Quotes about thousand
page 13

Ryan Adams photo
Halldór Laxness photo
Peter Kropotkin photo
George H. W. Bush photo

“Here, India will be a global player of considerable political and economic impact. As a result, the need to explicate what it means to be an Indian (and what the ‘Indianness’ of the Indian culture consists of) will soon become the task of the entire intelligentsia in India. In this process, they will confront the challenge of responding to what the West has so far thought and written about India. A response is required because the theoretical and textual study of the Indian culture has been undertaken mostly by the West in the last three hundred years. What is more, it will also be a challenge because the study of India has largely occurred within the cultural framework of America and Europe. In fulfilling this task, the Indian intelligentsia of tomorrow willhave to solve a puzzle: what were the earlier generations of Indian thinkers busy with, in the course of the last two to three thousand years? The standard textbook story, which has schooled multiple generations including mine, goes as follows: caste system dominates India, strange and grotesque deities are worshipped in strange andgrotesque ways, women are discriminated against, the practice of widow-burning exists and corruption is rampant. If these properties characterize India of today and yesterday, the puzzle about what the earlier generation of Indian thinkers were doing turns into a very painful realization: while the intellectuals of Europeanculture were busy challenging and changing the world, most thinkersin Indian culture were apparently busy sustaining and defendingundesirable and immoral practices. Of course there is our Buddha andour Gandhi but that is apparently all we have: exactly one Buddha and exactly one Gandhi. If this portrayal is true, the Indians have butone task, to modernize India, and the Indian culture but one goal: to become like the West as quickly as possible.”

S. N. Balagangadhara (1952) Indian philosopher

Foreword by S. N. Balagangadhara in "Invading the Sacred" (2007)
Source: Balagangadhara, S.N. (2007), "Foreword." In Ramaswamy, de Nicolas & Banerjee (Eds.), Invading the Sacred: An Analysis of Hinduism Studies in America . Delhi: Rupa & Co., pp. vii–xi.

Andrew Sullivan photo
Henry Ward Beecher photo
Charles Stross photo
Steven Pressfield photo
Madison Grant photo
Heinrich Heine photo
Jon Sobrino photo
Sri Aurobindo photo

“What the Divine wants is for man to embody Him here, in the individual and in the collectivity… to realise God in life. The old system of yoga could not harmonise or unify Spirit and life; it dismissed the world as Maya or a transient play of God. The result has been a diminution of life-power and the decline of India. The Gita says, utsideyur ime loka na kuryam karma cedaham ["These peoples would crumble to pieces if I did not do actions," 3.24]. Truly 'these peoples' of India have gone to ruin. What kind of spiritual perfection is it if a few Sannyasins, Bairagis and Saddhus attain realisation and liberation, if a few Bhaktas dance in a frenzy of love, god-intoxication and Ananda, and an entire race, devoid of life, devoid of intelligence, sinks to the depths of extreme tamas?… But now the time has come to take hold of the substance instead of extending the shadow. We have to awaken the true soul of India and in its image fashion all works…. I believe that the main cause of India's weakness is not subjection, nor poverty, nor a lack of spirituality or Dharma, but a diminution of thought-power, the spread of ignorance in the motherland of Knowledge. Everywhere I see an inability or unwillingness to think… incapacity of thought or 'thought-phobia'…. The mediaeval period was a night, a time of victory for the man of ignorance; the modern world is a time of victory for the man of knowledge. It is the one who can fathom and learn the truth of the world by thinking more, searching more, labouring more, who will gain more Shakti. Look at Europe, and you will see two things: a wide limitless sea of thought and the play of a huge and rapid, yet disciplined force. The whole Shakti of Europe lies there. It is by virtue of this Shakti that she has been able to swallow the world, like our Tapaswins of old, whose might held even the gods of the universe in awe, suspense and subjection. People say that Europe is rushing into the jaws of destruction. I do not think so. All these revolutions, all these upsettings are the initial stages of a new creation….. We, however, are not worshippers of Shakti; we are worshippers of the easy way…. Our civilisation has become ossified, our Dharma a bigotry of externals, our spirituality a faint glimmer of light or a momentary wave of intoxication. So long as this state of things lasts, any permanent resurgence of India is impossible…. We have abandoned the sadhana of Shakti and so the Shakti has abandoned us…. You say what is needed is emotional excitement, to fill the country with enthusiasm. We did all that in the political field during the Swadeshi period; but all we did now lies in the dust…. Therefore I no longer wish to make emotional excitement, feeling and mental enthusiasm the base. I want to make a vast and heroic equality the foundation of my yoga; in all the activities of the being, of the adhar [vessel] based on that equality, I want a complete, firm and unshakable Shakti; over that ocean of Shakti I want the vast radiation of the sun of Knowledge and in that luminous vastness an established ecstasy of infinite love and bliss and oneness. I do not want tens of thousands of disciples; it will be enough if I can get as instruments of God a hundred complete men free from petty egoism. I have no faith in the customary trade of guru. I do not want to be a guru. What I want is that a few, awakened at my touch or at that of another, will manifest from within their sleeping divinity and realise the divine life. It is such men who will raise this country.”

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

April, 1920, Letter to Barin Ghose, Sri Aurobindo's brother, Translated from Bengali
India's Rebirth

Stephen Baxter photo
Fethullah Gülen photo
Franz Marc photo

“In war we are all equal, but among a thousand good men, a bullet hit an irreplaceable one... We painters know well that with the loss of his harmony [ of August Macke ], the color in German art will become many shades paler..”

Franz Marc (1880–1916) German painter

Quote of Franz Marc, in exhibition-text 'Die Blaue Reiter', Gemeentemuseum the Hague, Netherlands 2010
c. 1914/15, on the death of his close friend August Macke, who fell in the first months of World War 1.
1915 - 1916

Richard Nixon photo

“Nixon: I still think we ought to take the North Vietnamese dikes out now. Will that drown people?
Kissinger: About two hundred thousand people.
Nixon: No, no, no, I'd rather use the nuclear bomb. Have you got that, Henry?
Kissinger: That, I think, would just be too much.
Nixon: The nuclear bomb, does that bother you?. I just want you to think big, Henry, for Christsakes.”

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

In conversation with Henry Kissinger regarding Vietnam, as quoted in Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers. (2002) by Daniel Ellsberg p. 418 ISBN 0-670-03030-9
2000s

Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo

“The Future is more present than the Past :
For one look back, a thousand on we cast;
And hope doth ever memory outlast.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

(1834-1) (Vol.40) The Future, compare Ethel Churchill (or The Two Brides) I, 31
The Monthly Magazine

Edgar Bronfman, Sr. photo
Chuck Klosterman photo

“We all have the potential to fall in love a thousand times in our lifetime. It's easy. The first girl I ever loved was someone I knew in sixth grade. Her name was Missy; we talked about horses. The last girl I love will be someone I haven't even met yet, probably. They all count. But there are certain people you love who do something else; they define how you classify what love is supposed to feel like. These are the most important people in your life, and you'll meet maybe four or five of these people over the span of 80 years. But there's still one more tier to all this; there is always one person who you love who becomes that definition. It usually happens retrospectively, but it always happens eventually. This is the person who unknowingly sets the template for what you will always love about other people, even if some of those lovable qualities are self-destructive and unreasonable. You will remember having conversations with this person that never actually happened. You will recall sexual trysts with this person that never technically occurred. This is because the individual who embodies your personal definition of love does not really exist. The person is real, and the feelings are real--but you create the context. And context is everything. The person who defines your understanding of love is not inherently different than anyone else, and they're often just the person you happen to meet the first time you really, really want to love someone. But that person still wins. They win, and you lose. Because for the rest of your life, they will control how you feel about everyone else.”

Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story (2005)

Ray Bradbury photo
Primo Levi photo
Mike Oldfield photo

“And now the story's just begun
A thousand years to stay;
We wake each morning with the sun
To live our dreams away…”

Mike Oldfield (1953) English musician, multi-instrumentalist

Song lyrics, Islands (1987)

George W. Bush photo

“[T]he facts are that thousands of small businesses - Hispanically owned or otherwise - pay taxes at the highest marginal rate.”

George W. Bush (1946) 43rd President of the United States

Speech http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=45784 to the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, (March 19, 2001)
2000s, 2001

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow photo
Kaarlo Sarkia photo
Frederick Locker-Lampson photo

“"Vanitas vanitatum" has rung in the ears
Of gentle and simple for thousands of years;
The wail still is heard, yet its notes never scare
Either simple or gentle from Vanity Fair.”

Frederick Locker-Lampson (1821–1895) British poet

Vanity Fair; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

Ken Ham photo

“You see, Adam had a perfect brain. We don't, because our brain has suffered from thousands of years of sin and the curse. Frankly, we're nowhere near as intelligent as Adam was.”

Ken Ham (1951) Australian young Earth creationist

Did Adam have a Bellybutton?: And other tough questions about the Bible (2000)

Garth Nix photo
Milton Friedman photo

“Thanks to economists, all of us, from the days of Adam Smith and before right down to the present, tariffs are perhaps one tenth of one percent lower than they otherwise would have been. … And because of our efforts, we have earned our salaries ten-thousand fold.”

Milton Friedman (1912–2006) American economist, statistician, and writer

Speaking at a meeting of the American Economic Association, as quoted by Walter Block in "Milton Friedman RIP" in Mises Daily (16 November 2006) http://mises.org/story/2393

Guillaume de Salluste Du Bartas photo

“Or savage beasts upon a thousand hils.”

Guillaume de Salluste Du Bartas (1544–1590) French writer

First Week, Third Day. Compare: "The cattle upon a thousand hills", Psalm i.
La Semaine; ou, Création du monde (1578)

Philip José Farmer photo
Chuck Palahniuk photo
Harry Chapin photo
Jacob Bronowski photo
Thomas Jefferson photo

“I may say Christianity itself divided into its thousands also, who are disputing, anathematizing and where the laws permit burning and torturing one another for abstractions which no one of them understand, and which are indeed beyond the comprehension of the human mind”

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

.
Letter to George Logan (12 November 1816). Published in The Works of Thomas Jefferson in Twelve Volumes http://oll.libertyfund.org/ToC/0054.php, Federal Edition, Paul Leicester Ford, ed., New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1904, Vol. 12 http://oll.libertyfund.org/Texts/Jefferson0136/Works/0054-12_Bk.pdf, pp. 43
1810s

George Frisbie Hoar photo
Donald J. Trump photo
James A. Garfield photo

“It is not part of the functions of the national government to find employment for people — and if we were to appropriate a hundred millions for this purpose, we should be taxing forty millions of people to keep a few thousand employed.”

James A. Garfield (1831–1881) American politician, 20th President of the United States (in office in 1881)

To B. A. Hinsdale in 1874, as quoted in The Life and Letters of James Abram Garfield: 1831-1877 (1925) by Theodore Clarke Smith, p. 517
1870s

Bernard Mandeville photo
David Attenborough photo
Pat Condell photo
Winston S. Churchill photo

“He who has a thousand friends has not a friend to spare, while he who has one enemy will meet him everywhere.”

Ali (601–661) cousin and son-in-law of the Islamic prophet Muhammad

As quoted in "Considerations By the Way" in Conduct of Life by Ralph Waldo Emerson
Variant translation: Believe me, a thousand friends suffice thee not; In a single enemy thou hast more than enough

Michael Moorcock photo
Aron Ra photo
Richard Arkwright photo
Nathan Bedford Forrest photo

“Every moment lost is worth the life of a thousand men.”

Nathan Bedford Forrest (1821–1877) Confederate Army general

Said to Braxton Bragg at Chickamauga, September 18-20, 1863. As quoted in May I Quote You, General Forrest? by Randall Bedwell.
1860s

Septimius Severus photo

“You see by what has happened that we are superior to you in intelligence, in size of army, and in number of supporters. Surely you were easily trapped, captured without a struggle. It is in my power to do with you what I wish when I wish. Helpless and prostrate, you lie before us now, victims of our might. But if one looks for a punishment equal to the crimes you have committed, it is impossible to find a suitable one. You murdered your revered and benevolent old emperor, the man whom it was your sworn duty to protect. The empire of the Roman people, eternally respected, which our forefathers obtained by their valiant courage or inherited because of their noble birth, this empire you shamefully and disgracefully sold for silver as if it were your personal property. But you were unable to defend the man whom you yourselves had chosen as emperor. No, you betrayed him like the cowards you are. For these monstrous acts and crimes you deserve a thousand deaths, if one wished to do to you what you have earned. You see clearly what it is right you should suffer. But I will be merciful. I will not butcher you. My hands shall not do what your hands did. But I say that it is in no way fit or proper for you to continue to serve as the emperor's bodyguard, you who have violated your oath and stained your hands with the blood of your emperor and fellow Roman, betraying the trust placed in you and the security offered by your protection. Still, compassion leads me to spare your lives and your persons. But I order the soldiers who have you surrounded to cashier you, to strip off any military uniform or equipment you are wearing, and drive you off naked. 9. And I order you to get yourselves as far from the city of Rome as is humanly possible, and I promise you and I swear it on solemn oath and I proclaim it publicly that if any one of you is found within a hundred miles of Rome, he shall pay for it with his head.”

Septimius Severus (145–211) Emperor of Ancient Rome

Herodian, Book II.

Nathanael Greene photo
William Trufant Foster photo
Stanisław Jerzy Lec photo

“The mob shouts with one big mouth and eats with a thousand little ones.”

Tłum krzyczy jednymi wielkimi ustami, ale je tysiącem małych.
Unkempt Thoughts (1957)

Edwin Lefèvre photo

“As I have said a thousand times, no manipulation can put stocks down and keep them down.”

Source: Reminiscences of a Stock Operator (1923), Chapter XV, p. 186

Osama bin Laden photo
Isaac Watts photo

“Strange that a harp of thousand strings
Should keep in tune so long!”

Isaac Watts (1674–1748) English hymnwriter, theologian and logician

Hymn 19, Hymns and Spiritual Songs, Book II.
Attributed from postum publications, Hymns and Spiritual Songs (1773)

Ramsey Clark photo

“There can't be any more Fallujahs. Fallujah is the 21st century equivalent of Guernica. We just went in and destroyed that city, drove the people out, killed them, thousands. We don't know how many.”

Ramsey Clark (1927) United States Marine

Democracy Now interview, January 21, 2005 http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/01/21/1531214

John Armstrong photo
Ali al-Rida photo

“For the Devil, the presence of learned one is by far more painful than a thousand worshipers.”

Ali al-Rida (770–818) eighth of the Twelve Imams

Majlisi, Bihārul Anwār, vol.2, p. 16.
Regarding Knowledge & Wisdom, Religious

Harold Macmillan photo
Samuel Taylor Coleridge photo
Mao Zedong photo

“Thousands upon thousands of martyrs have heroically laid down their lives for the people; let us hold their banner high and march ahead along the path crimson with their blood!”

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

On Coalition Government (1945)

Friedrich Hayek photo
Freeman Dyson photo
David Graeber photo

“The moment we begin to map the history of money across the last five thousand years of Eurasian history, startling patterns begin to emerge.”

David Graeber (1961) American anthropologist and anarchist

Source: Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011), Chapter Eight, "Credit versus Bullion", p. 212

Anne Brontë photo
Bill Clinton photo
James A. Garfield photo
Dutch Schultz photo

“A mother's boy has never wept, nor dashed a thousand kim.”

Dutch Schultz (1902–1935) American mobster

From police transcripts of incoherent deathbed confession

George William Curtis photo

“Mayor Macbeth, of Charleston, told General Howard that he did not believe that a bureau at Washington could manage the social relations of the people from the Potomac to the Rio Grande. But the answer to Mayor Macbeth is that he and his companions have managed those relations at a cost to the country of four years of civil war, three thousand millions of dollars, and hundreds of thousands of lives. The Freedmen's Bureau will hardly be as expensive as that. And while such a bureau merely defends the rights of a certain class under the laws, the aid societies give them that education which in the present state of local feeling would be inevitably withheld. The mighty arch of Sherman, wasting and taming the land, is followed by the noiseless steps of the band of unnamed heroes and heroines who are teaching the people. The soldier drew the furrow, the teacher drops the seed. There is many and many a devoted woman, hidden at this moment in the lowliest cabins of the South, whose name poets will not sing nor historians record, but whose patient toil the eye that marks the sparrow's fall beholds and approves. Not more noble, not more essential, was the work of the bravest and most famous of the heroes who fell in the wild storm of battle, than that of many a woman to us unknown, faithful through privation and exposure and disease, and perishing at the lonely outpost of duty in the act of helping the nation keep its word.”

George William Curtis (1824–1892) American writer

1860s, The Good Fight (1865)

Albert Barnes photo
Frédéric Bazille photo

“[ Monet is].. hard at work for some time now. His paintings has really progressed, I'm sure it will attract a lot of attention. He has sold thousands of franc's worth of paintings in the last few days, and has one or two other small commissions. He's definitely on his way.”

Frédéric Bazille (1841–1870) French painter

Quote of Bazille in a letter to his brother, December 1865; as cited in The private lives of the Impressionists, Sue Roe, Harpen Collins Publishers, New York 2006, p. 43
1861 - 1865

“The most basic facts in biology are that this earth is now two thousand million years old, and that the biologist studies mostly that which exists today.”

W. Ross Ashby (1903–1972) British psychiatrist

Source: An Introduction to Cybernetics (1956), Part 3: Regulation and control, p. 196

William Ewart Gladstone photo
Frederic G. Kenyon photo
Michael Savage photo
Kathleen Raine photo
Kent Hovind photo
Orson Scott Card photo
Bernie Sanders photo

“We have a crisis in higher education today. Too many of our young people cannot afford a college education and those who are leaving college are faced with crushing debt. It is a national disgrace that hundreds of thousands of young Americans today do not go to college, not because they are unqualified, but because they cannot afford it. This is absolutely counterproductive to our efforts to create a strong competitive economy and a vibrant middle class. This disgrace has got to end. In a global economy, when our young people are competing with workers from around the world, we have got to have the best educated workforce possible. And, that means that we have got to make college affordable. We have got to make sure that every qualified American in this country who wants to go to college can go to college -- regardless of income. Further, it is unacceptable that 40 million Americans are drowning in more than $1.2 trillion in student loan debt. It is unacceptable that millions of college graduates cannot afford to buy their first home or their first new car because of the high interest rates they are paying on student debt. It is unacceptable that, in many instances, interest rates on student loans are two to three times higher than on auto loans.”

Bernie Sanders (1941) American politician, senator for Vermont

Bernie Sanders Statement by Senator Bernard Sanders on the College for All Act http://www.sanders.senate.gov/download/051915-highered/?inline=file (19 May 2015)
2010s, 2015

Octavia E. Butler photo
Ursula K. Le Guin photo
Walter Scott photo

“Where, where was Roderick then!
One blast upon his bugle-horn
Were worth a thousand men.”

Walter Scott (1771–1832) Scottish historical novelist, playwright, and poet

Canto VI, stanza 18.
The Lady of the Lake http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/3011 (1810)

Aron Ra photo
Vanna Bonta photo

“People have been making love and having sex in space over the thousands of years that our ancestors lived and traveled in small hunting-and-gathering bands. Earth is in Space.”

Vanna Bonta (1958–2014) Italian-American writer, poet, inventor, actress, voice artist (1958-2014)

Source: Zero Gravity interview (2006), p. 90

Amir Khusrow photo
Chris Quigg photo

“Each second, some 1014 neutrinos made in the Sun and about a thousand neutrinos made by cosmic rays in Earth's atmosphere pass through your body.”

Chris Quigg (1944) American physicist

[Cosmic neutrinos, arXiv preprint arXiv:0802.0013, 2008, https://arxiv.org/abs/0802.0013] p. 1.

Adair Turner, Baron Turner of Ecchinswell photo
Sinclair Lewis photo
Ali Zayn al-Abidin photo
James A. Garfield photo
Joanne B. Freeman photo

“I’ve stayed interested in Hamilton not because he was a standard-issue hero, but because of his complications; he was self-destructive, had a highly problematic personality, and was often extreme in his politics. I don’t like hero history. It does the study of history a disservice on a thousand different levels. It’s far more interesting to study complicated people and the history they helped to shape.”

Joanne B. Freeman (1962) US historian and tenured professor of History and American Studies at Yale University

In conversation: Joanne Freeman on Alexander Hamilton the man and 'Hamilton' the musical https://news.yale.edu/2016/08/11/conversation-joanne-freeman-alexander-hamilton-man-and-hamilton-musical

Muhammad bin Qasim photo

“When Muhammad bin Qasim invaded Sind, he took captives wherever he went and sent many prisoners, especially women prisoners, to his homeland. Parimal Devi and Suraj Devi, the two daughters of Raja Dahir, who were sent to Hajjaj to adorn the harem of the Caliph, were part of a large bunch of maidens remitted as one-fifth share of the state (Khums) from the booty of war (Ghanaim). The Chachnama gives the details. After the capture of the fort of Rawar, Muhammad bin Qasim “halted there for three day, during which time he masscered 6,000 …men. Their followers and dependents, as well as their women and children were taken prisoner.” When the (total) number of prisoners was calculated, it was found to amount to thirty thousand persons (Kalichbeg has sixty thousand), amongst whom thirty were the daughters of the chiefs. They were sent to Hajjaj. The head of Dahir and the fifth part of prisoners were forwarded in charge of the Black Slave Kaab, son of Mubarak Rasti.96 In Sind itself female slaves captured after every campaign of the marching army, were married to Arab soldiers who settled down in colonies established in places like Mansura, Kuzdar, Mahfuza and Multan. The standing instructions of Hajjaj to Muhammad bin Qasim were to “give no quarter to infidels, but to cut their throats”, and take the women and children as captives. In the final stages of the conquest of Sind, “when the plunder and the prisoners of war were brought before Qasim… one-fifth of all the prisoners were chosen and set aside; they were counted as amounting to twenty thousand in number… (they belonged to high families) and veils were put on their faces, and the rest were given to the soldiers”.97 Obviously, a few lakhs of women were enslaved and distributed among the elite and the soldiers.”

Muhammad bin Qasim (695–715) Umayyad general

Chachnama, in Lal, K. S. (1992). The legacy of Muslim rule in India. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan. Chapter 7

Philip Massinger photo

“Death hath a thousand doors to let out life.”

A Very Woman (1619), Act v. Sc. 4. Compare: "Death hath so many doors to let out life", Beaumont and Fletcher, The Custom of the Country, act ii. sc. 2; "The thousand doors that lead to death", Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici, part i, sect. xliv.