dangerous ill-health, he accomplished, through life, little in comparison with what he seemed capable of;”

John Stuart Mill book Autobiography

Source: https://archive.org/details/autobiography01mill/page/74/mode/1up pp. 74-75

Men , Nature , Study , Health

“I looked down the long lines of waving black plumes and stern faces beneath them, and sighed to think that within one short hour most, if not all, of those magnificent veteran warriors, not a man of whom was under forty years of age, would be laid dead or dying in the dust. It could not be otherwise; they were being condemned, with that wise recklessness of human life which marks the great general, and often saves his forces and attains his ends, to certain slaughter, in order to give their cause and the remainder of the army a chance of success. They were foredoomed to die, and they knew the truth. It was to be their task to engage regiment after regiment of Twala’s army on the narrow strip of green beneath us, till they were exterminated or till the wings found a favourable opportunity for their onslaught. And yet they never hesitated, nor could I detect a sign of fear upon the face of a single warrior. There they were—going to certain death, about to quit the blessed light of day for ever, and yet able to contemplate their doom without a tremor. Even at that moment I could not help contrasting their state of mind with my own, which was far from comfortable, and breathing a sigh of envy and admiration. Never before had I seen such an absolute devotion to the idea of duty, and such a complete indifference to its bitter fruits.”

H. Rider Haggard book King Solomon's Mines

Source: King Solomon's Mines (1885), Chapter 14, "The Last Stand of the Greys"

Life , Death , Truth , Age

“Let us look back on the events which fill up the ten years of the Sullan restoration. No one of the movements, external or internal, which occurred during this period - neither the insurrection of Lepidus, nor the enterprises of the Spanish emigrants, nor the wars in Thrace and Macedonia and in Asia Minor, nor the risings of the pirates and the slaves - constituted of itself a mighty danger necessarily affecting the vital sinews of the nation; and yet the state had in all these struggles well-night fought for its very existence. The reason was that the tasks were left everywhere unperformed, so long as they might still have been performed with ease; the neglect of the simplest precautionary measures produced the most dreadful mischiefs and misfortunes, and transformed dependent classes and impotent kings into antagonists on a footing of equality. The democracy and the servile insurrection were doubtless subdued; but such as the victories were, the victor was neither inwardly elevated nor outwardly strengthened by them. It was no credit to Rome, that the two most celebrated generals of the government party had during a struggle of eight years marked by more defeats than victories failed to master the insurgent chief Sertorius and his Spanish guerrillas, and that it was only the dagger of his friends that decided the Sertorian war in favour[sic] of the legitimate government. As to the slaves, it was far less an honour[sic] to have confronted them in equal strive for years. Little more than a century had elapsed since the Hannibalic war; it must have brought a blush to the cheek of the honourable[sic] Roman, when he reflected on the fearfully rapid decline of the nation since that great age. Then the (the Roman) Italian slaves stood like a wall against the veterans of Hannibal; now the Italian militia were scattered like chaff before the bludgeons of their runaway serfs. Then every plain captain acted in case of need as general, and fought often without success, but always with honour, not it was difficult to find among all the officers of rank a leader of even ordinary efficiency. Then the government preferred to take the last farmer from the plough rather than forgo the acquisition of Spain and Greece; now they were on the eve of again abandoning both regions long since acquired, merely that they might be able to defend themselves against the insurgent slaves at home. Spartacus too as well as Hannibal had traversed Italy with an army from the Po to the Sicilian Straights, beaten both consuls, and threatened Rome with a blockade; the enterprise which had needed the greatest general of antiquity to conduct it against the Rome of former days could be undertaken against the Rome of the present by a daring captain of banditti. Was there any wonder that no fresh life sprang out of such victories over insurgents and robber-chiefs?”

Theodor Mommsen (1817–1903) German classical scholar, historian, jurist, journalist, politician, archaeologist and writer

Vol. 4, Pt. 1, Chapter 2. "Rule of the Sullan Restoration"
The Government of the Restoration as a Whole
The History of Rome - Volume 4: Part 1

Life , War , Age , Democracy

“Our task is not the training of interpreters, nor the indulgence of exotic tastes, nor the revelation of some arcane Truth which the Orient possesses but we do not, nor the mastery of a sterile Asiatic scholasticism, but literature. If universities are not to teach language by means of literature—by means of books which are intrinsically worth-while reading, I for one do not want to be a university teacher.”

David Hawkes (sinologist) (1923–2009) British sinologist

Source: Inaugural Lecture, Oxford, 1961, p. 27

Truth , Books , Literature , Teachers

“I'm optimistic. I see no longer people accepting fuzzy thinking in the world. The change is not that people aren't still saying under-informed things. The change is that if you're in power and you say something under-informed, there are people out there with a voice who will take you to task for having done so.”

Neil deGrasse Tyson (1958) American astrophysicist and science communicator

A Conversation about Communicating Science, © 2007-2011 The Science Network, January 20, 2011 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ulkX-DA9BM,
2010s

People , World , Thinking , Change

“WE have placed our psychotechnical interest at the service of economic tasks… The purpose before us was to find for every economic occupation the best-fitted personality, both in the interest of economic success and in the interest of personal development.”

Hugo Munsterberg (1863–1916) German-American psychologist, philosopher and agitator

Source: Psychology and Industrial Efficiency (1913), p. 141

Success , Personality

“An old oriental saying tells us, ‘when our willpower is concentrated upon a stone, it can pass through it. When our willpower is focused and in harmony with the universe, it can command the wind, rain and thunder’. But from where does our willpower come? Those who understand and answer this question are those who accomplish important tasks. When we coordinate mind and body by stilling the waves of our mind to imperceptible, infinitely decreasing ripples, we can send forth our great willpower that moves the universe.”

Koichi Tohei (1920–2011) Japanese aikidoka

19 : Willpower
Ki Sayings (2003)

Understanding , Question , Universe

“I see the tasks of social sciences to discover what kinds of order actually do exist in the whole range of the behavior of human beings; what kind of functional relationships between different parts of culture exist in space and over time, and what functionally more useful kinds of order can be created.”

Robert Staughton Lynd (1892–1970) American sociologist

R.S. Lynd (1939) Knowledge of What? p. 125-6, cited in Karl William Kapp (1976), The nature and significance of institutional economics http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-6435.1976.tb01971.x/abstract. in: Kyklos, Vol 29/2, Jan 1976, p. 209

Behavior , Science , Time , Parting

“Teachers are expected to reach unattainable goals with inadequate tools. The miracle is that at times they accomplish this impossible task.”

Haim Ginott (1922–1973) psychologist

Ginott, H. G. (1972). Teacher and child. New York: Macmillan.

Teachers , Time

“So great the Task to raise the Roman State!”

John Ogilby (1600–1676) Scottish academic

The Works of Publius Virgilius Maro (2nd ed. 1654), Virgil's Æneis

“For those who stubbornly seek freedom around the world, there can be no more urgent task than to come to understand the mechanisms and practices of indoctrination. These are easy to perceive in the totalitarian societies, much less so in the propaganda system to which we are subjected and in which all too often we serve as unwilling or unwitting instruments.”

Noam Chomsky (1928) american linguist, philosopher and activist

"Propaganda, American-style" http://www.zpub.com/un/chomsky.html in Propaganda Review, 1987.
Quotes 1960s-1980s, 1980s

World , Understanding , Freedom

“The purpose of this closed session in the Senate chamber is to finally give the truth to at least the members of the Senate—to finally call to task the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee.”

Richard Durbin (1944) U.S. senior senator from Illinois

Truth , Intelligence

“Mr. Hoover's presidency was drawing to a close and Mr. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, one of the most dynamic grave diggers of the Western world, succeeded on a platform not dissimilar to that of his predecessor. Though Mr. Roosevelt belonged to the Democratic party, his social background indisposed him for a time to leftist policies, both national and international. But his wife (from another branch of the Roosevelt family) was more in tune with leftist ideas, undoubtedly the aftereffect of higher feminine education in the United States. Whereas Mr. Roosevelt played his politics by ear, his wife, who wielded considerable influence, was ideologically far more consistent. Mr. Roosevelt, moreover, had but the scantiest education for his task; he hardly knew Europe, and his knowledge of foreign languages was as modest as his acquaintance with the mentality of other nations. Largely ignorant himself, and profoundly anti-intellectual, he had no way of judging, evaluating, and coordinating expert opinion. Even worse, perhaps, his sense of objective truth was gravely impaired. His handicap was by no means primarily of a physical nature.”

Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn (1909–1999) Austrian noble and political theorist

Source: Leftism Revisited (1990), pp. 230-231

Truth , World , Education , Family

“When you (President Ratu Sir Penaia Ganilau) called me at Lomaloma in December 1987 and asked me to form an Interim Government to prepare the country for a return to parliamentary rule, I knew the task at hand would be onerous. Fiji had experienced the ordeal of two military coups. Society was fractured, the economy was tottering and the country had been ostracised by some of its oldest friends and allies. There was no Parliament and no properly functioning political system. Even institutions of State, such as the judiciary, were seriously weakened, to the extent that the citizenry justifiably feared a breakdown in law and order. The business community was hit by a slump in sales and confidence, leading to reduced earnings and loss of jobs.”

Kamisese Mara (1920–2004) President of Fiji

(On the eve of final his departure from the Prime Ministerial office). (Report to President Ganilau, 15 May 1992).

Fear , Law , Confidence , Communication

“Workin' in the fillin' station - too many tasks.
Wipe the windows - check the tires - check the oil - dollar gas!
Too much monkey business. Too much monkey business.
Don't want your botheration, get away, leave me!
Too much monkey business for me!”

Chuck Berry (1926–2017) American rock-and-roll musician

"Too Much Monkey Business" (1956)
Song lyrics

Business

“Interaction is the mode of life of living organisms. Each must feed on its environment, ingesting chemicals or other organisms. This is something more than "interaction", it is activity directed towards the environment. Since the organism must be selective in what it ingests, it needs to discriminate among the entities in its environment. From very primitive forms of discrimination, the sensory mechanisms of organisms have evolved into the senses of man, interpreted by an internal cognitive apparatus, memories of past experiences, and an ability to take rational decisions. By "rational" I mean activity that achieves intended results because it is based on a reliable understanding of the nature of the environment. In interacting with each other to carry out tasks jointly, men have further developed language, leading to a shared understanding of the environment. This shared understanding is knowledge.”

Brian Campbell Vickery (1918–2009) British information theorist

Brian Vickery (2009) " The development of knowledge http://web.archive.org/web/20100125043520/http://www.lucis.me.uk/devtknow.htm" on lucis.me.uk, 2009.

Life , Men , Understanding , Nature

“The old form of trade union, which was born in the nineteenth century and aimed primarily at negotiating wages for a specific trase is no longer sufficient. First of all, as we have been argueing, the old trade unions are not able to represent the unemployed, the poor, or even the mobile and flexible post-Fordist workers with short term contracts, all of whom participate actively in social production and increase social wealth. Second, the old unions are divided according to the various products and tasks defined in the heyday of industrial production - a miners' union, a pipefitters' union, a machinists' union and so forth. Today, insofar as the conditions and the relations of labor are becoming common, these traditional divisions (or even newly defined divisions) no longer make sense and serve only as an obstacle. Finally the old unions have become purely economic, not political, organization.”

Antonio Negri book Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

136
Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

Sense , Wealth

“My etchings have.... the mistake of being processed as images and to have at the same time the meaning of epigrams. It is the union of pure painting with pure graphics... From now onwards my task will be the division of art and graphics, and the full development of both fields. The pure art has already turned to impressionism and the graphics is going to do it.”

Paul Klee (1879–1940) German Swiss painter

Quote in a letter to his wife, 12 June, 1906; as cited in Paul Klee. Das Frühwerk 1883-1922, p. 50.
1903 - 1910

Art , Time , Painting

“To the gardener who goes about his task with the right spirit must every plant appear as the most wonderful of laboratories in which miracles of transformation, outmatching the utmost feats of the most skillful conjurer, are being performed every hour.”

Luther Burbank (1849–1926) American botanist, horticulturist and pioneer in agricultural science

p, 125
How Plants are Trained to Work for Man (1921) Vol. 5 Gardening

Appearance

“An evolving discipline–whether it be history or economics or astrophysics or immunology–is ever dynamically changing. Two steps forward and X steps back, so to speak. Periodically, the scholarly group registers more or less self-confidence, self-esteem, and complacency. We careerists are happiest when recent past achievements have seemed to be successful, but when still there are completable tasks dimly visible ahead.”

Paul A. Samuelson (1915–2009) American economist

"Foreword: Eavesdropping on the Future?" in New Frontiers in Economics (2004)
New millennium

Confidence , History , Change , Success

“To State Department employees: "Yours is not an easy task nor one which is much appreciated. You don't ask much of your fellow citizens, and if any of you are so inexperienced that you ever do, you will receive very little. Certainly not much in the form of material recompense; certainly not much in the form of appreciation for your work, because you are dealing with matters which, though they affect life of every citizen of this country intimately, do it in ways which it is not easy for every citizen to understand. And so you are dealing in a field which I called the other day a field of 'alien knowledge,' which seems strange to many of your fellow citizens … We have a tradition in this country of skepticism about government, of looking at it very carefully, of seeing whether our public servants can take it. That isn't always comfortable, but, on the whole, it is good. Any time when there are governments in the world which are crushing the liberties of their citizens, it is good that in this great country people look with some skepticism upon government as such. That is one of our traditions … "”

Dean Acheson book Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department

Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department (1969), Principles

Life , People , World , Way

“The supreme task before the people of the United States today is the Americanizing and, above all, the Christianizing of the great cities of the country. …It calls for consecrated leadership and prayer of the intensest sort.”

Kirby Page (1890–1957) American clergyman

"The Disciples of Christ and the City" World Call 1 (July, 1919)

People , Country

“In the course of history … new books have been written that have won their place in the list. Books once thought entitled to belong to it have been superseded; and this process of change will continue as long as men can think and write. It is the task of every generation to reassess the tradition in which it lives, to discard what it cannot use, and to bring into context with the distant and intermediate past the most recent contributions to the Great Conversation. … the West needs to recapture and reemphasize and bring to bear upon its present problems the wisdom that lies in the works of its greatest thinkers and in the discussion that they have carried on.”

Robert Maynard Hutchins (1899–1977) philosopher and university president

Great Books: The Foundation of a Liberal Education (1954)

Wisdom , Men , Books , History

“The combination of low culture and high technology is one of the most fascinating social features of the video game phenomenon. Computers were invented as super drones to do tasks no human in her or his right mind (much less left brain) would have the patience, or the perseverance, to manage. […] Now our robot drones, the ones designed to take all the boring jobs, become the instrument for libidinal extravaganzas devoid of any socially productive component. Video games are computers neutered of purpose, liberated from functionality. The idea is intoxicating; like playing with the help on their night off.”

Charles Bernstein (1950) American writer

"Play It Again, Pac-Man" http://pmc.iath.virginia.edu/text-only/issue.991/pop-cult.991, Postmodern Culture, vol. 2 no. 1 (September 1991)

Game , Idea , Help , Patience

“The fact of the modern national States or empires not having originated organically does not prevent their being organs of that great entity which we call civilised humanity, and which is much too extensive to be included in any single State. And, indeed, these organs are at present necessary and of great importance for human development. On this point Socialists can scarcely differ now. And it is not even to be regretted, from the Socialist point of view, that they are not characterised purely by their common descent. The purely ethnological national principle is reactionary in its results. Whatever else one may think about the race-problem, it is certain that the thought of a national division of mankind according to race is anything rather than a human ideal. The national quality is developing on the contrary more and more into a sociological function. But understood as such it is a progressive principle, and in this sense Socialism can and must be national. This is no contradiction of the cosmopolitan consciousness, but only its necessary completion, The world-citizenship, this glorious attainment of civilisation, would, if the relationship to national tasks and rational duties were missing, become a flabby characterless parasitism. Even when we sing "Ubi bene, ibi patria," we still acknowledge a "patria," and, therefore, in accordance with the motto, "No rights without duties"; also duties towards her.”

Eduard Bernstein (1850–1932) German politician

Bernstein, Eduard. "Patriotism, Militarism and Social-Democracy." (Originally published as: "Militarism." Social Democrat. Vol.11 no.7, 15 July 1907, pp.413-419.) http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/bernstein/works/1907/07/patriotism.htm

World , Problem , Thinking , Sense

“Him here he found preparing for the field
His bow, his breast-plate, and his glittering shield:
Whilst beauteous Helen 'mongst her maids in state
Their several works and tasks disposing sate.”

John Ogilby (1600–1676) Scottish academic

Book IV
Homer His Iliads Translated (1660)

“The same ‘ practical’ viewpoint is dominant in Marx’ s conception of the cognitive functions of the mind and its role in the historical process; ‘ practical’ is always regarded as implying ‘ social’, and ‘ social life is practical by its very essence’. So is the task of philosophy as defined in the eleventh Thesis, in what are perhaps Marx’ s most-quoted words: ‘ The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.’ It would be a caricature of Marx’ s thought to read this as meaning that it was not important to observe or analyse society and that only direct revolutionary action mattered. The whole context shows that it is a formula expressing in a nutshell the viewpoint of ‘ practical philosophy’ as opposed to the ‘ contemplative’ attitude of Hegel or Feuerbach – the viewpoint which Hess, and through him Cieszkowski, suggested to Marx and which became the philosophical nucleus of Marxism. To understand the world does not mean considering it from outside, judging it morally or explaining it scientifically; it means society understanding itself, an act in which the subject changes the object by the very fact of understanding it.”

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

Source: Main Currents Of Marxism (1978), Three Volume edition, Volume I, The Founders, pp. 143-4

Life , World , Way , Quotes

“Faith in a distant, ephemeral God, solver of problems by house call, has also been left behind. Increasingly I come to understand my religion and priesthood as a committment to the society in which I live. A committment to men and women who struggle for a new social order where slavery has no place, that prepares people to fully realize themselves, in which injustice and exploitation cease to be our daily bread. I understand Jesus Christ as very related to this matter. I understand Jesus Christ as each one of my brothers and sisters. I understand that in uniting with them in this struggle, perhaps I will be capable of overcoming the small and large personal needs that are only relevant because they impede me from fully giving myself to this task.”

Antonio Llidó (1936–1974) Spanish priest

Letter to a friend on March 9, 1971 (from the book Antonio Llidó: Epistolario de un compromiso,Tàndem Edicons,España (1999) ISBN 84-8131-227-4.

Women , Men , God , People

“conventional terms such as service work, intellectual labor, and cognitive labor all refer to aspects of immaterial labor, but none of them captures its generality. As an initial approach, one can concieve immaterial labor in two principle forms. The first for refers to labor, that is primarily intellectual or linguistic such as problem solving, symbolic and analytical tasks, and linguistic expressions. This kind of immaterial labor produces ideas, symbols, codes, texts, linguistic figures, images and other such products. We call the other principle form of immaterial labor "affective labor."”

Antonio Negri book Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

Affective labor, then, is labor that produces or manipulates affects such as a feeling of ease, well-being, satisfaction, excitement, or passion.
108
Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

Feeling , Idea , Problem , Passion

“The more sectors in which the organization subject to rationality norms is constrained; the more power the organization will seek over remaining sectors of its task environment… many constraints and unable to achieve power in other sectors of its task environment will seek to enlarge the task environment.”

James D. Thompson (1920–1973) American sociologist

Source: Organizations in Action, 1967, p. 36-37; As cited in: Christopher A. Simon (2001). To Run a School: Administrative Organization and Learning, p. 40

“The whole task of psychology can therefore be summed up in these two problems : (1) What are the elements of consciousness? (2) What combinations do these elements undergo and what laws govern these combinations?”

Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920) German physician, physiologist, philosopher and professor

Source: An Introduction to Psychology (1912), p. 44; Cited in: Stephen Kosslyn. Image and Mind. 1980, p. 438

Law , Problem

“Every time the cycle is stopped, some 200 tons of coal are lost. So close is the task interdependence that the system becomes vulnerable from its need for 100 percent performance at each step.”

Eric Trist (1909–1993) British scientist

Source: "Some Social and Psychological Consequences of the Long Wall Method of Coal-Getting", 1951, p. 18

Time

“But you were in the restaurant business before?? Marco-Pierre White or something…. The Titanic – well here's another bloody disaster you're in now! (To Syed before Alexa is fired after the infamous catering task when the Invicta team lose because they bought an excessive number of chickens to make pizzas).”

Alan Sugar (1947) British business magnate, media personality, and political advisor

The Apprentice, Series 2

Business

“So long as we love life for itself, we seldom dread the losing it. When we desire life for the attainment of an object, we recognize the frailty of its texture. But, side by side with this sense of insecurity, there is a vital faith in our invulnerability to the shaft of death while engaged in any task that seems assigned by Providence as our proper thing to do, and which the world would have cause to mourn for should we leave it unaccomplished.”

Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) American novelist and short story writer (1804 – 1879)

"The Artist of the Beautiful" (1844)

Love , Life , Death , World

“In our online descriptions and program literature we describe the cloisters as a public sphere for networked interaction, the gathering place for students, professors, and librarians engaged in planning, evaluating, or reviewing the efforts of research and study utilizing the whole range of technologies of literacy. We go further and describe the task of the cloisters as to "channel flows of research, learning and teaching between the increasingly networked world of the library and the intimacy and engagement of our classrooms and other campus spaces". There we continue to explore the "collectible object", which I tentatively described in Othermindedness in terms of maintaining an archive of "the successive choices, the errors and losses, of our own human community" and suggesting that what constitutes the collectible object is the value which suffuses our choices. It seemed to me then that electronic media are especially suited to tracking such "changing change".
I think it still seems so to me now but I do fear we have lost track of the beauty and nimbleness of new media in representing and preserving the meaning-making quotidian, the ordinary mindfulness which makes human life possible and valuable.
It is interesting, I think, that recounting and rehearsing this notion leaves this interview layered and speckled with (self) quotations, documentations, implicit genealogies, images, and traditions of continuity, change, and difference. Perhaps the most quoted line of afternoon over the years has been the sentence "There is no simple way to say this."”

Michael Joyce (1945) American academic and writer

The same is true of any attempt to describe the way in which the collectible object participates in (I use this word as a felicitous shorthand for the complex of ideas involved in what I called "representing and preserving the meaning-making quotidian" above) the library as living archive.
An interview with Michael Joyce and review of Liam’s Going at Trace Online Writing Centre Archive (2 December 2002) http://tracearchive.ntu.ac.uk/review/index.cfm?article=33

Life , World , Fear , Beauty

“Men can usefully undertake and properly accomplish a common task only when one of them continually directs the activities of all towards the same end. This is self-evident when actions which must follow a rhythm are involved. It would be useless for a gang of men laying rails or a rowing-crew to exert themselves if a foreman or coxswain did not control their movements. Every non-directed collective action turns rapidly into confusion and disorder. All who have fought in a battle know how necessary it is that someone should be in command; and what is true of the army is true of the dockyard, the factory, the newspaper office, the whole country. Whenever men are required to act together, there must be a chief.”

André Maurois (1885–1967) French writer

Un Art de Vivre (The Art of Living) (1939), The Art of Leadership

Men , Country

“I would like to congratulate everybody with the commencement of the "Combined Endeavour 2007" military exercises. This exercise is running simultaneously in Armenia and Germany. We have about 130 participants from 6 countries, this being evidence of importance and actuality of the event. It is notable that the cooperation between the Ministry of Defence of Armenia and the US European Command is developing and implementing a number of projects, and the vivid evidence of this cooperation is this military exercise. This is not the first military exercise in Armenia. Since 2003, we have hosted a number of military exercises organized with the NATO/PfP and the US European Command. It is important that the running of military exercises in Armenia is growing into a good tradition. Especially since, we already have an arrangement of hosting "Cooperative Longbow/Lancer" military exercises in Armenia for 2008. I would also like to mention with appreciation that the planning conference and working meetings before the military exercise would be held in a constructive atmosphere. We have effectively managed to run all preparation activities with joint efforts of the US European Command, the MOD of Armenia and other partners. The communication field is that chain which has fundamental importance for realizing multinational activities. The effectiveness and successes of our cooperation is related to that. This military exercise not only supports the testing of capabilities of participating units and experts, but also an opportunity for developing effective mechanisms for ensuring an interoperability and carrying out the tasks jointly. It is not accidental that Armenia has always expressed its readiness to host such kinds of events, and all participants have been trying to create appropriate conditions for their work. Taking this opportunity, one more time, I would like to thank all participants for their presence here and the US European command for their assistance in organizational matters. I am sure that due to our joint activities, the military exercise would be on a high professional and organizational level. I also hope that while you are in Armenia, you have a chance to make yourselves familiar with our history, culture and will have wonderful impressions. I am sure that on the 10th of May, after the completion of the military exercise, we will ascertain one more time that another multinational military exercise was held with success and fulfilled its tasks. I would like to wish all participants fruitful work and further success. I allow the commencement of the opening of the "Combined Endeavour 2007" military exercise.”

Mikael Harutyunyan (1946) Armenian general

Quoted in 2007 article. [April 27, 2007]

Hope , Exercises , History , Communication

“The restoration of the confidence of a great nation is a massive task. We do not shrink from it. It will not be given to this generation of our countrymen to create a great Empire. But it is given to us to demand an end to decline and to make a stand against what Churchill described as the “long dismal drawling tides of drift and surrender, of wrong measurements and feeble impulses”. Though less powerful than once we were, we have friends in every quarter of the globe, who will rejoice at our recovery, welcome the revival of our influence, and benefit from the message and from the example of our renewal.”

Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013) British stateswoman and politician

Speech to the Conservative Political Centre Summer School ("The Renewal of Britain") (6 July 1979) http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/104107
First term as Prime Minister

Confidence

“I am not much an advocate for travelling, and I observe that men run away to other countries because they are not good in their own, and run back to their own because they pass for nothing in the new places. For the most part, only the light characters travel. Who are you that have no task to keep you at home? I have been quoted as saying captious things about travel; but I mean to do justice. …. He that does not fill a place at home, cannot abroad. He only goes there to hide his insignificance in a larger crowd. You do not think you will find anything there which you have not seen at home? The stuff of all countries is just the same. Do you suppose there is any country where they do not scald milk-pans, and swaddle the infants, and burn the brushwood, and broil the fish? What is true anywhere is true everywhere. And let him go where he will, he can only find so much beauty or worth as he carries.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson book The Conduct of Life

The Conduct of Life, Chapter 4, “Culture,” p. 145

Men , Justice , Beauty , Travel

“If solutions could be offered within the existing system, there would be no need to design. Thus designers have to transcend the existing system. Their task is to create a different system or devise a new one. That is why designers say they can truly define the problem only in light of the solution. The solution informs them as to what the real problem is.”

Béla H. Bánáthy (1919–2003) Hungarian linguist and systems scientist

Source: Systems Design of Education (1991), p. 20

Problem , Light

“I know we have still done very little, and that the main tasks still lie ahead of us. I would say that we have just completed a year of preparation in which the conditions for a new environment have been created.”

Václav Havel (1936–2011) playwright, essayist, poet, dissident and 1st President of the Czech Republic

New Year's Address to the Nation (1991)

Lie

“[I]t is not true–no, it is not true–that we have uprooted the Arabs. We have not uprooted them; we have shown them the way to a better life, and we shall continue to do this until they understand that we have a common interest in reviving the Middle East, and that this task can be achieved only on the basis of a strong Jewish Palestine.”

Chaim Weizmann (1874–1952) Zionist leader, 1st president of Israel

[Rouhana, Nadim N., Huneidi, Sahar S., Israel and its Palestinian Citizens: Ethnic Privileges in the Jewish State, Zionist Theories of Peace in the Pre-state Era Legacies of Dissimulation and Israel’s Arab Minority, Lustick, Ian S., Cambridge University Press, 2016, 9781107045316, 10.1017/cbo9781107045316, 53, https://www.sas.upenn.edu/polisci/sites/www.sas.upenn.edu.polisci/files/Lustick_Zionist%20theories%20of%20peace%20in%20Pre-state%20Era.pdf], Weizmann’s address to the 19th Zionist Congress in Lucerne,Switzerland, August 27, 1935, in ibid.:81

Life , Way , Understanding , Strong

“There is a deep irony in the fact that the more nearly an ideal is brought to realization, the more acutely do the saints and heroes who have committed themselves to the task, experience a vehement sense of failure in not having perfected their ideal in its totality; and inversely, the more perfunctory is the pursuit of an ideal, the less are people troubled by discrepancies between practice and principle.”

William H. McNeill (1917–2016) Canadian historian

Discrepancies among the Social Sciences (1981)

People , Failure , Sense , Perfection

“It has been a long time since philosophers have read men's souls. It is not their task, we are told. Perhaps. But we must not be surprised if they no longer matter much to us.”

Emil M. Cioran book The Trouble With Being Born

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

Men , Soul , Time , Reading

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

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

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

Exercises , Idea , Nature , Teachers

“Systemicity is imposed as a set of rules binding the parts among themselves. But these rules do not constrain the parts to act in one way and one way only; they merely prescribe that certain types of functions are carried out in certain sequences. The parts have options; as long as a sufficient number of sufficiently qualified units carry out the prescribed tasks, the requirements of systemic determination are met.”

Ervin László (1932) Hungarian musician and philosopher

Source: The systems view of the world (1996), p. 85-86 as cited in: Sherryl Stalinski (2005, p. 23).

Way , Parting

“Above all he did not content himself with hurling invectives for emotional release and then to retire into smug, passive satisfaction. History had taught him it is not enough for people to be angry—the supreme task is to organize and unite people so that their anger becomes a transforming force.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

"Honoring Dr. DuBois", speech at International Cultural Evening at Carnegie Hall, 23 February 1968, published in Freedomways: A Quarterly Review of the Negro Freedom Movement, compiled in Esther Cooper Jackson (ed.), Freedomways Reader: Prophets In Their Own Country, p. 36 https://books.google.com/books?id=-oivNmSJOfAC&pg=PA36&dq=%22the+supreme+task+is+to+organize+and+unite%22
1960s

People , History , Anger

“If a person is unwilling to make a decisive resolution, if he wants to cheat God of the heart’s daring venture in which a person ventures way out and loses sight of all shrewdness and probability, indeed, takes leave of his senses or at least all his worldly mode of thinking, if instead of beginning with one step he almost craftily seeks to find out something, to have the infinite certainty changed into a finite certainty, then this discourse will not be able to benefit him. There is an upside-downness that wants to reap before it sows; there is a cowardliness that wants to have certainty before it begins. There is a hypersensitivity so copious in words that it continually shrinks from acting; but what would it avail a person if, double-minded and fork-tongued he wanted to dupe God, trap him in probability, but refused to understand the improbable, that one must lose everything in order to gain everything, and understand it so honestly that, in the most crucial moment, when his soul is already shuddering at the risk, he does not again leap to his own aid with the explanation that he has not yet fully made a resolution but merely wanted to feel his way. Therefore, all discussion of struggling with God in prayer, of the actual loss (since if pain of annihilation is not actually suffered, then the sufferer is not yet out upon the deep, and his scream is not the scream of danger but in the face of danger) and the figurative victory cannot have the purpose of persuading anyone or of converting the situation into a task for secular appraisal and changing God’s gift of grace to the venture into temporal small change for the timorous. It really would not help a person if the speaker, by his oratorical artistry, led him to jump into a half hour’s resolution, by the ardor of conviction started a fire in him so that he would blaze in a momentary good intention without being able to sustain a resolution or to nourish an intention as soon as the speaker stopped talking.”

Sören Kierkegaard book Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses

Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses, Hong, One Who Prays Aright Struggles In Prayer and is Victorious-In That God is Victorious p. 380-381
1840s, Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses

God , Pain , Way , Feeling

“To assume that one’s existential task is completed when the individual is brought into right relation with society, that is, when the individual has been socialized, is to absolutize society and confuse society with God.”

Merold Westphal (1940)

Source: Kierkegaard’s Critique of Reason and Society (1992), p. 35

God

“I busied myself to think of a story, — a story to rival those which had excited us to this task. One which would speak to the mysterious fears of our nature, and awaken thrilling horror—one to make the reader dread to look round, to curdle the blood, and quicken the beatings of the heart. If I did not accomplish these things, my ghost story would be unworthy of its name.”

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797–1851) English novelist, short story writer, dramatist, essayist, biographer, and travel writer

Introduction http://www.rc.umd.edu/editions/frankenstein/1831v1/intro.html to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein

Fear , Business , Nature , Thinking

“In my essay I refuted the Hayek-Robbins argument by showing how a market mechanism could be established in a socialist economy which would lead to the solution of the simultaneous equations by means of an empirical procedure of trial and error. […] Were I to rewrite my essay today my task would be much simpler. My answer to Hayek and Robbins would be: so what’s the trouble?
Let us put the simultaneous equations on an electronic computer and we shall obtain the solution in less than a second. The market process with its cumbersome tatonnements appears old-fashioned. Indeed, it may be considered as a computing device of the preelectronic age.”

Oskar R. Lange (1904–1965) Polish economist

"The computer and the market" (1967)

Age , Error , Fashion , Appearance

“There can be no doubt that the existence of public tortures and executions were connected with something quite other than this internal organization. Rusche and Kirchheimer are right to see it as the effect of a system of production in which labour power, and therefore the human body, has neither the utility nor the commercial value that are conferred on them in an economy of an industrial type. Moreover, this ‘contempt’ for the body is certainly related to a general attitude to death; and, in such an attitude, one can detect not only the values proper to Christianity, but a demographical, in a sense biological, situation: the ravages of disease and hunger, the periodic massacres of the epidemics, the formidable child mortality rate, the precariousness of the bio-economic balances – all this made death familiar and gave rise to rituals intended to integrate it, to make it acceptable and to give a meaning to its permanent aggression. But in analysing why the public executions survived for so long, one must also refer to the historical conjuncture; it must not be forgotten that the ordinance of 1670 that regulated criminal justice almost up to the Revolution had even increased in certain respects the rigour of the old edicts; Pussort, who, among the commissioners entrusted with the task of drawing up the documents, represented the intentions of the king, was responsible for this, despite the views of such magistrates as Lamoignon; the number of uprisings at the very height of the classical age, the rumbling close at hand of civil war, the king’s desire to assert his power at the expense of the parlements go a long way to explain the survival of so severe a penal system.”

Michel Foucault book Discipline and Punish

Source: Discipline and Punish (1977), pp. 51

Death , Hunger , War , Age

“I am not so much angry as trying to find my own voice in the world, to find enough courage to speak up in the first place, then to go forth and use it, which both are monumental tasks and require more confidence than you'd think.”

Margaret Cho (1968) American stand-up comedian

From Her Books, I Have Chosen To Stay And Fight, SPEAKING UP

World , Confidence , Courage , Thinking

“The aesthetic is the sine qua none for art: if a work is not aesthetic, it is not art by definition... We feel through the senses, and everyone knows that the content of art is feeling; it is the creation of an object for sensing that is the artist’s task; and it is the qualities of this object that constitute its felt content.”

Mark Rothko (1903–1970) American painter

Source: 1940's, Beyond the Aesthetics (1946), p. 38

Art , Feeling , Sense

“The new discovery that I have made in painting is the following. There are chords of colors, let's say a certain red and green, which move, shimmer when you look at them. Now if you're looking at a tree in a landscape, you can either look at the tree, or at the landscape, but not both, because of the stereoscopic effect. Now, when you are painting something three-dimensional, the chromatic sound which shimmers is the three-dimensional effect of colour, and when you paint a landscape, and the green foliage shimmers a little with the blue sky showing through it, that happens because the green is on a different plane from the sky in nature too. Finding the space-shaping energies of colour, instead of contenting ourselves with a dead chiaroascuro, is our finest task.”

August Macke (1887–1914) German painter of the expressionist group Der Blaue Reiter

in a letter to artist de:Hans Thuar, 1913, from Lake Thun in Switzerland; as quoted by de:Wolf-Dieter Dube, in Expressionism; Praeger Publishers, New York, 1973, p. 145

Color , Nature , Tree , Painting

“On the evening of December 8, therefor, after the Japanese had bombed the airfields and destroyed many of General MacArthur's planes, our submarines and motor torpedo boats, which were still in Philippine water, were left with the task of impeding the enemy's advance.”

Ernest King (1878–1956) United States Navy admiral, Chief of Naval Operations

From King's report on the Japanese attack on the Philippines, as quoted in Battle Stations! Your Navy In Action (1946) by Admirals of the U.S. Navy, p. 180

Water

“… you don't realize whether or not you completely understand a topic until you are tasked to explain it to someone else. … That really challenges your understanding of a topic.”

Steven Novella (1964) American neurologist, skepticist

SGU, Podcast #170, October 22nd, 2008 http://www.theskepticsguide.org/podcast/sgu/170
The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, Podcast, 2000s

Understanding

“We had our domestic problems which resulted from the war. The chief of these was the care and relief of the afflicted veterans and their dependents. This was a tremendous task, on which about $3,000,000,000 has already been expended. No doubt there have been cases where the unworthy have secured aid, while the worthy have gone unrelieved. Some mistakes were inevitable, but our people and our Government have at all times been especially solicitous to discharge most faithfully this prime obligation. What is now being done is related to you in detail by General Hines, of the Veterans' Bureau, a public official of demonstrated merit, so that I shall not dwell upon it. During the past year, under the distinguished and efficient leadership of Commander Drain, the Legion itself has undertaken to provide an endowment fund of $5,000,000 to minister to the charitable requirements of their comrades. The response to this appeal has been most generous and the results appear most promising. The Government can do much, but it can never supply the personal relationship that comes from the ministrations of a private charity of that kind.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

1920s, Toleration and Liberalism (1925)

War , People , Problem , Affliction

“An arrogant person considers himself perfect. This is the chief harm of arrogance. It interferes with a person’s main task in life—becoming a better person.”

Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) Russian writer

Source: Path of Life (1909), p. 110

Life , Personality , Perfection

“With every citizen watching for an opportunity to strike a blow for freedom, the force of Communism can be halted, smothered, and then eliminated. This is our task. Without our tolerance and help the Communist empire would never have become the second strongest power in the earth. Now we have the job of dismantling it.”

W. Cleon Skousen book The Naked Communist

The Naked Communist (1958)

Communication , Freedom , Help

“The task counts more than the one who does it.”

Lloyd Alexander The Chronicles of Prydain

Source: The Chronicles of Prydain (1964–1968), Book I: The Book of Three (1964), Chapter 2

“With our grandmother staying behind in Somalia, my mother had nobody with whom to share tasks and plans. She could do nothing on her own. She wasn't supposed to go out on the street without these new guardians of ours, our uncles, and neither were we. To phone them she had to scuttle down to the corner grocer, with my ten-year-old brother in tow acting as her protective male.”

Ayaan Hirsi Ali book Infidel

Source: Infidel (2007), Ch. 3

“Back in the mid-1700s, Samuel Johnson observed that there were two kinds of knowledge: that which you know, and that which you know where to get. It was a moment when cheap and abundant print coupled with reliable postal networks triggered an information explosion that dramatically changed the way people thought. […] Now the Internet is changing how we think again. Just as print took over the once-human task of knowing, cyberspace is assuming the task of knowing where to get what we seek. […] Now we revel in search, but most of what we search for isn't worth seeking, as the top search lists on Google, Yahoo and Bing make clear. […] The Internet has changed our thinking, but if it is to be a change for the better, we must add a third kind of knowledge to Johnson's list — the knowledge of what matters.”

Paul Saffo (1954) American writer

"A Third Kind of Knowledge" http://www.edge.org/q2010/q10_7.html#saffo, in The Edge Annual Question—2010: How Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think? http://www.edge.org/q2010/q10_index.html, January 2010

People , Way , Search , Knowledge

“The important task of all art is to destroy the static equilibrium by establishing a dynamic one. Non-figurative art demands an attempt of what is a consequence of this task, the destruction of particular form and the construction of a rhythm of mutual relations, of mutual forms, or free lines.... the law of the denaturalization of matter is of fundamental importance. In painting, the primary color that is as pure as possible realizes this abstraction of natural color.”

Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) Peintre Néerlandais

Quote in: 'Plastic Art and Pure Plastic Art', Piet Mondrian (1937); in 'Documents of modern Art' ed. Robert Motherwell for Wittenborn, Schulz, New York 1945
1930's

Law , Art , Color , Nature

“[A computer program for Task A qua an explanatory model and how a human cognizer actually carries out Task A are equivalent in the strong sense when it can be shown that]… the model and the organism are carrying out the same process.”

Zenon Pylyshyn (1937) Canadian philosopher

Source: Computation and cognition, 1984, p. xv; As cited in: Journal of Intelligent Systems, Volume 4. (1994), p. 313

Sense , Strong

“It may remain for us to learn … that our task is only beginning; and that there will never be given to us even the ghost of any help, save the help of unutterable unthinkable Time. We may have to learn that the infinite whirl of death and birth, out of which we cannot escape, is of our own creation, of our own seeking;—that the forces integrating worlds are the errors of the Past;—that the eternal sorrow is but the eternal hunger of insatiable desire;—and that the burnt-out suns are rekindled only by the inextinguishable passions of vanished lives.”

Lafcadio Hearn (1850–1904) writer

Source: Out of the East, pp. 156–7.

Death , Hunger , World , Error

“I apologize if I've interrupted some exceptionally demanding hippie task, like trying to remember where the glue is on the Zig-Zag paper, but it seems we have yet another problem, not unconnected with this fatality of yours for introducing disaster into every life you touch, however glancingly.”

Thomas Pynchon book Inherent Vice

Source: Inherent Vice (2009), p. 203

Life , Problem

“This year we must continue to improve the quality of American life. Let us fulfill and improve the great health and education programs of last year, extending special opportunities to those who risk their lives in our armed forces. I urge the House of Representatives to complete action on three programs already passed by the Senate—the Teacher Corps, rent assistance, and home rule for the District of Columbia. In some of our urban areas we must help rebuild entire sections and neighborhoods containing, in some cases, as many as 100,000 people. Working together, private enterprise and government must press forward with the task of providing homes and shops, parks and hospitals, and all the other necessary parts of a flourishing community where our people can come to live the good life. I will offer other proposals to stimulate and to reward planning for the growth of entire metropolitan areas. Of all the reckless devastations of our national heritage, none is really more shameful than the continued poisoning of our rivers and our air. We must undertake a cooperative effort to end pollution in several river basins, making additional funds available to help draw the plans and construct the plants that are necessary to make the waters of our entire river systems clean, and make them a source of pleasure and beauty for all of our people. To attack and to overcome growing crime and lawlessness, I think we must have a stepped-up program to help modernize and strengthen our local police forces. Our people have a right to feel secure in their homes and on their streets—and that right just must be secured. Nor can we fail to arrest the destruction of life and property on our highways.”

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

1960s, State of the Union Address (1966)

Life , People , Health , Pleasure

“Agreeable men are those who are interested in everything; men who accomplish things, who finish their tasks, are those who, during a given period of time, interest themselves in one thing only. In America these men are said to possess "single-track minds"' their tenacity and their obsession are sometimes boring, but they succeed, by repeated attacks, in demolishing the obstacles that hinder their progress.”

André Maurois (1885–1967) French writer

Un Art de Vivre (The Art of Living) (1939), The Art of Working

Men , Time

“The truth is that what really needs fixing is something only a few, like President Obama, are willing to speak about, perhaps because it is so daunting a task. Through the “My Brother’s Keeper” initiative, the President is addressing the disproportionate challenges faced by young men of color. For instance, data shows that the percentage of young men not working or not enrolled in school is nearly twice as high for blacks as it is for whites. This initiative, and others like it, is about doing the hard work to grow drug-resistant and violence-resistant kids, especially in communities of color, so they never become part of that officer’s life experience.”

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

2010s, Hard Truths: Law Enforcement (2015)

Life , Men , Truth , School

“We start with enthusiasm — out we go each of us to our task in all the brightness of sunrise, and hope beats along our pulses; we believe the world has no blanks except to cowards, and we find, at last, that, as far as we ourselves are concerned, it has no prizes; we sicken over the endless unprofitableness of labour most when we have most succeeded, and when the time comes for us to lay down our tools we cast them from us with the bitter aching sense, that it were better for us if it had been all a dream. We seem to know either too much or too little of ourselves — too much, for we feel that we are better than we can accomplish; too little, for, if we have done any good at all, it has heen as we were servants of a system too vast for us to comprehend. We get along through life happily between clouds and sunshine, forgetting ourselves in our employments or our amusements, and so long as we can lose our consciousness in activity we can struggle on to the end. But when the end comes, when the life is lived and done, and stands there face to face with us; or if the heart is weak, and the spell breaks too soon, as if the strange master-worker has no longer any work to offer us, and turns us off to idleness and to ourselves; in the silence then our hearts lift up their voices, and cry out they can find no rest here, no home. Neither pleasure, nor rank, nor money, nor success in life, as it is called, have satisfied, or can satisfy; and either earth has nothing at all which answers to our cravings, or else it is something different from all these, which we have missed finding — this peace which passes understanding — and from which in the heyday of hope we had turned away, as lacking the meretricious charm which then seemed most alluring.
I am not sermonizing of Religion, or of God, or of Heaven, at least not directly.”

James Anthony Froude book The Nemesis of Faith

Confessions Of A Sceptic
The Nemesis of Faith (1849)

Life , Money , God , Pleasure

“It is a difficult task, O citizens, to make speeches to the belly, which has no ears.”

Plutarch (46–127) ancient Greek historian and philosopher

Life of Marcus Cato
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

“Today our approaches to children are fragmented and partial. Those who care for well children know little of children who are sick. The deep knowledge that comes from the intensive attempt to cure is separated from the knowledge of those whose main task is to teach.”

Margaret Mead (1901–1978) American anthropologist

Source: 1960s, Continuities in Cultural Evolution (1964), p. 321

Children , Knowledge

“If, therefore, our personal religious life is likely to be sapped by our devotion to social work, it would be a calamity second to none. But is it really likely that this will happen? The great aim underlying to whole social movement is the creation of a free, just, and brotherly social order. This is the greatest moral task conceivable. Its accomplishment is the manifest will of God for this generation. Every Christian motive is calling us to do it. If it is left undone, millions of lives will be condemned to a deepening moral degradation and to spiritual starvation. Does it look probable that we will lose our contact with God if we plunge too deeply into this work? Does it stand to reason that we shall go astray from Jesus Christ if we engage in the unequal conflict with organized wrong? What kind of ‘spirituality’ is it which is likely to get hurt by being put to work for justice and our fellow-men?”

Walter Rauschenbusch (1861–1918) United States Baptist theologian

Source: Christianizing the Social Order (1912), p. 104

Life , Men , God , Justice

“When superstition is allowed to perform the task of old age in dulling the human temperament, we can say goodbye to all excellence in poetry, in painting, and in music.”

Denis Diderot (1713–1784) French Enlightenment philosopher and encyclopædist

Source: Pensées Philosophiques (1746), Ch. 3, as quoted in Selected Writings (1966) edited by Lester G. Crocker

Goodbye , Age , Music , Painting

“Aware of the sort of primary sources we will be dealing with and what their limitations and orientations are, we are now prepared to undertake the task of chronicling New Testament history, a task that immediately takes us first to source material we have not even mentioned yet, sources both Jewish and pagan about the events that transpired between the time of Alexander the Great and the birth of Jesus.”

Ben Witherington III (1951) American religion academic

Prolegomenon
New Testament History : A Narrative Account (2001)

History , Birth , Time

“We find that the manager, particularly at senior levels, is overburdened with work. With the increasing complexity of modern organizations and their problems, he is destined to become more so. He is driven to brevity, fragmentation, and superficiality in his tasks, yet he cannot easily delegate them because of the nature of his information. And he can do little to increase his available time or significantly enhance his power to manage. Furthermore, he is driven to focus on that which is current and tangible in his work, even though the complex problems facing many organizations call for reflection and a far-sighted perspective.”

Henry Mintzberg (1939) Canadian busines theorist

Source: The structuring of organizations (1979), p. 173

Nature , Problem , Time

“Since I'm shouldering this commitment, I will do it with courage and without fear. Being the president of the Republic of China is no simple task.”

Hung Hsiu-chu (1948) Taiwanese politician

Hung Hsiu-chu (2015) cited in " KMT denies no-confidence vote plan http://www.chinapost.com.tw/taiwan/national/presidential-election/2015/09/10/445470/KMT-denies.htm" on The China Post, 10 September 2015

Fear , Courage