Quotes about term (3147 quotes, page 8)

“Competition is the final price determinant and competitive prices may result in profits which force you to accept a rate of return less than you hoped for, or for that matter to accept temporary losses. And, in times of inflation, the rate-of-return concept comes up against the problem of assets undervalued in terms of replacement. Nevertheless, no other financial principle with which I am acquainted serves better than rate of return as an objective aid to business judgment. This principle had governed the thinking of the Finance Committee of General Motors since 1917.”

Alfred P. Sloan (1875–1966) American businessman

Source: My Years with General Motors, 1963, p. 140

Hope , Business , Problem , Thinking

“It is not a matter of who can give the most but rather the spirit in which one participates in nation- building. And I apply that term to whatever useful exercise one is doing at any given time.”

Joni Madraiwiwi (1957–2016) Fijian politician

Opening address to the Leadership Fiji 2006 program, 9 March 2006.

Exercises , Time

“Extravagant in movie terms but stingy in emotional ones, it embodies all of [director Steven] Spielberg's bad impulses and almost none of his good ones: It's a grand display of how well he knows how to work us over, and yet the desperation with which he tries to get to us is repulsive.”

Stephanie Zacharek (1963) American film critic

Review http://dir.salon.com/story/ent/movies/review/2005/06/29/war/index.html of War of the Worlds (2005)

“More complicated, but still a placid environment, is that which can be characterized in terms of clustering: goals and noxiants are not randomly distributed but band together in certain ways. This may be called the placid, clustered environment.”

Fred Emery (1925–1997) Australian psychologist

Source: The Causal Texture of Organizational Environments (1963), p. 28-29.

Way

“We found that technological optimism is the common and the most dangerous reaction to our findings… Technology can relieve the symptoms of the problem without affecting the underlying causes. Faith in technology as the ultimate solution to all problems can thus divert our attention from the most fundamental problem— the problem of growth in a finite system- and prevent us from taking effective action to solve it… We would deplore an unreasoned rejection of the benefits of technology as strongly as we argue here against an unreasoned acceptance of them. Perhaps the best summary of our position is the motto of the Sierra Club; not blind opposition to progress but opposition to blind progress.
Taking no action to solve these problems is equivalent of taking strong action. Every day of continued exponential growth brings the world system closer to the ultimate limits of that growth. A decision to do nothing is a decision to increase the risk of collapse.
The way to proceed is clear… [we posses] all that is necessary to create a totally new form of human society… the two missing ingredients are the realistic long-term goal… and the human will to achieve that goal.”

Mihajlo D. Mesarovic (1928) Serbian academic

Source: Mankind at the Turning Point, (1974), p. 88, quoted in: Martin Bridgstock, David Burch, John Forge, John Laurent, Ian Lowe (1998) Science, Technology and Society: An Introduction. Cambridge University Press. pp. 245-246

World , Faith , Way , Optimism

“Accuracy is vexing to a crowd of would-be fantasizers. Hasn't our age coined the term "escapism," when in fact the only way to escape oneself is to allow oneself to be invaded?”

Jean Cocteau (1889–1963) French poet, novelist, dramatist, designer, boxing manager and filmmaker

Diary of an Unknown (1988), On Invisibility

Age , Way

“What happens when our eye sees a rose? What do we do when that happens? Our mind does something, to be sure, in the mere fact of taking in the object, grasping its color, its shape, and so on. We have to be awake and active. But all the same, it is a "relaxed" looking, so long as we are merely looking at it and not observing or studying it, counting or measuring its various features. Such observation would not be a "relaxed" action; it would be what Ernst Jünger termed an "act of aggression." But simply looking at something, gazing at it, "taking it in," is merely to open our eyes to receive the things that present themselves to us, that come to us without any need for "effort" on our part to "possess" them.”

Josef Pieper (1904–1997) German philosopher

Source: Leisure, the Basis of Culture (1948), Leisure, the Basis of Culture, p. 9
The Ernst Jünger quote is from Blätter und Steine (Hamburg, 1934), p. 202.

Color , Effort , Study , Parting

“The word science of administration has been used. There are many who object to the term. Now if by science is meant a conceptual scheme of things in which every particularity coveted may be assigned a mathematical value, then administration is not a science. In this sense only astro-physics may be called a science and it is well to remember that mechanical laws of the heavens tell us nothing about the color and composition of the stars and as yet cannot account for some of the disturbances and explosions which seem accidental. If, on the other hand, we may rightly use the term science in connection with a body of exact knowledge derived from experience and observation, and a body of rules or axioms which experience has demonstrated to be applicable in concrete practice, and to work out in practice approximately as forecast, then we may, if we please, appropriately and for convenience, speak of a science of administration. Once, when the great French mathematician, Poincaré, was asked whether Euclidean geometry is true, he replied that the question had no sense but that Euclidean geometry is and still remains the most convenient. The Oxford English Dictionary tells us that a science is, among other things, a particular branch of knowledge or study; a recognized department of learning.”

Charles A. Beard (1874–1948) American historian

Source: Philosophy, Science and Art of Public Administration (1939), p. 660-1

Law , Color , Star , Mathematics

“What Wilson and Lloyd George failed to see was that the terms of peace which they were hammering out against the dogged resistance of Clemenceau and Foch, while seemingly severe enough, left Germany in the long run relatively stronger than before. Except for the return of Alsace-Lorraine to France in the west and the loss of some valuable industrialized frontier districts to the Poles, form whom the Germans had taken them originally, Germany remained virtually intact, greater in population and industrial capacity than France could ever be, and moreover with her cities, farms, and factories undamaged by the war, which had been fought in enemy lands. In terms of relative power in Europe, Germany's position was actually better in 1919 than in 1914, or would be as soon as the Allied victors carried out their promise to reduce their armaments to the level of the defeated. The collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire had not been the catastrophe for Germany that Bismarck had feared, because there was no Russian empire to take advantage of it. Russia, beset by revolution and civil war, was for the present, and perhaps would be for years to come, impotent. In the place of this powerful country on her eastern border Germany now had small, unstable states which could not seriously threaten her and which one day might easily be made to return former German territory and even made to disappear from the map.”

William L. Shirer book The Collapse of the Third Republic

The Collapse of the Third Republic (1969)

War , Fear , Peace , Dogs

“If low-wage workers do not always behave in an economically rational way, that is, as free agents within a capitalist democracy, it is because they dwell in a place that is neither free nor in any way democratic. When you enter the low-wage workplace — and many of the medium-wage workplaces as well — you check your civil liberties at the door, leave America and all it supposedly stands for behind, and learn to zip your lips for the duration of the shift. The consequences of this routine surrender go beyond the issues of wages and poverty. We can hardly pride ourselves on being the world's preeminent democracy, after all, if large numbers of citizens spend half their waking hours in what amounts, in plain terms, to a dictatorship.”

Barbara Ehrenreich (1941) American writer and journalist

Evaluation (p. 210)
Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America (2001)

World , Way , Democracy , Learning

“The term "just war" contains an internal contradiction. War is inherently unjust, and the great challenge of our time is how to deal with evil, tyranny, and oppression without killing huge numbers of people.”

Howard Zinn (1922–2010) author and historian

Terrorism and War (2002)

War , People , Evil , Time

“The term “system” is unquestionably one of the most widely used terms not only in science, but in other areas of human endeavor as well. It is a highly overworked term, which enjoys different meanings under different circumstances and for different people. However, when separated from its specific connotations and uses, the term "system" is almost never explicitly defined.”

George Klir (1932–2016) American computer scientist

Source: Facets of Systems Science, (2001), p. 4.

People , Science

“It was a historic event. Not unfortunately because of its scale. Unpleasant to think about, but in terms of the scale it’s not that unusual. I did say it’s the worst, probably the worst instant human toll of any crime. And that may be true. But there are terrorist crimes with effects a bit more drawn out that are more extreme, unfortunately. Nevertheless, it’s a historic event because there was a change. The change was the direction in which the guns were pointing. That’s new. Radically new.”

Noam Chomsky (1928) american linguist, philosopher and activist

Quotes 2000s, 2001, The New War Against Terror, 2001

Thinking , Change

“It is no more rational to have lawyers in positions of power than it would be to have garbage collectors in positions of power. And in human terms garbage collectors would be preferable.”

Pierre Stephen Robert Payne (1911–1983) British lecturer, novelist, historian, poet and biographer

A Vision of the Uncorrupted Society, p. 288 (See also: Hunter S. Thompson..)
The Corrupt Society - From Ancient Greece To Present-Day America (1975)

“By any honest assessment of where we are as a party, without a major course correction, we are simply on the way out. The demographic picture of America is rapidly changing, and we have to change with it. George W. Bush got 56 percent of the white vote, and won. Mitt Romney got 59 percent of the white vote, and lost. Every four years in this country, the electorate gets about two percentage points less white; as an increasingly old and increasingly white party, we are skidding with each passing election toward irrelevance in terms of appealing to a broad electorate. We hold out our hand, expecting our share of nonwhite votes, and yet we give these Americans too few reasons to come our way. Instead, we demonize them, marginalize them, and blame them for our country's problems. We all knew of this before the last election, but we quickly set it aside for the sugar high of populism, nativism, and demagoguery. The crash from this sugar high will be particularly unpleasant.”

Jeff Flake (1962) American politician

Source: Conscience of a Conservative (2017), p. 8

Way , Problem , Change , Country

“From Richard McKeon and Robert Brumsbaugh I learned to view the history of philosophy as a series, not of alternative solutions to the same problems, but of quite different sets of problems. From Rudolph Carnap and Carl Hempel I learned how pseudo-problems could be revealed as such by restarting them in the formal mode of speech. From Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss I learned how they could be so revealed by being translated into Whiteheadian or Hegelian terms.”

Richard Rorty book Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature

Preface
Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979)

History , Problem , Learning

“Vieta (c. 1590) rejected the name "algebra" as having no significance in the European languages, and proposed to use the word "analysis," and it is probably to his influence that the popularity of this term in connection with higher algebra is due.”

David Eugene Smith (1860–1944) American mathematician

Source: History of Mathematics (1925) Vol.2, p. 392

“The body of scientific evidence supporting creation science is as strong as that supporting evolution. In fact, it may be stronger…. The evidence for evolution is far less compelling than we have been led to believe. Evolution is not a scientific "fact," since it cannot actually be observed in a laboratory. Rather, evolution is merely a scientific theory or "guess."… It is a very bad guess at that. The scientific problems with evolution are so serious that it could accurately be termed a "myth."”

Antonin Scalia (1936–2016) former Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

Edwards v. Aguillard, 482 U.S. 578 (1987) (dissenting) http://www.belcherfoundation.org/edwards_v_aguillard_dissent.htm
Has been misleadingly quoted without Scalia's statements attributing the assertions to witness testimony paragraphs earlier, "Before summarizing the testimony of Senator Keith and his supporters, I wish to make clear that I by no means intend to endorse its accuracy... Senator Keith and his witnesses testified essentially as set forth in the following numbered paragraphs:", as in Michael Stone, " Scalia Commencement Speech Supports Young Earth Creationism http://www.patheos.com/blogs/progressivesecularhumanist/2015/06/scalia-commencement-speech-supports-young-earth-creationism/" (), Progressive Secular Humanist, Patheos.
Misattributed

Support , Problem , Strong , Science

“…the most serious charges are made nowadays, not against the religious values of the Old Testament, but against its ethical values…. the Sacred Scriptures of the Old Testament, which all Christians, of whatever denomination, treat with reverence, are spoken of in blasphemous terms which may not be repeated in this holy place.”

Michael von Faulhaber (1869–1952) German Roman Catholic Cardinal

Sermon Two

“[Lloyd George] had a not too satisfactory interview with [Eamon de Valera] yesterday…. After DeV. had read the terms he told [Lloyd George] he could not advise his people to accept them. 'Very well, Mr. DeV.', was [Lloyd George]'s answer, 'then there is only one thing more left for us to discuss'. 'What is that?', asked DeV. 'The time for the truce to come to an end', said [Lloyd George]. [Lloyd George] says DeV. went perfectly white, and had difficulty controlling his agitation…. [Lloyd George] says that if they refuse there is only one thing to be done—to reconquer Ireland.”

David Lloyd George (1863–1945) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Frances Stevenson's diary entry (22 July 1921), A. J. P. Taylor (ed.), Lloyd George: A Diary (London: Hutchinson, 1971), pp. 230-231.
Prime Minister

People , Time , Reading

“To me it was more about eight years of bad policy before (Obama) got there that let this happen. It was Dracula running the blood bank in terms of oil and leases. I think that has more to do with it than how the president reacted to it.”

Jimmy Buffett (1946) American singer–songwriter and businessman

Jimmy Buffett Organizes Gulf Benefit, Blames Bush for Spill, foxnews.com, July 6, 2010, January 6, 2011 http://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/2010/07/06/jimmy-buffet-organizes-gulf-benefit-blames-bush-spill/#ixzz1AHyM5yHe,

Thinking

“The staff officer must be kept in his place. But this does not mean that he must be kept down, that he must be discouraged, that his initiative and imagination must be checked. On the contrary, all these characteristics should be encouraged. The important question is, through what channel are they to be directed? They should, of course, Bow through the responsible operating executive, not around him.
This process may be described in terms of the following sequence: the staff official makes a recommendation; it is approved by the responsible executive who, in his authoritative capacity, announces to those below him in the hierarchy that the recommendation is going to be adopted. Thereafter there are many details in connection with putting it into effect that can be carried out more effectively by the staff official than by the line official and with a saving of time to the latter. So long as the subordinates in the hierarchy are aware that this delegation is authorized and that the staff officer is not acting independently, unification of managerial responsibility is not impaired and there is no loss of influence and responsibility in the part of the executive.”

Marshall E. Dimock (1903–1991) American writer

Source: "The Meshing of Line and Staff", 1945, pp. 102-104, as cited in Albert Lepawsky (1949), Administration, p. 306-7

Imagination , Question , Loss , Time

“Architecture worth great attention. As we double our numbers every 20 years we must double our houses. Besides we build of such perishable materials that one half of our houses must be rebuilt in every space of 20 years. So that in that term, houses are to be built for three fourths of our inhabitants. It is then among the most important arts: and it is desireable to introduce taste into an art which shews so much.”

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

Hints to Americans travelling in Europe, letter to John Rutledge, Jr. (June 19, 1788); in The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Julian P. Boyd (1956), vol. 13, p. 269
1780s

Art , Housing

“The enemies will be asking reasonable questions, like Isn't politics the way matters are really decided, and isn't the rational systems approach simply one political device, to be used when politically expedient? Or isn't morality essentially inexpressible in terms of concepts and words, and doesn't this essentially ineffable quality of our lives lead us humans to decide the way we do? Or, isn't religious imagery really the basis of all our perspectives and concepts, including the perspective of the systems approach? And what is it that carries the values we humans cherish? It is not the ego or the mind, but, say our basic aesthetic feeling, which cannot be conceptualized. And finally, and most generally, why is a rational, holistic approach desirable for the human species, especially since it so often gets out of hand, missing the vital essence of the specific and individual, the here and now, encompassing "everything" to the exclusion of every thing?”

C. West Churchman (1913–2004) American philosopher and systems scientist

Source: 1960s - 1970s, The Systems Approach and Its Enemies (1979), p. 69; As cited in: Book Review: The Systems Approach and its Enemies http://phd-take-2.wikispaces.com/The+Systems+Approach+and+its+Enemies

Way , Feeling , Question

“It would be silly, of course, to be either 'for' or 'against' modernity tout court, not only because it is pointless to try to stop the development of technology, science, and economic rationality, but because both modernity and antimodernity may be expressed in barbarous and antihuman terms.”

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

"Modernity on Endless Trial" (1986)

Science

“The '80s to me, more than anything else, represents a time of real criminal activity in the office of the president: an incredibly disparate economy in terms of the class distinctions and whatnot, and a tremendous shallowness—a lot of sort of bank robbery by executives. This is the '80s to me. And a lot of synthesizer music. And, of course, Madonna and the beginning of MTV.”

Martha Plimpton (1970) American actress

Interview with Keith Phipps March 3, 1999 http://www.avclub.com/articles/martha-plimpton,13582/

Music , Time

“What woman here is so enamored of her own oppression that she cannot see her heelprint upon another woman's face? What woman's terms of oppression have become precious and necessary to her as a ticket into the fold of the righteous, away from the cold winds of self-scrutiny?”

Audre Lorde (1934–1992) writer and activist

"The Uses of Anger"
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984)

“Does the Minister accept that the attitude of the EEC and of North American countries towards commodity prices has been a major contributory factor in the debt crisis in much of the world? Does she agree that the latest round of Lomé convention prices on exports from ACP countries has resulted in virtually the lowest real terms prices ever achieved by those countries? They are worried about the way in which they have been treated by the EEC. Is the right hon. Lady aware that exports from ACP countries to the European Community are at their lowest level for 25 years? Those countries and many of us are worried about the growing crisis faced by the poorer countries because the richer industrial countries are closing their markets to them and forcing them into debt and low commodity prices.”

Jeremy Corbyn (1949) British Labour Party politician

Question http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1990/jan/08/commodity-prices in the House of Commons (8 January 1990).
1990s

World , Way , Communication , Country

“Past and future exist only in our memory. The present moment, though, is outside of time, it’s Eternity. In India, they use the word ‘karma,’ for lack of any better term.”

Paulo Coelho book Aleph

Aleph (2011)

Memory , Time , Past , Future

“The trends that produced Schumann’s early piano works started out not so much from Weber’s refined brilliance as from Schubert’s more intimate and deeply soul-searching idiom. His creative imagination took him well beyond the harmonic sequences known until his time. He looked at the fugues and canons of earlier composers and discovered in them a Romantic principle. In the interweaving of the voices, the essence of counterpoint found its parallel in the mysterious relationships between the human psyche and exterior phenomena, which Schumann felt impelled to express. Schubert’s broad melodic lyricism has often been contrasted with Schumann’s terse, often quickly repeated motifs, and by comparison Schumann is often erroneously seen as short-winded. Yet it is precisely with these short melodic formulae that he shone his searchlight into the previously unplumbed depths of the human psyche. With them, in a complex canonic web, he wove a dense tissue of sound capable of taking in and reflecting back all the poetical character present. His actual melodies rarely have an arioso form; his harmonic system combines subtle chromatic progressions, suspensions, a rapid alternation of minor and major, and point d’orgue. The shape of Schumann’s scores is characterized by contrapuntal lines, and can at first seem opaque or confused. His music is frequently marked by martial dotted rhythms or dance-like triple time signatures. He loves to veil accented beats of the bar by teasingly intertwining two simultaneous voices in independent motion. This highly inde-pendent instrumental style is perfectly attuned to his own particular compositional idiom. After a period in which the piano had indulged in sensuous beauty of sound and brilliant coloration, in Schumann it again became a tool for conveying poetic monologues in musical terms.”

Burkard Schliessmann classical pianist

Talkings about Chopin and Schumann

Love , Beauty , Music , Color

“If men do not keep on speaking terms with children, they cease to be men, and become merely machines for eating and for earning money.”

John Updike (1932–2009) American novelist, poet, short story writer, art critic, and literary critic

“A Foreword for Younger Readers,” Assorted Prose (1965)

Men , Money , Children

“Our existence in this world seems insignificant within the extent of space and of time. Therefore, nonreligious people have to come to terms with living in a world full of uncertainty and unknowns. Nevertheless, many people prefer facing the uncertainty, rather than believing in a certainty that makes no sense to them.”

Mordechai Ben-Ari (1948) Israeli computer scientist

Source: Just a Theory: Exploring the Nature of Science (2005), Chapter 8, “Science and Religion: Scientists Just Do Science” (pp. 136-137; minor grammatical errors corrected silently)

People , World , Sense , Time

“How would we express in terms of the statistical theory the marvelous faculty of a living organism, by which it delays the decay into thermodynamical equilibrium (death)?… the device by which an organism maintains itself stationary at a fairly high level of orderliness… really consists in continually sucking orderliness from its environment.”

Erwin Schrödinger book What Is Life?

What Is Life? (1944)

Death

“For whatever reason, we find it easier to "read" Hilbert Space patterns in terms of time. Yet the patterns exist outside of time. Thinking timelessly is not some unusual skill; when you remember last night's supper you sense a whole and not a chew-by-chew replay. To know a novel's action is to grasp the four-dimensional spacetime whole described.”

Rudy Rucker (1946) American mathematician, computer scientist, science fiction author and philosopher

Source: The Sex Sphere (1983), p. 135

Thinking , Sense , Time , Reading

“Surely, after 62 years, we should have an exact formulation of some serious part of quantum mechanics? By 'exact' I do not of course mean 'exactly true'. I mean only that the theory should be fully formulated in mathematical terms, with nothing left to the discretion of the theoretical physicist… until workable approximations are needed in applications. By 'serious' I mean that some substantial fragment of physics should be covered. Nonrelativistic 'particle' quantum mechanics, perhaps with the inclusion of the electromagnetic field and a cut-off interaction, is serious enough.”

John S. Bell (1928–1990) Northern Irish physicist

Against 'measurement' (1990)

Mathematics , Parting

“I felt that I was like Joan of Arc (at that time my heroine) and that, like her, I was seeing spiritual visions and was consequently set aside for a great work. What it was I could not imagine, but pictured myself as the dramatic and admired teacher of thousands. This is a very common mistake on the part of beginners and I see a lot of it today in connection with various occult groups. People's sincerity and aspiration do succeed in bringing them some inner, spiritual contact and they then interpret it in terms of personality success and importance. A reaction of over-stimulation…”

Alice A. Bailey (1880–1949) esoteric, theosophist, writer

Source: The Unfinished Autobiography (1951), Chapter I, Part 2

People , Imagination , Teachers , Time

“On Christmas Eve, during my terrible personal ordeal of the renewed bombing of North Vietnam, which after 12 years of war finally helped to bring America peace with honor, I sat down just before midnight. I wrote out some of my goals for my second term as President.
Let me read them to you:”

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

To make it possible for our children, and for our children's children, to live in a world of peace.
To make this country be more than ever a land of opportunity — of equal opportunity, full opportunity for every American.
To provide jobs for all who can work, and generous help for those who cannot work. To establish a climate of decency and civility, in which each person respects the feelings and the dignity and the God-given rights of his neighbor.
To make this a land in which each person can dare to dream, can live his dreams — not in fear, but in hope — proud of his community, proud of his country, proud of what America has meant to himself and to the world.
1970s, First Watergate Speech (1973)

War , Peace , Reading , Help

“What takes place within the structure of the leaf, then, with the aid of the wonderful green workmen, is this: A certain number of molecules of water, brought to the leaf from root and stem, are taken in hand and compounded with a certain number of molecules of carbon extracted from the air that has been brought into the leaf laboratory through its mouths or stomata from the outside atmosphere.
When the compound has been effected, we still have the atoms of hydrogen and oxygen that composed the water molecules and the atoms of carbon, but they are so marvelously put together that they no longer constitute the liquid water or the gas in which the carbon was imported. They now constitute an altogether new substance which is termed sugar.
Thus only three elements are dealt with and these very familiar ones. It would seem as if almost any chemist should be able to manage a simple combination like that. But… no human chemist knows how to manage it. There are forces to be invoked in effecting that combination of which no chemist has any knowledge.
Only the chlorophyll grains in the plant leaf have learned the secret, and up to the present they have kept their secret well.”

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

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

Secret , Knowledge , Learning , Water

“[P]eople misunderstand Israel, and see it now in colonial, imperialist terms is because it’s a unique event in human history. The British colonization of North America, New Zealand, Australia, the Dutch in South Africa, they came to places that they had never been to. That’s colonialism. You put your people in there. You takeover. You marginalize the natives if you can. You may not succeed. In South Africa, that’s colonialism. So they see the Jews arriving in what’s called Palestine, and that’s the parallel, the only one they understand. They can’t put their heads around the fact that this is a people returning to their home. That they never gave up title to. They never gave up their longing for. It was repeated in their rituals three times a day, it wasn’t like once a year, let’s remember the homeland.”

Charles Krauthammer (1950–2018) American journalist

2010s, 2015, Interview with Bill Kristol (2015)

People , Home , History , Understanding

“There can be no society without poetry, but society can never be realized as poetry, it is never poetic. Sometimes the two terms seek to break apart. They cannot.”

Octavio Paz (1914–1998) Mexican writer laureated with the 1990 Nobel Prize for Literature

"Signs in Rotation" (1967) in The Bow and the Lyre : The Poem, The Poetic Revelation, Poetry and History (1973) as translated by Ruth L.C. Simms, p. 249

“Nation state as a fundamental unit of man's organized life has ceased to be the principal creative force: International banks and multinational corporations are acting and planning in terms that are far in advance of the political concepts of the nation-state.”

Zbigniew Brzeziński book Between Two Ages

Between Two Ages: The Technetronic Era, 1971.

Life

“[There is an] unbridgeable chasm in the world. On one side are such criminal gangs, sanctified by the term government, and the United Nations they dominate, enforcing by their guns mass slavery, mass death, mass violence, mass impoverishment, and mass famine. On the other side are democratic countries where people are free, secure, and need not fear mass impoverishment, murder at the hands of government agents, and killing famines.”

Rudolph Rummel (1932–2014) American academic

Source: The Blue Book of Freedom: Ending Famine, Poverty, Democide, and War (2007), p. 12

Death , People , World , Fear

“Of greater importance than this regulation of African clientship were the political consequences of the Jugurthine war or rather of the Jugurthine insurrection, although these have been frequently estimated too highly. Certainly all the evils of the government were therein brought to light in all their nakedness; it was now not merely notorious but, so to speak, judicially established, that among the governing lords of Rome everything was treated as venal--the treaty of peace and the right of intercession, the rampart of the camp and the life of the soldier; the African had said no more than the simple truth, when on his departure from Rome he declared that, if he had only gold enough, he would undertake to buy the city itself. But the whole external and internal government of this period bore the same stamp of miserable baseness. In our case the accidental fact, that the war in Africa is brought nearer to us by means of better accounts than the other contemporary military and political events, shifts the true perspective; contemporaries learned by these revelations nothing but what everybody knew long before and every intrepid patriot had long been in a position to support by facts. The circumstance, however, that they were now furnished with some fresh, still stronger and still more irrefutable, proofs of the baseness of the restored senatorial government--a baseness only surpassed by its incapacity--might have been of importance, had there been an opposition and a public opinion with which the government would have found it necessary to come to terms. But this war had in fact exposed the corruption of the government no less than it had revealed the utter nullity of the opposition. It was not possible to govern worse than the restoration governed in the years 637-645; it was not possible to stand forth more defenceless and forlorn than was the Roman senate in 645: had there been in Rome a real opposition, that is to say, a party which wished and urged a fundamental alteration of the constitution, it must necessarily have now made at least an attempt to overturn the restored senate. No such attempt took place; the political question was converted into a personal one, the generals were changed, and one or two useless and unimportant people were banished. It was thus settled, that the so-called popular party as such neither could nor would govern; that only two forms of government were at all possible in Rome, a -tyrannis- or an oligarchy; that, so long as there happened to be nobody sufficiently well known, if not sufficiently important, to usurp the regency of the state, the worst mismanagement endangered at the most individual oligarchs, but never the oligarchy; that on the other hand, so soon as such a pretender appeared, nothing was easier than to shake the rotten curule chairs. In this respect the coming forward of Marius was significant, just because it was in itself so utterly unwarranted. If the burgesses had stormed the senate-house after the defeat of Albinus, it would have been a natural, not to say a proper course; but after the turn which Metellus had given to the Numidian war, nothing more could be said of mismanagement, and still less of danger to the commonwealth, at least in this respect; and yet the first ambitious officer who turned up succeeded in doing that with which the older Africanus had once threatened the government,(16) and procured for himself one of the principal military commands against the distinctly- expressed will of the governing body. Public opinion, unavailing in the hands of the so-called popular party, became an irresistible weapon in the hands of the future king of Rome. We do not mean to say”

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

Vol. 3, pg 163, Translated by W.P. Dickson.
The History of Rome - Volume 3

Life , War , People , Truth

“The people are being kept in line at the moment, because there are still lots of shiny new things for them to buy. But more and more Americans are beginning to look beyond their immediate material comfort and to worry about the long-term moral slide of their country. If the economy slips badly, there will be hell to pay. More and more people will listen to the dissidents. A big problem for the Jews is how to silence the dissidents now, how to stifle the people who are asking inconvenient questions and thinking dangerous thoughts, before these thoughts spread to other people. They've tried to do it with legislation, but the country isn't yet in a mood to be told what it can think. What the Jews need is a nice, big war. Then they can crack down on the dissidents. Then they can call us "subversives." Then they can call us "unpatriotic," because we will be against their war… That's why I am convinced that there will be a strong effort to involve America in another major war during the next four years. This effort will be disguised, of course. It will be cloaked in deceit, as such efforts always are. While the warmongers are scheming for war, they will tell us how much they want peace. They're good at that sort of thing. They've had a lot of practice. But they will be scheming for war, believe me, no matter what they say. And when that war comes, remember what you have read today.”

William Luther Pierce (1933–2002) American white nationalist

Get Set for War, 1997.
1990s, 1990

War , People , Peace , Mood

“To consider the city as the projection of society on space is both an indispensible starting point and too elementary an approach. For, although one must go beyond the empiricism of geographical description, one runs the very great risk of imagining space as a white page on which the actions of groups and institutions are inscribed, without encountering any other obstacle than the trace of past generations. This is tantamount to conceiving of nature as entirely fashioned by culture, whereas the whole social problematic is born by the indissoluble union of these two terms, through the dialectical process by which a particular biological species (particularly because divided into classes) "man", transforms himself and transforms his struggle for life and for the appropriation of the product of his labour.”

Manuel Castells (1942) Spanish sociologist (b.1942)

Source: The Urban Question: A Marxist Approach, 1977, p. 115

Life , Imagination , Fashion , Nature

“To me, looking at other people in terms of what is wrong with them —these gradations of disturbance— was and is distasteful. Always implicit in the doctor's view is, of course, how much more "healthy" you are than they. And this is almost never the case.”

Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson (1941) American writer and activist

Source: Final Analysis (1990), p. 94

People

“[Zuanne de Tonini] da Coi… impuned Tartaglia to publish his method, but the latter declined to do so. In 1539 Cardan wrote to Tartaglia, and a meeting was arranged at which, Tartaglia says, having pledged Cardan to secrecy, he revealed the method in cryptic verse and later with a full explanation. Cardan admits that he received the solution from Tartaglia, but… without any explanation. At any rate, the two cubics x^3 + ax^2 = c and x^3 + bx = c could now be solved. The reduction of the general cubic x^3 + ax^2 + bx = c to the second of these forms does not seem to have been considered by Tartaglia at the time of the controversy. When Cardan published his Ars Magna however, he transformed the types x^3 = ax^2 + c and x^3 + ax^2 = c by substituting x = y + \frac{1}{3}a and x = y - \frac{1}{3}a respectively, and transformed the type x^3 + c = ax^2 by the substitution x = \sqrt[3]{c^2/y}, thus freeing the equations of the term x^2. This completed the general solution, and he applied the method to the complete cubic in his later problems.”

David Eugene Smith (1860–1944) American mathematician

Source: History of Mathematics (1925) Vol.2, p.461

Problem , Time

“By the RIAA's terms, we commit piracy every time we share files on the Internet. In reality, the RIAA pirated almost all the 400 million CDs sold in America last year, since the people who made the music didn't get paid for them.”

Dave Marsh (1950) American music critic, author, editor and radio talk show host

"Paying the Cost to Feed the Boss" http://www.counterpunch.org/marsh0430.html, CounterPunch (2002-04-30)

People , Music , Reality , Time

“A solution of newly appearing economic problems, and in particular those connected with the scientific-technical revolution often cannot be based on existing methods but needs new ideas and approaches. Such one is the problem of the protection of nature. The problem of economic valuation of technical innovations efficiency and rates of their spreading cannot be solved only by the long-term estimation of direct outcomes and results without accounting peculiarities of new industrial technology, its total contribution to technical progress.”

Leonid Kantorovich (1912–1986) Russian mathematician

"Mathematics in Economics: Achievements, Difficulties, Perspectives," 1975

Idea , Nature , Problem , Appearance

“I gotta come to term with my sexuality. I gotta know what I'm all about.”

Chris Pontius (1974) American actor

[Spermathon- Jackass Episodes]
Variant: I gotta come to term with my sexuality. I gotta know what I'm all about.

“And I think America, if we're ever going to truly defeat terror without changing the character of our own country or compromising the future of our children, has got to not only say, "Okay, I want to shoulder my responsibilities, I want to create my share of opportunities" but we have to find a way to define the future in terms of a humanity that goes beyond our country, that goes beyond any particular race, that goes beyond any particular religion.”

Bill Clinton (1946) 42nd President of the United States

Statement (May 21, 2004)
2000s

Children , Religion , Way , Thinking

“Of all the religions ever devised by the great practical jokers of the race, [Christianity] is the one that offers most for the least money, so to speak, to the inferior man. It starts out by denying his inferiority in plain terms: all men are equal in the sight of God. It ends by erecting that inferiority into a sort of actual superiority: it is a merit to be stupid, and miserable, and sorely put upon—of such are the celestial elect. Not all the eloquence of a million Nietzsches, nor all the painful marshalling of evidence of a million Darwins and Harnacks, will ever empty that great consolation of its allure. The most they can ever accomplish is to make the superior orders of men acutely conscious of the exact nature of it, and so give them armament against the contagion.”

H.L. Mencken (1880–1956) American journalist and writer

1940s–present, Introduction to Nietzsche's The Antichrist

Men , Money , God , Pain

“Framework 2 is connected with the creativity and vitality of your world. In your terms, the dead waken in Framework 2 and move through it to Framework 3, where they can be aware of their reincarnational identities and connections with time, while being apart from a concentration on earth realities. In those terms, the so-called dead dip in and out of earth probabilities by travelling through Framework 2, and into those probabilities connected with earth realities. Some others may wind up in Framework 4, which is like Framework 2, except that it is a creative source for other kinds of realities not physically oriented at all and outside of, say, time concepts as you are used to thinking about them. In a way impossible to describe verbally, some portion of each identity also resides in Framework 4, and in all other Frameworks.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Source: The God of Jane: A Psychic Manifesto (1981), p. 139

World , Way , Travel , Thinking

“Over the years, many companies have contributed to free software development. Some of these companies primarily developed non-free software, but the two activities were separate; thus, we could ignore their non-free products, and work with them on free software projects. Then we could honestly thank them afterward for their free software contributions, without talking about the rest of what they did.
We cannot do the same with these new companies, because they won't let us. These companies actively invite the public to lump all their activities together; they want us to regard their non-free software as favorably as we would regard a real contribution, although it is not one. They present themselves as "open source companies," hoping that we will get a warm fuzzy feeling about them, and that we will be fuzzy-minded in applying it.
This manipulative practice would be no less harmful if it were done using the term "free software."”

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

But companies do not seem to use the term "free software" that way; perhaps its association with idealism makes it seem unsuitable. The term "open source" opened the door for this.
1990s, Why "Free Software" is better than "Open Source" (1998)

Hope , Way , Feeling

““Sounds kind of long-term to me. Just how far ahead do you think?”
“Very long-term—at least twenty, thirty years. And you can forget governments for this market, Bob; if they can’t tax it, they won’t understand it.””

Charles Stross book Accelerando

Source: Accelerando (2005), Chapter 1 (“Lobsters”), pp. 14-15

Understanding , Thinking , Forgetting

“I am aware that many regard me as an anti-sports character person, but the truth is that the country’s economy by then was in bad shape. Tanzania being among the highly indebted countries, I had to give sports the least prominence during my first term, while setting priorities in revitalising our economy.”

Benjamin Mkapa (1938) Tanzanian politician and former president

2011-05-07 http://dailynews.co.tz/sports/?n=19642&cat=sports
2011

Truth , Sport , Personality , Country

“I believe that we probably have lost the culture war. That doesn't mean the war is not going to continue, and that it isn't going to be fought on other fronts. But in terms of society in general, we have lost. This is why, even when we win in politics, our victories fail to translate into the kind of policies we believe are important.Therefore, what seems to me a legitimate strategy for us to follow is to look at ways to separate ourselves from the institutions that have been captured by the ideology of Political Correctness, or by other enemies of our traditional culture. I would point out to you that the word "holy" means "set apart," and that it is not against our tradition to be, in fact, "set apart." You can look in the Old Testament, you can look at Christian history. You will see that there were times when those who had our beliefs were definitely in the minority and it was a band of hardy monks who preserved the culture while the surrounding society disintegrated.What I mean by separation is, for example, what the homeschoolers have done. Faced with public school systems that no longer educate but instead "condition" students with the attitudes demanded by Political Correctness, they have seceded. They have separated themselves from public schools and have created new institutions, new schools, in their homes.”

Paul Weyrich (1942–2008) American political activist

Letter to Amy Ridenour, National Center for Public Policy Research http://www.nationalcenter.org/Weyrich299.html (1999-02-16)

War , Education , School , Way

“The [sexual harassment] situation has gotten so out of hand that, in 1993, in one of the first British cases, a plumber was fired for continuing to use the traditional term "ballcock" for the toilet flotation unit, instead of the new politically correct term, sanitized of sexual suggestiveness. This is insane. We are back to the Victorian era, when table legs had to be draped lest they put the thought of ladies' legs into someone's dirty mind.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Vamps and Tramps (1994), "No Law in the Arena: A Pagan Theory of Sexuality", p. 50

“But further analysis and experience soon raised doubts about the efficacy of these new tools. Empirical research indicated that the Keynesian multiplier was much smaller than earlier analyses had assumed, reduced by a crowding out of interest-sensitive spending caused by an induced increase in the demand for money and by the effect of the larger national debt on long-term interest rates. The leakage of demand through imports and the effect of the fiscal expansion on the exchange rate further reduced the multiplier.”

Martin Feldstein (1939–2019) American economist

"Rethinking the Role of Fiscal Policy" (2009).

Money

“Wilson is adopting a dangerous line. He wants to pose as the great arbiter of the war. His Fourteen Points are very dangerous. He speaks of the freedom of the seas. That would involve the abolition of the right of search and seizure, and the blockade. We shall not agree to that. Such a change would not suit this country. Wilson does not see that by laying down terms without consulting the Allies, he is making their position very difficult. He had no right to reply to the German Note without consultation, and I insisted upon a cablegram being sent to him. The position is very disturbing.”

David Lloyd George (1863–1945) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Quoted in Lord Riddell's diary entry (10 October 1918), J. M. McEwen (ed.), The Riddell Diaries 1908-1923 (London: The Athlone Press, 1986), p. 240
Prime Minister

War , Search , Freedom , Change

“Scientific realism in classical (i. e. pre-quantum) physics has remained compatible with the naive realism of everyday thinking on the whole; whereas it has proven impossible to find any consistent way to visualize the world underlying quantum theory in terms of our pictures in the everyday world. The general conclusion is that in quantum theory naive realism, although necessary at the level of observations, fails at the microscopic level.”

Ravi Gomatam (1950) Indian academic

R.Gomatam's paper Physics and Commonsense - Reassessing the connection in the light of the quantum theory http://arxiv.org/abs/0708.1536, 2004.

World , Way , Thinking

“What we have here is clear-cut evidence that illegitimacy—something I've always said we should talk about in terms of not having it—leads to drug abuse.”

Dan Quayle (1947) American politician, lawyer

Remarks (20 May 1992), quoted in Esquire (August 1992) and Ann Beatts (23 November 1997) "ABSURDUM; Murphy Brown's Got Dan All Fired Up Again," Los Angeles Times
Attributed

“Most of us understand that innovation is enormously important. It's the only insurance against irrelevance. It's the only guarantee of long-term customer loyalty. It's the only strategy for out-performing a dismal economy.”

Gary Hamel (1954) American management expert

Gary Hamel in: Gary Hamel On Innovating Innovation http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2012/12/04/gary-hamel-on-innovating-innovation/, Forbes, 4 December 2012.

Understanding , Loyalty

“Wadewitz eventually came out as a Wikipedian, the term the encyclopedia uses to describe the tens of thousands of volunteers who write and edit its pages. A rarity as a woman in the male-centric Wikipedia universe, she became one of its most valued and prolific contributors as well as a force for diversifying its ranks and demystifying its inner workings.”

Adrianne Wadewitz (1977–2014) academic and Wikipedian

Woo, Elaine (April 23, 2014). "Adrianne Wadewitz dies at 37; helped diversify Wikipedia" http://www.latimes.com/obituaries/la-me-adrianne-wadewitz-20140424,0,1077455.story. Los Angeles Times.
About

Universe

“[Capra for instance, uses the term "Paradigm" to mean] the totality of thoughts, perceptions, and values that form a particular vision of reality, a vision that is the basis of the way a society organizes itself”

Fritjof Capra (1939) American physicist

Uncommon Wisdom (1988)

Way , Reality

“The reality is that we do not know on what terms we would have access to the single market. We do know that in a negotiation we would need to make concessions in order to access it, and those concessions could well be about accepting EU regulations, over which we would have no say, making financial contributions, just as we do now, accepting free movement rules, just as we do now, or quite possibly all three combined.”

Theresa May (1956) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech as Home Secretary on the UK and European Union https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/home-secretarys-speech-on-the-uk-eu-and-our-place-in-the-world (25 April 2016)

Reality

“From the very beginning of hostilities, came into conflict the two ideas which for fifty months were to struggle for the dominion of the world - the idea of sovereign force, which accepts neither control nor check, and the idea of justice, which depends on the sword only to prevent or repress the abuse of strength…the war gradually attained the fullness of its first significance, and became, in the fullest sense of the term, a crusade of humanity for Right; and if anything can console us in part at least, for the losses we have suffered, it is assuredly the thought that our victory is also the victory of Right. This victory is complete, for the enemy only asked for the armistice to escape from an irretrievable military disaster…And in the light of those truths you intend to accomplish your mission. You will, therefore, seek nothing but justice, "justice that has no favourites," justice in territorial problems, justice in financial problems, justice in economic problems. But justice is not inert, it does not submit to injustice. What it demands first, when it has been violated, are restitution and reparation for the peoples and individuals who have been despoiled or maltreated. In formulating this lawful claim, it obeys neither hatred nor an instinctive or thoughtless desire for reprisals. It pursues a twofold object - to render to each his due, and not to encourage crime through leaving it unpunished.”

Raymond Poincaré (1860–1934) 10th President of the French Republic

Welcoming Address http://www.firstworldwar.com/source/parispeaceconf_poincare.htm at the Paris Peace Conference (18 January 1919).

Hostility , War , People , Truth

“I now began to search for a new path in art [from 1914, with the outbreak of World War 1. ]. It was a major task. I understood that I did not have to paint what I saw, not even what I felt, but only that which lived within me, in my soul. To put it in symbolic terms, it is like this: I felt within myself, within my breast, the keyboard of an organ and I had to make it resonate. And the nature that was in front of me served me only as a prompter. And that was a key that unlocked this organ and made it resonate. In the beginning it was very difficult. But little by little, it became easy for me to use colours and forms to find what was within my soul.”

Alexej von Jawlensky (1864–1941) Russian painter

In his letter, 12 June, 1938 to P. Willibrord Verkade, as quoted in Alexej von Jawlensky, der Maler und Mensch, , Clemens Weiler; Wiesbaden 1955, pp. 39 ff
1936 - 1941

War , World , Art , Soul

“I think the issues happen to be so important for the future of Canada. (spoken over Brian Mulroney's objections) I happen to believe that you've sold us out…once any country yields its economic levers, once a country yields its investments, once a country yields its energy, once a country yields its agriculture, once a country opens itself to a subsidy war with the United States on terms of definition, then the political ability of this country to sustain the influence of the United States, to remain as an independent nation- that is lost forever!”

John Turner (1929) 17th Prime Minister of Canada

Attacking the Free Trade agreement in the 1988 Federal Election debate, October 25, 1988.
Source: https://www.cbc.ca/archives/entry/mulroney-battles-turner-on-free-trade-in-1988

War , Country , Thinking , Future

“Every man lives in his neighborhood, and beyond his home and his job. To most men, except in the largest cities, the municipality is interpreted in terms of his neighborhood. Few men get beyond this except through occasional excursions into the larger world. America is a country of parallel neighborhoods; the native American in one section and the immigrant in another. Americanization is the elimination of the parallel line. So long as the American thinks that a house in his street is too good for his immigrant neighbor and tolerates discriminations in sanitation, housing, and enforcement of municipal laws, he can serve on all Americanization Committees that exist and still fail in his efforts.”

Frances Kellor (1873–1952) American sociologist

What is Americanization? (1919)
Context: Every man lives in his neighborhood, and beyond his home and his job. To most men, except in the largest cities, the municipality is interpreted in terms of his neighborhood. Few men get beyond this except through occasional excursions into the larger world. America is a country of parallel neighborhoods; the native American in one section and the immigrant in another. Americanization is the elimination of the parallel line. So long as the American thinks that a house in his street is too good for his immigrant neighbor and tolerates discriminations in sanitation, housing, and enforcement of municipal laws, he can serve on all Americanization Committees that exist and still fail in his efforts. The immigrant neighborhood is often made up of people who have come from one province in the old country. Inevitably the culture of that neighborhood will be that of the old country; its language will persist and its traditions will flourish. It is not that we undervalue these, or desire to discredit them. But separated from the land and surroundings that gave them birth, from the history that cherishes them, they do not remain the strong, beautiful things they were on the other side. These aliens may retain some of the form of culture of the land of their birth long after its spirit has departed or has lost its savor in a new atmosphere. New opportunities, strange conditions, unforeseen adjustments, necessary sacrifices, and forces unseen and not understood affect the immigrant and his life here, and unless this culture is connected and fused with that of the new world, it loses its vitality or becomes corrupt.

Men , World , Law , Home

“The digital revolution changed my process early on in terms of technique, but my early analog drawings and paintings had the same thematic intention as my latest digital work: the attempt to conjure, or render, a glimpse into an enigmatically layered and lively world that I sense and know to be reality, an energetic vibratory world of almost dreadful depth. In this respect, my process of making computer-robotic assisted paintings and animations have, until recently, been made up of an excessive concoction of ambiguous sexual body parts (morphed from both sexes) tied to the viral form. Philosophy has been, and is, a way of freeing myself enough to connect with this depth so as to process the phantasmagorical aspects of reality into art. This process of art making, for me, must hinge on a dynamic engagement and then wedding of image production and image resistance. The idea is to encourage subversive readings of computational media by presenting an artistic consciousness that articulates contemporary concerns regarding safety, truth, identity and objectivity.”

Joseph Nechvatal (1951) American artist

" An Interview with Joseph Nechvatal http://versejunkies.com/?p=6110#," at versejunkies.com. Posted On 10 August 2013.

Truth , World , Art , Sex

“Unity, in Fascist terms, means uniformity; freedom of conscience means insubordination; co-ordination means coercion.”

Dorothy Thompson (1893–1961) American journalist and radio broadcaster

Source: "Let the Record Speak" 1939, p. 20 (newspaper column: “Political Dictionary,” March 19, 1936)

Freedom

“But it is rather true that the people, in so far as this term signifies a special part of the citizens, does not know what it wants.”

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel book Elements of the Philosophy of Right

So ist vielmehr der Fall, daß das Volk, insosern mit diesem Worte ein besonderer Theil der Mitglieder eines Staats bezeichnet ist, den Theil ausdrückt, der nicht weiß was er will.
http://books.google.com/books?id=ePATAAAAQAAJ&q=%22So+ist+vielmehr+der+Fall+da%C3%9F+das+Volk+insosern+mit+diesem+Worte+ein+besonderer+Theil+der+Mitglieder+eines+Staats+bezeichnet+ist+den+Theil+ausdr%C3%BCckt+der+nicht+wei%C3%9F+was+er+will%22&pg=PA393#v=onepage
Sect. 301
Elements of the Philosophy of Right (1820/1821)

People , Parting

“A great deal of misunderstanding is avoided if it be remembered that the terms infinity, infinite, zero, infinitesimal must be interpreted in connexion with their context, and admit a variety of meanings according to the way in which they are defined.”

George Ballard Mathews (1861–1922) British mathematician

Part 1, sect. 104.
Theory of Numbers, 1892

Way

“A language in the full semiotical sense of the term is any intersubjective set of sign vehicles whose usage is determined by syntactical, semantical, and pragmatical rules.”

Charles W. Morris (1903–1979) American philosopher

Variant: The full characterization of a language may now be given: A language in the full semiotic sense of the term is any intersubjective set of sign vehicles whose usage is determined by syntactical, semantical, and pragmatical rules.
Source: Writings on the General Theory of Signs, 1971, p. 48; as cited in: Adam Schaff (1962). Introduction to semantics, p. 314

Sense

“There as elsewhere a cruel universe combined to crush a child. As though three or four vigorous brothers and sisters, with the best will, were not enough to crush any child, every one else conspired towards an education which he hated. From cradle to grave this problem of running order through chaos, direction through space, discipline through freedom, unity through multiplicity, has always been, and must always be, the task of education, as it is the moral of religion, philosophy, science, art, politics, and economy; but a boy's will is his life, and he dies when it is broken, as the colt dies in harness, taking a new nature in becoming tame. Rarely has the boy felt kindly towards his tamers. Between him and his master has always been war. Henry Adams never knew a boy of his generation to like a master, and the task of remaining on friendly terms with one's own family, in such a relation, was never easy.”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

Life , Hate , War , Education

“The term 'capital' has two quite different meanings in economics: a sum of money, and a collection of machinery.”

Steve Keen (1953) Australian economist

Source: Debunking Economics - The Naked Emperor Of The Social Sciences (2001), Chapter 6, The Holy War Over Capital, p. 130

Money

“Human cognition constitutes a natural information processing system that has evolved to mimic the architecture of biological evolution… Both evolution by natural selection and human cognition can be characterised by a series of basic principles. In the case of human cognition, these are:
The information store principle dealing with human long-term memory;
The borrowing and reorganising principle dealing with how we characteristically obtain information from other people;
The randomness as genesis principle dealing with how we create novel information;
The narrow limits of change principle dealing with the role of a limited working memory in processing novel information;
The environmental linking and organising principle that explains how we use organised information held in long-term memory to determine how we interact with our environment.”

John Sweller (1946) educational psychologist

John Sweller, "Evolutionary bases of human cognitive architecture: implications for computing education." Proceedings of the fourth international workshop on computing education research. ACM, 2008.

People , Nature , Memory , Change

“As part of my current charge I have been instructed to provide an occasional journal of my recent activities*.
* I avoid the term blog, since coincidentally this word is also the name of a repulsive sub-caste of foliots, characterised by ooze, fleshy folds and gills of blue-grey gristle. Think slugs, but with worse personalities.”

Jonathan Stroud (1970) British writer of fantasy fiction

The Bartimaeus Trilogy Official Website, Bart's Journal

Thinking , Parting , Personality

“The term (system-of-systems) is being applied to the creation of new systems by bringing together existing operational systems under a single umbrella and, presumably, creating or adapting links and interactions between the operational systems, which become subsystems of the higher level umbrella system.”

Derek Hitchins (1935) British systems engineer

Source: Advanced Systems Thinking, Engineering and Management (2003), p. 80 as cited in: Jung-Ho Lewe (2005) An Integrated Decision-Making Framework for Transportation Architectures https://smartech.gatech.edu/jspui/bitstream/1853/6918/1/Jung-Ho_Lewe_200505_phd.pdf. p.

“Decadence is a difficult word to use since it has become little more than a term of abuse applied by critics to anything they do not yet understand or which seems to differ from their moral concepts.”

Ernest Hemingway book Death in the Afternoon

Source: Death in the Afternoon (1932), Ch. 7

Understanding

“The media talks about home grown terrorism but Islamic radicalism and that's a very, very important term — a term that the president refuses to use and the networks that nurture it are imports from overseas whether you like it or whether you don't like it. Yes, there are many radicalized people already inside our country as a result of poor policies of the past.”

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

2010s, 2016, June, Speech about the Orlando Shooting (June 13, 2016)

People , Home , Past , Country

“Then came those years in which I was forced to recognize the existence of a drive within me that had to make itself small and hide from the world of light. The slowly awakening sense of my own sexuality overcame me, as it does every person, like an enemy and terrorist, as something forbidden, tempting, and sinful. What my curiosity sought, what dreams, lust and fear created — the great secret of puberty — did not fit at all into my sheltered childhood. I behaved like everyone else. I led the double life of a child who is no longer a child. My conscious self lived within the familiar and sanctioned world; it denied the new world that dawned within me. Side by side with this I lived in a world of dreams, drives and desires of a chthonic nature, across which my conscious self desperately built its fragile bridges, for the childhood world within me was falling apart. Like most parents, mine were no help with the new problems of puberty, to which no reference was ever made. All they did was take endless trouble in supporting my hopeless attempts to deny reality and to continue dwelling in a childhood world that was becoming more and more unreal. I have no idea whether parents can be of help, and I do not blame mine. It was my own affair to come to terms with myself and to find my own way, and like most well-brought-up children, I managed it badly.”

Hermann Hesse book Demian

Source: Demian (1919), p. 135

Life , Children , Secret , World

“Early scientific thinking was holistic, but speculative -- the modern scientific temper reacted by being empirical, but atomistic. Neither is free from error, the former because it replaces factual inquiry with faith and insight, and the latter because it sacrifices coherence at the altar of facticity. We witness today another shift in ways of thinking: the shift toward rigorous but holistic theories. This means thinking in terms of facts and events in the context of wholes, forming integrated sets with their own properties and relationships”

Ervin László (1932) Hungarian musician and philosopher

Source: Introduction to Systems Philosophy (1972), p. 19; As cited in: Bela H. Banathy (1996) Designing social systems in a changing world. p. 156.

Faith , Way , Error , Thinking

“Finally, I wish to speak, through you, directly to those who came to London today to take life. I know that you personally do not fear to give your own life in exchange for taking others — that is why you are so dangerous. But I know you do fear that you may fail in your long-term objective to destroy our free society, and I can show you why you will fail. In the days that follow look at our airports, look at our sea ports and look at our railway stations, and even after your cowardly attack, you will see that people from the rest of Britain, people from around the world will arrive in London to become Londoners and to fulfil their dreams and achieve their potential.
They choose to come to London, as so many have come before because they come to be free, they come to live the life they choose, they come to be able to be themselves. They flee you because you tell them how they should live. They don't want that and nothing you do, however many of us you kill, will stop that flight to our cities where freedom is strong and where people can live in harmony with one another. Whatever you do, however many you kill, you will fail.”

Ken Livingstone (1945) Mayor of London between 2000 and 2008

Response to London bombings (7 July 2005)

Life , People , World , Fear

“I coined the term feminized protein for eggs and dairy products: plant protein produced through the abuse of the reproductive cycle of female animals. Feminized protein is taken from living female animals, whose reproductive capacity is manipulated for human needs. The unique situation of domesticated female animals required its own term: a sexual slavery with chickens in battery cages and dairy cows hooked up to milking machines. … The radical truth is that people can be perfectly happy as vegans, but the dominant culture can’t or won’t acknowledge this. … Being vegan is an exciting, wonderful culinary experience and we probably don’t even know what’s possible because it’s still so new. … The process of objectification/fragmentation/consumption can be interrupted by the process of attention/nowness/compassion.”

Carol J. Adams (1951) author, animal rights activist

“ Why Vegan-Feminist? http://caroljadams.com/why-vegan-feminist/”, in caroljadams.com (2015). Retrieved on 18 June 2016.

People , Truth , Animals , Happiness

“Perhaps our ultimate understanding of scientific topics is measured in terms of our ability to generate metaphoric pictures of what is going on. Maybe understanding is coming up with metaphoric pictures.”

Per Bak (1948–2002) Danish physicist

[Per Bak, How Nature Works: the science of self-organized criticality, Springer, 1996, 0387947914]

Understanding

“The terms for the Phocians were mild by Greek Standards (one Greek state proposed the execution of all the men) disarmament, division into village-settlements, payment of all indemnity to Apollo and expulsion from the Amphictiony. In their place the Macedonians were elected members. The two votes of Phocis on the council were transferred to the Macedonian state.”

N. G. L. Hammond (1907–2001) British classical scholar

"The Genius of Alexander the Great", p.18, Gerald Duckworth & Co Ltd (November 26, 2004)

Men

“The effect of any thought is quite precise and definite and set into motion because of the nature of its own electromagnetic identity. The physical body operates within certain electromagnetic patterns and is adversely affected by others. These effects change the actual molecular structure of the cells, for better or worse, and because of the laws of attraction, habitual patterns will operate. A destructive thought, then, is dangerous not only to the present state of the organism, but is also dangerous in terms of the 'future.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Source: Seth, Dreams & Projections of Consciousness, (1986), p. 238

Law , Nature , Change , Future

“On February 26 last, Roger Gunson, the deputy district attorney in charge of the case in 1977, now retired, testified under oath before Judge Mary Lou Villar in the presence of David Walgren, the present deputy district attorney in charge of the case, who was at liberty to contradict and question him, that on September 16, 1977, Judge Rittenband stated to all the parties concerned that my term of imprisonment in Chino constituted the totality of the sentence I would have to serve.”

Roman Polanski (1933) Polish-French film director, producer, writer, actor, and rapist

I can remain silent no longer (2010)

Question

“‎Whatever the costs in terms of sacrifice, the fruits of resistance are always greater than the damage generated from resignation to occupation, succumbing to its blows and acquiescing to its conditions.”

Naim Qassem (1953) deputy general secretary of Hezbollah

Hizbullah - The Story from Within, page 240, 2010.

“In unambiguous terms, fundamentalist Islam has announced again and again that it despises the values, culture, and traditions of America. The American Left does too. Consistent with the Arabic proverb that the enemy of my enemy is my friend, the American Left has formed an alliance with fundamentalist Islam to transform this country into something far removed from its Judeo-Christian origins and ideals. The mistake the Left is making is that its so-called progressive goals have nothing in common with the medieval tenants of fundamentalist Islam. Militant Muslims have no respect for American progressives, any more than they respect the very existence of Israel. Fundamentalist Islam is using the American Left to advance its own agenda.”

Chuck Hustmyre (1963) American journalist

2000s, 2009, The Left's love affair with Islam (2009)

Country

“A fundamental change is taking place in the nature and application of technology in business, a change with profound and far-reaching implications for companies of every size and shape. A multimillion dollar research program conducted by the DMR Group, Inc., studied more than 4,500 organizations in North America, Europe, and the Far East to investigate the nature and impact of changes in technology. The synthesis and analysis of this information indicate that information technology is going through its first paradigm shift. Driven by the demands of the competitive business environment and profound changes in the nature of computers, the information age is evolving into a second era. Computing platforms in most organizations today are not able to deliver the goods for corporate rebirth. It is only through open network computing that the open networked client/server enterprise can be achieved. In nontechnical language this book shows managers and professionals how to take immediate action for the short-term benefits of the new technology while positioning their organizations for long-term growth and transformation…”

Don Tapscott (1947) Canadian businessman

Don Tapscott and Art Caston (1993) Paradigm Shift: The New Promise of Information Technology. McGraw Hill, Inc. Abstract

Books , Age , Business , Nature

“What we've lost - 'I said in more or less these terms' - is the proper interest in and taste for detail. We've been noting that for a long time yet the loss is irremediable. In the old days man was everything. A human face was worth a poem. When nature appeared behind a human being it was a kind of backdrop taking the place of the dark background of portrait painters or the gold of the Italian primitives… The day when a separation took place art was diminished. It was transformed the day that the 'subject' and the 'genre' destroyed great painting, denaturing even landscapes.”

Eugène Fromentin (1820–1876) French painter

Quote of Fromentin, as cited by Sarah Anderson in Between Sea and Sahara: An Orientalist Adventure, 'Chapter IV', Eugène Fromentin, (1859); transl. Blake Robinson; publisher I.B. Tauris 2004, p. 4

Art , Nature , Appearance , Loss

“We cannot go forward and build up this new world order, and this is our war aim, unless we begin to think differently…one must stop thinking in terms of property and power and begin thinking in terms of community and creation. Property is the old-fashioned way of thinking of a country as a thing, and a collection of things in that thing, all owned by certain people and constituting property; instead of thinking of a country as the home of a living society with the community itself as the first test.”

J.B. Priestley (1894–1984) English writer

BBC Radio Broadcast, July 21, 1940. Reprinted in Priestley, Postscripts, William Heinemann Limited, 1940, and All England Listened: The Wartime Broadcasts of J.B. Priestley, Chilmark Press, 1968.

War , People , World , Way

“Third. The funding of projects, activities, and programs that were not covered by any appropriation in the GAA. The law prohibits, according to the court, the augmentation of a non-existent program, activity, or project with an appropriation in terms of specific allotment classes, either Personal Services, Maintenance and other Operating Expenses, and/or Capital Outlays within the subject GAA.”

Francis Escudero (1969) Filipino politician

2014, Speech: Sponsorship Speech for the FY 2015 National Budget

Law , Personality

“The fact is that for complex systems like the bacterial flagellum no biologist has or is anywhere close to reconstructing its history in Darwinian terms. Is Darwinian theory therefore falsified? Hardly. I have yet to witness one committed Darwinist concede that any feature of nature might even in principle provide countervailing evidence to Darwinism. In place of such a concession one is instead always treated to an admission of ignorance. Thus it's not that Darwinism has been falsified or disconfirmed, but that we simply don't know enough about the biological system in question and its historical context to determine how the Darwinian mechanism might have produced it.”

William A. Dembski (1960) American intelligent design advocate

Is Intelligent Design Testable — A Response to Eugenie Scott
2011-01-24
The Golden Spiral
http://www.metanexus.net/magazine/tabid/68/id/2667/Default.aspx
2011-10-23
responding to Eugenie Scott's 2001-01-18 lecture at U.C. Berkeley, "Icons of Creationism: The New Anti-Evolutionism and Science"
2000s

History , Question , Nature