Quotes about thought
page 73

“I … view deviance as the product of a transaction that takes place between some social group and one who is viewed by that group as a rule-breaker. I will be less concerned with the personal and social characteristics of deviants than with the process by which they come to be thought of as outsiders and their reactions to that judgment.”

Howard S. Becker (1928) American sociologist

Source: Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance (1963), p. 10.

Personality

“I have often thought, if it was not for this Tyranny which Custom usurps over us, that Men of any tolerable Good-nature could never be reconcil'd to the killing of so many Animals for their daily Food, as long as the bountiful Earth so plentifully provides them with Varieties of vegetable Dainties.”

Bernard Mandeville book The Fable of the Bees

Remark P, p. 187
The Fable of the Bees (1714)

Men, Food, Nature, Animals

“When you think that you are beautiful, you are liable to think that you are more beautiful than others, and such a thought is not a beautiful thought. To recognize or criticise ugliness and inferiority in others is to create the inferior and the ugly in yourself, and what you create in yourself will sooner or later be expressed through your mind and personality.”

Christian D. Larson (1874–1962) Prolific author of metaphysical and New Thought books

Source: Your Forces and How to Use Them (1912), Chapter 7, p. 115–116

Beauty, Thinking, Personality

“Attention consists of suspending our thought, leaving it detached, empty, and ready to be penetrated by the object; it means holding in our minds, within reach of this thought, but on a lower level and not in contact with it, the diverse knowledge we have acquired which we are forced to make use of.”

Simone Weil (1909–1943) French philosopher, Christian mystic, and social activist

Waiting on God (1950), Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God

Knowledge

“All presentation, all demonstration—and the presentation of thought is demonstration—has, according to its original determination—and this is all that matters to us—the cognitive activity of the other person as its ultimate aim.”

Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–1872) German philosopher and anthropologist

Z. Hanfi, trans., in The Fiery Brook (1972), p. 67
Towards a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy (1839)

Personality

“Where, where, are you tonight?
Why did you leave me here all alone?
I searched the world over,
And thought I found true love.
You met another and
Pfft! you were gone.”

Buck Owens (1929–2006) American country singer-songwriter

" Pfft You Were Gone" - comedic country song often featured on Hee Haw

Love, World, Search

“Both these men are in love with Natasha, Count Rostov's younger daughter, and in her Tolstoy has created the most delightful girl in fiction. Nothing is so difficult as to portray a young girl who is at once charming and interesting. Generally the young girls of fiction are colorless (Amelia in Vanity Fair), priggish (Fanny in Mansfield Park), too clever by half (Constantia Durham in The Egoist), or little geese (Dora in David Copperfield), silly flirts or innocent beyound belief. It is understandable that they should be an awkward subject for the novelist to deal with, for at that tender age the personality is undeveloped. Similarly a painter can only make a face interesting when the vicissitudes of life, thought, love and suffering have given it character. In the portrait of a girl the best he can do is to represent the charm and beauty of youth. But Natasha is entirely natural. She is sweet, sensitive, and sympathetic, willful, childish, womanly already, idealistic, quick-tempered, warm-hearted, headstrong, capricious and in everything enchanting. Tolstoy created many women and they are wonderfully true to life, but never another who wins the affection of the reader as does Natasha.”

W. Somerset Maugham (1874–1965) British playwright, novelist, short story writer

Leo Tolstoy and War and Peace
Great Novelists and Their Novels

Love, Life, Women, Men

“Although Lewis Carroll thought of The Hunting of the Snark as a nonsense ballad for children, it is hard to imagine—in fact one shudders to imagine—a child of today reading and enjoying it.”

Martin Gardner (1914–2010) recreational mathematician and philosopher

The Annotated Snark (1962), Introduction, p. 15

Children, Imagination, Reading

“I wanted to kill art for myself.... a new thought for that object.”

Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) French painter and sculptor

1951 - 1968
Source: 'Marcel Duchamps 1887 – 1968', Artforum 7 no. 3, November 1968, p. 6

Art

“If at times I have thought myself unfortunate, it is because of a confusion, an error. I have mistaken myself for someone else… Who am I really? I am the author of The World as Will and Representation, I am the one who has given an answer to the mystery of Being that will occupy the thinkers of future centuries. That is what I am, and who can dispute it in the years of life that still remain for me?”

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) German philosopher

From The Total Library by Jorge Luis Borges, 1999
Other

Life, World, Error, Time

“Poverty can curdle the libido and corrode civilized thoughts. One's sense of humour vanishes, to be replaced by a curry-spoiling sarcasm as one's Mr Hyde emerges from the swamp of the subconscious.”

Tom Baker (1934) English actor

Sense

“Let us ask ourselves seriously and honestly, " What do I believe after all? What manner of man am I after all? What sort of show would I make after all, if the people around me knew my heart and all my secret thoughts?" What sort of show then do I already make in the sight of Almighty God, who sees every man exactly as he is?”

Charles Kingsley (1819–1875) English clergyman, historian and novelist

Source: Attributed, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 276.

God, People, Secret, Heart

“Heredity is not the dark specter which some people have thought—merciless and unchangeable, the embodiment of Fate itself. This dark, pessimistic belief which tinges even the literature of to-day comes, no doubt, from the general lack of knowledge of the laws governing the interaction of these two ever-present forces of heredity and environment wherever there is life.
My own studies have led me to be assured that heredity is only the sum of all past environment, in other words environment is the architect of heredity; and I am assured of another fact: acquired characters are transmitted and—even further—that all characters which are transmitted have been acquired…”

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

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

Life, Fate, People, Law

“The way Miramax handled it was B. S. There were a lot of crossing political agendas going on, and the reasons in the press weren't entirely true. It was like 'Are we seeing the same movie here?' I've always thought it's better to get people talking about the issue of school violence as opposed to trying to pretend it didn't happen.”

Julia Stiles (1981) American actress

On O
Details, September 2001

People, School, Way

“I thought you meant that religious belief involved the substitution of the ordinances for the moral law. That no doubt came to be true in a degree with certain of the pharisees, may be true in a degree with some Christians. But it is not true with the Xtianity in which I was brought up. To Xtians of that kind God's law and the moral law are and must be identical. Hence if it could be shewn that Pacifism was in accordance with the moral law I should have to hold that all war was prohibited by Xtianity. If on the other hand, it can be shewn as I think it can that there is no such prohibition by the Xtian law I cannot admit that the moral law forbids me to support my country in a just war.”

Robert Cecil, 1st Viscount Cecil of Chelwood (1864–1958) lawyer, politician and diplomat in the United Kingdom

Letter to Gilbert Murray (1943), quoted in Gilbert Murray : An Unfinished Autobiography (1960) edited by Jean Smith and Arnold Toynbee, pp. 179-180

God, War, Law, Support

“Maybe he was crazy, he thought. It would explain everything. Insanity was good that way.”

K. A. Bedford book Time Machines Repaired While-U-Wait

Source: Time Machines Repaired While-U-Wait (2008), Chapter 7 (p. 80)

Way

“I once thought that reason
Had led me to You,
And that through feeling
I sensed Your presence,
Caught a glimpse of
You in similitudes,
Knew You in Your perfection.
I know now that I was wrong,
That that truth was flawed.”

Jacopone da Todi (1236–1306) Italian Franciscan mystic

The Lauds

Truth, Feeling, Sense, Perfection

“Who knows the thoughts of a child?”

Nora Perry (1831–1896) American writer

Who Knows?, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

“It is not difficult to grasp and express thoughts that float on the stream of current opinion: but to think and rightly utter what is permanently true and interesting, what shall appeal to the best minds a thousand years hence, as it appeals to them to-day,—this is the work of genius.”

John Lancaster Spalding (1840–1916) Catholic bishop

Source: Aphorisms and Reflections (1901), p. 33

Thinking

“We can imagine that the Academy, which could be attended only by men of leisure, was a cradle of discontent. The author of the Laws was a disgruntled old man, full of political rancor, fearing and hating the crowd and above all their demagogues; his prejudices had crystallized and he had become an old doctrinaire, unable to see anything but the reflections of his own personality and to hear anything but the echoes of his own thoughts. The worst of it was that he, a noble Athenian, admired the very Spartans who had defeated and humiliated his fatherland. Plato was witnessing a social revolution (even as we are) and he could not bear it at all. His main concern was: how could one stop it.”

George Sarton (1884–1956) American historian of science

Source: A History of Science Vol.1 Ancient Science Through the Golden Age of Greece (1952), Ch.16 "Plato and the Academy" p. 409.

Men, Hate, Fear, Law

“Jeff Stelling: "There's been a red card but for who Chris Kamara?" Chris: "I don't know Jeff has there? I must have missed that. Is it a red card? I don't know, I don't know the rain must have got in my eyes Jeff. No you're right I saw him go off but I thought they were bringing a sub on Jeff. Still nil nil ha ha ha"”

Chris Kamara (1957) English association football player and manager

http://www.theguardian.com/money/2010/dec/04/chris-kamara-my-greatest-mistake Reporting back from Fratton Park 03 April 2010.

“As UKIP’s health spokesman at the last General Election, I can say with gladness that now we have voted to leave, our treasured NHS will now be safe from the clutches of the EU/US TTIP agreement that would have seen American drug and insurance companies elbow their way into our healthcare. I would have thought that the local Green Party would at least join me in celebrating on this issue.”

Louise Bours (1968) British politician

Accept the Will of the People http://www.louiseboursmep.co.uk/accept-will-of-the-people/ (July 5, 2016)

Health, Way

“a writer once asked what I'd say if i ever met my biggest hater. I paused, thought deeply and said, "probably 'suk a dog dik, motherfuker'"”

Ezra Koenig (1984) American rock musician

Tweeted on Twitter

Dogs

“Mr. Khan is the one that went out and struck the first blow, and in a campaign, if you're going to go out and think you can take a shot at someone and not have incoming coming back at you, shame on you. I think the Democrats used him in a way that quite frankly I'm not sure I approve of. We love our veterans, we love our Gold Star families, but the fact of the matter is Mr. Khan politically used his time on that stage to go after Donald Trump, why in the world he thought that he would get a free ride with that is beyond me. He shouldn’t get a free ride when he’s going to inject himself in the political arena.”

Rick Perry (1950) 14th and current United States Secretary of Energy

About the Khan family and Donald Trump controversy. As quoted by Politico — Rick Perry accuses Khan of striking 'first blow' against Trump http://www.politico.com/story/2016/08/rick-perry-khizr-khan-227081 (August 16, 2016) 2016

Love, World, Family, Way

“Ask of all-healing, all-consoling thought
Salve and solace for the woe it wrought.”

Nicolas Chamfort (1741–1794) French writer

La pensée console de tout et remédie à tout. Si quelquefois elle vous fait du mal, demandez-lui le remède du mal qu'elle vous a fait, elle vous le donnera.
As translated by Samuel Beckett, in Samuel Beckett: Collected Poems 161-163.

“I ever give a thought to another, you may well spare it, for those fancies are here and gone like a flash of lightning, while my love for you burns on steadily, and for ever, like the sun.”

Anne Brontë book The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

Source: The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), Ch. XXVII : Misdemeanour; Arthur to Helen

Love, Sun

“Few inventions have had so rapid and wide-ranging effects as the various machines which now process data and information by electronic energy. But I hope and believe that even these remarkable engines will not supersede the book as an instrument for the transfer of information. I remain sceptical, particularly when I see the advocates of the paperless society and the electronic library writing large books to support their case. I earnestly hope and believe also that libraries, as the records and memory of humanity, can form a fruitful partnership with the latest tools invented to ease the burden of our labour. Provided that these tools are efficiently operated by well-thought-out systems for organising and retrieving information, they offer the possibilities and opportunities for librarians and information specialists in all types of institution to meet the challenges of the new millennium.”

Douglas John Foskett (1918–2004)

Librarians and Information Systems (1995)

Books, Hope, Support, Memory

“We had thought Mike the greatest; now we began to discover he was only human and, worse, we had our first dismaying confrontation with the fact that he would not back up his ministers.”

Judy LaMarsh (1924–1980) Canadian politician, writer, broadcaster and barrister.

Source: Memoirs Of A Bird In A Gilded Cage (1969), CHAPTER 4, Sixty days of decision, p. 63

“What Jim wanted to do, and it was totally his vision, was to get back to the darkness of the original Grimm’s fairy tales. He thought it was fine to scare children. He didn’t think it was healthy for children to always feel safe.”

Jim Henson (1936–1990) American puppeteer

Frank Oz, as quoted in Q&A: Frank Oz on Henson, “Dark Crystal” and the Kwik Way http://blog.sfgate.com/parenting/2007/06/28/qa-frank-oz-on-henson-dark-crystal-and-the-kwik-way/, SFGate, (June 28, 2007). About

Children, Feeling, Thinking

“Though old the thought and oft expressed,
'Tis his at last who says it best.”

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

For an Autograph

“The anti‐Semite understands nothing about modern society. He would be incapable of conceiving of a constructive plan; his action cannot reach the level of the methodical; it remains on the ground of passion. To a long‐term enterprise he prefers an explosion of rage analogous to the running amuck of the Malays. His intellectual activity is confined to interpretation; he seeks in historical events the signs of the presence of an evil power. Out of this spring those childish and elaborate fabrications which give him his resemblance to the extreme paranoiacs. In addition, anti‐Semitism channels evolutionary drives toward the destruction of certain men, not of institutions. An anti‐Semitic mob will consider it has done enough when it has massacred some Jews and burned a few synagogues. It represents, therefore, a safety valve for the owning classes, who encourage it and thus substitute for a dangerous hate against their regime a beneficent hate against particular people. Above all this naive dualism is eminently reassuring to he anti‐Semite himself. If all he has to do is to remove Evil, that means that the Good is already given. He has no need to seek it in anguish, to invent it, to scrutinize it patiently when he has found it, to prove it in action, to verify it by its consequences, or, finally, to shoulder he responsibilities of the moral choice be has made. It is not by chance that the great outbursts of anti‐Semitic rage conceal a basic optimism. The anti‐Semite as cast his lot for Evil so as not to have to cast his lot for Good. The more one is absorbed in fighting Evil, he less one is tempted to place the Good in question. One does not need to talk about it, yet it is always understood in the discourse of the anti‐Semite and it remains understood in his thought. When he has fulfilled his mission as holy destroyer, the Lost Paradise will reconstitute itself. For the moment so many tasks confront the anti‐Semite that he does not have time to think about it. He is in the breach, fighting, and each of his outbursts of rage is a pretext to avoid the anguished search for the Good.”

Jean Paul Sartre book Anti-Semite and Jew

Pages 31-32
Anti-Semite and Jew (1945)

Men, Hate, People, Search

“Summertime, 1950, I recognized Isherwood browsing in a Santa Monica bookstore. My book had just come out, so I grabbed a copy off the shelf, signed it and gave it to him. His face fell and my heart sank, but two days later he called and said, "Do you know what you've done?" I asked, "What?" And he simply told me to read his review in the Times. His rave turned my life around; the book immediately made the best-seller lists and has been in print ever since.
He was very kind in introducing me to various people he thought I should know, like Aldous Huxley, who had been my literary hero since Brave New World came out.”

Ray Bradbury (1920–2012) American writer

On the chance meeting with Christopher Isherwood just after publication of The Martian Chronicles which led to fame and acclaim outside of SF fandom.
Playboy interview (1996)

Life, People, Books, World

“The historical associations of the word algebra almost substantiate the sordid character of the subject. The word comes from the title of a book written by… Al Khowarizmi. In this title, al-jebr w' almuqabala, the word al-jebr meant transposing a quantity from one side of an equation to another and muqabala meant simplification of the resulting expressions. Figuratively, al-jebr meant restoring the balance of an equation… When the Moors reached Spain… algebrista… came to mean a bonesetter… and signs reading Algebrista y Sangrador (bonesetter and bloodletter) were found over Spanish barber shops. Thus it might be said that there is a good historical basis for the fact that the word algebra stirs up disagreeable thoughts.”

Morris Kline (1908–1992) American mathematician

Source: Mathematics and the Physical World (1959), p. 69

Books, Reading

“I know that the world I converse with in the city and in the farms, is not the world I think. I observe that difference, and shall observe it. One day I shall know the value and law of this discrepance. But I have not found that much was gained by manipular attempts to realize the world of thought.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson book Experience

1840s, Essays: Second Series (1844), Experience

World, Law, Thinking

“So far has Athens left the rest of mankind behind in thought and expression that her pupils have become the teachers of the world, and she has made the name of Hellas distinctive no longer of race but of intellect, and the title of Hellene a badge of education rather than of common descent.”

Isocrates Panegyricus

Panegyricus, 50.

World, Education, Teachers

“I can read minds but, it's pointless cause I'm illiterate. I'd know what you were thinking, if I could read. (laugh) I tried to add on to that joke. I got busted. Thought I could squeeze a couple more laughs out of it but, it was not to be.”

Mitch Hedberg (1968–2005) American stand-up comedian

Do You Believe in Gosh?

Thinking, Reading

“I didn't plan on rock 'n' roll. I wanted to learn jazz; I got to know some people doing rock 'n' roll with jazz, and I thought I could make money playing music. In rock 'n' roll you can realize anything that you can in jazz or anything. There's no limitation other than the beat. You have more freedom than you do in anything except jazz — which is dying — as far as making any money is concerned.”

Robby Krieger (1946) American rock guitarist and songwriter

Comment posted at his official website http://www.robbykrieger.com.

Money, People, Music, Freedom

“All the proper balances of our daily life are disturbed, everything we do is colored by the underlying thought of "that."”

Slavoj Žižek book The Sublime Object of Ideology

33
The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989)

Life, Color

“I warrant you, if he danced till doomsday, he thought I was to pay the piper.”

William Congreve Love for Love

Act II, scene ii
Love for Love (1695)

Dance

“In time one came to recognize the type in other men, with differences and variations, as normal; men whose energies were the greater, the less they wasted on thought; men who sprang from the soil to power; apt to be distrustful of themselves and of others; shy; jealous; sometimes vindictive; more or less dull in outward appearance; always needing stimulants, but for whom action was the highest stimulant — the instinct of fight.”

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

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

Men, Appearance, Time, Fight

“They learn to arrange their thoughts in logical order, to write and speak clearly and economically.”

Roger Smith (executive) (1925–2007) CEO

Learning

“Why, this man seemed barely older than himself, Emmanuel thought. He gave off a sense of almost irresistible vigor. Quite simply, he had at last become a man…”

Gabrielle Roy book The Tin Flute

Source: The Tin Flute (1945), P.375

Sense

“Here's a thought for sweat shop owners: Air Conditioning. Problem solved.”

Mitch Hedberg (1968–2005) American stand-up comedian

Do You Believe in Gosh?

Problem

“Bod walked back into the graveyard and up the hill, until he reached the Frobisher mausoleum. He did not enter it. He climbed up the side of the building, using the thick ivy root as a foothold, and he pulled himself up onto the stone roof, where he sat and thought looking out at the world of moving things beyond the graveyard, and he remembered the way Scarlett had held him and how safe he felt, if only for a moment, and how fine it would be to walk safely in the lands beyond the graveyard, and how good it was to be master of his own small world.”

Neil Gaiman book The Graveyard Book

Source: The Graveyard Book (2008), Ch. 7

World, Way

“It feels wild, you know, because in the beginning I never thought it was going to really happen. It's all in Turkish, you know, and nobody understands a word. But I think it's a groove. It's the kisses that are universal.”

Tarkan (1972) Turkish singer

Tarkan finds his moves take him across borders, CNN Worldbeat, August 9, 1999 http://www.cnn.com/SHOWBIZ/Music/9908/09/tarkan.wb/index.html, About his hit single Şımarık

Feeling, Understanding, Kiss, Thinking

“The philosopher … subjects experience to his critical judgment, and this contains a value judgment — namely, that freedom from toil is preferable to toil, and an intelligent life is preferable to a stupid life. It so happened that philosophy was born with these values. Scientific thought had to break this union of value judgment and analysis, for it became increasingly clear that the philosophic values did not guide the organisation of society.”

Herbert Marcuse book One-Dimensional Man

Source: One-Dimensional Man (1964), p. 126

Life, Stupidity, Intelligence, Freedom

“Only within the 20th Century has biological thought been focused on ecology, or the relation of the living creature to its environment. Awareness of ecological relationships is — or should be — the basis of modern conservation programs, for it is useless to attempt to preserve a living species unless the kind of land or water it requires is also preserved. So delicately interwoven are the relationships that when we disturb one thread of the community fabric we alter it all — perhaps almost imperceptibly, perhaps so drastically that destruction follows.”

Rachel Carson (1907–1964) American marine biologist and conservationist

"Essay on the Biological Sciences" in Good Reading (1958)

Communication, Water

“He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.”

W. H. Auden (1907–1973) Anglo-American poet

Source: Funeral Blues (1936)

Love

“They contain, by the side of simple, natural, childish thoughts, many ideas which to us sound decidedly modern, or secondary and tertiary.”

Max Müller (1823–1900) German-born philologist and orientalist

On the Vedas, in India, What can it teach us (1882) Lecture IV

Idea, Nature

“Anita, I have just come the comforting conclusion that I'll have to paint acres and acres of water color landscapes before I will look for even a passably fair one. After about ten attempts — I certainly have to laugh at myself — It's like feeling around in the dark — thought I knew what I was going to try to do but I find I don't — and guess I'll only find out by slaving away at it. I feel — like a wreck — Have been working like mad all day — and you know how deliciously disgusted with every thing one can be — when the sun begins to go down — and one has been working ones head off all day. It gives me the sensation I used to have when I was a youngster and was going away from home on the train — It is a very special sort of sick feeling.”

Georgia O'Keeffe (1887–1986) American artist

New York City (February 1916), p. 145
1910s, Letters to Anita Pollitzer' (1916)

Color, Feeling, Home, Water

“This was no time for thinking. Thought in combat was a luxury about as appropriate as a hot bath and massage.”

Richard K. Morgan book Altered Carbon

Source: Altered Carbon (2002), Chapter 41 (p. 493)

Thinking, Time

“The defendant in this case has attacked certain beliefs, thought by the Christian world to be sacred. Yet, after all, nothing is sacred but the truth, and by truth I mean what a man sincerely and honestly believes.”

Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–1899) Union United States Army officer

The trial of Charles B. Reynolds for blasphemy (1887)

Truth, World, Sincerity

“By words one transmits thoughts to another, by means of art, one transmits feelings.”

Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) Russian writer

What is Art? (1897)

Art, Feeling

“Modernism began in the mid-nineteenth century as a response not only to the restrictions and hypocrisies of everyday life, but also as a reaction to the Enlightenment's emphasis on the rationality of human behavior. …The founders of the Royal Society thought of God as a mathematician who had designed the universe according to logical and mathematical principles. The role of the scientist—the natural philosopher was to… decipher the codebook that God had used in creating the cosmos.”

Eric R. Kandel (1929) American neuropsychiatrist

The Age of Insight (2012)

Life, God, Behavior, Mathematics

“To win, beloved Caroline from thee,
One thought, in years when we shall sever'd be--
--Sever'd, perchance, by those deep waves, which pour
Their billowy murmurs round our native shore,--
For this, I wander'd round the Bow'rs of Song,
A weary, and rejected suppliant long,
And of the Muses crav'd in humblest tone
From their rich wreaths, one simple bud alone:
They did but fling their wildest weeds at me,
And thus I twin'd them into verse for thee!”

Eliza Acton (1799–1859) Poet, cook

To Caroline (1826)

“In the name of a new theory past theory is declared honorable but feeble; one can lay aside Freud and Marx—or appreciate their limitations—and pick up the latest at the drive-in window of thought.”

Russell Jacoby (1945) American historian

Source: Social Amnesia: A Critique of Conformist Psychology from Adler to Laing (1975), p. 3

Past

“Stemming from the Germanic philosophical heritage, Hayek was likely to place more emphasis on the act of knowing than on objects themselves. Hayek ultimately followed Kant in his ontological conception of reality—he thought that mind impresses order on existence.”

Alan O. Ebenstein (1959) American political scientist, educator and author

Hayek's Journey: The Mind of Friedrich Hayek (2003)

Reality

“It's not going to interfere with the film. I heal miraculously. I've been in an auto accident and another fire. They thought I'd need plastic surgery, but I haven't a scar…No, I don't think I'm accident prone, but it's strange.”

Edie Sedgwick (1943–1971) Socialite, actress, model

Referring to a house fire
Edie : Girl On Fire (2006)

Thinking

“Bob Forestier had pretended for so many years to be a gentleman that in the end, forgetting that it was all a fake, he had found himself driven to act as in that stupid, conventional brain of his he thought a gentleman must act. No longer knowing the difference between sham and real, he had sacrificed his life to a spurious heroism.”

W. Somerset Maugham (1874–1965) British playwright, novelist, short story writer

"The lion's skin", p. 283
Short Stories, Collected short stories 1

Life, Stupidity, Forgetting

“We are, even now, killing ourselves over ancient literature. Who would have thought something so tragically absurd could be possible?”

Sam Harris (1967) American author, philosopher and neuroscientist

2000s, The End of Faith (2004)

Literature

“In those days it was thought that only through the principle of nationality could freedom be established, and here, again, the changes which had happened had made this ideal seem less needed than it was. The principle of nationality was held to make for peace and was quite consistent with cosmopolitanism, which played a leading part in conceptions of what was needed for the happiness of the world. There was rather more in the old ideals of the moral element and less of the material element than there was to-day; there was, too, rather more of a sanguine spirit, and the golden age seemed nearer then it seemed now.”

James Bryce, 1st Viscount Bryce (1838–1922) British academic, jurist, historian and Liberal politician

Speech to the Economic Students' Union at the School of Economics and Political Science, London (14 December 1900), quoted in The Times (17 December 1900), p. 13.
1900s

Happiness, Age, World, Peace

“He had never been sure but that there might be something to the doctrines he had preached as an evangelist. Perhaps God really had dictated every word of the Bible. Perhaps there really was a hell of burning sulphur. Perhaps the Holy Ghost really was hovering around watching him and reporting. But he knew with serenity that all of his New Thoughts, his theosophical utterances, were pure and uncontaminated bunk. No one could deny his theories because none of his theories meant anything. It did not matter what he said, so long as he kept them listening; and he enjoyed the buoyancy of power as he bespelled his classes with long, involved, fruity sentences rhapsodic as perfume advertisements.”

Sinclair Lewis book Elmer Gantry

Elmer Gantry (1927)

God, Hell

“Hitler's dictatorship differed in one fundamental point from all its predecessors in history. His was the first dictatorship in the present period of technical development, a dictatorship which made complete use of all technical means for the domination of its own country. Through technical means like the radio and the loud-speaker, eighty million people were deprived of independent thought. It was thereby possible to subject them to the will of one man.”

Albert Speer (1905–1981) German architect, Minister of Armaments and War Production for Nazi Germany

1946. Quoted in "Nuremberg: The War Crimes Trial" by Richard Norton-Taylor, Nicolas Kent - Drama - (1997)

People, History, Country

“Give, and thou shalt receive. Give thoughts of cheer,
Of courage and success, to friend and stranger.
And from a thousand sources, far and near,
Strength will be sent thee in thy hour of danger.”

Ella Wheeler Wilcox (1850–1919) American author and poet

Give
Poetry quotes, New Thought Pastels (1913)

Courage, Success

“We can establish universally an education that recognizes in every child a tongue-tied prophet, and in the school the voice of the future, and that equips the mind to think beyond and against the established context of thought and of life as well as to move within it. We can develop a democratic politics that renders the structure of society open in fact to challenge and reconstruction, weakening the dependence of change on crisis and the power of the dead over the living. We can make the radical democratization of access to the resources and opportunities of production the touchstone of the institutional reorganization of the market economy, and prevent the market from remaining fastened to a single version of itself. We can create policies and arrangements favorable to the gradual supersession of economically dependent wage work as the predominant form of free labor, in favor of the combination of cooperation and self-employment. We can so arrange the relation between workers and machines that machines are used to save our time for the activities that we have not yet learned how to repeat and consequently to express in formulas. We can reshape the world political and economic order so that it ceases to make the global public goods of political security and economic openness depend upon submission to an enforced convergence to institutions and practices hostile to the experiments required to move, by many different paths, in such a direction.”

Roberto Mangabeira Unger The Religion of the Future

Source: The Religion of the Future (2014), p. 29

Life, Hostility, World, Education

“In the cold light of the morning they almost bore a grudge against the girl for not having secretly sought out the Prussian, that the rest of the party might receive a joyful surprise when they awoke. What more simple?
Besides, who would have been the wiser? She might have saved appearances by telling the officer that she had taken pity on their distress. Such a step would be of so little consequence to her.
But no one as yet confessed to such thoughts.”

Guy De Maupassant book Boule de Suif

Boule de Suif (1880)

Girl, Light, Appearance

“The farther West we drove [to California, Fall of 1963, with Gerard Malanga, Wynn Chamberlain, and Taylor Mead for an opening of Warhol's 'Liz & Elvis paintings' at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles], the more Pop everything looked on the highways. Suddenly we all felt like insiders because even though Pop was everywhere – that was the thing about it, most people still took it for granted, whereas we were dazzled by it – to us, it was the new Art. Once you 'got' Pop, you could never see a sign the same way again. And once you thought Pop, you could never see America the same way again. The moment you label something, you take a step – I mean, you can never go back again to seeing it unlabeled. We were seeing the future and we knew it for sure.... the mystery was gone, but the amazement was just starting.”

Andy Warhol (1928–1987) American artist

quote in 1963
Quote in Warhol in his own words – Untitled Statements ( 1963 – 1987), selected by Neil Printz; as quoted in Andy Warhol, retrospective, Art and Bullfinch Press / Little Brown, 1989, pp. 457 – 467
1963 - 1967

People, Art, Angels, Way

“There are men who astonish and delight, men who instruct and guide. Some men's words I remember so well that I must often use them to express my thought. Yes, because I perceive that we have heard the same truth, but they have heard it better.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

Character
1880s, Lectures and Biographical Sketches (1883)

Men, Truth

Michael Moorcock (1939) English writer, editor, critic

Introduction (p. vi)
The Warlord of the Air (1971)

Dead

“Before the sun went down again, she realized, she would be in New York. The thought sent a nervous thrill through her entire body. Her throat was tight, her heart suddenly racing.”

M. K. Hobson book The Native Star

Source: The Native Star (2010), Chapter 15, “Ososolyeh” (pp. 220-221)

Sun, Heart

“And I was painting and changing and developing and going through [c. 1950-52] that bridge from early Kandinsky and Gorky to my own [painting] thing. And just soaking up [Willem] de Kooning and [Jackson] Pollock... So I had the place to myself. And while Bill [= Willem] and Elaine [de Kooning] and Charlie [Egan] and such would maybe come to my studio, there was no thought,.... of my going in with those four or five young ones.”

Helen Frankenthaler (1928–2011) American artist

quote about her painting-years 1951-52
1960s, Interview with Barbara Rose', Archives - American Art, 1968

Change, Painting

“When thus the heart is in a vein
Of tender thought, the simplest strain
Can touch it with peculiar power.”

Thomas Moore (1779–1852) Irish poet, singer and songwriter

Evenings in Greece, First Evening.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Heart

“Iraq is an unjust war. I thought then, and I think now, that the invasion of Iraq was unnecessary and unjust. And I think the premises on which it was launched were false.”

Jimmy Carter (1924) American politician, 39th president of the United States (in office from 1977 to 1981)

News conference at the Baptist World Alliance's centenary conference in Birmingham, England (30 July 2005), as quoted in "Carter: Iraq War is 'Unjust'" in FOX News (30 July 2005) http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,164229,00.html Post-Presidency

War, Thinking, Falseness

“The red thought rose up inside Blaine’s brain: Why not kill him now?
For the killing would come easy. He was an easy man to hate. Not on principle alone, but personally, clear down to his guts.”

Clifford D. Simak book Time is the Simplest Thing

Source: Time is the Simplest Thing (1961), Chapter 26 (p. 206)

Hate, Personality

“Look at the design of a lot of consumer products — they're really complicated surfaces. We tried to make something much more holistic and simple. When you first start off trying to solve a problem, the first solutions you come up with are very complex, and most people stop there. But if you keep going, and live with the problem and peel more layers of the onion off, you can often times arrive at some very elegant and simple solutions. Most people just don't put in the time or energy to get there. We believe that customers are smart, and want objects which are well thought through.”

Steve Jobs (1955–2011) American entrepreneur and co-founder of Apple Inc.

On the design of the iPod, as quoted in Newsweek (14 October 2006)
2000s

People, Problem, Time

“Today's looting and acts of violence in Baltimore will not be tolerated. In response, I have put the Maryland National Guard on alert so they can be in position to deploy rapidly as needed. I strongly condemn the actions of the offenders who are engaged in direct attacks against innocent civilians, businesses and law enforcement officers. There is a significant difference between protesting and violence and those committing these acts will be prosecuted under the fullest extent of the law.My thoughts and prayers go out to the men and women in uniform who are actively working to stem this violence and several who been injured in the line of duty. These malicious attacks against law enforcement and local communities only betray the cause of peaceful citizens seeking answers and justice following the death of Freddie Gray.”

Larry Hogan (1956) American politician

" Statement From Governor Larry Hogan On Violence In Baltimore City http://governor.maryland.gov/2015/04/27/statement-from-governor-larry-hogan-on-violence-in-baltimore-city/" (27 April 2015).

Death, Women, Men, Peace

“We sat on a crate of oranges and thought what good men most biologists are, the tenors of the scientific world — temperamental, moody, lecherous, loud-laughing, and healthy. […] Your true biologist will sing you a song as loud and off-key as will a blacksmith, for he knows that morals are too often diagnostic of prostatitis and stomach ulcers. Sometimes he may proliferate a little too much in all directions, but he is as easy to kill as any other organism, and meanwhile he is very good company, and at least he does not confuse a low hormone productivity with moral ethics.”

John Steinbeck book The Log from the Sea of Cortez

Source: The Log from the Sea of Cortez (1951), Chapter 4

Men, World, Singing

“Riding on anything
Anything’s good enough
Who would’ve thought it of someone like you”

Justine Frischmann (1969) English musician

"Connection", from Elastica (1995)
Lyrics

“He smiled. Julie’s wedding, exquisite thought. Would his grandchildren be free of godhead? Was divinity a recessive trait?”

James K. Morrow book Only Begotten Daughter

Source: Only Begotten Daughter (1990), Chapter 5 (p. 92)

Smile, Wedding

“He ventured to enter his most earnest protest against the mode in which several Members of that House were inclined to treat anything that ran out of the common ruck—and introduced them to schemes and ideas which former debates had not reached. The scheme of the hon. Gentleman was not new—he should not have thought that it was new to many Members of that House; the literature of the country had been full of it for three or four years. They all instinctively felt that it was a scheme that had no chance of success. It was not of our atmosphere—it was not in accordance with our habits; it did not belong to us. They all knew that it could not pass. Whether that was creditable to the House or not was a question into which he would not inquire; but every Member of the House the moment he saw the scheme upon the Paper saw that it belonged to the class of impracticable things.”

Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury (1830–1903) British politician

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1867/may/30/committee-progress-may-28 in the House of Commons (30 May 1867) against John Stuart Mill's proposal for electing MPs by proportional representation 1860s

Literature, Idea, Question, Chance

“The goat thing, I went out, I was drinking some beers with the writers - writers I couldn't stand, and they didn't like me either. They were all like Harvard, Yale, and [imperious voice] 'We've been studying comedy for seven years, and…we've never been on stage, but we know comedy! Bwahahaha!' So I said 'Listen, I know this is a little out there, but what about a guy…who has Tourette's of a goat?' And these guys just stare at me like 'Man, Breuer's HIGH out of his MIND!' I said 'The more he drinks, the more he starts eating the curtains, and he gets nuts and sings karaoke at the end of the night.' And then about two weeks later, this guy came back, he's like, 'Hey, I've got an idea for that weird goat thing you were talking about.' He said 'What if he only sings 80's?' And I thought that was the DUMBEST…thing I've ever heard in my life! And then, we tried it, and now I've got people drunk out of their minds in a bar trying to 'baa' at me. [drunken voice] 'Hey, man! Yo, yo man, it's the sheep dude right here! [drunken 'baa'ing] I shouldn'ta had that hot dog, man!”

Jim Breuer (1967) American actor and comedian

Just hammered, baaing at me in the street.
Explaining the origin of Goat Boy on Mancow's Morning Madhouse
Unsourced

Life, People, Dogs, Guy

“I returned to civilization shortly after that and went to Cornell to teach, and my first impression was a very strange one. I can't understand it any more, but I felt very strongly then. I sat in a restaurant in New York, for example, and I looked out at the buildings and I began to think, you know, about how much the radius of the Hiroshima bomb damage was and so forth… How far from here was 34th street?… All those buildings, all smashed — and so on. And I would go along and I would see people building a bridge, or they'd be making a new road, and I thought, they're crazy, they just don't understand, they don't understand. Why are they making new things? It's so useless. But, fortunately, it's been useless for almost forty years now, hasn't it? So I've been wrong about it being useless making bridges and I'm glad those other people had the sense to go ahead.”

Richard Feynman (1918–1988) American theoretical physicist

On his emotional reaction after the first uses of the atomic bomb.
Part 3: "Feynman, The Bomb, and the Military", "Los Alamos from Below", p. 136
Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! (1985)

People, Understanding, Thinking, Sense

“When we first started, we were able to take our undercover video to 60 Minutes or 20/20, and they would fight over it and do these thought-provoking exposés. Now that society has become less interested in these programs and more interested in sensationalism and the tabloids, we have to reinvent ourselves to keep our issues on the front burner; we have had to do a lot of theatrical things. … Much of what we do is geared toward kids, who have a great sense of justice. This is the first generation in which kids have grown up with this issue. Twenty-five years ago, parents were petrified when their kids went vegetarian — some still are.”

Dan Mathews (1964) American activist

About PETA's activities. “Sir Paul McCartney and PETA VP Dan Mathews Reflect on Two Decades of Activism” (April 2005), in PETA.org http://www.peta.org/features/paul-mccartney-interview/.

Justice, Parent, Sense, Fight

“I was almost annoyed hearing that Putin plays chess and Obama or other leaders of the free world they play checkers. I thought I had to defend the integrity of my game because chess is not a game for dictators for numerous reasons. One, it’s transparent. It’s all information hundred percent available so you know exactly what you have, you know exactly what your opponent has. You don’t know what he or she is thinking, but you definitely know what kind of resources your opponent can use to hurt you, to damage your position.”

Garry Kasparov (1963) former chess world champion

2010s, Interview with Bill Kristol (2016)

World, Game, Thinking, Hurt

“Although I like to be thought of as a tough rugby-playing Welsh miner's son, able to take on the world, the reality is that this image is just superficial. I am the reverse of what people think.”

Richard Burton (1925–1984) Welsh actor

In Richard Burton Biography, IMDb

People, World, Thinking, Reality

“It was something that came up right from the get-go, but as you know, from the beginning we kind of thought we were going to kill Shiro at one point. And so we’re like, ‘Y’know what? We don’t really want to kill off our gay representation. Maybe we’ll find it somewhere else.’ But then we found out pretty soon after that, Shiro wasn’t allowed to die. Well, all right, we go back to plan one and yeah, it just took us a little while to get to the point in the story where we were able to reveal it. But he was kind of always in the works to be our [gay] representation.
It’s a very normal part of his life and it’s just a very normal part of our story. It wasn’t supposed to be, like, scandalous or surprising or--
It’s just daily life. And I think we kind of try to envision a world where all of those things are just normal and accepted and people don’t freak out about them.
It doesn’t change who he is at all.”

Lauren Montgomery (1980) artist

26 July 2018 article on ScreenRant https://screenrant.com/voltron-shiro-gay-boyfriend-adam/

Life, People, World, Thinking

“Thought is the medially between earth and world. The broader the magnitude of his reach, the more painful man's tragic limitation. Thought is the medially between earth and world. The broader the magnitude of his reach, the more painful man's tragic limitation. To get where motion is interminate.”

Paul Klee (1879–1940) German Swiss painter

IIII.37, The Arrow. p. 54
1921 - 1930, Pedagogical Sketch Book, (1925)

Pain, World

“It is imperative for many reasons that the appalling gap between public and computer insider be closed. As the saying goes, war is too important to be left to the generals. Guardianship of the computer can no longer be left to a priesthood. I see this as just one example of the creeping evil of Professionalism, the control of aspects of society by cliques of insiders. There may be some chance, though, that Professionalism can be turned around. Doctors, for example, are being told that they no longer own people’s bodies. And this book may suggest to some computer professionals that their position should not be as sacrosanct as they have thought, either.”

Ted Nelson (1937) American information technologist, philosopher, and sociologist; coined the terms "hypertext" and "hypermedia"

Computer Lib
Computer Lib/Dream Machines (1974, rev. 1987)

War, People, Books, Evil

“Thinking is but an idle waste of thought,
And nought is everything and everything is nought.”

Horace Smith (1779–1849) English poet and novelist

Rejected Addresses. Cui Bono?, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

Thinking

“I became aware of Louise Bourgeois in my first or second year at Brighton Art College. One of my teachers, Stuart Morgan, curated a small retrospective of her work at the Serpentine, and both he and another teacher, Edward Allington, saw something in her, and me, and thought I should be aware of her. I thought the work was wonderful. It was her very early pieces, The Blind Leading the Blind, the wooden pieces and some of the later bronze works. Biographically, I don't really think she has influenced me, but I think there are similarities in our work. We have both used the home as a kind of kick-off point, as the space that starts the thoughts of a body of work. I eventually got to meet Louise in New York, soon after I made House. She asked to see me because she had seen a picture of House in the New York Times while she was ironing it one morning, so she said. She was wonderful and slightly kind of nutty; very interested and eccentric. She drew the whole time; it was very much a salon with me there as her audience, watching her. I remember her remarking that I was shorter than she was. I don't know if this was true but she was commenting on the physicality of making such big work and us being relatively small women. When you meet her you don't know what's true, because she makes things up. She has spun her web and drawn people in, and eaten a few people along the way.”

Louise Bourgeois (1911–2010) American and French sculptor

Rachel Whiteread, " Kisses for Spiderwoman http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2007/oct/14/art2," The Guardian, 14 Oct. 2007:

Women, People, Art, Way

“Sharing the food is to me more important than arguing about beliefs. Jesus, according to the gospels, thought so too.”

Freeman Dyson (1923) theoretical physicist and mathematician

Progress In Religion (2000)

Food

“In reality, no one had meant anything by talking to the parish pauper, none of them cared at all, no one even thought of carrying him downstairs to let him see the wedding like other folk; he was not allowed to see the wedding that he himself had brought about with his poetic talent—such is the lot of poets.</b”

Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) Icelandic author

Heimsljós (World Light) (1940), Book One: The Revelation of the Deity

Reality, Wedding

“A child born today will grow up with no conception of privacy at all. They’ll never know what it means to have a private moment to themselves an unrecorded, unanalyzed thought. And that’s a problem because privacy matters; privacy is what allows us to determine who we are and who we want to be.”

Edward Snowden (1983) American whistleblower and former National Security Agency contractor

Source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/edward-snowden-after-months-of-nsa-revelations-says-his-missions-accomplished/2013/12/23/49fc36de-6c1c-11e3-a523-fe73f0ff6b8d_story.html 2013 Christmas Message

26 December 2013

Problem

“A central tenet of modern feminist thought has been the assertion that "all women are oppressed." This assertion implies that women share a common lot, that factors like class, race, religion,, and it is both appropriate and necessary that we speak against such oppression.”

Bell Hooks book Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center

p. 5 https://books.google.com/books?id=L1WvBAAAQBAJ&pg=PA5. Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (1984), Chapter 1: Black Women: Shaping Feminist Theory

Women, Religion

“Systems Are Seductive. They promise to do a hard job faster, better, and more easily than you could do it by yourself. But if you set up a system, you are likely to find your time and effort now being consumed in the care and feeding of the system itself. New problems are created by its very presence. Once set up, it won't go away, it grows and encroaches. It begins to do strange and wonderful things. Breaks down in ways you never thought possible. It kicks back, gets in the way, and opposes its own proper function. Your own perspective becomes distorted by being in the system. You become anxious and push on it to make it work. Eventually you come to believe that the misbegotten product it so grudgingly delivers is what you really wanted all the time. At that point encroachment has become complete. You have become absorbed. You are now a systems person.”

John Gall (1925–2014) American physician

Source: General systemantics, an essay on how systems work, and especially how they fail..., 1975, p. 90 as cited in: Robert B. Seidensticker (2006) Future Hype: The Myths of Technology Change. p. 45

Way, Problem, Effort, Time