Quotes about thousand (2694 quotes, page 8)

“In Somalia, we know exactly what they had to gain because they told us. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Colin Powell, described this as the best public relations operation of the Pentagon that he could imagine. His picture, which I think is plausible, is that there was a problem about raising the Pentagon budget, and they needed something that would be, look like a kind of a cakewalk, which would give a lot of prestige to the Pentagon. Somalia looked easy. Let's look back at the background. For years, the United States had supported a really brutal dictator, who had just devastated the country, and was finally kicked out. After he's kicked out, it was 1990, the country sank into total chaos and disaster, with starvation and warfare and all kind of horrible misery. The United States refused to, certainly to pay reparations, but even to look. By the middle of 1992, it was beginning to ease. The fighting was dying down, food supplies were beginning to get in, the Red Cross was getting in, roughly 80% of their supplies they said. There was a harvest on the way. It looked like it was finally sort of settling down. At that point, all of a sudden, George Bush announced that he had been watching these heartbreaking pictures on television, on Thanksgiving, and we had to do something, we had to send in humanitarian aid. The Marines landed, in a landing which was so comical, that even the media couldn't keep a straight face. Take a look at the reports of the landing of the Marines, it must've been the first week of December 1992. They had planned a night, there was nothing that was going on, but they planned a night landing, so you could show off all the fancy new night vision equipment and so on. Of course they had called the television stations, because what's the point of a PR operation for the Pentagon if there's no one to look for it. So the television stations were all there, with their bright lights and that sort of thing, and as the Marines were coming ashore they were blinded by the television light. So they had to send people out to get the cameramen to turn off the lights, so they could land with their fancy new equipment. As I say, even the media could not keep a straight face on this one, and they reported it pretty accurately. Also reported the PR aspect. Well the idea was, you could get some nice shots of Marine colonels handing out peanut butter sandwiches to starving refugees, and that'd all look great. And so it looked for a couple of weeks, until things started to get unpleasant. As things started to get unpleasant, the United States responded with what's called the Powell Doctrine. The United States has an unusual military doctrine, it's one of the reasons why the U. S. is generally disqualified from peace keeping operations that involve civilians, again, this has to do with sovereignty. U. S. military doctrine is that U. S. soldiers are not permitted to come under any threat. That's not true for other countries. So countries like, say, Canada, the Fiji Islands, Pakistan, Norway, their soldiers are coming under threat all the time. The peace keepers in southern Lebanon for example, are being attacked by Israeli soldiers all the time, and have suffered plenty of casualties, and they don't like it. But U. S. soldiers are not permitted to come under any threat, so when Somali teenagers started shaking fists at them, and more, they came back with massive fire power, and that led to a massacre. According to the U. S., I don't know the actual numbers, but according to U. S. government, about 7 to 10 thousand Somali civilians were killed before this was over. There's a close analysis of all of this by Alex de Waal, who's one of the world's leading specialists on African famine and relief, altogether academic specialist. His estimate is that the number of people saved by the intervention and the number killed by the intervention was approximately in the same ballpark. That's Somalia. That's what's given as a stellar example of the humanitarian intervention.”

Noam Chomsky (1928) american linguist, philosopher and activist

Responding to the question, "what did the United States have to gain by intervening in Somalia?", regarding Operation Provide Relief/Operation Restore Hope/Battle of Mogadishu.
Quotes 1990s, 1995-1999, Sovereignty and World Order, 1999

People , World , Peace , Food

“[From Ernest von Hermanstadt]; Action—action in the sunshine—passion—but little feeling, and less thought: such was meant to be our existence. But we refine—we sadden and we subdue—we call up the hidden and evil spirits of the inner world—we wake from their dark repose those who will madden us. The heart is like the wood on yonder flickering hearth: green and fresh, haunted by a thousand sweet odours, bathed in the warm air, and gladdened by the summer sunshine—so grew it at first upon its native soil. But nature submitteth to art, and man has appointed for it another destiny: it is gathered, and cast into the fire. It seems, then, as if its life had but just begun. A new spirit has crept into the kindled veins—a brilliant light dances around it—it is bright—it is beautiful—and it is consumed! What remains?—A warmth on the atmosphere soon passing away, and a heap of blackened ashes! What more will remain of the heart?”

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

The Monthly Magazine

Life , World , Beauty , Art

“Note that nobody reads every post in linux-kernel. In fact, nobody who expects to have time left over to actually do any real kernel work will read even half. Except Alan Cox, but he's actually not human, but about a thousand gnomes working in under-ground caves in Swansea. None of the individual gnomes read all the postings either, they just work together really well.”

Linus Torvalds (1969) Finnish-American software engineer and hacker

Post, Linux kernel mailing list, 2000-05-02, Google Groups, Torvalds, Linus, 2006-08-28 https://groups.google.com/d/msg/fa.linux.kernel/iQtWFALi4JA/eSzv64_tOvoJ,
2000s, 2000-04

Time , Reading

“One to destroy, is murder by the law;
And gibbets keep the lifted hand in awe;
To murder thousands takes a specious name,
War's glorious art, and gives immortal fame.”

Edward Young (1683–1765) English poet

Satire VII, l. 55.
Love of Fame (1725-1728)

War , Law , Art

“Look, it was an accident. Five thousand accidents happen every day -- bizarre, tragic, farcical… they're Acts of God fit only to amaze the survivors and irritate the Insurance Company…”

Peter Greenaway (1942) British film director

A Zed and Two Noughts

God

“For thousands of years people have been trying to force other people to think their way. Did they succeed? No. Will they succeed? No. Why? Because brute force is not an argument.”

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

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

People , Way , Thinking

“Seven million people I turned on, and only one hundred thousand have come by to thank me.”

Timothy Leary (1920–1996) American psychologist

Don Lattin, The Harvard Psychedelic Club (2010), p. 202

People

“They were now as a party engaged in carrying laboriously uphill the last few columns out of the Gladstonian quarry. … Foremost among the tasks of Liberalism in the near future was the regeneration of rural life and the emancipation of the land of this country from the paralysing grip of an effete and unprofitable system. … [The reports into rural life] were startling. When they were published they would prove conclusively that there were hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of men, women, and children dependent upon the land in this country and engaged in cultivating it, hardworking men and women, who were living under conditions with regard to wages, to housing, as well as hours of labour—conditions which ought to make this great Empire hang its head in shame that such things could be permitted to happen in any corner of its vast dominions, let alone in this country, the centre and source of all its glory.”

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

Speech to the National Liberal Club (31 January 1913), quoted in The Times (1 February 1913), p. 8.
Chancellor of the Exchequer

Life , Women , Men , Children

“However incumbent it may be on most of us to do our duty, there is, in spite of a thousand narrow dogmatisms, nothing in the world that anyone is under the least obligation to like — not even (one braces one's self to risk the declaration) a particular kind of writing.”

Henry James (1843–1916) American novelist, short story author, and literary critic

Flaubert (1893).

World

“Once one is caught up into the material world not one person in ten thousand finds the time to form literary taste, to examine the validity of philosophic concepts for himself, or to form what, for lack of a better phrase, I might call the wise and tragic sense of life.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) American novelist and screenwriter

Letter to his daughter Frances Scott Fitzgerald (5 October 1940)
Quoted, Letters

Life , World , Sense , Time

“We have fed our sea for a thousand years
And she calls us, still unfed,
Though there's never a wave of all her waves
But marks our English dead.”

Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) English short-story writer, poet, and novelist

The Song of the Dead http://whitewolf.newcastle.edu.au/words/authors/K/KiplingRudyard/verse/volumeXI/songdead.html, II, Stanza 1 (1896).
The Seven Seas (1896)

Sea , Dead

“I also know that Christianity has held back any further advances in human consciousness for the past thousand years. And for the past century it’s been in direct conflict with its illegitimate offspring, Communism (again with a capital C). Both ask the individual to sacrifice his self-interest to the higher goals of the organization. (Which is okay by me as long as it’s voluntary; but as soon as either becomes too big—and takes on that damned capital C—they stop asking for cooperation and start demanding it.)
Any higher states of human enlightenment have been sacrificed between these two monoliths.”

David Gerrold book The Man Who Folded Himself

Source: The Man Who Folded Himself (1973), p. 73

Communication , Past

“The best estimates are that it takes a minimum of fifty thousand years for an adaptation to show up in the human genome. This is called evolutionary lag… Our hunter-gatherer ancestors had a very different lifestyle…”

Daniel Levitin (1957) American psychologist

This is Your Brain on Music (2006)

“Below the highest sphere four Regents sit
Who rule our world, and under them are zones
Nearer, but high, where saintliest spirits dead
Wait thrice ten thousand years, then live again;
And on Lord Buddha, waiting in that sky,
Came for our sakes the five sure signs of birth
So that the Devas knew the signs, and said
"Buddha will go again to help the World."
"Yea!" spake He, "now I go to help the World.
This last of many times; for birth and death
End hence for me and those who learn my Law.
I will go down among the Sakyas,
Under the southward snows of Himalay,
Where pious people live and a just King."”

Edwin Arnold book The Light of Asia

Book The First.
The Light of Asia (1879)

Death , People , World , Law

“Wars always bring about a conservative reaction. They overwhelm and destroy patient and careful efforts to improve the condition of man. Nothing can be heard in the cannon's roar but the voice of might. All the safeguards laboriously built to preserve individual freedom and foster man's welfare are blown to pieces with shot and shell. In the presence of the wholesale slaughter of men the value of life is cheapened to the zero point. What is one life compared with the almost daily records of tens of thousands or more mowed down like so many blades of grass in a field? Building up a conception of the importance of life is a matter of slow growth and education; and the work of generations is shattered and laid waste by machine guns and gases on a larger scale than ever before. Great wars have been followed by an unusually large number of killings between private citizens and individuals. These killers have become accustomed to thinking in terms of slaying and death toward all opposition, and these have been followed in turn by the most outrageous legal penalties and a large increase in the number of executions by the state. It is perfectly clear that hate begets hate, force is met with force, and cruelty can become so common that its contemplation brings pleasure, when it should produce pain.”

Clarence Darrow (1857–1938) American lawyer and leading member of the American Civil Liberties Union

Source: The Story of My Life (1932), Ch. 26 "The Aftermath Of The War"

Life , Death , Men , Pain

“The President recalled the very warm ties that exist between the two countries build on civilisational links of thousands of years. We felt that there are enormous opportunities of cooperation between the two countries in the field of information and digital technologies”

Sushma Swaraj (1952–2019) Indian politician

Between India and Sri Lanka, quoted on Leader Call (February 11, 2016), "Sushma Swaraj calls on Sri Lankan PM Ranil Wickremesinghe" http://leadercall.com/2016/02/sushma-swaraj-calls-on-sri-lankan-pm-ranil-wickremesinghe/

Country

“Next year he [Muhammad of Ghor] defeated Jayachandra of Kanauj. A general massacre, rapine, and pillage followed. The Gahadvad treasuries at Asni and Varanasi were plundered. Hasan Nizami rejoices that in Benares which is the centre of the country of Hind, they destroyed one thousand temples and raised mosques on their foundations. According to Kamil-ut-Tawarikh of Ibn Asir, 'The slaughter of Hindus (at Varanasi) was immense; none were spared except women and children, and the carnage of men went on until the earth was weary.' The women and children were spared so that they could be enslaved and sold all over the Islamic world. It may be added that the Buddhist complex at Sarnath was sacked at this time, and the Bhikshus were slaughtered.”

Muhammad of Ghor (1160–1206) Ghurid Sultan

Sita Ram Goel, The Story of Islamic Imperialism in India

Women , Men , Children , World

“I would never have surrendered, because of my pledge as a German officer. But when Hitler died, that pledge ended. By killing himself, Hitler saved thousands of lives. They relieved us of our oaths as soldiers.”

Otto Skorzeny (1908–1975) Austrian SS-Standartenführer (colonel) in the German Waffen-SS

To Jack Bell of the Chicago Daily News, as quoted in Scoop : An Historical Adventure (2006) by James H. Walters, p. 34.

“With… small-town life… there are hundreds of thousands… who are not content. The more intelligent young people… flee to the cities… and… stay there, seldom returning even for holidays. The reason, Carol insisted… is an unimaginatively standardized background, a sluggishness of speech and manners, a rigid ruling of the spirit by the desire to appear respectable. It is contentment… the contentment of the quiet dead, who are scornful of the living for their restless walking. It is the prohibition of happiness. It is the slavery self-sought and self-defended. It is dullness made God. A savorless people, gulping tasteless food and sitting afterward, coatless and thoughtless, in rocking-chairs prickly with inane decorations, listening to mechanical music, saying mechanical things about the excellence of Ford automobiles, and viewing themselves as the greatest race in the world.”

Sinclair Lewis book Main Street

Main Street (1920)

Life , God , People , World

“The church has stood, a rock colossus of bigotry, in the path of ten thousand proposed reforms. Sane efforts to legalize birth control information, the manufacture of proper birth control appliances, appliances for the inhibition of the spread of venereal disease, public instruction in sex hygiene, free clinics for the treatment of venereal disease, the inspection and treatment of prostitutes, controlled prostitution itself, the publication of psychological and physical sex information, aid for unwed mothers—myriad attempts by sane men acting sanely on real problems — have been fought down by church-frightened legislatures and church-dominated courts.”

Philip Wylie (1902–1971) American writer

Source: Generation of Vipers (1942), p. 74

Men , Disease , Sex , Birth

“Today, citizens from all across the country came to Washington to honor the precious gift of life, The March for Life movement has for nearly four decades given a voice to those who have no voice. It is a privilege to stand together with thousands of Americans in solidarity and faithful commitment to our solemn duty to protect and defend the lives of the most innocent among us. The Republican majority in Congress has pledged to protect the sanctity of life by ensuring no tax dollars are used for abortion, a policy supported by the vast majority of America. Appreciation goes to those whose tireless efforts continue to shine a light on the need to protect the sanctity and value of human life. May we never forget that our cause is just and timeless because there is nothing more fundamental to our humanity than to defend life.”

Tom Price (U.S. politician) (1954) former United States Secretary of Health and Human Services; former Congressman of Georgia

Price Statement on March for Life https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/trumps-new-hhs-secretary-there-is-nothing-more-fundamental-to-our-humanity (January 24, 2011)

Life , Faith , Support , Effort

“Nevermore
Let the great interests of the State depend
Upon the thousand chances that may sway
A piece of human frailty; swear to me
That ye will seek hereafter in yourselves
The means of sovereignty.”

Thomas Noon Talfourd (1795–1854) British politician

Act v.
Ion (1835)

Chance , Dependency

“Rocks are like wreck magnets and ships run aground today in pretty much the same locations and for the same reasons they did thousands of years ago.”

E. Lee Spence (1947) German anthropologist, photographer, archaeologist, historian, photojournalist and academic

Concordia Not the First Sunk by Treacherous Reef http://news.discovery.com/history/concordia-reef-120207.html, Discovery News, by Rossella Lorenzi, Tue Feb 7, 2012 03:43 PM ET.

“Education in Chile has been modeled as a "consumer good" and this was accepted with much resignation by a broad layer of society for many years, they believed that education and health were to be treated like any other topic…. For this reason we cannot fail to recognize the intervention that the student movement made on the consciousness of thousands of Chileans who today are dissatisfied with the reality of today's education model, to whom a change of the outdated constitution makes sense, who understand the need to reform the taxation system, who no longer put up with the overexploitation of our natural resources, to benefit foreign capital, i. e. Chile awoke and once again came to believe in the possibility of building a different country. One which is more just, a country where education and health are guaranteed, a country where workers have dignified working conditions, where young people are not exploited nor ill-treated in their work-place, where women are integrated with rights and equal opportunities, a country where the environment is protected, where natural resources are exploited to improve the living condition of its people, a country were culture develops freely, where there is access to literature, a country where children don't suffer discrimination because they don't have any money, a country where a walk down your street doesn't mean constant fear of being assaulted, a country where the most disadvantaged youth don't have to resort to drugs or delinquency to give sense to their lives, a country where grandparents are not made to feel as burdens, a country where the development of knowledge becomes a task of society as a whole, where advances in science are placed at the service of the people. We are once again beginning to dream of this beautiful country …because we are not the same that we were a year ago, hope has resurfaced despite the elaborate effort of those who foster neoliberal ideology and who are trying to eternalize capitalism in a process of permanent auto-reproduction, excluding all possibility of a social revolution.”

Karol Cariola (1987) Chilean politician

Ser un joven comunista, por Karol Cariola, La Jota de Ingenieria, November 2011, 2013-10-03 http://www.jotainjenieria.cl/ser-un-joven-comunista-por-karol-cariola, Ser un joven comunista, por Karol Cariola, Oceansur.com, November 2011, 2013-10-03 http://www.oceansur.com/media/uploads/documents/files/prologo-karol.pdf,
Original: La educación en Chile ha sido modelada como un “bien de consumo”, hecho que fue aceptado por un amplio sector de la sociedad, con mucha resignación durante años, ellos creyeron que la Educación y la Salud debían ser tratados como cualquier otro tema.... Por esto no podemos dejar de reconocer el gran acierto del movimiento estudiantil al intervenir en las conciencias de miles de chilenos que hoy , ya no se conforman con la realidad del actual modelo de educación, que le hace sentido el cambio de esta añeja constitución, que entendieron necesaria una reforma tributaria, que ya no aguantan la sobre explotación de nuestros recursos naturales en beneficio de capitales extranjeros, es decir, Chile despertó y volvió a creer en la posibilidad de construir un país distinto, un país más justo, un país donde la educación y la salud estén garantizadas, un país donde los trabajadores tengan condiciones laborales dignas, donde los jóvenes no sean explotados ni mal tratados en su fuente laboral, donde las mujeres sean integradas con igualdad de derechos y oportunidades, un país donde se proteja el medio ambiente, en que los recursos naturales sean explotados para mejorar las condiciones de su pueblo, un país donde la cultura se desarrolle libremente, un país en el que haya acceso a la literatura, un país donde los niños no sufran la discriminación desde que nacen por no tener dinero, un país donde caminar por las calles no sean un temor constante de ser asaltados, un país donde los jóvenes más desposeídos no tengan que recurrir a las drogas y la delincuencia para dar sentido a sus vidas, un país donde los abuelos no se sientan un estorbo, un país donde el desarrollo del conocimiento sea una tarea de la sociedad en su conjunto, un país donde el avance de la ciencia se ponga al servicio del pueblo, ese hermoso país es el que hoy estamos volviendo a soñar, porque con emoción lo vuelvo a mencionar, Chile está cambiando, hoy no somos los mismos que hace un año atrás, las esperanzas han resurgido a pesar del esmero de aquellos que propician la ideología neoliberal y que pretenden eternizar el capitalismo en un proceso de auto reproducción permanente, excluyendo toda posibilidad de una revolución social.

Women , Money , Children , People

“Thousands of pulpit orators have swayed their audiences as a wind sways standing corn; but in the result, those who were most affected differed nothing from their former selves. An effect of eloquence is sufficient to account for a vast amount of feeling at the moment; but to trace to this a moral power, by which a man, for his life long, overcomes his besetting sins, and adorns his name with Christian virtues, is to make sport of human nature.”

William Arthur (minister) (1819–1901) Wesleyan Methodist minister and author

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 322.

Life , Feeling , Nature , Sport

“At that time the issue was between the groups loyal to Hitler and those who regarded Gregor Strasser as the coming man. The opposing groups were fighting so furiously that they were continually on the verge of blood-shed. Similar violent hostilities were frequent between Nazi magnates. The tension was not as extreme as in 1934 when Hitler resolved to have several thousand party comrades shot.”

Hermann Rauschning (1887–1982) German politician

Source: Men in Chaos (1942), p. 20

Hostility , Time , Fight

“What matters it, that, all around,
Danger, and guilt, and darkness lie,
If but within our bosom's bound
We hold a bright, untroubled sky,
Warm with ten thousand mingled rays
Of suns that know no winter days?”

Emily Brontë (1818–1848) English novelist and poet

To Imagination (1846)

Lie , Winter , Sun

“I'm an agnostic, but I understand that a book like the Bible that has been around as long as it has, because there is wisdom in it. People don't read over two thousand years, four thousand years, a book that doesn't have wisdom. Think of the story of Genesis. Adam and Eve were given paradise. It's better than anything that Nanci Pelosi promises, the garden of Eden, they didn't have to work, there was no pain, they lived forever, plucked fruit from the trees, but, there was one rule, which was: "Do not eat of the tree of Knowledge of good and evil", don't eat from that tree. Well, our foreparents were too ornery to obey that law and so they were expelled from the garden, and God put an angel with a flaming sword in the entrance to Eden. This is a very important parable for understanding where we are. An angel with a flaming sword to prevent human beings from returning to Eden, only by a divine hand, could we return. The whole agenda of the left, is to return us to Eden.”

David Horowitz (1939) Neoconservative activist, writer

Young America's Foundation conference at the Reagan Ranch Center in Santa Barbara - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sW2SFGIIqFI#t=06m45s
2013

Wisdom , God , Pain , People

“The greatest scandal of the century in American psychiatry … is the growing mania among thousands of inept therapists, family counselors, and social workers for arousing false memories of childhoood sexual abuse.”

Martin Gardner (1914–2010) recreational mathematician and philosopher

Notes of a Fringe-Watcher, "The Tragedies of False Memories" Skeptical Inquirer (Fall 1994) http://www.skepticfiles.org/false/mgfmsasc.htm

Family , Memory , Falseness

“It was hard for Wilt to put his faith in many people. Being in his position, many people tried to exploit him. I say little in reference to character, not size. There were always those who enjoyed hanging around to pick up the crumbs that might fall off their 7' cake. No matter where we went to play ball, It seemed that he had a thousand cousins who needed tickets to the game-free tickets, that is. One of Wilt's weaknesses was being too big-hearted. He never turned down any of these requests, and very often he was holding the bag. You'd expect a 7' person to have an extra big heart, but his was even out of proportion to his size.”

Wilt Chamberlain (1936–1999) basketball player

Bob Billings in a college english paper that profiled his friend[citation needed]
Personality

People , Faith , Game , Heart

“Of course what makes breakfast in bed so special is you're lying down and eating bacon, the most beautiful thing on Earth. Bacon's the best, even the frying of bacon sounds like an applause. (sizzling sounds) YEAAAA BACON!!!! You wanna hear how good bacon is? To improve other food they wrap it in bacon. If it wasn't for bacon we wouldn't even know what a water chestnut is. "Thank you bacon. Sincerely, Water Chestnut the third". And those bits of bacon, bits of bacon are like the fairy dust of the food community. "you don't want this baked potato," bbbrrriinnnggg! it's now your favorite part of the meal. "not interested in a salad?" bippady boppidy bacon! Just turned it into an entre. And once you put bacon into a salad it's no longer a salad, it just becomes a game of find the bacon in the lettuce. It's like you're panning for gold, hmmmmm, EUREKA! bacon! not many ways to prepare bacon, you can either fry it or get botulism. It's amazing the shrinkage that occurs. You start with a pound you end up with a book mark. You know the only bad part about bacon is it makes you thirsty… for more bacon! I never feel like I get enough bacon. at breakfast it's like they're rationalizing it. "Here's your two strips of bacon." "But I want more! More bacon!" Whenever you're at a brunch buffet and you see that metal tray filled with the four thousand strips of bacon, don't you almost expect a rainbow to be coming out of it? "I found it I found the source of all bacon!"”

Jim Gaffigan (1966) comedian, actor, author

That bacon tray is always at the end of the buffet, you always regret all the stuff on your plate. "What am I doing with all this worthless fruit? I should have waited! If I had known you were here I would've waited...."
King Baby

Books , Food , Beauty , Way

“If you go back a hundred, two hundred years, you would find that India is energy; it is a force. If you go back a thousand years, two thousand years, you would find that force came from our rivers: Ganga, Yamuna, Saraswati. We worshiped these rivers and the reason we worshiped these rivers was because that is where our energy came from, and everything we had was built on these rivers. Now, we have gone way beyond that. We have built structures that are allowing this energy to rise, to explode.”

Rahul Gandhi (1970) Indian politician

Wall Street Journal Speech by Rahul Gandhi http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/RahulGandhiSpeech.pdf

Way

“Life cannot have had a random beginning … The trouble is that there are about two thousand enzymes, and the chance of obtaining them all in a random trial is only one part in 1040,000, an outrageously small probability that could not be faced even if the whole universe consisted of organic soup.”

Fred Hoyle (1915–2001) British astronomer

Fred Hoyle and N. Chandra Wickramasinghe, Evolution from Space (London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1981)

Life , Universe , Chance , Parting

“I soon had a few thousand people I didn’t know sending me messages like “OMG! Is it really you?” “I love it when old ladies blog,” one early follower remarked. … and they really shone when, during the Olympics, I said that "Own the podium" was too brash to be Canadian, and suggested "A podium might be nice." Their own variations poured onto a feed tagged #cpodium: "A podium! For me?" "Rent the podium, see if we like it." "Mind if I squeeze by you to get onto that podium?"”

Margaret Atwood (1939) Canadian writer

I was so proud of them! It was like having 33,000 precocious grandchildren!
"Atwood in the Twittersphere", The New York Review of Books (29 March 2010)

Love , People

“The truth is that dinosaurs have always lived with man. They were called dragons for most of human history and man killed most of them. In 1841, a new name "dinosaur" was given to them. It is quite possible that a few are still alive. There have been thousands of sightings of creatures, such as the Loch Ness Monster or the dead dinosaur that washed up on the beach in California in 1925.”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Source: Are you being brainwashed?: Propaganda in science textbooks (2007), pp. 22-23

Truth , History , Dead

“Dear friends, on 9 October 2012, the Taliban shot me on the left side of my forehead. They shot my friends, too. They thought that the bullets would silence us, but they failed. And out of that silence came thousands of voices. The terrorists thought they would change my aims and stop my ambitions. But nothing changed in my life except this: weakness, fear and hopelessness died. Strength, power and courage was born. I am the same Malala. My ambitions are the same. My hopes are the same. And my dreams are the same. Dear sisters and brothers, I am not against anyone. Neither am I here to speak in terms of personal revenge against the Taliban or any other terrorist group. I am here to speak for the right of education for every child. I want education for the sons and daughters of the Taliban and all the terrorists and extremists. I do not even hate the Talib who shot me.”

Malala Yousafzai (1997) Pakistani children's education activist

UN speech, June 2013

Life , Hate , Education , Fear

“My grandmother was ill in bed when the Nazis came to her home town of Staszów. A German soldier shot her dead in her bed. Madam Deputy Speaker, my grandmother did not die to provide cover for Israeli soldiers murdering Palestinian grandmothers in Gaza. The present Israeli government ruthlessly and cynically exploit the continuing guilt among Gentiles over the slaughter of Jews in the Holocaust as justification for their murder of Palestinians. The implication is that Jewish lives are precious, but the lives of Palestinians do not count. On Sky News a few days ago, the spokeswoman for the Israeli Army Major Livovich was asked about the Israeli killing of, at that time, eight hundred Palestinians. The total is now a thousand. She replied instantly, "Five hundred of them were militants."”

Gerald Kaufman (1930–2017) British politician

That was the reply of a Nazi. I suppose the Jews fighting for their lives in the Warsaw Ghetto could have been dismissed as militants.
Speech to the House of Commons, Jan 2009

Home , Time , Fight , Dead

“The Badlands were extensive. Ancient bomb craters and soil erosion joined hands here; man’s talent for war, coupled with his inability to manage forested land, had produced thousands of square miles of temperate purgatory, where nothing moved but dust.”

Brian W. Aldiss (1925–2017) British science fiction author

“Who Can Replace a Man?” p. 19 (originally published in Infinity Science Fiction, June 1958)
Short fiction, Who Can Replace a Man? (1965)

War

“Far too often, Christians have accepted the common secular view that we are the masters of animals, their rulers or owners — utterly forgetting that the dominion promised to humanity is a deputized dominion, in which we are to stand before creation as God's vice-regents, putting into effect not our own egotistical wants but God's own law of love and mercy. And yet, when one begins to challenge our despotic treatment of animals — whether killing for sport, the ruthless export trade, or (to take the latest example) the quite obscene slaughter of thousands of seals for their penises, to be sold as aphrodisiacs in Europe and Asia — again and again, one has to face this humanistic dogma: If it benefits humanity, it must be right.”

Andrew Linzey (1952) British theologian and divine

Source: Animal Gospel: Christian Faith as if Animals Mattered (1998), p. 12

Love , God , Law , Sport

“People often think that Europeans are homogeneous group that arrived in a simple way there maybe 40 or 50 thousand years ago maybe based on the archaeology and just kind of sat there until they became the Europeans they are today, but that's probably not true: the Europeans today are a replacement population who came in much more recently and replaced the people who were there originally 40 thousand years ago.”

David Reich (geneticist) (1974) American geneticist, Professor of Genetics

History Aids Understanding Diseases Today http://www.livescience.com/21740-history-aids-understanding-diseases-today.html, National Science Foundation, 20 July 2012

People , Way , Thinking

“On-line service providers and others have a key role to play in freeing cyberspace of the taint of copyright lawlessness. Accountability for copyright violations committed by users is as essential for advancing this indispensable goal.
Who is responsible if a valuable copyrighted work is downloaded from a provider, and then copied on a digital video machine from which thousands of copies can be made, the last copy as pure and pristine as the first? And if no one can be held responsible, then who and what is to prevent the flood that will surely follow? This is a loophole larger than a parade of eight-wheelers through which a dam-busting avalanche of violations can rupture the purpose of your bill every day.”

Jack Valenti (1921–2007) President of the MPAA

Testimony to the U.S. House of Representatives on copyright immunities for ISPs. (7 February 1996) http://www.judiciary.house.gov/legacy/461.htm

“If, in spite of the fact that all these attributes have been faithfully handed down unaltered for hundreds of generations, we are to believe that, in the course of time, they have all diverged from one common stock, how shall we resist the arguments of the transmutationist, who contends that all closely allied species of animals and plants have in like manner sprung from a common parentage, albeit that for the last three or four thousand years they may have been persistent in character?”

Charles Lyell (1797–1875) British lawyer and geologist

Source: The Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man (1863), Ch.20, p. 387-388

Time , Animals

“There were other fellow-sufferers, lower-case ones: the thousands who were either killed, maimed or bereaved by the devotees of the Irish Republic in Mr Sands's organization, the Provisional IRA. Those other dead, however, being the wrong kind, are implicitly excluded from what is seen as a celestial tête-à-tête.”

Conor Cruise O'Brien (1917–2008) Irish politician

Passion & Cunning; Essays on Nationalism, Terrorism and Revolution

Suffering , Dead

“It so coincided that Marcos had money. After the Bretton Woods agreement he started buying gold from Fort Knox. Three thousand tons, then 4,000 tons. I have documents for these: 7,000 tons. Marcos was so smart. He had it all. It's funny; America didn't understand him.”

Imelda Marcos (1929) Former First Lady of the Philippines

Quoted in " Queen of the Quirky, Imelda Marcos Holds Court http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C07EED81E39F937A35750C0A960958260" at the New York Times (4 March 1996).

Money , Understanding

“"Lust is the offspring of a thousand sighs,
"Intrigue, deception, and as many lies;
"A strange compound of hidden, plotting ill,
"To fire with rage, to torture, or to kill"
-Lust”

John Lyon (poet) (1803–1889) Scottish Latter Day Saint poet and hymn writer

The Harp of Zion (1853)

Rage

“The harvest of your Summer [1910] is displayed on our walls. I like some of them terrifically. The 'certainty' with which most of it is done makes me feel ashamed of myself. The thousand steps that I need to take for a picture are of no advantage, as I sometimes foolishly used to think. Things must change.”

Franz Marc (1880–1916) German painter

In a letter to August Macke, Nov. 1910; as quoted by de:Wolf-Dieter Dube, in Expressionism; Praeger Publishers, New York, 1973, p. 128
Franz Marc is reacting on Macke who focused in his exhibited works strongly on the independent power of color
1905 - 1910

Feeling , Thinking , Change , Summer

“A bystander… remarked, '… One day of life is weightier than ten thousand pieces of gold…. It is not because they do not fear death, but because they forget the nearness of death that men do not rejoice in life. One may say that he has grasped the true principle who is unconcerned with the manifestation of life or death.' When he said this people scoffed at him more than ever.”

Yoshida Kenkō (1283–1350) japanese writer

Source: Tsurezure-Gusa (Essays in Idleness), p. 93

Life , Death , Men , People

“There is a growing mountain of research. But there is increased evidence that we are being bogged down today as specialization extends. The investigator is staggered by the findings and conclusions of thousands of other workers — conclusions which he cannot find time to grasp, much less to remember, as they appear. Yet specialization becomes increasingly necessary for progress, and the effort to bridge between disciplines is correspondingly superficial.”

Vannevar Bush book As We May Think

As We May Think (1945)

Mountain , Effort , Appearance , Time

“The Lord took pity on me thousands upon thousands of times, because he saw within me that I was prepared, but that I was ignorant of what to do in view of my situation; because many were trying to prevent this mission. They were talking among themselves behind my back, and saying: 'Why is this fellow throwing himself into danger among enemies who know not God?' Not from malice, but having no liking for it; likewise, as I myself can testify, they perceived my rusticity. And I was not quick to recognize the grace that was then in me; I now know that I should have done so earlier.”

Saint Patrick (385–461) 5th-century Romano-British Christian missionary and bishop in Ireland

The Confession (c. 452?)

God , Time

“My little sister, she got me on Facebook because I was on MySpace: "No, no, no. You don't want to be on MySpace, you want to be on Facebook!" So I joined both. But I keep muddling them up, so I keep asking people to come on MyFace. Still, eighty thousand friends!”

Shappi Khorsandi (1973) Iranian born comedian

Live at the Apollo (Series 4 Episode 2, December 2008)

People , Sister

“Death is not necessarily an old and withered book with dry pages. It can be a thousand leaves of strong and shining text on a powerful body, held erect on the vertebrae of a strong spine. The heart hardly breathes because quietus has been reached, the torso is like a rock, the legs are rooted, the ink is dependable. If the words of death should be considered faded and sere -- where could be the dignity in dying?”

Peter Greenaway (1942) British film director

From the thirteenth book, "The Book of the Dead"
The Pillow Book

Death , Books , Strong , Heart

“The past speaks to us in a thousand voices, warning and comforting, animating and stirring to action. What its great thinkers have thought and written on the deepest problems of life, shall we not hear and enjoy? The future calls upon us to prepare its way. Dare we fail to answer its solemn summons?”

Felix Adler (1851–1933) German American professor of political and social ethics, rationalist, and lecturer

Founding Address (1876)

Life , Way , Problem , Past

“Among the many symbols used to frighten and manipulate the populace of the democratic states, few have been more important than “terror” and “terrorism.” These terms have generally been confined to the use of violence by individuals and marginal groups. Official violence, which is far more extensive both in scale and destructiveness, is placed in a different category altogether. The usage has nothing to do with justice, causal sequence, or numbers abused. Whatever the actual sequence of cause and effect, official violence is described as responsive or provoked (“retaliation,” “protective reaction,” etc.), not the active and initiating source of abuse. Similarly, the massive long-term violence inherent in the oppressive social structures that U. S. power has supported is typically disregarded. The numbers tormented and killed by official violence – wholesale as opposed to retail terror – during recent decades have exceeded those of unofficial terrorists by a factor running into the thousands. But this is not “terror,” although one terminological exception may be noted: while Argentinian “security forces” only retaliate and engage in “police action,” violence carried out by unfriendly states (Cuba, Cambodia) may be designated “terroristic.””

Edward S. Herman (1925–2017) American journalist

The status of proper usage is settled not merely by the official or unofficial status of the perpetrators but also by their political affiliations.
Source: The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism, with Noam Chomsky, 1979, p. 6.

Justice , Support

“The shock therapy of decisive war against Iraq will elevate the stock market by a couple-thousand points. We will know that our businesses will stay open, that our families will be safe, and that our future will be unlimited. The world will be righted in this life-and-death struggle to preserve our values and our civilization. But to do all this, we must act.”

Lawrence Kudlow (1947) American economist

National Review Online http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ZTIzOWYzYjk4NWM1Y2U5M2U1NmI3ZWFjODdkOTI3MTg= June 26, 2002.

Life , Death , War , World

“Let your love flow out on all living things. These words at some level have the quality of a strapping homily. Nonetheless, they are remarkably beautiful, strung together in their honest lump-like English syllables… Let your love flow out on all living things.
But there are a couple of problems with this precept of mine. The first is, of course, that it is not mine. It springs from the universe and is the property of God, and the words have been intercepted — on the wing, so to speak — by such mediators as Lao-tzu, Jesus, Gautama Buddha and thousands upon thousands of lesser prophets, including your narrator, who heard the terrible truth of their drumming somewhere between Baltimore and Wilmington and set them down with the fury of a madman sculpting in stone.”

William Styron book Sophie's Choice

Source: Sophie's Choice (1979), Ch. 16; the italicized words being quotes of the song "Let Your Love Flow" by Larry E. Williams, as sung by The Bellamy Brothers

Love , God , Truth , Beauty

“Once, my back wedded to the solid cliff,
I sat silently, bathed in the full moon's light. I counted there ten thousand shapes,
None with substance save the moon's own glow. The pristine mind is empty as the moon,
I thought, and like the moon, freely shines. By what I knew of moon I knew the mind,
Each mirror to each, profound as stone.”

Han-shan Chinese monk and poet

Encounters With Cold Mountain, tr. Peter Stambler (Foreign Languages Press, Beijing, 1996)

Wedding , Light

“p>Come live with me and be my Love,
And we will all the pleasures prove
That hills and valleys, dales and fields,
Or woods or steepy mountain yields.And we will sit upon the rocks,
And see the shepherds feed their flocks
By shallow rivers, to whose falls
Melodious birds sing madrigals.And I will make thee beds of roses
And a thousand fragrant posies.”

Christopher Marlowe The Passionate Shepherd to His Love

The Passionate Shepherd to His Love (unknown date), stanzas 1 and 2. Compare: "To shallow rivers, to whose falls / Melodious birds sings madrigals; / There will we make our peds of roses, / And a thousand fragrant posies", William Shakespeare, Merry Wives of Windsor, act iii. scene i. (Sung by Evans.)

Love , Pleasure , Mountain , Bird

“I love to smoke. I smoke seven thousand packs a day!”

Denis Leary (1957) American actor and comedian

Standup routines, No Cure for Cancer (1993)

Love

“There being several strong fortifications in and about King's Bridge, if the enemy should throw in a thousand or fifteen hundred men,, they could cut off our communication effectually; and, as the state of the barracks is, they would find exceeding good cover for the men. But if we were to take the barracks down, if the boards were not removed, it would, in a great measure, deprive them of that advantage. However, I have not had it in my power to do either as yet.”

Nathanael Greene (1742–1786) American general in the American Revolutionary War

Letter to George Washington (24 October 1776)

Men , Communication , Strong

“No sociologist, for instance, should think himself too good, even in his old age, to make tens of thousands of quite trivial computations in his head and perhaps for months at a time”

Max Weber (1864–1920) German sociologist, philosopher, and political economist

Source: From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (1946), p. 135 (in 2009 edition)

Age , Thinking , Time

“Everything was dying, yet death did not suffice. Life had hidden resources. In a thousand ways it was concentrating strength, hoarding its energies in seed, chrysalis, and nectar, preparing for the warrior sweep out of exile that would undo the defeat of winter. Spring was implicit.”

Michael Swanwick book Jack Faust

Source: Jack Faust (1997), Chapter 19, “Ashes” (p. 330)

Life , Death , Way , Spring

“If, when Christ was on his way to Calvary, some brave soul had rescued him from the pious mob, he would not only have been damned for his pains, but would have rendered impossible the salvation of any human being. The Christian world has been trying for nearly two thousand years to explain the atonement, and every effort has ended in an admission that it cannot be understood, and a declaration that it must be believed. Has the promise and hope of forgiveness ever prevented the commission of a sin? Can men be made better by being taught that sin gives happiness here; that to live a virtuous life is to bear a cross; that men can repent between the last sin and the last breath; and that repentance washes every stain of the soul away?”

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

Some Reasons Why (1881)

Life , Men , Pain , World

“I know only that in my belief in Adolf Hitler I put all my strength at the disposal of my people. As a German soldier I could only put myself at the service of the defense against those destructive forces which had once brought Germany close to the abyss, and which today, after the collapse of the Reich, are still threatening the world. If I have made mistakes in my work through a false conception of obedience, if I carried out orders, all of which, insofar as they are alleged to be cardinal orders, were issued before my time of office, then they are part of a fate which is stronger than myself and which is carrying me along with it. I am accused here because substitutes are needed for the missing Himmler and other elements which were completely contrary to me. Whether my point of view and explanation are accepted or rejected, I ask you not to connect the fate and honor of hundreds of thousands of the living and dead of the General SS, of the Waffen-SS, and of the civil servants who, believing in their ideal, bravely defended, their Reich to the last, with your just curse against Himmler. Like myself, they believed that they were acting according to law.”

Ernst Kaltenbrunner (1903–1946) Austrian-born senior official of Nazi Germany executed for war crimes

8/31/46. Quoted in "Trial of the Major War Criminals Before the International Military Tribunal" - Page 381 - Nuremberg, Germany - 1947

Fate , People , World , Law

“I did not want to destroy the Bamiyan Buddha. In fact, some foreigners came to me and said they would like to conduct the repair work of the Bamiyan Buddha that had been slightly damaged due to rains. This shocked me. I thought, these callous people have no regard for thousands of living human beings -- the Afghans who are dying of hunger, but they are so concerned about non-living objects like the Buddha. This was extremely deplorable. That is why I ordered its destruction. Had they come for humanitarian work, I would have never ordered the Buddha's destruction.”

Mohammed Omar (1959–2013) Founder and former leader of the Taliban

http://www.rediff.com/news/2004/apr/12inter.htm.
Buddhas of Bamyan

Hunger , People

“A good pony can occur on a farm once in a generation, with luck; but on some farms, never in a thousand years. From the sea, beyond the sands and marshes, for a thousand years, the murmur was always the same.”

Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) Icelandic author

Paradísarheimt (Paradise Reclaimed) (1960)

Sea

“If I had a thousand pounds, China should have it. If I had a thousand lives, China should have them. No! not China, but Christ. Can we do too much for Him?”

James Hudson Taylor (1832–1905) Missionary in China

A.J. Broomhall. Hudson Taylor and China’s Open Century, Book Two: Over the Treaty Wall. London: Hodder and Stoughton and Overseas Missionary Fellowship, 1982, 6).

Christ

“The artist's studio will be like a glass-bell or a hollow crystal. The painter himself must be white, which is to say, without tragedy or sorrow. The pallet must be of glass; the brush must be square and hard, dust-free and as immaculate as a surgical instrument. Doubtless there is much to learn from a medical laboratory... The studio of the modern painter must reflect the ambiance of mountains which are nine thousand feet high and topped with a eternal cap of snow. There the cold kills the microbes.”

Theo van Doesburg (1883–1931) Dutch architect, painter, draughtsman and writer

Quote in Van Doesburg's article 'Elementarism', as cited in De Stijl – Van Doesburg Issue, January 1932, pp. 17–19
1926 – 1931

Mountain , Learning

“Plots- it seems there are thousands of them, all one's acquaintances known some, strangers make a present of them in letters, each the basis for a play or a novel…”

Max Frisch (1911–1991) Swiss playwright and novelist

Sketchbook 1946-1949

“Lovers can find nothing to say to each other that has not been said and unsaid a thousand times over. Kisses were invented to translate such nothings into wounds”

Lawrence Durrell The Alexandria Quartet

Source: The Alexandria Quartet (1957–1960), Mountolive (1958), I

Lovers , Kiss , Time

“What I lack are the skills of painting, the profession which I don't know, and now I see that the French [artists] possess this so extremely strong. I do believe that you can learn it all here. I am in Paris now. When someone is richer than me and he wants me to stay here for a year or half a year (for a few thousand francs) my future will have a lot of more certainty than when I must go back to Holland after eight days... I hope you will be able to fulfill my wish; I also put enough trust in you that you will do this, if you can. Waiting for your letter with a lot of anxiety, I remain”

George Hendrik Breitner (1857–1923) Dutch painter and photographer

G.H. Breitner (translation from the original Dutch, Fons Heijnsbroek)
version in original Dutch (citaat van Breitner's brief, in het Nederlands:) Wat mij mankeert is de manier van schilderen, 't métier dat ik niet ken, en wat ik nu zie dat de Franschen zoo buitengewoon sterk bezitten. en wat ik wel geloof dat men hier leeren kan. Ik ben nu in Parijs. Wanneer iemand rijker is dan ik mij hier een jaar of een half jaar (voor een paar duizend francs) wil laten blijven, is mijn toekomst vrij wat zekerder, dan dat ik na acht daag weer naar Holland moet terugkeeren.. .Ik hoop dat U in staat zult zijn mijn wensch te verwezentlijken; ik stel ook genoeg vertrouwen in U dat ge dat doen zult als ge kunt. Met de meeste angst Uw brief te wachten, blijf ik' - tt G.H. Breitner.
In Breitner's letter to A.P. van Stolk from Paris, 5 Juin, 1884; as cited in Breitner en Parijs – master-thesis 9928758 https://dspace.library.uu.nl/handle/1874/8382, by Jacobine Wieringa, Faculty of Humanities Theses, Utrecht, p. 16
before 1890

Hope , Strong , Learning , Waiting

“To tell the indigenous inhabitants of Brixton or Southall or Leicester or Bradford or Birmingham or Wolverhampton, to tell the pensioners ending their days in streets of nightly terror unrecognisable as their former neighbourhoods, to tell the people of towns and cities where whole districts have been transformed into enclaves of foreign lands, that "the man with a coloured face could be an enrichment to my life and that of my neighbours" is to drive them beyond the limits of endurance. It is not so much that it is obvious twaddle. It is that it makes cruel mockery of the experience and fears of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of ordinary, decent men and women…In understanding this matter, the beginning of wisdom is to grasp the law that in human societies power is never left unclaimed and unused. It does not blow about, like wastepaper on the streets, ownerless and inert. Men's nature is not only, as Thucydides long ago asserted, to exert power where they have it: men cannot help themselves from exerting power where they have it, whether they want to or not…It is the business of the leaders of distinct and separate populations to see that the power which they possess is used to benefit those for whom they speak. Leaders who fail to do so, or to do so fast enough, find themselves outflanked and superseded by those who are less squeamish. The Gresham's Law of extremism, that the more extreme drives out the less extreme, is one of the basic rules of political mechanics which operate in this field: it is a corollary of the general principle that no political power exist without being used. Both the general law and its Gresham's corollary point, in contemporary circumstances, towards the resort to physical violence, in the form of firearms or high explosive, as being so probable as to be predicted with virtual certainty. The experience of the last decade and more, all round the world, shows that acts of violence, however apparently irrational or inappropriate their targets, precipitate a frenzied search on the part of the society attacked to discover and remedy more and more grievances, real or imaginary, among those from whom the violence is supposed to emanate or on whose behalf it is supposed to be exercised. Those commanding a position of political leverage would then be superhuman if they could refrain from pointing to the acts of terrorism and, while condemning them, declaring that further and faster concessions and grants of privilege are the only means to avoid such acts being repeated on a rising scale. This is what produces the gearing effect of terrorism in the contemporary world, yielding huge results from acts of violence perpetrated by minimal numbers. It is not, I repeat again and again, that the mass of a particular population are violently or criminally disposed. Far from it; that population soon becomes itself the prisoner of the violence and machinations of an infinitely small minority among it. Just a few thugs, a few shots, a few bombs at the right place and time – and that is enough for disproportionate consequences to follow.”

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

Speech to the Stretford Young Conservatives (21 January 1977), from A Nation or No Nation? Six Years in British Politics (Elliot Right Way Books, 1977), pp. 168-171
1970s

Life , Wisdom , Women , Men

“We live in stormy and unsettled times. Hence we may confer a benefit, not only on ourselves, but on others, by diverting attention from the exciting circumstances of the present day—from the disheartening eccentricities of a literature which meanders in a thousand frivolous directions—to the calm regions where the inner man, self-examined, submits himself to moral treatment. Here our connection with things, our object, our duty, become clear; and, while we quietly separate ourselves from a world which is unable to assure us of anything, we feel that the joy we thought lost again returns, and that a second innocence spreads its clear and tranquillizing light over human existence. The child may amuse himself with childish rhymes. Man should find his recreation in reflecting on his relation to the things of this life. To all has this power been vouchsafed; by all should it be exercised.”

Ernst, Baron von Feuchtersleben (1806–1849) Austrian psychiatrist, poet and philosopher

The Dietetics of the Soul; Or, True Mental Discipline (1838)

Life , World , Feeling , Exercises

“Thud. My eyes are open. It is four-thirty in the morning, one morning, and my dry eyes click in their sockets, awake before the birds. There is no light. The eye strains for logic, some play of form. I have been dreaming of wind. The tree outside my window stands silent. I listen to the breathing of the man lying beside me. I know where I am. I am awake. I am alive. Am I tethered to earth only by this fragile breath? A strawful of breath at best. Yet this is the breath that patients beg, their hands gripping the edges of mattresses; this is the breath that wrestles trees, that brings down all the leaves in the Third Act. We know where the car is parked. We know, word-for-word, the texts of plays. We have spoken, in proximity to one another, over years, sentences, hundreds of thousands of sentences—bright, grave, fallible, comic, perishable—perhaps eternal? I don’t know. Where does the wind go? When will the light come? We will have hotcakes for breakfast. How can I protect this...? My church teaches me I cannot. And I believe it. I turn the pillow to its cool side. Then rage fills me, against the cubist necessity of having to arrange myself comically against orthodoxy, against having to wonder if I will offend, against theology that devises that my feeling for him, more than for myself, is a vanity. My brown paradox: The church that taught me to understand love, the church that taught me well to believe love breathes—also tells me it is not love I feel, at four in the morning, in the dark, even before the birds cry. Of every hue and caste am I.”

Richard Rodríguez (1944) American journalist and essayist

Brown : The Last Discovery of America (2003)

Love , Dreams , Cars , Feeling

“A sort of gulpy, gurgly, plobby, squishy, wofflesome sound, like a thousand eager men drinking soup in a foreign restaurant.”

P.G. Wodehouse (1881–1975) English author

Blandings Castle (1935)

Men , Drink

“In what people irritatingly call "iconic" terms, Bin Laden certainly had no rival. The strange, scrofulous quasi-nobility and bogus spirituality of his appearance was appallingly telegenic, and it will be highly interesting to see whether this charisma survives the alternative definition of revolution that has lately transfigured the Muslim world. The most tenaciously lasting impression of all, however, is that of his sheer irrationality. What had the man thought he was doing? Ten years ago, did he expect, let alone desire, to be in a walled compound in dear little Abbottabad?…Ten years ago, I remind you, he had a gigantic influence in one rogue and failed state—Afghanistan—and was exerting an increasing force over its Pakistani neighbor. Taliban and al-Qaida sympathizers were in senior positions in the Pakistani army and nuclear program and had not yet been detected as such. Huge financial subventions flowed his way, often through official channels, from Saudi Arabia and other gulf states…. Then, not only did he run away from Afghanistan, leaving his deluded followers to be killed in very large numbers, but he chose to remain a furtive and shady figure, on whom the odds of a successful covert "hit," or bought-and-paid-for betrayal, were bound to lengthen every day…It seems thinkable that he truly believed his own mad propaganda, often adumbrated on tapes and videos, especially after the American scuttle from Somalia. The West, he maintained, was rotten with corruption and run by cabals of Jews and homosexuals. It had no will to resist. It had become feminized and cowardly. One devastating psychological blow and the rest of the edifice would gradually follow the Twin Towers in a shower of dust. Well, he and his fellow psychopaths did succeed in killing thousands in North America and Western Europe, but in the past few years, their main military triumphs have been against such targets as Afghan schoolgirls, Shiite Muslim civilians, and defenseless synagogues in Tunisia and Turkey. Has there ever been a more contemptible leader from behind, or a commander who authorized more blanket death sentences on bystanders?”

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

2011-05-02
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fighting_words/2011/05/death_of_a_madman.html
Death of a Madman
Slate
1091-2339
2010s, 2011

Death , People , World , Way

“Titian, Tintoretto, and Paul Veronese absolutely enchanted me, for they took away all sense of subject. … It was the poetry of color which I felt, procreative in its nature, giving birth to a thousand things which the eye cannot see, and distinct from their cause.”

Washington Allston (1779–1843) American artist

Washington Allston, as quoted in The Quotable Artist (2002) by Peggy Hadden, p. 20

Color , Birth , Nature , Sense

“I like the evening in India, the one magic moment when the sun balances on the rim of the world, and the hush descends, and ten thousand civil servants drift homeward on a river of bicycles, brooding on the Lord Krishna and the cost of living.”

James Cameron (journalist) (1911–1985) British journalist

The News Chronicle, February 22, 1957.

World , Sun

“For example, the great linguist Panini gave the concept for meta-language-and constructed one-thousands of years before computer scientists began exploring the same idea. No one has been able to match him to this day.”

Pāṇini ancient Sanskrit grammarian

Sir Monier Monier-Williams in: Organiser, Volume 52 https://books.google.co.in/books?id=d-Q-AQAAIAAJ, Bharat Prakashan., 2001

Idea

“They say use it, channel it. Do it, like there will be a sign, be an artist, you're so creative, do anything, you've got to do it, use it. Then, things like, and you've got to collect yourself, too. I mean, you know, make your hair more about yourself, self-respect. But I mean, ridiculous. You know why my doctor got so mad this time? He said, that scene, remember in the LSD bit, the only time I had it in that, sleeping with what's-his-name and having that sex bit go on while, it was very strange-mannered, but I certainly wasn't mortified. I mean, I humanly might be a little mortified knowing that a thousand other human beings would think it mortifying, but basically, me. So he thought that was a total lack of self-respect, which is wrong. Totally wrong.”

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

Edie : Girl On Fire (2006)

Sex , Thinking , Sleep , Time

“Owing to the strength of this [the Navajo] tribe which numbered then not less than sixty or seventy thousand (60 or 70,000) souls embracing as it did some of those Indians who now call themselves 'Apaches' but who still speak the same language, and who are so alike, and to the fact that they inhabit a country equal to one-third of the whole Territory; that this section was a 'Terra Incognita' and that there is no portion of the American Continent so well adapted by nature for the peculiar style of warfare adopted by the Indians, it is not at all surprising that the many powerful campaigns made against them by the Spanish Government were entirely barren of results as to their subjugation.”

Kit Carson (1809–1868) American frontiersman and Union Army general

Letter to General James Henry Carleton (May 17, 1864) as quoted by Ralph Emerson Twitchell, The Leading Facts of New Mexican History Vol. 3 https://books.google.com/books?id=GUUOAAAAIAAJ (1917)

Soul , Nature , Country

“There is a place,
List, daughter! in a black and hollow vault,
Where day is never seen; there shines no sun,
But flaming horror of consuming fires;
A lightless sulphur, choked with smoky fogs
Of an infected darkness; in this place
Dwell many thousand thousand sundry sorts
Of never-dying deaths.”

John Ford (dramatist) (1586–1639) dramatist

Act III, sc. v.
Tis Pity She's a Whore (1629-33?)

Death , Sun , Daughters

“The start of work means the end to freedom, but also to doubt, intensity and wayward desires. The accountant’s ten thousand possibilities have been reduced to an agreeable handful. She has a business card which she hands over in meetings and which tells other people—and, more meaningfully perhaps, reminds her—that she is a Business Unit Senior manager, rather than a vaporous transient consciousness in an incidental universe. How satisfying it is to be held in check by the assumptions of colleagues, instead of being forced to contemplate, in the loneliness of the early hours, all that one might have been and now never will be. … Life is no longer mysterious, sad, haunting, touching, confusing or melancholy; it is a practical stage for clear-eyed action.”

Alain de Botton (1969) Swiss writer

Source: The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work (2009), p. 238.

Life , People , Sadness , Business

“But contrast the attitude of the Socialist Government towards their Bolshevist friends and their attitude to the great self-governing Dominions of the Crown. To the enemies of Britain, of civilization, of freedom, to those who deserted us in the crises of the war—smiles, compliments, caresses, cash. But for Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, who sent their brave men to fight and die by scores of thousands, who never flinched and never wearied, who are bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh—to them nothing but frigid repulsion. Our bread for the Bolshevist serpent; our aid for the foreigner of every country; our favours for the Socialists all over the world who have no country; but for our own daughter States across the oceans, on whom the future of the British island and nation depends, only the cold stones of indifference, aversion, and neglect. (Cheers.) That is the policy with which the Socialist Government confronts us, and against that policy we will strive to marshal the unconquerable might of Britain.”

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

Speech in Edinburgh (25 September 1924), quoted in The Times (26 September 1924), p. 14
Early career years (1898–1929)

Men , War , World , Smile

“There are souls that are incurable and lost to the rest of society. Deprive them of one means of folly, they will invent ten thousand others. They will create subtler, wilder methods, methods that are absolutely desperate. Nature herself is fundamentally antisocial, it is only by a usurpation of powers that the organized body of society opposes the natural inclination of humanity.”

Antonin Artaud (1896–1948) French-Occitanian poet, playwright, actor and theatre director

General Security: The Liquidation of Opium (1925)

Soul , Nature

“They were allowed a little touch at each of the books, but only with their fingertips tonight, literature cannot bear dirty hands; first we'll have to back each volume with paper, the covers must not get dirty, nor the spines slit, books are the nation's most precious possession, books have preserved the nation's life through monopoly, pestilence, and volcanic eruption, not to mention the tons of snow that have lain over the country's widely scattered homesteads for the major part of every one of its thousand years.”

Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) Icelandic author

Sjálfstætt fólk (Independent People) (1935), Book Two, Part I: Hard Times

Life , Books , Literature , Parting

“We heard moving accounts from two working miners about just what they have to face as they try to make their way to work. The sheer bravery of those men and thousands like them who kept the mining industry alive is beyond praise. “Scabs” their former workmates call them. Scabs? They are lions!”

Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013) British stateswoman and politician

Speech to Conservative Party Conference (12 October 1984) http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/105763
Second term as Prime Minister

Men , Way

“Even after my old man returned from the wars with all his ribbons and a thousand stories I still struggled for survival without my love. He was so busy rigging up the house to look like a ship, printing the rules of command on little notes which he pinned to the wall above the sink, Attention: Do not waste water … Do not throw garbage in here; in the outhouse and in the washroom, Attention: Toilet paper rules … Use only four sections per use … Do not throw funny paper in commode. I doubt if he noticed my dying condition.”

Oscar Zeta Acosta book Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo

Source: Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo (1972), p. 92.

Love , War , Business , Water

“I may not be able to say all I think; but I am not going to say anything that I do not think. I would rather a thousand times be a free soul in jail than to be a sycophant and coward in the streets.”

Eugene V. Debs (1855–1926) American labor and political leader

The Canton, Ohio Speech, Anti-War Speech (1918)

Soul , Thinking , Time

“Let me tell you about the English War Bow, Joscelyn. It is a simple thing, med of yew, a peasant's tool, really. My huntsman can use one, but he is the only man in Berat who has ever mastered the weapon. Why do you think that is? I'll tell you anyway. It takes years, Joscelyn, many years to master the yew bow. Ten years? Probably that long, and after ten years a man can send an arrow clean through armor at two hundred paces. Splat! A thousand ecus of man, armor, and weaponry fallen to a peasant's bow. And it isn't luck, Joscelyn. My huntsman can put an arrow through a bracelet at a hundred paces. He can pierce mail coat at two hundred. I've seen him put an arrow through an oak door at a hundred and fifty, and the door was three inches thick!”

Bernard Cornwell The Grail Quest

The Count of Berat, p. 111
The Grail Quest, Heretic (2003)

War , Thinking

“If we have a thousand bamboo spears, there's nothing to worry about a war with the Soviet Union.”

Sadao Araki (1877–1966) Japanese general

Quoted in "Sugamo Diary" - Page 30 - by Yoshio Kodama - 1960

War

“The theology taught by Milton was dear to the Puritan heart. It was accepted by New England, and it poisoned the souls and ruined the lives of thousands. The genius of Shakespeare could not make the theology of Milton poetic. In the literature of the world there is nothing, outside of the “sacred books,” more perfectly absurd.”

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

Why I Am an Agnostic (1896)

Books , World , Soul , Literature

“How excellent is the saying of one of old: ‘He that adventureth upon matrimony is like unto one who thrusteth his hand into a sack containing many thousands of serpents and one eel. Yet, if Fate so decree, he may draw forth the eel.”

F. Anstey (1856–1934) English novelist and journalist

Source: The Brass Bottle (1900), Chapter 6, “Embarras de Richesses”

Fate , Drawing

“I'd hate the sound of thirty thousand people booing.”

Benny Andersson (1946) Swedish musician

After being asked if he ever gets stage fright
Interview during the 1977 Australian tour, included in "ABBA: The Movie"

Hate , People

“So I thought my first Prime Ministers Question time I'd do in a slightly different way and I'm sure the Prime Minister's going to absolutely welcome this as he welcomed this idea in 2005 but something has seemed to have happened to his memory during that period. So I sent out an email to thousands of people and asked them what questions they would like to put to the Prime Minister, and I recieved forty thousand replies.”

Jeremy Corbyn (1949) British Labour Party politician

Speech http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/sep/16/pmqs-jeremy-corbyn-verdict Jeremy Corbyn makes his debut as leader of the opposition (16 September 2015).
2000s

People , Way , Idea , Question

“The brilliance of Midwestern California, the California that is founded upon discontent, and the reason why so much technological innovation springs from the West Coast, is that having confronted the finitude of the coastline, technologists in Silicon Valley have shrunk the needed commodity—the future (thousands of miles of Zen pathway)—to the size of a fleck of gold dust, to a microchip.”

Richard Rodríguez (1944) American journalist and essayist

Darling: A Spiritual Autobiography (2013)

Spring , Future

“For all species, including our own, the true figure of life is a perching bird, a passerine, alert and nervous in every part, ready to dart off in an instant. Life is always poised for flight. From a distance it looks still, silhouetted against the bright sky or the dark ground; but up close it is flitting this way and that, as if displaying to the world at every moment its perpetual readiness to take off in any of a thousand directions.”

Jonathan Weiner (1953) American nonfiction writer

Source: The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time (1994), Chapter 7, Twenty-Five Thousand Darwins

Life , World , Way , Bird

“At one time the Spartans were capable of such a wise measure, but not our present, mendaciously sentimental, bourgeois patriotic nonsense. The rule of six thousand Spartans over three hundred and fifty thousand Helots was only thinkable in consequence of the high racial value of the Spartans. But this was the result of a systematic race preservation; thus Sparta must be regarded as the first Völkisch State. The exposure of sick, weak, deformed children, in short their destruction, was more decent and in truth a thousand times more humane than the wretched insanity of our day which preserves the most pathological subject, and indeed at any price, and yet takes the life of a hundred thousand healthy children in consequence of birth control or through abortions, in order subsequently to breed a race of degenerates burdened with illnesses.”

Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) Führer and Reich Chancellor of Germany, Leader of the Nazi Party

As translated in Hitler's Secret Book (1961) Grove Press edition, pp. 8-9, 17-18
1920s, Zweites Buch (1928)

Life , Children , Truth , Birth

“At once, far off… begins a rumbling, droning noise -- like a thousand distant flying machines -- like the sound of an armada of mechanical birds -- a noise reminiscent of implacable, massive stage machinery in a masque or pageant that is several streets away. It is not one sound but many sounds combined. This is the sound of Prospero's magic.”

Peter Greenaway (1942) British film director

Prospero's Books

Bird , Distant , Flying

“Hold somebody's hand and feel its warmth. Gram per gram, it converts 10 000 times more energy per second that the sun. You find this hard to believe? Here are the numbers: an average human weighs 70 kilograms and consumes about 12 600 kilojoules / day; that makes about 2 millijoules / gram. second, or 2 milliwatts / gram. For the sun it's a miserable 0.2 microjoules / gram. second. Some bacteria, such as the soil bacterium "Azotobacter" convert as much as 10 joules / gram. second, outperforming the sun by a factor 50 million. I am warm because inside each of my body cells there are dozens, hundreds or even thousands of mitochondria that burn the food I eat.”

Gottfried Schatz (1936–2015) biochemist

Jeff's view on science and scientists (Amsterdam, Elsevier Butterworth-Heinemann, 2006, ISBN 0-444-52133-X, pbk.), Ch. 5: "The tragic matter" (p. 43).

Food , Feeling , Time , Sun

“Everything takes place in an infinitely greater field than what is framed by the size of the picture or by what is materially in the picture. This matter [door/window/wall] is but a support inviting the viewer to participate in the much larger game of a thousand and one visions and feelings; it is the talisman lifting or sinking walls into the deepest recesses of our spirit, opening and at times closing windows in the construction of our impotence, our bondage, or our freedom. The 'subject-matter' then may be found in the picture or it may exist solely inside the spectator's head.”

Antoni Tàpies (1923–2012) Catalan painter, sculptor and art theorist

1945 - 1970, A Report on the Wall' 1970

Feeling , Game , Support , Freedom

Quotes about thousand page 8

Quotes about thousand
page 8