Quotes about tendency (775 quotes, page 5)

“Liberalism is extremely harmful in a revolutionary collective. It is a corrosive which eats away unity, undermines cohesion causes apathy and creates dissension. It robs the revolutionary ranks of compact organization and strict discipline, prevents policies from being carried through and alienates the Party organization from the masses which the Party leads. It is an extremely bad tendency.”

Mao Zedong (1893–1976) Chairman of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China

Combat Liberalism (1937)

“Reification, the essential tendency of capitalism, can never be wholly realized. If it were, if the system were actually able to change individuals into things moved only by economic “forces,” it would collapse not in the long run, but immediately. The struggle of people against reification is, just as much as the tendency towards reification, the condition for the functioning of capitalism. Capitalism can function only by continually drawing upon the genuinely human activity of those subject to it, while at the same time trying to level and dehumanize them as much as possible.”

Cornelius Castoriadis (1922–1997) Greek-French philosopher

Source: The Imaginary Institution of Society (1975), p. 16.

People , Change , Time , Drawing

“The end result of experiencing terror and injury is not an increase in compassion, but a tendency toward callousness.”

Joseph Heller (1923–1999) American author

Cited as being from Catch-22 but really from the discussion, for Chapter 26, in CliffsNotes on Heller’s Catch-22 https://www.amazon.com/CliffsNotes-Hellers-Catch-22-Cliffsnotes-Literature-ebook/dp/B00BOE144M.
Disputed

“In conclusion, it appears to me that nothing can be more improving to a young naturalist, than a journey in distant countries. It both sharpens, and partly likewise allays that want and craving, which, as Sir J. Herschel remarks, a man experiences although every corporeal sense is fully satisfied. The excitement from the novelty of objects, and the chance of success, stimulate him to increased activity. Moreover as a number of isolated facts soon become uninteresting, the habit of comparison leads to generalization. On the other hand, as the traveller stays but a short space of time in each place, his descriptions must generally consist of mere sketches, instead of detailed observation. Hence arises, as I have found to my cost, a constant tendency to fill up the wide gaps of knowledge, by inaccurate and superficial hypotheses.”

Charles Darwin book The Voyage of the Beagle

Source: The Voyage of the Beagle (1839), chapter XXIII: "Mauritius To England", pages 607-608 http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?pageseq=626&itemID=F10.3&viewtype=image

Travel , Knowledge , Sense , Distant

“If then the Courts of justice are to be considered as the bulwarks of a limited Constitution, against Legislative encroachments, this consideration will afford a strong argument for the permanent tenure of Judicial offices, since nothing will contribute so much as this to that independent spirit in the Judges, which must be essential to the faithful performance of so arduous a duty. This independence of the Judges is equally requisite to guard the Constitution and the rights of individuals, from the effects of those ill humors, which the arts of designing men, or the influence of particular conjunctures, sometimes disseminate among the People themselves, and which, though they speedily give place to better information, and more deliberate reflection, have a tendency, in the mean time, to occasion dangerous innovations in the Government, and serious oppressions of the minor party in the community.”

Alexander Hamilton Federalist Papers

No. 78
The Federalist Papers (1787–1788)

Men , People , Faith , Justice

“The de-eroticization of the world, a companion to its disenchantment … seems to result from a combination of causes—our democratic regime and its tendencies toward leveling and self-protection, a reductionist-materialist science that inevitably interprets eros as sex, and the atmosphere generated by “the death of God” and of the subordinate god, Eros.”

Allan Bloom (1930–1992) American philosopher, classicist, and academician

Source: Love and Friendship (1993), p. 15.

Death , God , World , Sex

“The presence of The Sean has a tendency to taint a film, I find, because he is never his character; he's always just The Sean.”

Ben Croshaw (1983) English video game journalist

The Leauge of Extraordinary Gentlemen
Fully Ramblomatic, Reviews

“The expansion of Europe was a phenomenon of such magnitude with such a profound and irreversible effect on humankind that it might be thought that our moralising tendency would be silenced in the face of it. But as we saw on the 500th anniversary of Columbus's voyage in 1992, there are those who think that its disastrous consequences for indigenous people make it quite definitely a bad thing which should not have happened. Unprovoked invasion of the territory of another society is immoral by our standards and breaches current international law, but if these be the standards we apply to history there will be no end to our condemning.”

John Hirst (1942–2016) Australian historian

Sense and Nonsense in Australian History (2005)

People , Law , History , Thinking

“You can inherit male-pattern baldness from your mother's father, but not a tendency to fight in the First World War.”

Jeremy Hardy (1961–2019) British comedian

The News Quiz, BBC Radio 4, October 1998 (rebroadcast on BBC 7, 6 June 2006)

War , World , Fight

“With all of our differences, we [members of the audience] all have one thing in common, we’re all gay. Now there are people out there [in audience] going “Do they think we’re gay because we’re here? Do we look gay? I told you this would happen. We’re not going to understand a word of this.” Seriously, though, if you're here you're probably gay. I mean, you have tendencies, you've thought about it. Now there are people [in audience] going “I have thought about it. Does that mean I'm gay? I'm not gay. Is that how they get us?””

Ellen DeGeneres (1958) American stand-up comedian, television host, and actress

Here and Now

People , Understanding , Thinking

“The capitalist and the quantitative scientist were working out the final consequences of the tendencies that had begun with Plato and Archimedes, borne fruit in Kepler and Galileo, and were reaching their culmination in Carnegie, Ford, and Zaharoff, and – as we shall see – in Heisenberg. Yes, it would be unfair, and perhaps libelous, to accuse recent leaders of the West of a mature consciousness of their own historical significance.”

Lancelot Law Whyte (1896–1972) Scottish industrial engineer

Source: The Next Development in Man (1948), p. 150

“The final test of painting, theirs, mine, any other, is; does the painter’s emotion comes across?.... Procedure is the keyword.... The difference is that we don't begin with a definite sense of procedure. It's free association from the start to the finished state. The old idea was to make use of your talent. This, we feel, is often to take the line of least resistance.... painters like Rothko, Pollock, Still, perhaps in reaction to the tendency to analyze which has dominated painting from Seurat to Albers, associate with very little analysis. A new form of expressionism inevitably followed. With De Kooning the procedure is continual change, and the immediacy of the change. With Jackson, it's the confidence you feel from the concentration of his energy in a given picture..”

Franz Kline (1910–1962) American painter

1958
Quote from Kline, in Conversations with Artists, Seldon Rothman, New York Capricorn Books, 1961, p. 106 - 109: Talk ing about the Abstract expressionists
1960's

Feeling , Confidence , Idea , Sense

“Of course, every revolution repudiates what went on before and considers itself a conscious break with the past; it is only posterity that sees, or imagines it sees, the historical continuity. Fascism, however, goes much further in its negation of the past than any earlier political movement, because it makes this negation its main platform. What is even more important, it denies simultaneously ideas and tendencies which are in themselves antithetic.”

Peter F. Drucker (1909–2005) American business consultant

Source: 1930s- 1950s, The End of Economic Man (1939), p. 13

Imagination , Idea , Past

“Another explanation for the persistence of the paranormal, I submit, is due to the transcendental temptation. In my book by that name, I present the thesis that paranormal and religious phenomena have similar functions in human experience; they are expressions of a tendency to accept magical thinking. This temptation has such profound roots within human experience and culture that it constantly reasserts itself.”

Paul Kurtz (1925–2012) American professor of philosophy

Source: The Skeptical Inquirer, Vol. 25, (2001), p. 47

Books , Thinking

““Aristocracy,” … taken in its etymological sense, means precisely the power of the elect. The elect, by the very definition of the word, can only be the few, and their power, or rather their authority, being due to their intellectual superiority, has nothing in common with the numerical strength on which democracy is based, a strength whose inherent tendency is to sacrifice the minority to the majority, and therefore quality to quantity and the elect to the masses.”

René Guénon (1886–1951) French metaphysician

Source: The Crisis of the Modern World (1927), pp. 97-98

Democracy , Sense

“Traditional organizational theories have tended to view the human organization as a closed system. This tendency has led to a disregard of differing organizational environments and the nature of organizational dependency on environment. It has led also to an over-concentration on principles of internal organizational functioning, with consequent failure to develop and understand the processes of feedback which are essential to survival.”

Daniel Katz (1903–1998) American psychologist

Source: The Social Psychology of Organizations (1966), p. 34

Failure , Understanding , Nature , Dependency

“Authoritarianism and secrecy breed incompetence; the two feed on each other. It's a vicious cycle. Governments with authoritarian tendencies point to what is in fact their own incompetence as the rationale for giving them yet more power.”

Josh Marshall Talking Points Memo

Talking Points Memo (2006-01-17) http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/--94387

“The book rest upon tour assumptions. It assumes that administration is a - single process, substantially uniform in its essential characteristics whether observed and therefore avoids the study of municipal administration, state administration, or federal administration as such. It is assumed that the study of administration should start from the base of management rather than the foundation of law, and is therefore more absorbed in the affairs of the American Management Association than in the decisions of the courts. It assumes that administration is still primarily an art but attaches importance to the significant tendency to transform it into a science. It assumes that administration has become, and will continue to be, the hart of the problem of modern government.”

Leonard D. White (1891–1958) American historian

Source: Introduction to the Study of Public Administration, 1926, p. ix

Books , Law , Art , Problem

“It were to be wished that no youth of genius were suffered ever to look into Statius, Lucan, Claudian, or Seneca the tragedian; authors who, by their forced conceits, by their violent metaphors, by their swelling epithets, by their want of just decorum, have a strong tendency to dazzle and to mislead inexperienced minds, and tastes unformed, from the true relish of possibility, propriety, simplicity, and nature. […] If I might venture to pronounce so rigorous a sentence, I would say, that the Romans can boast of but eight poets who are unexceptionably excellent,—namely, Terence, Lucretius, Catullus, Virgil, Horace, Tibullus, Propertius, Phaedrus. These only can be called legitimate models of just thinking and writing. Succeeding authors, as it happens in all countries, resolving to be original and new, and to avoid the imputation of copying, become distorted and unnatural. By endeavouring to open an unbeaten path, they deserted simplicity and truth; weary of common and obvious beauties, they must needs hunt for remote and artificial decorations…”

Joseph Warton (1722–1800) English literary critic

An Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope, Vol. II (1782), pp. 21–24

Truth , Youth , Beauty , Nature

“A man of genuine literary genius, since he possesses a temperament whose susceptibilities are of wider area than those of any other, is inevitably of all people the one most variously affected by his surroundings. And it is he, in consequence, who of all people most faithfully and compactly exhibits the impress of his times and his times' tendencies, not merely in his writings — where it conceivably might be just predetermined affectation — but in his personality.”

James Branch Cabell (1879–1958) American author

"Auctorial Induction"
The Certain Hour (1916)

People , Time , Personality

“Dada is a new tendency in art. One can tell this from the fact that until now nobody knew anything about it, and tomorrow everyone in Zurich will be talking about it. Dada comes from the dictionary. It is terribly simple. In French it means 'hobby horse'. In German it means 'good-bye', 'Get off my back', 'Be seeing you sometime'. In Romanian: 'Yes, indeed, you are right, that's it. But of course, yes, definitely, right.”

Hugo Ball (1886–1927) German author, poet and one of the leading Dada artists

And so forth.
1916, Dada Manifesto (1916)

Art , Horse

“There is a division within the neo-conservative movement, which is, by the way, one of the tests of its authenticity as a tendency. I would say I was a supporter of Paul Wolfowitz.”

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) British American author and journalist

"Tariq Ali v. Christopher Hitchens: A Debate on the U.S. War on Iraq, the Bush-Kerry Race and the Neo-Conservative Movement" http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/10/12/1347208&mode=thread&tid=25, Democracy Now (2004-10-12).
2000s, 2004

Way , Support

“I do reproach a school of modern philosophers for wishing to force, so to speak, impersonal philosophy, a moral science, indifferent nature, to speak the same language as our aspirations and our passions — even, I grant, our generous aspirations, our noble passions. Our innate and psychic tendencies (in the moral, social, and religious realms) are phenomena for science to record and authenticate, not to justify or legitimize. The epoch of scholasticism ought to be left behind for good and all.”

Albert Schinz (1870–1943) American writer

Anti-Pragmatism; an Examination into the Respective Rights of Intellectual Aristocracy and Social Democracy (1909), pp. xvii-xviii.

School , Nature , Passion , Science

“There is a natural physiological tendency to pronounce in one breath successive groups of rhythmic feet, and the rhythmic content in the average length of breathing can only be called a verse.”

F. S. Flint (1885–1960) English Imagist poet

Contemporary French Poetry, The Poetry Review, 1914

Nature , Success

“Nothing but the cross of Christ can so startle the spiritual nature from its torpor, as to make it an effectual counterpoise to the debasing and sensual tendencies of the race. Favored by temperament and education, individuals may measurably escape; but if the race is to triumph in the conflict between the flesh and the spirit, between the lower propensities and the higher nature, they must, as Constantine is said to have done, see the cross, and on it the motto, "In hoc signo vinces."”

Mark Hopkins (educator) (1802–1887) American educationalist and theologian

By this sign we conquer.
Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 172.

Education , Nature , Christ

“I think that public opinion today likes a certain amount of pageantry. It is a great mistake to make government too dull. That, I think, was the fault of the German Republic after the First World War. They were very drab and dull; the trouble was that they let the devil get all the best tunes. Therefore, we on this side of the Committee believe that it is right to have a certain amount of pageantry, because it pleases people, and it also counteracts a tendency to other forms of excitement.”

Clement Attlee (1883–1967) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1952/jul/09/civil-list#column_1328 in the House of Commons (9 July 1952) on the civil list
1950s

War , People , World , Thinking

“There is considerable danger that psychoanalysis, as well as other forms of psychotherapy and adjustment psychology, will become new representations of the fragmentation of man, that they will exemplify the loss of the individual's vitality and significance, rather than the reverse, that the new techniques will assist in standardizing and giving cultural sanction to man's alienation from himself rather than solving it, that they will become expressions of the new mechanization of man, now calculated and controlled with greater psychological precision and on a vaster scale of unconscious and depth dimensions — that psychoanalysis and psychotherapy in general will become part of the neurosis of our day rather than part of the cure. This would indeed be a supreme irony of history. It is not alarmism nor the showing of unseemly fervor to point out these tendencies, some of which are already upon us. It is simply to look directly at our historical situation and to draw unflinchingly the implications.”

Rollo May (1909–1994) US psychiatrist

Source: Existence (1958), p. 35; also published in The Discovery of Being: Writings in Existential Psychology (1983), Part II : The Cultural Background, Ch. 5 : Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Freud, p. 86

History , Loss , Parting , Drawing

“A dream is by definition a series of sensations that occur in the brain when both our senses of perception and our powers of will and reason are in abeyance, so that we have no control over that flux of sensations. But it is, of course, a well-known phenomenon that when we dream that we are dreaming, the dream ends and we awaken. Then the conscious mind takes over and we are again responsible for our thoughts, and must face a day in which we must be responsible for our actions, which, by their wisdom or folly, may determine the rest of our lives. Our dreams may give expression, pleasant or painful, to our subconscious desires or fears. But in our waking hours we must, if we are rational, make our decisions on the basis of the most objective and cold-blooded estimates that we can make: estimates of the forces and tendencies in the world about us; estimates of the realities with which we must deal; remembering always that nothing is likely to happen just because we think it's good, or unlikely to happen just because we think it's evil.”

Revilo P. Oliver (1908–1994) American philologist

"What We Owe Our Parasites", speech (June 1968); Free Speech magazine (October and November 1995)
1960s

Wisdom , Pain , World , Fear

“Some maintain that such a tendency distorts the curve of tradition. Do they derive their arguments from the future or the past? The future does not belong to them, as far as we are aware, and one be singularly ingenuous to seek to measure that which exists by that which exists no longer.”

Albert Gleizes (1881–1953) French painter

1910s, Du Cubisme (1912)

Past , Future

“The method of naming and registering also extends, of course, to noble thoughts and impulses, which will be encouraged and strengthened. Without being given deliberate attention, such wholesome tendencies often pass unnoticed and remain barren. But when clear awareness is applied to them, it will stimulate their growth.”

Nyanaponika Thera (1901–1994) German Buddhist monk

Source: The Vision of Dhamma (1994), p. 80

“Natural selection builds child brains with a tendency to believe whatever their parents and tribal elders tell them. Such trusting obedience is valuable for survival: the analogue of steering by the moon for a moth. But the flip side of trusting obedience is slavish gullibility. The inevitable by-product is vulnerability to infection by mind viruses.”

Richard Dawkins book The God Delusion

Source: The God Delusion (2006), p. 176

Nature , Parent

“…) All you need is to get rid of the tendency to define yourself. All definitions apply to your body only and its expressions. Once this obsession with the body goes, you will revert to your natural state, spontaneously and effortlessly. (…”

Nisargadatta Maharaj (1897–1981) Indian guru

Body
Source: "I am That." P.5.

Nature

“Do women avoid fields like engineering because of the tendency of male-dominated fields to discriminate against women? Probably not. Prior to the women's movement, engineering was no more male-dominated than medicine and law. And women have entered medicine and law by the droves. When women enter male-dominated fields, they tend to enter the more glamorous occupations. And the media reinforces this. There was L. A. Law, but no L. A. Engineering. ER doesn't mean Engineering Room. Women receive six layers of encouragement to enter fields involving engineering, computers, and math and science: first, better starting salaries than men's; second, special programs for girls in high school; third, female-only government scholarships; fourth, female-only corporate grants and scholarships; fifth, the advertising that reaches out to women to create a more female-supportive atmosphere; and sixth, special grants for science programs at leading women's colleges.”

Warren Farrell (1943) author, spokesperson, expert witness, political candidate

Source: Why Men Earn More (2005), p. 25.

Women , Men , School , Law

“Particles that, like 4He, show constructive interference are said to be bosons—a shorthand term for "particles obeying Bose–Einstein statistics." …One way to recognize bosons is their tendency to imitate one each other…. the presence of one boson increases the chance that another of its identical siblings will also appear in the same spot. There's an attraction between them. We will speak… of an attractive identity force drawing together identical bosons. Lasers are a spectacular example…”

Frank Wilczek (1951) physicist

Longing for the Harmonies: Themes and Variations from Modern Physics (1987)

Way , Appearance , Chance , Siblings

“Where do you go when hard times hit? Most of the time, our tendency is to enter our internal cave…we naturally shut down, withdraw from it all, and try to figure things out on our own, reemerging from life when we have some sense of centeredness.”

John Townsend (1952) Canadian clinical psychologist and author

Where Is God (2009, Thomas Nelson publishers)

Life , Nature , Sense , Time

“Even though you may have started out saying you wanted imaginative, novel ideas, the tendency to drift back into the conventional is powerful.”

Tim Hurson (1946) Creativity theorist, author and speaker

Think Better: An Innovator's Guide to Productive Thinking

Imagination , Idea

“In my case, I find a blank canvas so beautiful that that to work immediately, in relation to how beautiful the canvas is as such, is inhibiting and, for me, demands 'too much to quickly'; so that my tendency is to get the canvas 'dirt', so to speak, in one way or another, and then, so to speak 'work in reverse', and try to bring it back to an equivalent of the original clarity and perfection of the canvas, that one began on…”

Robert Motherwell (1915–1991) American artist

as cited in Abstract Expressionism, Creators and Critics, ed. Clifford Ross, Abrahams Publishers, New York 1990, p. 111
1960s, Interview with David Sylvester', (1960)

Beauty , Way , Perfection

“Those who say that without the monarchy Britain would be a banana republic are closing their eyes to the banana republic features which the cult of monarchy necessitates. Dazzled by the show, moreover, they may be missing other long-run tendencies towards banana-dom which it is the partial function of monarchy to obscure.”

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) British American author and journalist

1990s, The Monarchy: A Critique of Britain's Favourite Fetish

“When speaking of a “body of knowledge” or of “the results of research,” e. g., we tacitly assign the same cognitive status to inherited knowledge and to independently acquired knowledge. To counteract this tendency a special effort is required to transform inherited knowledge into genuine knowledge by revitalizing its original discovery, and to discriminate between the genuine and the spurious elements of what claims to be inherited knowledge.”

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

Source: What is Political Philosophy (1959), p. 77

Knowledge , Effort

“We must surely learn, from both our past and present history, how careful we must be not to provoke the anger of the native people by doing them wrong, how we should be cautious in our dealings with a foreign people among whom we returned to live, to handle these people with love and respect and, needless to say, with justice and good judgment. And what do our brothers do? Exactly the opposite! They were slaves in their Diasporas, and suddenly they find themselves with unlimited freedom, wild freedom that only a country like Turkey [the Ottoman Empire] can offer. This sudden change has planted despotic tendencies in their hearts, as always happens to former slaves ['eved ki yimlokh – when a slave becomes king – Proverbs 30:22]. They deal with the Arabs with hostility and cruelty, trespass unjustly, beat them shamefully for no sufficient reason, and even boast about their actions. There is no one to stop the flood and put an end to this despicable and dangerous tendency. Our brothers indeed were right when they said that the Arab only respects he who exhibits bravery and courage. But when these people feel that the law is on their rival's side and, even more so, if they are right to think their rival's actions are unjust and oppressive, then, even if they are silent and endlessly reserved, they keep their anger in their hearts. And these people will be revengeful like no other.”

Ahad Ha'am (1856–1927) Hebrew essayist and thinker

Source: Wrestling with Zion, p. 15.

Love , Hostility , People , Justice

“Superior forms of thought have a fatal tendency of later becoming revealed law: and all philosophy ends, in its last stages, by becoming religion.”

José Maria Eça de Queiroz book Cartas de Inglaterra

As formas superiores do pensamento tem uma tendência fatal a tornar-se na futura lei revelada: e toda a filosofia termina, nos seus velhos dias, por ser religião.
"Israelismo"; "Israelism" p. 50.
Cartas de Inglaterra (1879–82)

Religion , Law

“I have noticed that doctors who fail in the practice of medicine have a tendency to seek one another's company and aid in consultation. A doctor who cannot take out your appendix properly will recommend you to a doctor who will be unable to remove your tonsils with success.”

Ernest Hemingway book A Farewell to Arms

Source: A Farewell to Arms (1929), Ch. 15

Success

“The State, agent and slave of the Church, has so long united with it in suppression of woman’s intelligence, has so long preached of power to man alone, that it has created an inherited tendency, an inborn line of thought toward repression.”

Matilda Joslyn Gage (1826–1898) American abolitionist, writer

Source: Woman, Church and State (1893), p. 543 as quoted in K. M. Talreja, Holy Vedas and Holy Bible: A Comparative Study https://books.google.com/books?id=9qkoAAAAYAAJ, New Delhi: Rashtriya Chetana Sangathan, 2000

Intelligence

“There are common-sense things that your government could do that would give Americans more opportunities to succeed. Why don’t we do it? Because powerful special interests and the tendency to put ideology ahead of political progress have led to gridlock in Congress.”

Hillary Clinton (1947) American politician, senator, Secretary of State, First Lady

Presidential campaign (April 12, 2015 – 2016), Speech in Warren, Michigan (August 11, 2016)

Sense

“The Spirit is a higher infinite of verities; life is a lower infinite of possibilities which seek to grow and find their own truth and fulfilment in the light of these verities. Our intellect, our will, our ethical and our aesthetic being are the reflectors and the mediators. The method of the West is to exaggerate life and to call down as much — or as little — as may be of the higher powers to stimulate and embellish life.
But the method of India is on the contrary to discover the spirit within and the higher hidden intensities of the superior powers and to dominate life in one way or another so as to make it responsive to and expressive of the spirit and in that way increase the power of life. Its tendency with the intellect, will, ethical, aesthetic and emotional being is to sound indeed their normal mental possibilities, but also to upraise them towards the greater light and power of their own highest intuitions.”

Sri Aurobindo (1872–1950) Indian nationalist, freedom fighter, philosopher, yogi, guru and poet

The Renaissance in India (1918)

Life , Truth , Way , Light

“There is no iron law here, but there is clearly some tendency for larger-than-necessary coalitions to disintegrate.”

Thomas Flanagan (political scientist) (1944) author, academic, and political activist

Source: Game Theory and Canadian Politics (1998), Chapter 5, How Many Are Too Many? Size of Coalitions, p. 88.

Law

“The sane understand that human beings are incapable of sustaining conspiracies on a grand scale, because some of our most defining qualities as a species are inattention to detail, a tendency to panic, and an inability to keep our mouths shut.”

Dean Koontz book Fear Nothing

Source: Fear Nothing (1998), Chapter 17; musings of Christopher Snow

Understanding

“Last year, initially The Scotsman newspaper — being Scottish and J. K. Rowling being Scottish — and because of the English tendency to try and tear down their idols, they kept trying to build stories which said J. K. Rowling ripped off Neil Gaiman. They kept getting in touch with me and I kept declining to play because I thought it was silly. And then The Daily Mirror in England ran an article about that mad woman who was trying to sue J. K. Rowling over having stolen muggles from her. And they finished off with a line saying [something like]: And Neil Gaiman has accused her of stealing.
Luckily I found this online and I found it the night it came out by pure coincidence and the reporter's e-mail address was at the bottom of the thing so I fired off an e-mail saying: "This is not true, I never said this. You are making this up." I got an apologetic e-mail back, but by the time I'd gotten the apologetic e-mail back it was already in The Daily Mail the following morning and it was very obvious that The Daily Mail‘s research [had] consisted of reading The Daily Mirror. And you're going: journalists are so lazy.”

Neil Gaiman (1960) English fantasy writer

On stories which implied that Harry Potter was merely a revised Timothy Hunter of Gaiman's The Books of Magic, in January magazine interview (2002) http://januarymagazine.com/profiles/gaiman.html

Tear , Time , Reading , Madness

“We have a tendency to overcome any strong tension between desire and impotence by depreciating or denying the positive value of the desired object.”

Max Scheler (1874–1928) German philosopher

Source: Das Ressentiment im Aufbau der Moralen (1912), L. Coser, trans. (1973), p. 73

Strong

“A finished or even a competent reasoner is not the work of nature alone… education develops faculties which would otherwise never have manifested their existence. It is, therefore, as necessary to learn to reason before we can expect to be able to reason, as it is to learn to swim or fence, in order to attain either of those arts. Now, something must be reasoned upon, it matters not much what it is, provided that it can be reasoned upon with certainty. The properties of mind or matter, or the study of languages, mathematics, or natural history may be chosen for this purpose. Now, of all these, it is desirable to choose the one… in which we can find out by other means, such as measurement and ocular demonstration of all sorts, whether the results are true or not.
.. Now the mathematics are peculiarly well adapted for this purpose, on the following grounds:—
1. Every term is distinctly explained, and has but one meaning, and it is rarely that two words are employed to mean the same thing.
2. The first principles are self-evident, and, though derived from observation, do not require more of it than has been made by children in general.
3. The demonstration is strictly logical, taking nothing for granted except the self-evident first principles, resting nothing upon probability, and entirely independent of authority and opinion.
4. When the conclusion is attained by reasoning, its truth or falsehood can be ascertained, in geometry by actual measurement, in algebra by common arithmetical calculation. This gives confidence, and is absolutely necessary, if… reason is not to be the instructor, but the pupil.
5. There are no words whose meanings are so much alike that the ideas which they stand for may be confounded.
…These are the principal grounds on which… the utility of mathematical studies may be shewn to rest, as a discipline for the reasoning powers. But the habits of mind which these studies have a tendency to form are valuable in the highest degree. The most important of all is the power of concentrating the ideas which a successful study of them increases where it did exist, and creates where it did not. A difficult position or a new method of passing from one proposition to another, arrests all the attention, and forces the united faculties to use their utmost exertions. The habit of mind thus formed soon extends itself to other pursuits, and is beneficially felt in all the business of life.”

Augustus De Morgan (1806–1871) British mathematician, philosopher and university teacher (1806-1871)

Source: On the Study and Difficulties of Mathematics (1831), Ch. I.

Life , Children , Truth , Education

“There were two modern ideas of the State which, they believed, had the same tendency to set up a despotic administrative system. One was the deification of the State and the absolute subordination of the individual to it. That was the solution of Fascism and, as they added later, of National Socialism. The other was the State of the common weal, or, as would be said today, the State of social services. It was the modern form of the ‘philanthropic’ State, in which the individual was controlled for his good by the State, down to the smallest details of life. The Bolshevist State, they considered, lay in the line of this conception.”

Hermann Rauschning (1887–1982) German politician

Source: Men in Chaos (1942), pp. 138-139

Life , Idea

“Partnership—the tendency to associate, establish links, live inside one another, and cooperate—is one of the hallmarks of life.”

Fritjof Capra (1939) American physicist

Epilogue: Ecological Literacy
The Web of Life (1996)

Life , Partnership

“An idle man has a constant tendency to torpidity. He has adopted the Indian maxim — that it is better to walk than to run, and better to stand than to walk, and better to sit than to stand, and better to lie than to sit. He hugs himself into the notion, that God calls him to be quiet.”

Richard Cecil (clergyman) (1748–1810) British Evangelical Anglican priest and social reformer

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 345.

God , Lie

“Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia (the whole peninsula of Indochina) present a puzzling picture, enigmatic to most foreigners and especially so to Americans. The very name Vietnam evokes deep emotions and bitter memories in our countrymen. But the tendency to blame Vietnam for our domestic ills has no foundation in fact. The problems of urban decay, racial disharmony, drug abuse, and all the rest were bound to plague us, whether or not we became involved in Vietnam. Indeed, one can argue that in the 1950s, well before we became heavily involved in Vietnam, a sense of national direction and purpose appeared to be lacking in the United States. This book looks at the Vietnam War from the perspective of a senior military professional who held important positions of responsibility during the conflict. Among other things, I will seek to bring out the lessons we have learned or should have learned from the war, and their implications for the future. The severe impact of the war on our armed forces and its almost disastrous effect on the U. S. Army will receive special treatment.”

Bruce Palmer Jr. (1913–2000) United States Army Chief of Staff

Source: The 25-Year War: America's Military Role in Vietnam (1984), p. vii-viii

War , Books , Problem , Sense

“There is (so to speak) "a mighty stream of tendency" to good in the human mind, upon which all objects float and are imperceptibly borne along; and though in the voyage of life we meet with strong rebuffs, with rocks and quicksands, yet there is a "a tide in the affairs of men," a heaving and a restless aspiration of the soul, by means of which, "with sails and tackle torn," the wreck and scattered fragments of our entire being drift into the port and haven of our desires!”

William Hazlitt (1778–1830) English writer

"Why Distant Objects Please"
Table Talk: Essays On Men And Manners http://www.blupete.com/Literature/Essays/TableHazIV.htm (1821-1822)

Life , Men , Soul , Strong

“The whole tendency of empiricism and democracy in speech, dress and manners has been toward a plainness which is without symbolic significance. The power of symbolism is greatly feared by those who wish to expel from life all that is nonrational in the sense of being nonutilitarian”

Richard M. Weaver (1910–1963) American scholar

Source: Ideas have Consequences (1948), p. 160.

Life , Fear , Democracy , Sense

“The employment of the poor in roads and public works, and a tendency among landlords and persons of property to build, to improve and beautify their grounds, and to employ workmen and menial servants, are the means most within our power and most directly calculated to remedy the evils arising from that disturbance in the balance of produce and consumption.”

Thomas Robert Malthus Principles of Political Economy

Book II, Chapter I, On The Progress of Wealth, Section X, p. 430
Principles of Political Economy (Second Edition 1836)

Evil , Personality

“Our constitutional history started with the States retaining all powers of sovereignty unimpaired, save those conferred upon the National Government. The evolution of the constitutional system has consisted largely in determining the line of demarcation between State and national authority. The cases involved are many and complicated, but there is a fairly good popular understanding of this continuing struggle between these contending sovereignties. Because of better communication and transportation, the constant tendency has been to more and more social and economic unification. The present continent-wide union of forty-eight States is much closer than was the original group of thirteen States.”

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

1920s, The Reign of Law (1925)

History , Communication , Understanding

“If Andrew were still around, I bet he'd tell Bannon to stay in Europe — and not just because his tendency to wear several shirts seems more consistent with European fashion. Bannon's understanding of conservatism is entirely European.”

Jonah Goldberg (1969) American political writer and pundit

2010s, 2018, Andrew Breitbart would tell Steve Bannon to stay in Europe (2018)

Fashion , Understanding

“The natural tendency of the state is inflation.”

Murray N. Rothbard (1926–1995) American economist of the Austrian School, libertarian political theorist, and historian

The Case for a 100 Percent Gold Dollar (1974) http://mises.org/story/1829.

Nature

“Considering the general tendency to multiply offices and dependencies and to increase expense to the ultimate term of burden which the citizen can bear, it behooves us to avail ourselves of every occasion which presents itself for taking off the surcharge; that it never may be seen here that, after leaving to labor the smallest portion of its earnings on which it can subsist, Government shall itself consume the whole residue of what it was instituted to guard.”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

Thomas Jefferson's First State of the Union Address (8 December 1801)
1800s, First Presidential Administration (1801–1805)

Dependency

“The very natural tendency to use terms derived from traditional grammar like verb, noun, adjective, passive voice, in describing languages outside of Indo-European is fraught with grave possibilities of misunderstanding.”

Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897–1941) American linguist

Whorf (1937) "Grammer categories" in: Language, (1945) Vol 21. p. 1-11.

Nature

“When certain hereditary tendencies are almost indelibly ingrained, environment will have a hard battle to effect a change in the child; but that a change can be wrought by the surroundings we all know. The particular subject may at first be stubborn against these influences, but repeated application of the same modifying forces in succeeding generations will at last accomplish the desired object in the child as it does in the plant.”

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

p, 125
The Training of the Human Plant (1907)

Change

“Both as ruling and ruled strata and both as a majority and minority, Protestants… have demonstrated a specific tendency toward economic rationalism. This tendency has not been observed in the same way in the present or the past among Catholics, regardless of whether they were the dominant or dominated stratum or constituted a majority or minority. Therefore the cause of the different behavior must be mainly sought in the enduring inner quality of these religions and not only in their respective historical-political external situations.”

Max Weber book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

Source: The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905; 1920), Ch. 1 : Religious Affiliation and Social Stratification

Religion , Way , Behavior , Past

“All OO languages show some tendency to suck programmers into the trap of excessive layering. Object frameworks and object browsers are not a substitute for good design or documentation, but they often get treated as one. Too many layers destroy transparency: It becomes too difficult to see down through them and mentally model what the code is actually doing. The Rules of Simplicity, Clarity, and Transparency get violated wholesale, and the result is code full of obscure bugs and continuing maintenance problems.”

Eric S. Raymond book The Art of Unix Programming

The Art of Unix Programming: Unix and Object-Oriented Languages, Eric S. Raymond, 2003, 2014-08-06 http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/html/unix_and_oo.html,

Problem

“Through our own folly and refusal to face realities and deal with evil tendencies while they were yet controllable, we have allowed brutal and intolerant forces to gain almost unchallenged supremacy in Europe and have placed ourselves in a position of weakness and peril, the like of which our history does not record for two and a half centuries.”

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

Speech to the New Commonwealth Society (15 July 1936), quoted in Martin Gilbert, Prophet of Truth: Winston S. Churchill, 1922–1939 (London: Minerva, 1990), p. 764
The 1930s

History , Reality , Evil

“As in other European countries there were anti-semitic tendencies in pre-Hitler Austria too. Formerly political forces, together with the official authorities, had been sufficiently strong to prevent any excesses and nip any outburst in the bud apart from some verbal invective. Karl Renner says: … Throughout the Christian Social period in power no harm came to a single Jew in Vienna; in fact the Jewish element made far greater progress in the press, literature, theatre and business worlds than in the previous so-called liberal period... It must not be forgotten, however, that Vienna was the entry point for Jews from the East who did not assimilate easily.”

Kurt Schuschnigg (1897–1977) Chancellor of Austria

Source: The Brutal Takeover: The Austrian ex-Chancellor’s account of the Anschluss of Austria by Hitler, 1971, p. 62

World , Literature , Business , Strong

“The tendency has always been strong to believe that whatever received a name must be an entity or thing, having an independent existence of its own; and if no real entity answering to the name could be found, men did not for that reason suppose that none existed, but imagined that it was something peculiarly abstruse and mysterious, too high to be an object of sense. The meaning of all general, and especially of all abstract terms, became in this way enveloped in a mystical base…”

John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) British philosopher and political economist

Note to Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind http://books.google.com/books?id=GxIuAAAAIAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=james+mill&ei=jsFoR7yAOYfQiwHEzdVv&ie=ISO-8859-1#PPA5,M1 (1829) by James Mill, edited with additional notes by John Stuart Mill (1869)

Men , Way , Imagination , Sense

“The Canadian government has a closer relation to economic activities than most governments. The trade in staples, which characterizes an economically weak country, to the highly industrialized areas of Europe and latterly the United States, and especially the fur trade, has been responsible for various peculiar tendencies in Canadian development. The maintenance of connections with Europe, at first with France and later with Great Britain has been a result. The diversity of institutions which has attended this relationship has made for greater elasticity in organization and far greater tolerance among her peoples.”

Harold Innis (1894–1952) Canadian professor of political economy

Conclusion, p. 401.
The Fur Trade in Canada (1930)

People , Country

“The destruction of animals for food, in its details and tendencies, involves so much of cruelty as to cause every reflecting individual — not destitute of the ordinary sensibilities of our nature — to shudder.”

William Alcott (1798–1859) American physician and author

Source: Vegetable Diet (1838), p. 267

Food , Nature , Animals

“The convict era gave Australia a high English and Irish population and a predominance of men, a tendency to disdain authority and resent policemen, and probably a love of leisure and an indifference to religion. The convict era imposed on governments from the outset a high and detailed role in economic and social life. Some of these convict influences were fragile and were quickly erased or reversed by the waves of free immigration; some were reinforced by later events, so that they persist to this day.”

Geoffrey Blainey (1930) Australian historian

A Land Half Won (1980)

Love , Life , Men , Religion

“As a result of changes which, over the last century, have modified our empirically based pictures of the world and hence the moral value of many of its elements, the "human religious ideal" inclines to stress certain tendencies and to express itself in terms which seem, at first sight, no longer to coincide with the "christian religious ideal."”

Pierre Teilhard De Chardin (1881–1955) French philosopher and Jesuit priest

Preface, p. 43
The Divine Milieu (1960)

World , Change

“If out of reading this book you get just one thing—an increased tendency to think always in terms of other people’s point of view, and see things from their angle—if you get that one thing out of this book, it may easily prove to be one of the building blocks of your career.”

Dale Carnegie How to Win Friends and Influence People

Source: How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936), p. 63

People , Books , Thinking , Reading

“The ultimate notion of right is that which tends to the universal good; and when one's acting in a certain manner has this tendency, he has a right thus to act.”

Francis Hutcheson (philosopher) (1694–1746) Irish philosopher

A System of Moral Philosophy (1755) Book II, Ch. III

Universe

“We must give the system sufficient factors of stability to enable it to work; but we must not assume that these forces are so powerful as to prevent the system from being liable to fluctuations. There must be a tendency to rigidity of certain prices, particularly wage-rates; but there must also be a tendency to rigidity of certain price-expectations as well, in order to provide an explanation for the rigidity of these prices… Indeed we should do better to assume a good deal of variation in different people’s elasticities of expectations… Of course the way in which a population is divided with respect to this sort of sensitivity will vary very much in different circumstances… We have to be prepared to deal with a range of possible cases, varying from that of a settled community, which has been accustomed to steady conditions in the past (and which, for that reason, is not easily disturbed in the present), to that of a community which has been exposed to violent disturbances of prices (and which may have to be regarded, in consequence, as being economically neurotic.”

John Hicks (1904–1989) British economist

Source: Value and capital, (1939), p. 271–2; as cited in: Roberto Scazzieri, ‎Amartya Sen, ‎Stefano Zamagni (2008) Markets, Money and Capital: Hicksian Economics for the Twenty First Century, p. 161

People , Way , Communication , Past

“Karl Marx, who knew quite a bit about the human tendency to fall down and worship our own creations, wrote Das Capital in an attempt to demonstrate that, even if we start from the economists' utopian vision, so long as we also allow some people to control productive capital, and, again, leave others with nothing to sell but but their brains and bodies, the results will be in very many ways barely distinguishable from slavery, and the whole system will eventually destroy itself.”

David Graeber (1961) American anthropologist and anarchist

Source: Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011), Chapter Eleven, "Age of the Great Capitalist Empires", p. 354

People , Way

“A man is a man to the extent that he is a superman. A man should be defined by the sum of those tendencies which impel him to surpass the human condition.”

Gaston Bachelard book L'Eau et les Rêves

Introduction
L'eau et les rêves (Water and Dreams) 1942

“In Victorian criminology there was an enthusiasm for spotting criminal tendencies in a person’s features.”

Derren Brown (1971) British illusionist

TV Series and Specials (Includes DVDs), Trick of the Mind (2004–2006)

Personality

“Colin believed that the world contained exactly two kinds of people: Dumpers and Dumpees. A lot of people will claim to be both, but those people miss the point entirely: You are predisposed to either one fate or the other. Dumpers may not always be the heartbreakers, and the Dumpees may not always be the heartbroken. But everyone has a tendency.”

John Green book An Abundance of Katherines

Colin Singleton, pp. 15-16
An Abundance of Katherines (2006)

Fate , People , World

“Theoretical research in information science is still marked by a tendency to play safe… it is still marked by timidity. It could now afford to be more boldly speculative, intellectually exciting and therefore more attractive to intelligent and ambitious students.”

Brian Campbell Vickery (1918–2009) British information theorist

Have things changed?
Source: A Long Search for Information (2004), p. 25; As cited in: Lyn Robinson and David Bawden (2011).

Intelligence , Science , Change

“In the early days of the computer revolution computer designers and numerical analysts worked closely together and indeed were often the same people. Now there is a regrettable tendency for numerical analysts to opt out of any responsibility for the design of the arithmetic facilities and a failure to influence the more basic features of software. It is often said that the use of computers for scientific work represents a small part of the market and numerical analysts have resigned themselves to accepting facilities "designed" for other purposes and making the best of them. […] One of the main virtues of an electronic computer from the point of view of the numerical analyst is its ability to "do arithmetic fast."”

James H. Wilkinson (1919–1986) English mathematician

Need the arithmetic be so bad!
Some Comments from a Numerical Analyst (1971)

People , Failure , Parting

“The first evil choice or act is linked to the second; and each one to the one that follows, both by the tendency of our evil nature and by the power of habit, which holds us as by a destiny. – As Lessing says, 'Let the devil catch you but by a single hair, and you are his forever.”

Tryon Edwards (1809–1894) American theologian

Source: A Dictionary of Thoughts, 1891, p. 152.

Nature , Evil

“Once we can see how this question of freedom of the will has been vitiated by post-romantic philosophy, with its inbuilt tendency to laziness and boredom, we can also see how it came about that existentialism found itself in a hole of it’s own digging, and how the philosophical developments since then have amounted to walking in circles round that hole.”

Colin Wilson (1931–2013) author

Source: The Angry Years (2007), p. 214

Question , Freedom

“If we put in the details, the singularities of the field, viz. the galactic systems and the stars, we find that there is… a tendency, called gravitation, to decrease the mutual distances of these "singularities." At short distances, within the confines of a galactic system, this second tendency is by far the strongest, and the galactic systems retain their size independent of the expansion or contraction of the universe…”

Willem de Sitter (1872–1934) Dutch cosmologist

Kosmos (1932), Above is Beginning Quote of the Last Chapter: Relativity and Modern Theories of the Universe -->

Star , Universe

“The idea of a law of progress, or of an all but irresistible tendency to general improvement, is then merely a superstition, one of the tents of the modernist pseudo-religion of humanism. Even if such a law or tendency existed and were demonstrable, the liberal faith in progress would for Santayana be pernicious. For it leads to a corrupt habit of mind in which things are valued, not for their present excellence or perfection, but instrumentally, as leading to something better; and it insinuates into thought and feeling a sort of historical theodicy, in which past evil is justified as a means to present or future good. The idea of progress embodies a kind of time-worship (to adopt an expression used by Wyndham Lewis) in which the particularities of our world are seen and valued, not in themselves, but for what they might perhaps become, thereby leaving us destitute of the sense of the present and, at the same time, of the perspective of eternity.”

John Gray (1948) British philosopher

'Santayana's Alternative' (p.67-8)
Gray's Anatomy: Selected Writings (2009)

World , Faith , Religion , Law

“As in the case of the individual, not all the information which is available to the race at one time is accessible without special effort. There is a well-known tendency of libraries to become clogged by their own volume; of the sciences to develop such a degree of specialization that the expert is often illiterate outside his own minute specialty. Dr. Vannevar Bush has suggested the use of mechanical aids for the searching through vast bodies of material. These probably have their uses, but they are limited by the impossibility of classifying a book under an unfamiliar heading unless some particular person has already recognized the relevance of that heading for that particular book. In the case where two subjects have the same technique and intellectual content but belong to widely separated fields, this still requires some individual with an almost Leibnizian catholicity of interest.”

Norbert Wiener book Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine

VIII. Information, Language, and Society. p. 158.
Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (1948)

Books , Search , Effort , Science

“An active imagination may find a bad tendency arising out of every transaction between imperfect morals.”

Edward Hall Alderson (1787–1857) Lawyer and jurist

Brownlow v. Egerton (1854), 23 L. J. Rep. Part 5 (N. S.), Ch. 365.

Imagination

“(Holism is) the tendency in nature to form wholes that are greater than the sum of the parts through creative evolution …”

Jan Smuts (1870–1950) military leader, politician and statesman from South Africa

Holism and Evolution (1926)

Nature , Parting

“Culture's essential service to a religion is to destroy intellectual idolatry, the recurrent tendency in religion to replace the object of its worship with its present understanding and forms of approach to that object.”

Northrop Frye (1912–1991) Canadian literary critic and literary theorist

"Quotes", Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (1957), Anagogic Phase: Symbol as Monad

Religion , Understanding

“In all cases, wherein the mind feels itself in danger of being confounded by variety, it is sure to rest upon a few strong points, or perhaps upon a single instance. Amongst a multitude of proofs, it is one that does the business. If we observe in any argument, that hardly two minds fix upon the same instance, the diversity of choice shows the strength of the argument, because it shows the number and competition of the examples. There is no subject in which the tendency to dwell upon select or single topics is so usual, because there is no subject, of which, in its full extent, the latitude is so great, as that of natural history applied to the proof of an intelligent Creator.”

William Paley (1743–1805) Christian apologist, natural theologian, utilitarian

Source: Natural Theology (1802), Ch. 27 : Conclusion.

Feeling , History , Intelligence , Business

“We have never said that the fight against the Iranian aggression and against the expansionist Persian tendencies (which have been demonstrated by various means under successive regimes in Iran) is the decisive battle for the Arabs. What we have said, and still say, is that the fight against Zionism is the main decisive battle for the Arabs. This is a great objective reality, which cannot be denied or underestimated except by someone who would not only harm the Arab nation and its main causes, but would also overlook the main danger.”

Saddam Hussein (1937–2006) Iraqi politician and President

President Saddam Hussein's Speech on National Day (1981)

Reality , Decision , Success , Fight

“Gentlemen, I say to you this discrimination must cease. We are determined to fight this question; we believe the Constitution gives us this right. All of the fifteen amendments made to the Constitution run down in one single line of protecting the rights of the citizens of this country. One after another of those amendments give these rights to citizens; step by step these rights are secured to them. And now we say to you that if you will not obey the Constitution, then the power is given by that Constitution for the enactment of such a law as will have a tendency to enforce the provisions thereof.”

Joseph Hayne Rainey (1832–1887) politician

1873, Speech on Civil Rights Act (1873)

Law , Question , Fight , Country

“Perhaps more striking is the accuracy of many of Marx’s best-known qualitative predictions about the tendencies of capitalist development: capitalism continues to conquer the globe; its effect is the gradual erasure of cultural and regional identities; growing economic inequality is the norm in the advanced capitalist societies; where capitalism triumphs, market norms gradually dominate all spheres of life, public and private; class position continues to be the defining determinant of political outlook; the dominant class dominates the political process which, in turn, does its bidding; and so on.”

Brian Leiter (1963) American philosopher and legal scholar

"The Hermeneutics of Suspicion: Recovering Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud"

Life

“I think that one of the things that is needed is the fact that I don't think enough people in high positions in our country accept the importance of our world role with sufficient gravity. In other words, I think the tendency, because of politics and getting elected, is to stress local issues; and of course, they are important. But, I would like to see more of the leaders of our country spend more time traveling for one thing, getting to know the world, and studying history. To me, one of the sad things about our country is that our leadership — to a greater extent than I would like — is more concerned about very domestic issues than they are about our relations in the world.”

David Rockefeller (1915–2017) American banker and philanthropist

When asked what was wrong with America in an interview with Benjamin Fulford (13 November 2007) http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3704527408635856046

People , World , Sadness , Travel

“There is in fact no contradiction at all between the statement of an exact bookkeeping balance ex post and the obvious inference that in a situation when saving is increasing without a corresponding increase of investment, or perhaps with an adverse movement in investment, there must be a tendency ex ante to a disparity.”

Gunnar Myrdal (1898–1987) Swedish economist

Source: Monetary Equilibrium (1939), p. 46

“The manner in which time and space are bound up with each other in the four-dimensional continuum is variable. It is difficult to express this variability of the cross-connections between space and time in simple language, and different interpretations of it are possible, corresponding to different mathematical transformations of the fundamental line-element, e. g. a different choice of the variable which we interpret as "time." Perhaps the best way we can express it is by saying that the solution of the field-equations of the theory of relativity shows that there is in the universe a tendency to change its scale, which at the present time results in an expansion, but may perhaps at other times become, or have been, a shrinking. This is true of the grand scale model of the universe.”

Willem de Sitter (1872–1934) Dutch cosmologist

Kosmos (1932), Above is Beginning Quote of the Last Chapter: Relativity and Modern Theories of the Universe -->

Way , Mathematics , Universe , Change

“Anyone who has lost track of time when using a computer knows the propensity to dream, the urge to make dreams come true and the tendency to miss lunch.”

Tim Berners-Lee (1955) British computer scientist, inventor of the World Wide Web

Interview by Kris Herbst for Internet World (June 1994) http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/FAQ.html

Dreams , Time

“Jesus Christ: An irresponsible rabble rouser of communistic tendency; victim of an early witch-hunt.”

Edward S. Herman (1925–2017) American journalist

Source: Beyond Hypocrisy, 1992, Doublespeak Dictionary (within Beyond Hypocrisy), p. 124.

Christ

“The aphid Pemphigus betae typically shows a complex life cycle, with annual alternation between cottonwood trees, where it forms leaf galls, and herbaceous plants, where it lives on roots. Distinct phenotypes are associated with each phase. In a population in Utah, aphid clones vary in their tendencies to undergo the cottonwood phase of the life cycle, with certain clones rarely producing the winged migrants that initiate the cottonwood phase.”

Nancy A. Moran (1954) American biologist

[Phenotype fixation and genotypic diversity in the complex life cycle of the aphid Pemphigus betae, June 1991, Evolution, 45, 4, 957–970, 10.1111/j.1558-5646.1991.tb04363.x]

Life , Tree

“It is willingly granted that by cultivation the origination of new varieties is favored, and that by man's labor many varieties are acquired which, under natural conditions, would be lost; but nothing justifies the assumption that the tendency to formation of varieties is so extraordinarily increased that the species speedily lose all stability, and their offspring diverge into an endless series of extremely variable forms. Were the change in the conditions the sole cause of variability we might expect that those cultivated plants which are grown for centuries under almost identical conditions would again attain constancy.”

Gregor Mendel book Experiments in plant-hybridisation

Experiments with Hybrids of Other Species of Plants
Experiments in plant-hybridisation (1865)

Nature , Change

Quotes about tendency page 5

Quotes about tendency
page 5