Quotes about term
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“There are no shortcuts to moral insight. Nature is not intrinsically anything that can offer comfort or solace in human terms—if only because our species is such an insignificant latecomer in a world not constructed for us. So much the better. The answers to moral dilemmas are not lying out there, waiting to be discovered. They reside, like the kingdom of God, within us—the most difficult and inaccessible spot for any discovery or consensus.”

Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) American evolutionary biologist

"Kropotkin was no Crackpot", p. 339
Bully for Brontosaurus (1991)

God, World, Lying, Nature

“The painter thinks in terms of form and color. The goal is not to be concerned with the reconstitution of an anecdotal fact, but with constitution of a pictorial fact.”

Georges Braque (1882–1963) French painter and sculptor

Source: 1908 - 1920, quotes from Artists on Art...(1972), p. 423 - Braque's quote, Paris 1917

Color, Thinking

“The transformation of the automobile market was essentially complete in 1929. If Mr. Ford, in that pivotal year in the modern economy, still held stubbornly to his old concept in his new Model A, he was counterbalanced by Mr. Chrysler, who had come up from nowhere with tremendous vitality and with a market policy similar to General Motors'. The fact that Mr. Ford built nearly two million of the five million U. S.-produced cars and trucks sold that year was only incidental from the long-term point of view. it was a splurge, not the sign of a trend.”

Alfred P. Sloan (1875–1966) American businessman

Source: My Years with General Motors, 1963, p. 169

Cars

“Among politicians and businessman, Pragmatism is the current term for "To hell with our children."”

Edward Abbey (1927–1989) American author and essayist

Source: A Voice Crying in the Wilderness (Vox Clamantis in Deserto) (1990), Ch. 11 : Money Et Cetera, p. 100

Children, Hell

“In 1948 the Democrats had little choice but to nominate President Truman, under the banner HE'S GOING TO LOSE. Everybody felt this way: the politicians, the press, the pollsters, the piccolo players, Peter Piper, everybody. The Republicans were so confident that they nominated an individual named Thomas Dewey, whose lone accomplishment was inventing the decimal system. Truman campaigned doggedly around the nation, but his cause appeared to be hopeless. A Dewey victory seemed so inevitable that on election night, the Chicago Tribune printed the famous front-page headline DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN. This was because Dewey had defeated Truman, who immediately threatened to drop an atomic bomb on Chicago, so everybody went ha-ha-ha-ha, just kidding, and wisely elected to have the feisty ex-haberdasher have another term.”

Dave Barry (1947) American writer

Source: Dave Barry Slept Here: A Sort of History of the United States (1989), p. 131

Way, Confidence, Appearance, Victory

“(There will be) No manifestation but after Allah’s permission, and that will be after the passing of a long term, the hardening of the hearts, and the filling of the Earth with tyranny.”

Muhammad al-Mahdi (869–941) 12th and last Imam in Twelver Shia Islam

al-Tabarsi, al-Ihtijāj, Ch.2, p. 478
Religious-based Quotes

Heart

“The Japanese have a term called Ikigai. Ikigai is the Japanese translation of the French 'raison d’etre' or 'reason for being.' When Plato wrote about government, what Plato said was that the most preferred form of governor was what we know as the true statesman. -- The philosopher king who knows his place and his task. My purpose is to be a builder of new ideas and companies. I live to put new ideas together and advance the conversation. It is my Ikigai. I simply love to do it. There is nothing more exciting to me than helping new ideas spring up out of the ground.”

Robert Agresta (1983)

Public Release May, 2011, Politicker NJ

Love, Spring, Idea, Help

“It is just that, in so terrible a day, and in the last moments of my life, I should discover all the iniquity of falsehood, and make the truth triumph. I declare, then, in the face of heaven and earth, and acknowledge, though to my eternal shame, that I have committed the greatest crimes but it has been the acknowledging of those which have been so foully charged on the order. I attest - and truth obliges me to attest - that it is innocent! I made the contrary declaration only to suspend the excessive pains of torture, and to mollify those who made me endure them. I know the punishments which have been inflicted on all the knights who had the courage to revoke a similar confession; but the dreadful spectacle which is presented to me is not able to make me confirm one lie by another. The life offered me on such infamous terms I abandon without regret.”

Jacques de Molay (1243–1314) Grand Master of the Knights Templar

One of the foremost Templar scholars records of Jacques DeMolay's dying words.

Life, Pain, Truth, Lie

“After 200 years, the constitutional protection of the right of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is virtually gone. Today’s current terminology describing rights reflects this sad change. It is commonplace for politicians and those desiring special privileges to refer to: black rights, Hispanic rights, handicap rights, employee rights, student rights, minority rights, women’s rights, gay rights, children’s rights, student rights, Asian-American rights, Jewish rights, AIDS victims’ rights, poverty rights, homeless rights, etc. Unless all the terms are dropped & we recognize that only an individual has rights, the solution to the mess in which we find ourselves will not be found. The longer we lack of definition of rights, the worse the economic and social problems will be.”

Ron Paul (1935) American politician and physician

Freedom Under Siege https://web.archive.org/web/20111229190300/http://www.buzzfeed.com/ccbaxter/22-facts-that-dont-jibe-with-ron-paul-being-a-rac-41xp (1987). 1980s

Life, Women, Happiness, Children

“Every right of suffrage, like any political right in general, is not to be measured by some sort of abstract scheme of “justice,” or in terms of any other bourgeois-democratic phrases, but by the social and economic relationships for which it is designed. The right of suffrage worked out by the Soviet government is calculated for the transition period from the bourgeois-capitalist to the socialist form of society, that is, it is calculated for the period of the proletarian dictatorship. But, according to the interpretation of this dictatorship which Lenin and Trotsky represent, the right to vote is granted only to those who live by their own labor and is denied to everyone else.”

Rosa Luxemburg (1871–1919) Polish Marxist theorist, socialist philosopher, and revolutionary

Source: The Russian Revolution (1918), Chapter Five, "The Question of Suffrage"

Justice

“Being points beyond itself.
Accustomed to think in terms of space, the expression "being points beyond itself" may be taken to denote a higher point in space. What is meant, however, is a higher category than being: the power of maintaining being.”

Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907–1972) Polish-American Conservative Judaism Rabbi

Source: Who Is Man? (1965), Ch. 5

Thinking

“If a concept lacks an essence, nothing will ever be found that completely fits that concept. If you are lacking in the concept of human being, it will immediately expose that you are something individual, something that cannot be expressed by the term human being, thus, in every instance, an individual human being.”

Max Stirner (1806–1856) German philosopher

Stirner's Critics (1845)

“Our children grow up in a culture permeated with the idea that there are "smart people" and "dumb people". The social construction of the individual is as a bundle of aptitudes. There are people who are "good at math" and people who "can't do math." Everything is set up for children to attribute their first unsuccessful or unpleasant learning experiences to their own disabilities. As a result, children perceive failure as relegating them either to the group of "dumb people" or, more often, to a group of people "dumb at x" (where, as we have pointed out, x often equals mathematics). Within this framework children will define themselves in terms of their limitations, and this definition will be consolidated and reinforced throughout their lives. Only rarely does some exceptional event lead people to reorganize their intellectual self-image in such a way as to open up new perspectives on what is learnable.”

Seymour Papert book Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas

Source: Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas (1980), Chapter 2, Mathophobia: The Fear of Learning

Children, People, Way, Mathematics

“What we now have is too much focus on short-term revenues and almost no focus on the long-term survival or success of the firm. This is why you don't see anything very innovative out of firms like Apple.”

Rob Enderle (1954) American financial analyst

Why Are Tech Companies Trying to Kill Us? http://technewsworld.com/story/84944.html in Tech News World (13 November 2017)

Success

“Contingency theories dominate scholarly studies of organization behavior, design, performance, planning and management strategy. While they vary widely in subject matter, they have the common proposition that an organizational outcome is the consequency of a "fit" or match between two or more factors. "Fit" is the key concept in this proposition, and the core problem common to contingency theories is not defining this term clearly. This paper examines three ways to define and test this concept of fit: Selection, Interaction, and Systems approaches. A critical discussion of these three approaches will clarify much of the current confusion in the literature on contingency theories, and suggest ways that future theorizing and research can become more systematic and constructive.”

Andrew H. Van de Ven (1945) American business theorist

Andrew H. Van de Ven and Robert Drazin (1984). The Concept of Fit in Contingency Theory http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?AD=ADA152603. No. SMRC-DP-19). Minneapolis: Minnesota University Minneapolis Strategic Management Research Center.

Way, Behavior, Literature, Problem

“Our lives today are not conducted in linear terms. They are much more quantified; a stream of random events is taking place.”

J. G. Ballard (1930–2009) British writer

Conversation http://www.jgballard.ca/interviews/macbeth_interview_1967.html with George MacBeth on Third Programme (BBC) (1 February 1967)], published in The New S.F. (1969), edited by Langdon Jones

“To stop using the word "free" now would be a mistake; we need more, not less, talk about freedom.
If those using the term "open source" draw more users into our community, that is a contribution, but the rest of us will have to work even harder to bring the issue of freedom to those users' attention. We have to say, "It's free software and it gives you freedom!"”

Richard Stallman (1953) American software freedom activist, short story writer and computer programmer, founder of the GNU project

more and louder than ever before.
1990s, Why "Free Software" is better than "Open Source" (1998)

Communication, Freedom, Drawing

“It is particularly displeasing to hear professional critics using the term "layman" to describe people who are amateurs and patrons of those arts with which they are themselves professionally concerned. The fact that the critic gets money for knowing something, and giving public expression to his opinion, does not entitle him to consider the amateur, who may be as well informed and as sensitive as himself, an outsider.”

Robertson Davies book A Voice from the Attic

A Voice from the Attic (1960)

Money, People, Art

“But there are deeper motivations. I think at a fundamental level, in terms of what drives me in this is that I think God's glory is being robbed by these naturalistic approaches to biological evolution, creation, the origin of the world, the origin of biological complexity and diversity. When you are attributing the wonders of nature to these mindless material mechanisms, God's glory is getting robbed…And so there is a cultural war here. Ultimately I want to see God get the credit for what he's done - and he's not getting it.”

William A. Dembski (1960) American intelligent design advocate

2000s

God, War, World, Motivation

“Long-term success depends upon trust.”

Ted Malloch (1952) American businessman

Source: Doing Virtuous Business (Thomas Nelson, 2011), p. 10.

Success, Dependency

“For when scrutinized in terms not of what it is but of how it functions, of how it has served mankind in the past, of how it may serve today, mythology shows itself to be as amenable as life itself to the obsessions and requirements of the individual, the race, the age.”

Joseph Campbell book The Hero with a Thousand Faces

Epilogue
The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949)

Life, Age, Past

“You have to come to terms with yourself and your place in the scheme of life — something a good many people don't want to do. In the last century we have extended the normal life-span. Many seem to believe that this means we have extended the period when they should enjoy the things they enjoyed in youth. But I don't think they realize that we've also expanded the period of life when we can learn to think, feel, and experience the largeness and the splendor of life.”

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

"You Should Face Up to Your Death, Says Author".
Conversations with Robertson Davies (1989)

Life, People, Youth, Feeling

“I can bear this - that I am not the young wild guy [as he was in the 1970's]. I hope that the lust to work doesn't leave me. That would be sad. I am glad to get honors and high prices. But artists are valued today in terms of money, auctions. I wish society would need art more, but it doesn't. So I feel very lonely in this culture.”

Gerhard Richter (1932) German visual artist, born 1932

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

Money, Sadness, Hope, Art

“Fascism rebelled against modernity inasmuch as modernity was identified with the rationalism, optimism, and humanism of the eighteenth century, but it was not a reactionary or an anti-revolutionary movement in the Maurrassian sense of the term. Fascism presented itself as a revolution of another kind, a revolution that sought to destroy the existing political order and to uproot its theoretical and moral foundations but that at the same time wished to preserve all the achievements of modern technology.”

Zeev Sternhell (1935) Israeli historian

Source: The Birth of Fascist Ideology: From Cultural Rebellion to Political Revolution, 1994, p. 7

Optimism, Sense, Time

“In the simplest terms the question who or what caused the Second World War can be answered in two words: Adolf Hitler.”

Eric Hobsbawm book The Age of Extremes

Source: The Age of Extremes (1992), p. 36 <Ref> https://libcom.org/files/Eric%20Hobsbawm%20-%20Age%20Of%20Extremes%20-%201914-1991.pdf</ref>

War, World, Question

“Ruburt tuned in to the world view of a man known dead. He was not directly in communication with William James. He was aware, however, of the universe through William James' world view. As you might tune into a program on a television set, Ruburt tuned into the view of reality now held in the mind of William James. Because that view necessarily involved emotions, Ruburt felt some sense of emotional contact -- but only with the validity of the emotions. Each person has such a world view, whether living or dead in your terms, and that "living picture" exists despite time or space. It can be perceived by others.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Source: Psychic Politics: An Aspect Psychology Book (1976), p. 82-83

World, Communication, Reality, Sense

“A policy is a formulation of long term goals and purposes and of the values and aspirations by which those goals and purposes are not only defined but are to be translated into activities and practices. Thus a policy is an affirmation, perhaps a reaffirmation, of what may be taken for granted or is implied, but what is frequently ignored or neglected or inadequately recognized in plans and programs and customary operations. Sometimes a policy serves to point out where these goals and purposes and these values are being blocked or sacrificed to various short-term ends or convenience.”

Lawrence K. Frank (1890–1968) American cyberneticist

National Policy for the Family (1948)

“This is not to deny for one moment either the enormous cultural changes undergone by the Greeks despite a surviving sense of common ethnicity or the cultural influence of surrounding peoples and civilizations over two thousand years. At the same time in terms of script and language, certain values, a particular environment and its nostalgia, continuous social interactions, and a sense of religious and cultural difference, even exclusion, a sense of Greek identity and common sentiments of ethnicity can be said to have persisted beneath the many social and political changes of the last two thousand years”

Anthony D. Smith (1939–2016) British academic

Source: National Identity (1991), p. 31: About Ethnic Change, Dissolution and Survival

People, Sense, Nostalgia, Change

“The term A[rt] resembles a chemist's graduated glass. Each age contributes its own quantity: for example, 5 grams of the perfume 'Coty' to tickle the nostrils of the fine gentry. Or another example, 10 cc of sulfuric acid to be thrown into the face of the ruling classes. Or, 15 cc: of some kind of metallic solution that later changes into a new source of light.... [as Lissitzky goes on to say] This A[rt] is an invention of the mind, i. e. a complex, where rationality is fused with imagination.”

El Lissitsky (1890–1941) Soviet artist, designer, photographer, teacher, typographer and architect

Quote of El Lissitzky, 1925, from his text: 'A. and Pangeometry', in Architecture for World Revolution; trans. Paul Filotas et al. (London: Thames and Hudson, 1988) p. 17
1915 - 1925

Age, Imagination, Light, Change

“Secrecy was paramount. Britain's imperial general staff knew there would be outrage if it became known that the government was intending to use its secret stockpile of chemical weapons. But Winston Churchill, then secretary of state for war, brushed aside their concerns. As a long-term advocate of chemical warfare, he was determined to use them against the Russian Bolsheviks.”

Giles Milton (1966) British writer and historian

Winston Churchill's shocking use of chemical weapons https://www.theguardian.com/world/shortcuts/2013/sep/01/winston-churchill-shocking-use-chemical-weapons (1 September 2013), .

War, Secret

“What I am trying to do is something different — an effect of reality, but what some fools call Impressionism, a term that is usually misapplied, especially by the critics who don't hesitate to apply it to Turner, the greatest creator of mysterious effects in the whole world of art.”

Claude Debussy (1862–1918) French composer

As quoted in The Lives of the Great Composers (1997) by Harold C. Schonberg, p. 464

World, Fools, Art, Reality

“Do you know how many times, when I was a kid, going to Europe, having a Frenchman try to get on my case about Vietnam. And that wasn't the problem, do you know what it was like to have other kids, other American students go, "yeah, it's pretty bad, in Vietnam, we should, yeah". And I'd be like, 'but, mhmm, French Indochina.', and they'd be like, "Oh is that near Vietnam" (groans). We don't educate our young people, and then we send them out into the world, as ambassadors as lameness. So no, no world empire, I don't want to be responsible for the plumbing in Rwanda, but we do need to become as much of a student of them as they are of us. Because, here's the thing. Well, the problem with the global village, remember in the early 90's, with the term now, global village, well the problem with the global village is that a lot of people are waking up realizing that they are in the global villages ghetto. And now with media, we are broadcasting these images of our wealth, and our power, our society, and the people in the global village are looking up on the hill seeing that mansion, but we're not looking down into the slum, and we need to do that. There's just so many times you can drive slowly through the ghetto in a rich convertible before you get carjacked. So this is what I mean, we need to engage…”

Max Brooks (1972) American author

Lecture of Opportunity | Max Brooks: World War Z https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-nGG5E04cog

People, World, Education, Problem

“Discretion has been termed the better part of valour, and it is more certain, that diffidence is the better part of knowledge.”

Charles Caleb Colton (1777–1832) British priest and writer

Preface
Lacon (1820)

Knowledge, Parting

“Many times I had spoken about "mental bipolarity" and proved that our affects are bipolar. Desire and disgust, love and hate, will-to-power and will-to-submission, are composed of negative and positive parts like the current of electricity. My contention was that any human affect has its own counterpart. Later Bleuler described this fact as "ambivalence," a term that was accepted by everybody, whereas previously they had laughed at my discovery, and given me the nickname "Stekel with his Bipolarity."”

Wilhelm Stekel (1868–1940) Austrian physician and psychologist

Source: The Autobiography of Wilhelm Stekel (1950), p. 132

Love, Hate, Time, Parting

“Pure rationality and limited rationality share a common perspective, seeing decisions as based on evaluation of alternatives in terms of their consequences for preferences. This logic of consequences can be contrasted with a logic of appropriateness by which actions are matched to situations by means of rules organized into identities.”

James G. March (1928–2018) American sociologist

James G. March (1994), A Primer on Decision Making: How Decisions Happen, p. 57

Decision

“The intention of the US found its feature through a clear formulation in the Agreement for the IBRD. The “purposes of the Bank” were defined as follows: “To promote private foreign investment by means of guarantees or participations in loans and other investments made by private investors; and when private capital is not available on reasonable terms, to supplement private investments by providing, on suitable conditions, finance for productive purposes out of its own capital, funds raised by it and its other resources””

Nico Perrone (1935) Italian historian and writer

Source: The international economy from a political to an authoritative drive, p. 130

“Now the Disney Corporation could do this because that culture lived in a commons, an intellectual commons, a cultural commons, where people could freely take and build. It was a lawyer-free zone.
It was culture, which you didn't need the permission of someone else to take and build upon. That was the character of creativity at the birth of the last century. It was built upon a constitutional requirement that protection be for limited times, and it was originally limited. Fourteen years, if the author lived, then 28, then in 1831 it went to 42, then in 1909 it went to 56, and then magically, starting in 1962, look — no hands, the term expands.
Eleven times in the last 40 years it has been extended for existing works — not just for new works that are going to be created, but existing works. The most recent is the Sonny Bono copyright term extension act.”

Lawrence Lessig (1961) American academic, political activist.

OSCON 2002

People, Birth, Time

“When you think long-term, the edge is really investing because others can't know.”

Andy Kessler (1958) American writer

Part I, Raising Funds, Hedgies, p. 27.
Running Money (2004) First Edition

Thinking

“The poor are thought to be dangerous, either morally dangerous because they are unproductive social parasites - thieves, prostitutes, drug addicts, and the like - or potentially dangerous because they are disorganized, unpredicatble, and tendentially reactionary. In fact the term lumpenproletariat (or rad proletariat) has functioned for times to demonize the poor as a whole. … The industrial reserve army is a constant threat hanging over the heads of the existing working class because, first of all, its misery serves as a terrifying example to workers of what could happen to them, and, second, the excess supply of labor it represents lowes the costs of labor and undermines workers' power against employers (by serving potentially as strike breakers, for example).”

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

130
Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

Time

“Twenty years will produce all the mischief that can be apprehended from the liberty to import slaves. So long a term will be more dishonorable to the National character than to say nothing about it in the Constitution.”

James Madison (1751–1836) 4th president of the United States (1809 to 1817)

1780s, The Debates in the Federal Convention (1787) Source: Madison's notes (25 August 1787) http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/debates_825.asp

“Short-term amnesia is not the worst affliction if you have an Irish flair for the sauce.”

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

Vanity Fair (May 1984)

Affliction

“When I was first aware that I had been laid low by the disease, I felt a need, among other things, to register a strong protest against the word “depression.” Depression, most people know, used to be termed “melancholia,” a word which appears in English as early as the year 1303 and crops up more than once in Chaucer, who in his usage seemed to be aware of its pathological nuances. “Melancholia” would still appear to be a far more apt and evocative word for the blacker forms of the disorder, but it was usurped by a noun with a bland tonality and lacking any magisterial presence, used indifferently to describe an economic decline or a rut in the ground, a true wimp of a word for such a major illness. It may be that the scientist generally held responsible for its currency in modern times, a Johns Hopkins Medical School faculty member justly venerated — the Swiss-born psychiatrist Adolf Meyer — had a tin ear for the finer rhythms of English and therefore was unaware of the semantic damage he had inflicted by offering “depression” as a descriptive noun for such a dreadful and raging disease. Nonetheless, for over seventy-five years the word has slithered innocuously through the language like a slug, leaving little trace of its intrinsic malevolence and preventing, by its very insipidity, a general awareness of the horrible intensity of the disease when out of control.
As one who has suffered from the malady in extremis yet returned to tell the tale, I would lobby for a truly arresting designation. “Brainstorm,” for instance, has unfortunately been preempted to describe, somewhat jocularly, intellectual inspiration. But something along these lines is needed. Told that someone’s mood disorder has evolved into a storm — a veritable howling tempest in the brain, which is indeed what a clinical depression resembles like nothing else — even the uninformed layman might display sympathy rather than the standard reaction that “depression” evokes, something akin to “So what?” or “You’ll pull out of it” or “We all have bad days.””

William Styron book Darkness Visible

The phrase “nervous breakdown” seems to be on its way out, certainly deservedly so, owing to its insinuation of a vague spinelessness, but we still seem destined to be saddled with “depression” until a better, sturdier name is created.
Source: Darkness Visible (1990), IV

People, Disease, School, Way

“Several commentators have reflected on the fact that this may be one of the great political victories of all time. In terms of votes that may be true, but in terms of what a victory really is, a huge landslide margin means nothing at all unless it is a victory for America. It will be a victory for America only if, in these next four years, we, all of us, can work together to achieve our common great goals of peace at home and peace for all nations in the world, and for that new progress and prosperity which all Americans deserve.”

Richard Nixon (1913–1994) 37th President of the United States of America

1970s, Remarks on Being Reelected (1972)

World, Peace, Home, Time

“Vox populi, vox Dei is Latin for "The voice of the people is the voice of God". "Sarcode" is an archaic term for protoplasm.”

Charles Darwin book On the Origin of Species (1859)

On the Origin of Species (1859)

God, People

“Now, where did we ever get the idea that there is such a thing as 'good government?' That is a contradiction in terms as ridiculous as 'constructive rape.”

Robert LeFevre (1911–1986) American libertarian businessman

Rampart Institute, (Society for Libertarian Life edition), from 1977 speech, p. 14.
Good Government: Hope or Illusion? (1978)

Idea

“Of course some wars may have been necessary or inevitable, but none was ever regarded as holy. For us, a holy war is a contradiction in terms. War dehumanizes, war diminishes, war debases all those who wage it. The Talmud says, "Talmidei hukhamim marbin shalom baolam" (It is the wise men who will bring about peace). Perhaps, because wise men remember best.”

Elie Wiesel (1928–2016) writer, professor, political activist, Nobel Laureate, and Holocaust survivor

Hope, Despair, and Memory (1986)

Men, War, Peace

“When Reagan and Thatcher came to power, “authoritarian populism” was a term academics used to describe their politics. Now it’s a phenomenon, growing rapidly, cutting across old definitions of left and right, goes the argument. But it’s not so simple and the phenomenon is not new. The term “authoritarian populist” is a construct that, if we are not careful, could blind us to the real roots of centrism’s sudden crisis – and to the answers.”

Paul Mason (journalist) (1960) British journalist

How do we fight the loudmouth politics of authoritarian populism? (21 November 2016)

“It was God who breathed life into matter and inspired its many textures and processes. …Rather than turn away from what he could not explain, he plunged in more deeply. …There were forces in nature that he would not be able to understand mechanically, in terms of colliding billiard balls or swirling vortices. They were vital, vegetable, sexual forces—invisible forces of spirit and attraction. Later, it had been Newton, more than any other philosopher, who effectively purged science of the need to resort to such mystical qualities. For now, he needed them.”

James Gleick (1954) American author, journalist, and biographer

James Gleick, Isaac Newton (2003)

Life, God, Understanding, Nature

“If you look at what's going on in terms of unity, the Bernie people are angry. They're angry. He was angry. What was amazing to me is when she was talking about Bernie last night, the camera was on him and he was angry. It almost looks like he has buyer's remorse, like he shouldn't have made the deal.”

Donald J. Trump (1946) 45th President of the United States of America

2010s, 2016, July, This Week Interview (July 30, 2016)

People, Night

“And here again, what does the King mean? The functions of a King as an individual, are very small indeed. What the King means, is the British Government, and let there be no mistake, under the terms of this Treaty the British Government will be supreme in Ireland.”

Robert Erskine Childers (1870–1922) Irish nationalist and author

Literary Years and War (1900-1918), Last Years: Ireland (1919-1922)

“The phenomena of power and influence involve a dyadic relation between two agents which may be viewed from two points of view: (o) What determines the behavior of the agent who exerts power? (h) What determines the reactions of the recipient of this behavior? We take this second point of view and formulate our theory in terms of the life space of P, the person upon whom the power is exerted. In this way we hope to define basic concepts of power which will be adequate to explain many of the phenomena of social influence, including some which have been described in other less genotypic terms.”

John R. P. French (1913–1995) American psychologist

Source: "The bases of social power." 1959, p. 150

Life, Hope, Way, Behavior

“In terms of political geography, The French Revolution ended the European Middle Ages.”

Eric Hobsbawm (1917–2012) British academic historian and Marxist historiographer

Source: The Age of Revolution (1962), Chapter 4, War

Age

“It doesn't matter what he or anyone else thinks about it. Simply put, extending the term of the president is not allowed by the Constitution. Besides, I don't think President Noynoy is even thinking about that, much less wants it.”

Francis Escudero (1969) Filipino politician

Escudero, F. [Francis]. (2014, August 8). Retrieved from Official Facebook Page of Francis Escudero https://www.facebook.com/senchizescudero/posts/10152626118525610/ 2014, Facebook

Thinking

“Religion in terms of “personal experience is an independent functioning of the human mind, something unique, possessing and autonomous character. It is something inward and personal which unifies all values and organizes all experiences. It is the reaction to the whole of man to the whole of reality. It may be called spiritual life, as distinct from a merely intellectual or moral or aesthetic activity or a combination of them.”

Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan (1888–1975) Indian philosopher and statesman who was the first Vice President and the second President of India

Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Life, Religion, Reality, Personality

“Dialectic functions by converting everything it touches into figure but metaphor is a means of perceiving one thing in terms of another.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

Source: 1990s and beyond, The Book of Probes : Marshall McLuhan (2011), p. 298

“If some speak ill of me, I will try to understand their reasons, but after my death I will certainly come to terms with it.”

Fausto Cercignani (1941) Italian scholar, essayist and poet

Examples of self-translation (c. 2004), Quotes - Zitate - Citations - Citazioni

Death, Understanding

“I personally would say that the quickest way to wipe out a group of people is to put them on a soul food diet. One of the tragedies is that the very folks in the black community who are most sophisticated in terms of the political realities in this country are nonetheless advocates of “soul food.” They will lay down a heavy rap on genocide in America with regard to black folks, then walk into a soul food restaurant and help the genocide along.”

Dick Gregory (1932–2017) American comedian, social activist, social critic, writer, and entrepreneur

Source: Dick Gregory's Natural Diet For Folks Who Eat (1973), p. 81

People, Food, Way, Soul

“Magisterium' and 'oblation' are church terms, they are terms of church organisation. These are administrative things. These are bureaucratic things. How can an attack on those be construed as an attack on God? These are human things which human beings have constructed in order to wield power. That's not a contentious thing to say. That is simply true. These are forms of political organisation and no more than that.”

Philip Pullman (1946) English author

Surefish interview (2002)

God

“From the very beginning, President Obama has relentlessly tried to play down and deny the nature of the terrorist threat we continue to face. […] Hence, Guantanamo will close, CIA interrogators will face a special prosecutor, and Khalid Sheik Mohammed will bask in a civilian trial in New York — a trifecta of political correctness and image management. And just to make sure even the dimmest understand, Obama banishes the term "war on terror." […] Obama may have declared the war over. Unfortunately, al-Qaeda has not. Which gives new meaning to the term "asymmetric warfare."”

Charles Krauthammer (1950–2018) American journalist

Column, January 1, 2010, "Obama’s dangerous denial" http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/krauthammer010110.php3#.U35UucJOWUk at jewishworldreview.com. 2010s, 2010

War, Understanding, Nature

“The French symbolists had a special term to express their love for things that had lost their objective significance, namely, ‘spleen.’ The conscious, challenging arbitrariness in the choice of objects, its ‘absurdity’ and ‘perverseness,’ as if by a silent gesture discloses the irrationality of utilitarian logic, which it then slaps in the face in order to demonstrate its inadequacy with regard to human experience. And while making it conscious, by this shock, of the fact that it forgets the subject, the gesture simultaneously expresses the subject’s sorrow over his inability to achieve an objective order. Twentieth-century society is not troubled by such inconsistencies. For it, meaning can be achieved in only one way—service for a purpose.”

Max Horkheimer book Eclipse of Reason

Source: Eclipse of Reason (1947), p. 38.

Love, Way, Forgetting

“If it could be shown that the great Trust magnate or the great Aristocratic landowner, apart from the advantages of his inherited wealth, was a more highly developed species of humanity than the poor struggling sempstress or the unemployed docker, then there might be some justification for allowing the docker and the sempstress as the representatives of a weaker class to die out in order to enable the more highly developed creature to survive; but one moment's reflection will show that the alleged superiority of the landowner or the Trust magnate rests on one fact alone, namely, that he owns certain material possessions, usually inherited, which enable him to dictate the terms upon which his less fortunate fellow creatures shall be permitted to live.”

Keir Hardie (1856–1915) Scottish socialist and labour leader

Source: From Serfdom to Socialism (1907), pp. 4-5

Wealth

“Education by the State is a contradiction in terms. Intellectual development is only possible to those who have seen through society.”

Celia Green (1935) British philosopher

The Decline and Fall of Science (1976)

Education

“And when I say the world is governed by nothing but demons, who will continue to be demons until they have destroyed the world, I am not using profanities; on the contrary, demon is a scientific term, a formula covering a specific chemical composition without connotations from politics, religion, or moral philosophy.... Here among us on the lowest rung of the world of life, no attention is paid to books unless they are written by chemically analyzed demons, or at least for them. Poets and philosophers are respected in proportion to the contempt and disgust they feel for the creation of life. Give this day our daily war is the prayer of those who govern countries. Kill, kill, said the outlaw Skuggasveinn...”

Halldór Laxness book Kristnihald undir Jökli (bók)

Dr. Sýngmann
Kristnihald undir Jökli (Under the Glacier/Christianity at Glacier) (1968)

Life, War, Books, World

“I could give here several other ways of tracing and conceiving a series of curved lines, each curve more complex than any preceding one, but I think the best way to group together all such curves and them classify them in order, is by recognizing the fact that all points of those curves which we may call "geometric," that is, those which admit of precise and exact measurement, must bear a definite relation to all points of a straight line, and that this relation must be expressed by a single equation. If this equation contains no term of higher degree than the rectangle of two unknown quantities, or the square of one, the curve belongs to the first and simplest class, which contains only the circle, the parabola, the hyperbola, and the ellipse; but when the equation contains one or more terms of the third or fourth degree in one or both of the two unknown quantities (for it requires two unknown quantities to express the relation between two points) the curve belongs to the second class; and if the equation contains a term of the fifth or sixth degree in either or both of the unknown quantities the curve belongs to the third class, and so on indefinitely.”

René Descartes book La Géométrie

Second Book
La Géométrie (1637)

Way, Thinking

“With the hubris common to physicists, I have always felt that I have known what good science is — it is theory cast in terms of mechanisms that describe how parts of the universe behave. With sometimes immense historical delay, these mechanisms always move towards being grounded in the larger mechanistic view of the universe. Theories always propose a view of how the universe is. They can never be effectively argued to be true, but only be brought before the bar of empirical evidence. All the modern concern for contextualism, hermeneutics and the social determination of meaning has its point, but is a mere footnote to the massive evidence for this view of science. The overwhelming success within this framework of modern biology over the last half century has provided another major confirmation, if one is needed. Someday we will get another striking confirmation from cognitive science. Though it can be argued that we are well on our way, we still have an immense distance to go. Arguments are no match for the evidence that cognitive science does not control its subject the way physics, chemistry and now biology do.”

Allen Newell (1927–1992) American cognitive scientist

Draft of an introduction to the Mind Matters Symposium http://diva.library.cmu.edu/Newell/mindmatters.html, 26 May 1992, Carnegie Mellon University Archives http://diva.library.cmu.edu/Newell/biography.html

Way, Universe, Science, Success

“I think the most important thing that G. W. Bush has done is what he's done that's good for America: he has stood against this country's enemies. I don't remember on September the 12th that we counted the bodies in terms of who was black and who was white. Thank God that day we remembered that we were all of us Americans — and G. W. Bush has been a president standing against that evil for the sake of all Americans.”

Alan Keyes (1950) American politician

Fox News' Hannity & Colmes, July 12, 2004. http://renewamerica.us/archives/media/interviews/04_07_12hc.htm. 2009

God, Thinking, Evil, Country

“Trump is a fascist. And that’s not a term I use loosely or often. But he’s earned it.”

Max Boot (1969) American writer and historian

Max Boot, Twitter https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/donald-trump-isnt-todays-wendell-willkie-hes-todays-benito-mussolini/2015/12/08/77c81b0c-9ddc-11e5-a3c5-c77f2cc5a43c_story.html (2015)

“There are seven causes of inconsistencies and contradictions to be met with in a literary work. The first cause arises from the fact that the author collects the opinions of various men, each differing from the other, but neglects to mention the name of the author of any particular opinion. In such a work contradictions or inconsistencies must occur, since any two statements may belong to two different authors. Second cause: The author holds at first one opinion which he subsequently rejects: in his work, however, both his original and altered views are retained. Third cause: The passages in question are not all to be taken literally: some only are to be understood in their literal sense, while in others figurative language is employed, which includes another meaning besides the literal one: or, in the apparently inconsistent passages, figurative language is employed which, if taken literally, would seem to be contradictories or contraries. Fourth cause: The premises are not identical in both statements, but for certain reasons they are not fully stated in these passages: or two propositions with different subjects which are expressed by the same term without having the difference in meaning pointed out, occur in two passages. The contradiction is therefore only apparent, but there is no contradiction in reality. The fifth cause is traceable to the use of a certain method adopted in teaching and expounding profound problems. Namely, a difficult and obscure theorem must sometimes be mentioned and assumed as known, for the illustration of some elementary and intelligible subject which must be taught beforehand the commencement being always made with the easier thing. The teacher must therefore facilitate, in any manner which he can devise, the explanation of those theorems, which have to be assumed as known, and he must content himself with giving a general though somewhat inaccurate notion on the subject. It is, for the present, explained according to the capacity of the students, that they may comprehend it as far as they are required to understand the subject. Later on, the same subject is thoroughly treated and fully developed in its right place. Sixth cause: The contradiction is not apparent, and only becomes evident through a series of premises. The larger the number of premises necessary to prove the contradiction between the two conclusions, the greater is the chance that it will escape detection, and that the author will not perceive his own inconsistency. Only when from each conclusion, by means of suitable premises, an inference is made, and from the enunciation thus inferred, by means of proper arguments, other conclusions are formed, and after that process has been repeated many times, then it becomes clear that the original conclusions are contradictories or contraries. Even able writers are liable to overlook such inconsistencies. If, however, the contradiction between the original statements can at once be discovered, and the author, while writing the second, does not think of the first, he evinces a greater deficiency, and his words deserve no notice whatever. Seventh cause: It is sometimes necessary to introduce such metaphysical matter as may partly be disclosed, but must partly be concealed: while, therefore, on one occasion the object which the author has in view may demand that the metaphysical problem be treated as solved in one way, it may be convenient on another occasion to treat it as solved in the opposite way. The author must endeavour, by concealing the fact as much as possible, to prevent the uneducated reader from perceiving the contradiction.”

Maimónides book The Guide for the Perplexed

Guide for the Perplexed (c. 1190), Introduction

Men, Way, Intelligence, Understanding

“… our maturation has consisted in the gradual realization that, if we can rely on one another, we need not rely on anything else. In religious terms, this is the Feuerbachian thesis that God is just a projection of the best, and sometimes the worst, of humanity. In philosophical terms, it is the thesis that anything that talk of objectivity can do to make our practices intelligible can be done equally well by talk of intersubjectivity.”

Richard Rorty (1931–2007) American philosopher

"John Searle on Realism and Relativism." Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers, Volume 3 (1998).

God, Intelligence

“The presently existing global financial and monetary system will disintegrate during the near term. The collapse might occur this spring, or summer, or next autumn; it could come next year; it will almost certainly occur during President William Clinton's first term in office; it will occur soon. That collapse into disintegration is inevitable, because it could not be stopped now by anything but the politically improbable decision by leading governments to put the relevant financial and monetary institutions into bankruptcy reorganization.”

Lyndon LaRouche (1922–2019) American political activist and founder of the LaRouche movement

"The Coming Disintegration of Financial Markets" (June 1994) http://spanish.larouchepac.com/static/about-larouche.html.

Spring, Autumn, Decision, Summer

“Leroy Anderson was a crossover composer before anyone came up with the term. The voice of Leroy Anderson became the voice of the Boston Pops in its dual commitment to approachability and to excellence.”

Keith Lockhart

Keith Lockhart, conductor, Boston Pops Orchestra, in Ken Gewertz, " Leroy Anderson Square dedicated http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/2003/07.17/12-anderson.html" (Cambridge, Massachusetts, July 17, 2003).

“To speak of Hindu fundamentalism, is a contradiction in terms, since Hinduism is a religion without fundamentals. To be an Indian Hindu is to be part of an elusive dream all share, a dream that fills our minds with sounds, words, flavours from many sources that we cannot easily identify.”

Shashi Tharoor (1956) Indian politician, diplomat, author

The Elephant, the Tiger and the Cellphone. p. 64.

Religion, Dreams, Parting

“It is well to start by distinguishing the few really great – the major novelists who count in the same way as the major poets, in the sense that they not only change the possibilities of the art for practitioners and readers, but that they are significant in terms of the human awareness they promote; awareness of the possibilities of life.”

F. R. Leavis book The Great Tradition

The Great Tradition: George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad (London: Chatto & Windus, 1948) p. 2

Life, Art, Way, Sense

“By the time of its disappearance at the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s, it was no longer plausible to argue that the Soviet Union offered a clear alternative to the ‘right-wing extremism’ of fascism. In fact, it was no longer clear what ‘right-wing’ or ‘left-wing’ might be taken to mean in terms of the major revolutions of the twentieth century.”

A. James Gregor (1929–2019) American political scientist

Source: The Faces of Janus: Marxism and Fascism in the Twentieth Century, (2000), p. 6

Time

“There is not, and there never was on this earth, a work of human policy so well deserving of examination as the Roman Catholic Church. The history of that Church joins together the two great ages of human civilisation. No other institution is left standing which carries the mind back to the times when the smoke of sacrifice rose from the Pantheon, and when camelopards and tigers bounded in the Flavian amphitheatre. The proudest royal houses are but of yesterday, when compared with the line of the Supreme Pontiffs. That line we trace back in an unbroken series, from the Pope who crowned Napoleon in the nineteenth century to the Pope who crowned Pepin in the eighth; and far beyond the time of Pepin the august dynasty extends, till it is lost in the twilight of fable. The republic of Venice came next in antiquity. But the republic of Venice was modern when compared with the Papacy; and the republic of Venice is gone, and the Papacy remains. The Papacy remains, not in decay, not a mere antique, but full of life and youthful vigour. The Catholic Church is still sending forth to the farthest ends of the world missionaries as zealous as those who landed in Kent with Augustin, and still confronting hostile kings with the same spirit with which she confronted Attila. The number of her children is greater than in any former age. Her acquisitions in the New World have more than compensated for what she has lost in the Old. Her spiritual ascendency extends over the vast countries which lie between the plains of the Missouri and Cape Horn, countries which a century hence, may not improbably contain a population as large as that which now inhabits Europe. The members of her communion are certainly not fewer than a hundred and fifty millions; and it will be difficult to show that all other Christian sects united amount to a hundred and twenty millions. Nor do we see any sign which indicates that the term of her long dominion is approaching. She saw the commencement of all the governments and of all the ecclesiastical establishments that now exist in the world; and we feel no assurance that she is not destined to see the end of them all. She was great and respected before the Saxon had set foot on Britain, before the Frank had passed the Rhine, when Grecian eloquence still flourished at Antioch, when idols were still worshipped in the temple of Mecca. And she may still exist in undiminished vigour when some traveller from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul's.”

Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay book Critical and Historical Essays

"Essay on Ludwig von Ranke's 'History of the Popes', in "Critical and Historical Essays", iii, (London; Longman, 7th Edn. 1952), 100-1.
Attributed

Life, Hostility, Children, Lie

“I realise that 2008 will be an important test for Russia, and not an easy one. At the same time, the Constitution of the Russian Federation states that the President, the head of state, is elected for four years through direct secret ballot and cannot stay in office for more than two consecutive terms.
I am not indifferent of course to the question of who will take in their hands the destiny of the country I have devoted my life to serving. But if each successive head of state were to change the Constitution to suit them, we would soon find ourselves without a state at all. I think that Russia's different political forces are sufficiently mature to realise their responsibility to the people of the Russian Federation. In any case, the person who receives the votes of the majority of Russian citizens will become the President of the country.”

Vladimir Putin (1952) President of Russia, former Prime Minister

Answering the question of Dutch TV station "Nederland 1" and Dutch newspaper "NRC Handelsblad", "Can you imagine a situation in which you would decide to remain in office for a third term?", Putin said: http://web.archive.org/web/20061013003243/http://www.kremlin.ru/eng/speeches/2005/10/31/1955_type82914type82916_96455.shtml 2006- 2010

Life, People, Secret, Question

“The Charter was regarded as important because it assigned definite and practical remedies to temporary evils. There was very little that was abstract in its terms, less even than later generations supposed…. A King had been brought to order, not by a posse of reactionary feudalists, but the community of the land under baronial leadership; a tyrant had been subjected to the laws which hitherto it had been his private privilege to administer and to modify at will. A process had begun which was to end in putting the power of the Crown into the hands of the community at large.”

George Macaulay Trevelyan (1876–1962) Historian

on the Magna Carta's legacy
A Shortened History of England (1959)

Law, Communication, Evil

“Another book read this term seized upon my interest in an exceptional way, this was Gibbon's Autobiography. I had long before got hold of a few extracts from this, which had found their way into Lord Sheffield's Memoir of the author, prefixed to an edition of the Decline and Fall which we had at home. Those extracts had fixed themselves in my memory. I now procured the whole book and devoured it, reading it again and again till I could repeat whole paragraphs. Gibbon, in fact, supplied the place of a college tutor; he not only found me advice, but secretly inspired me with the enthusiasm to follow it.”

Mark Pattison (1813–1884) English author and Church of England priest

Source: Memoirs (1885), Chapter III, pp. 128–130

Books, Way, Home, Memory

“…we like somebody who succeeds with such bad conscience, and who seems to wish that he had the nerve to be a failure or, better still, something to which the terms success and failure don’t apply—as when Mallory said, about Everest: “Success is meaningless here.””

Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) poet, critic, novelist, essayist

“ ‘Very Graceful Are the Uses of Culture’ ”, p. 206
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

Failure, Success

“Whether the French were better colonists than the British is an academic question, but at least such Frenchmen as were planting in Malaya (Pierre Boulle, for instance, and Henri Fauconnier) were kept sane by their own culture and some of them (those two, anyway) produced memorable novels based on their Malayan experiences. The British were mostly philistines, and they left behind a heritage of philistinism. Kampung culture is dying, and a metropolitan culture of art galleries and orchestras seems unlikely to arise. What there is, and flourishing too, is a materialist consumerism that is threatened from the north by the communists and from the west by the militant Islam of the ayatollahs. Mr Butcher’s book deals with a race of people who may well be surveyed in terms of anthropological generalities. There was no room for the brilliant or the eccentric. British Malaya was created by courageous and suffering mediocrities. The building of Singapore in 1819 was a rather different affair.”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

"White Men Sweating" - review of The British in Malaya 1880-1941: The Social History of a European Community in Colonial South-East Asia, by John G. Butcher.
Non-Fiction, Homage to QWERT YUIOP: Selected Journalism 1978-1985 (1986)

People, Books, Art, Courage

“Prosperity, in any meaningful sense of the term, is about the quality of our lives and relationships, about the resilience of our communities and about our sense of individual and collective meaning.”

Tim Jackson book Prosperity Without Growth

Prosperity Without Growth: Foundations for the Economy of Tomorrow, 2017 edition, Routledge, pages xxxviii-xxxix (ISBN 9781138935419).
Prosperity Without Growth

Communication, Sense

“This 'liberty' is not a series of isolated points pricked out in terms of the taking of property; the freedom of speech, press, and religion; the right to keep and bear arms; the freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures; and so on. It is a rational continuum which, broadly speaking, includes a freedom from all substantial arbitrary impositions and purposeless restraints.”

John Marshall Harlan II (1899–1971) American judge and Associate Justice of the Supreme Court (1899-1971)

Poe v. Ullman http://supreme.justia.com/us/367/497/case.html#522, 367 U.S. 497, 522 (1961).

Religion, Search, Freedom

“Hard systems thinking is also accused of conservatism. It privileges the values and interests of its clients and customers, and lends its apparent expertise to their realization. It thus gives the facade of objectivity to changes that help to secure the status quo. In general terms, despite its many strengths and achievements, hard systems thinking is today thought of as having a limited domain of application.”

Mike Jackson (1951) systems scientist

Michael C. Jackson (2007) Systems Thinking: Creative Holism for Managers. p. 62

Thinking, Change, Help

“Still how unenlightened and ignorant are the very nations we term civilized!”

Jean-Baptiste Say (1767–1832) French economist and businessman

Source: A Treatise On Political Economy (Fourth Edition) (1832), Introduction, p. lix-lx

“When the sins and errors of an age have made the world impossible to live in, the next generation, seeking to make life tolerable again, may be able to find no way save by surrender of cherished ideals, and so may find themselves compelled to cast about for new dreams and purposes. An important aspect of the historical process is the work of the new generation… being driven to something like a creative act for the very reason that life on the old terms has become impossible.”

Herbert Butterfield book The Whig Interpretation of History

The Whig Interpretation of History (1931)

Life, Age, World, Dreams

“"The only trend I do not like in rap right now is the message rap. I consider the message rap the equivalent of what strings were to rock 'n' roll in the late '50s - a capitulation to the adult norm who can't accept the music on its own terms. The people who considered "Sixty Minute Man" by Billy Ward and the, "Annie Had a Baby" - as the pinnacles of '50s R&B now are super uptight over the - in quotes - hotel/motel lyrics of rap. Rap is definitely as true to the essence of rock 'n roll as anything that's out there today."”

Aaron Fuchs

Aaron Fuchs quoted by David Toop (1991). Rap Attack 2, p. 120. New York: Serpent's Tail. .

People, Music, Quotes, Baby

“Within a few days I will go to the papal Legate [Pucci], and if he shall open a conversation on the subject as he did before, I will urge him to warn the Pope not to issue an excommunication [against Luther], for which I think would be greatly against him [the Pope]. For if it be issued I believe the Germans will equally despise the Pope and the excommunication. But do you be of good cheer, for our day will not lack those who will teach Christ faithfully, and who will give up their lives for Him willingly, even though among men their names shall not be in good repute after this life…So far as I am concerned I look for all evil from all of them: I mean both ecclesiastics and laymen. I beseech Christ for this one thing only, that He will enable me to endure all things courageously, and that He break me as a potter's vessel or make me strong, as it pleased Him. If I be excommunicated I shall think of the learned and holy Hilary, who was exiled from France to Africa, and of Lucius, who though driven from his seat at Rome returned again with great honour. Not that I compare myself with them: for as they were better than i so they suffered what was a greater ignominy. And yet if it were good to flory I would rejoice to suffer insult for the name of Christ. But let him that thinketh he standeth take heed lest he fall. Lately I have read scarcely any thing of Luther's; but what I have seen of his hitherto does not seem to me to stray from gospel teaching. You know - if you rememeber - that what I have always spoken of in terms of the highest commendation in him is that he supports his position with authoritative witness.”

Huldrych Zwingli (1484–1531) leader of the Protestant Reformation in Switzerland, and founder of the Swiss Reformed Churches

As cited in Huldreich Zwingli, the Reformer of German Switzerland, 1484-1531 by Samuel Macauley Jackson, John Martin Vincent, Frank Hugh Foster, p.148-149

Life, Men, Courage, Support