Quotes about transformation
page 6

“I may remark that the curious transformations many formulae can undergo, the unsuspected and to a beginner apparently impossible identity of forms exceedingly dissimilar at first sight, is I think one of the chief difficulties in the early part of mathematical studies. I am often reminded of certain sprites and fairies one reads of, who are at one's elbows in one shape now, and the next minute in a form most dissimilar.”

Ada Lovelace (1815–1852) English mathematician, considered the first computer programmer

As quoted in Toole, Betty Alexandra (1998), Ada, the Enchantress of Numbers: Prophet of the Computer Age, Strawberry Press, ISBN 0912647183. p. 99

Mathematics, Thinking, Study, Reading

“The art of creation lies in the gift of perceiving the particular and generalizing it, thus creating the particular again. It is therefore a powerful transforming force and a generator of creative solutions in relation to a given problem. It is the currency of human exchanges, which enables the sharing of states of the soul and conscience, and the discovery of new fields of experience.”

Yehudi Menuhin (1916–1999) American violinist and conductor

Source: Katie Ahlquist concept http://sparkledesign.net/Concept.shtml, Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary

Art, Soul, Problem

“Many pressing problems facing science and society are inherently geospatial – location matters. The availability of essential geospatial data has increased dramatically over the past decade. Both scientific progress and application of geospatial information to societal needs remains hampered, however, due to the lack of methods for transforming these data into information and for combining information from diverse sources to construct knowledge. Progress requires fundamental breakthroughs in both geovisualization and its integration with other methods for geospatial knowledge construction. The research agenda delineated in this issue is a step toward achieving these breakthroughs. Identifying the challenges is the easy part. Meeting them is unlikely without a commitment to a coordinated approach, by both individuals and organizations in multiple countries.”

Alan MacEachren (1952) American geographer

Source: Research challenges in geovisualization (2001), p. 12. summary

Knowledge, Problem, Science, Past

“Through Operation Flood, milk has been transformed from a commodity into a brand, from insufficient production to sufficient production, from rationing to plentiful availability; from loose unhygienic milk to milk that is pure and sure, from subjugation to as symbol of farmer’s economic independence, to being the consumer’s greatest insurance policy for good health.”

Verghese Kurien (1921–2012) Indian founder of dairy-cooperative Amul

In p. 85
Quote, Our Leaders

Health

“The painter who loves his art is ruler in his own kingdom, even if he be in Lilliput and a Lilliputian himself. He transforms a kitchen maid in to a fairy, and a great lady into a brothel matron, if he wants to and sees them so, for he is a seer. His vision includes everything that is alive in the past.”

Georges Rouault (1871–1958) French painter

Quotes, 1940-1950, Stella Vespertina. (1947)

Love, Art, Past

“The ideals of truth, beauty, and goodness represent attempts to interpret the process of development as a group of tendencies permanently directed towards certain permanent and universal ends. But human behaviour is not directed towards unchanging ends, not even towards those temporary ideals which each community sets up for itself. The formative tendency is displayed, not in any steady process of definite orientation, but in a rhythmic sequence of transformation which cannot be represented as tending towards any particular final condition.”

Lancelot Law Whyte (1896–1972) Scottish industrial engineer

Source: The Next Development in Man (1948), p. 261-262

Truth, Beauty, Communication, Universe

“In a nutshell, Erhard's message was this: If you are in a rut, the problem isn't your parents, your boss or the system, it's you. Take responsibility, Erhard said, and you can transform your life overnight.”

Ed Bradley (1941–2006) News correspondent

[Ed Bradley, Werner Erhard, 60 Minutes, CBS News ; Producer: David Gelber, March 3, 1991]

Life, Problem, Parent

“Every night, at exactly a quarter past three, something dreadful happens on the street outside our bedroom window. We peek through the curtains, yawning and shivering in the life-draining chill, and then we clamber back beneath the blankets without exchanging a word, to hug each other tightly and hope for sound sleep before it's time to rise.

Usually what we witness verges on the mundane. Drunken young men fighting, swaying about with outstretched knives, cursing incoherently. Robbery, bashings, rape. We wince to see such violence, but we can hardly be shocked or surprised any more, and we're never tempted to intervene: it's always far too cold, for a start! A single warm exhalation can coat the window pane with mist, transforming the most stomach-wrenching assault into a safely cryptic ballet for abstract blobs of light.

On some nights, though, when the shadows in the room are subtly wrong, when the familiar street looks like an abandoned film set, or a painting of itself perversely come to life, we are confronted by truly disturbing sights, oppressive apparitions which almost make us doubt we're awake, or, if awake, sane. I can't catalogue these visions, for most, mercifully, are blurred by morning, leaving only a vague uneasiness and a reluctance to be alone even in the brightest sunshine.”

Greg Egan (1961) Australian science fiction writer and former computer programmer

Scatter My Ashes http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/HORROR/SCATTER/Scatter.html, published in Interzone (Spring 1988) Fiction

Life, Men, Hope, Sleep

“Over the years, I have become convinced that Hellenism as a culture represents not a static condition of uniform sublimity mysteriously achieved and maintained as an effect of some racial advantage. Rather it should be understood as an evolving process, governed by a dynamic of change, as both language and thought underwent transformational alteration caused by a transition from orality to literacy. The instrument of change is discerned to be the invention of the Greek alphabet, at a quite late stage in the history of developing cultures.”

Eric A. Havelock (1903–1988) 1903-1988, British classical philologist

"Chinese Characters and the Greek Alphabet" in Sino-Platonic Papers, 5 (December 1987)

History, Change

“Einstein, Planck, and other leading scientists said, "We're going to have to reassess and redefine the physical universe." — They defined the physical universe as "an aggregate of non-simultaneous and only partially overlapping transformation events."”

Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) American architect, systems theorist, author, designer, inventor and futurist

1960s, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1963)

Universe

“The ultimate reflection of the Creator’s glory will be the redemption and glorification of our bodies, when at the rapture, our bodies are transformed into the image of Christ. (1 Thess. 4:116-17; 1 Cor. 15:51-56).”

Paul P. Enns (1937) American theologian

Source: Heaven Revealed (Moody, 2011), p. 75

Christ

“The “old maid” with her repressed cravings for tenderness, sex, and propagation, is rarely quite free of ressentiment. What we call “prudery,” in contrast with true modesty, is but one of the numerous variants of sexual ressentiment. The habitual behavior of many old maids, who obsessively ferret out all sexually significant events in their surroundings in order to condemn them harshly, is nothing but sexual gratification transformed into ressentiment satisfaction. Thus the criticism accomplishes the very thing it pretends to condemn.”

Max Scheler (1874–1928) German philosopher

Source: Das Ressentiment im Aufbau der Moralen (1912), L. Coser, trans. (1973), pp. 61-62

Sex, Behavior

“A noble purpose inspires sacrifice, stimulates innovation, and encourages perseverance. In so doing, it transforms great talent into exceptional accomplishment.”

Gary Hamel (1954) American management expert

Gary Hamel quoted in: Richard L. Daft (2014), The Leadership Experience, p. 409

Perseverance

“Sabina’s initial inner revolt against Communism was aesthetic rather than ethical in character. What repelled her was not nearly so much the ugliness of the Communist world (ruined castles transformed into cow sheds) as the mask of beauty it tried to wear — in other words, Communist kitsch.”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), Part Five: Lightness and Weight

World, Beauty, Communication

“The world of immediate experience—the world in which we find ourselves living—must be comprehended, transformed, even subverted in order to become that which it really is.”

Herbert Marcuse book One-Dimensional Man

Source: One-Dimensional Man (1964), p. 123

World

“The contemporary scene of labor and production, we will explain, is being transformed under the hegemony of immaterial labor, that is, labor that produces immaterial products, suchs as information, knoledges, ideas, images, relationships, and affects. This does not mean that there is no more industrial working class whose calloused hands toil with machines or that there ae no more agricultural workers who till the soil. It does not even mean that the numbers of such workers have decreased globally. In fact, workers involved primarily in immaterial production are a small minority of the gloval whole. What it means, rather, is that the qualities and characteristics of immaterial production are tending to transform the other forms of labor and indeed society as a whole. Some of these new characteristics are decidedly unwelcome. When our ideas and affects, or emotions, are put to work, for insance, and when they thus become subject in a way to the command of the boss, we often experience new and intense forms of violation or alienation. Furthermore, the contractual and material conditions of immaterial labor that tend to spread to the entire labor market are making the position of labor in general more precarious. The is one tendency, for example, in various forms of immaterial labor to blur the distinction between work time and nonwork time, extending the working day indefinietly to fill all of life, and another tendency for immaterial labor to function without stable long-term contracts, and thus to adopt the precarious position of becoming flexible (to accomplish several tasks) and mobile (to move continually among locations). […] The production of ideas, knowledges, and affects, for example, does not merely create means by which society is formed and maintained; such immaterial labor also directly produces social relationships. […] immaterial labor tends to take the social form of network based on communication.”

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

65-66
Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

Life, Way, Communication, Idea

“Let us learn how the love of Christ, received into the heart, triumphs gradually but surely over all sin, transforms character, turning even its weakness into strength, and so, from the depths of transgression and the very gates of hell, raises men to God.”

Alexander Maclaren (1826–1910) British minister

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 398.

Love, Men, God, Hell

“The open system approach to organizations is contrasted with common-sense approaches, which tend to accept popular names and stereotypes as basic organizational properties and to identify the purpose of an organization in terms of the goals of its founders and leaders.
The open system approach, on the other hand, begins by identifying and mapping the repeated cycles of input, transformation, output, and renewed input which comprise the organizational pattern. This approach to organizations represents the adaptation of work in biology and in the physical sciences by von Bertalanffy and others.”

Daniel Katz (1903–1998) American psychologist

Source: The Social Psychology of Organizations (1966), p. 33

Sense, Science

“I transformed myself in the zero of form and emerged from nothing to creation, that is, to Suprematism, to the new realism in painting – to non-objective creation.”

Kazimir Malevich (1879–1935) Russian and Soviet artist of polish descent

Quote of Malevich, November 1916, in: 'From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism: The New Realism in Painting'
1910 - 1920

Painting

“We come, in our trust, unto God, and the moment we so embrace Him, by committing our total being and eternity to Him, we find every thing is transformed. There is life in us from God; a kind of Christ-consciousness is opened in us, testifying with the apostle,— Christ liveth in me.”

Horace Bushnell (1802–1876) American theologian

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 598.

Life, God, Christ

“First we notice an investigation which Prof. Planck of Berlin published in 1899. His aim was that it should fit the observed facts of radiation, and show why the energy of bodies was not wholly transformed into radiation. …his investigation seemed to show that continuity had to be given up, suggesting that in the last resort changes in the universe do not consist of continuous motions in space and time, but in some way are discontinuous.”

James Jeans (1877–1946) British mathematician and astronomer

Physics and Philosophy (1942)

Way, Universe, Change, Time

“The true investor scarcely ever has to sell his shares, and at all other times he is free di disregard the current price quotation. He need pay attention to it and act upon it only to the extent that it suits his book, and no more. Thus the investor who permits himself to be stampeded or unduly worried by unjustified market declines in his holdings is perversely transforming his basic advantage into a basic disadvantage. That man would be better off if his stocks had no market quotation at all, for he would then be spared the mental anguish caused him by other persons mistakes of judgement.”

Benjamin Graham (1894–1976) American investor

Source: The Intelligent Investor: The Classic Text on Value Investing (1949), Chapter II, The Investor and Stock-Market Fluctuations, p. 40

Books, Time, Personality

“By 1938, Mussolini could confidently assert that ‘in the face of the total collapse of the system [bequeathed] by Lenin, Stalin has covertly transformed himself into a Fascist.”

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

Source: The Fascist Persuasion in Radical Politics, (1974), p. 132

Confidence

“Russia's only real geostrategic option - the option that would give Russia a realistic international role and also maximize the opportunity of transforming and socially modernizing itself - is Europe.”

Zbigniew Brzeziński book The Grand Chessboard

Source: The Grand Chessboard (1997), Chapter 4, The Black Hole, p. 118.

“The ultimate goal of the anti-religious elites is to transform America into a completely secular nation, a nation that is legally and culturally biased against Christianity.”

Ron Paul (1935) American politician and physician

2000s, 2001-2005

“The great organization must not only accommodate the fact that each employee is different, it must capitalize on these differences. It must watch for clues to each employee's natural talents and then position and develop each employee so that his or her talents are transformed into bona fide strengths.”

Marcus Buckingham (1966) British writer

Source: Now, Discover Your Strengths (2001), p. 5

Nature

“An autopoietic machine is a machine organized (defined as a unity) as a network of processes of production (transformation and destruction) of components which:
(i) through their interactions and transformations continuously regenerate and realize the network of processes (relations) that produced them; and
(ii) constitute it (the machine) as a concrete unity in space in which they (the components) exist by specifying the topological domain of its realization as such a network.”

Humberto Maturana (1928) Chilean biologist and philosopher

Source: Autopoiesis and cognition: The realization of the living (1980), p. 87.

“The surfaces of three-dimensional space are distinguished from each other not only by their curvature but also by certain more general properties. A spherical surface, for instance, differs from a plane not only by its roundness but also by its finiteness. Finiteness is a holistic property. The sphere as a whole has a character different from that of a plane. A spherical surface made from rubber, such as a balloon, can be twisted so that its geometry changes…. but it cannot be distorted in such a way as that it will cover a plane. All surfaces obtained by distortion of the rubber sphere possess the same holistic properties; they are closed and finite. The plane as a whole has the property of being open; its straight lines are not closed. This feature is mathematically expressed as follows. Every surface can be mapped upon another one by the coordination of each point of one surface to a point of the other surface, as illustrated by the projection of a shadow picture by light rays. For surfaces with the same holistic properties it is possible to carry through this transformation uniquely and continuously in all points. Uniquely means: one and only one point of one surface corresponds to a given point of the other surface, and vice versa. Continuously means: neighborhood relations in infinitesimal domains are preserved; no tearing of the surface or shifting of relative positions of points occur at any place. For surfaces with different holistic properties, such a transformation can be carried through locally, but there is no single transformation for the whole surface.”

Hans Reichenbach (1891–1953) American philosopher

The Philosophy of Space and Time (1928, tr. 1957)

Way, Mathematics, Tear, Light

“The world today is experiencing a profound and rapid socio-cultural transformation. But the changes do not occur at a uniform pace, and the discrepancies in the change process have differentiated the various countries and regions of our planet.”

Gustavo Gutiérrez (1928) Peruvian theologian

Source: A Theology of Liberation - 15th Anniversary Edition, p. 21

World, Change, Country

“I did not share President's view on the Palestine solution…The number that could be absorbed by Arab Palestine without creating a grave political problem would be inadequate, and to transform the country into a Jewish state capable of receiving a million or more immigrants would vastly exacerbate the political problem and imperil not only American but all Western influence in the Near East.”

Dean Acheson book Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department

Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department (1969), Middle East

Problem, Country

“In 2014, one of the key agendas of the BJP’s election campaign was highlighting the dismal management of the Indian economy, ironically under an ‘economist’ prime minister and a ‘know-it-all’ finance minister. We all knew that the economy was in the doldrums but since we were not in government, we naturally did not have the complete details of the state of the economy. But, what we saw when we formed the government left us shocked! The state of the economy was much worse than expected. Things were terrible. Even the budget figures were suspicious. When all of this came to light, we had two options – to be driven by Rajneeti (political considerations) or be guided by Rashtraneeti (putting the interests of India First)… Rajneeti, or playing politics on the state of the economy in 2014, would have been extremely simple as well as politically advantageous for us. We had just won a historic election, so obviously the frenzy was at a different level. The Congress Party and their allies were in big trouble. Even for the media, it would have made news for months on end. On the other hand, there was Rashtraneeti, where more than politics and one-upmanship, reform was needed. Needless to say, we preferred to think of ‘India First’ instead of putting politics first. We did not want to push the issues under the carpet, but we were more interested in addressing the issue. We focused on reforming, strengthening and transforming the Indian economy. The details about the decay in the Indian economy were unbelievable. It had the potential to cause a crisis all over. In 2014, industry was leaving India. India was in the Fragile Five. Experts believed that the ‘I’ in BRICS would collapse. Public sentiment was that of disappointment and pessimism.”

Narendra Modi (1950) Prime Minister of India

Narendra Modi, Swarajya Interviews Prime Minister Modi, Interview, R Jagannathan- Jul 02, 2018 https://swarajyamag.com/economy/swarajya-interviews-prime-minister-modi-the-state-of-indian-economy 2018

Disappointment, Nature, Thinking, Light

“Human effort may manage at its best to transform a starving proletariat into a well-fed bourgeoisie; but then a worse proletariat emerges from the bowels of society. Jesus was right, there will always be the poor among us. Which proves that this humanity is the greatest error that God ever committed.”

José Maria Eça de Queiroz book Cartas de Inglaterra

O esforço humano consegue, quando muito, converter um proletariado faminto numa burguesia farta; mas surge logo das entranhas da sociedade um proletariado pior. Jesus tinha razão: haverá sempre pobres entre nós. Donde se prova que esta humanidade é o maior erro que jamais Deus cometeu.

"O Natal"; "Christmas" pp. 36-7.
Cartas de Inglaterra (1879–82)

God, Error, Effort

“Muhammad became the archetypal example of that perfect submission to the divine, and Muslims, as we shall see, would attempt to conform to this standard in their spiritual and social lives. Muhammad was never venerated as a divine figure, but he was held to be the Perfect Man. His surrender to God had been so complete that he had transformed society and enabled the Arabs to live together in harmony. The world Islam is etymologically related to salam (peace), and in these early years Islam did promote cohesion and concord.”

Karen Armstrong (1944) author and comparative religion scholar from Great Britain

Islam: A Short History (2000), Chapter 1: Beginnings

God, World, Peace, Perfection

“I was broken in body, soul and spirit. My natural elasticity was crushed, my intellect languished, the disposition to read departed, the cheerful spark that lingered about my eye died; the dark night of slavery closed in upon me; and behold a man transformed into a brute!”

Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman

Source: 1840s, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave (1845), Ch. 10

Soul, Nature, Reading, Night

“True transformation occurs only when we can look at ourselves squarely and face our attachments and inner demons, free from the buzz of commercial distraction and false social realities. We have to retreat into our own cocoons and come face-to-face with who we are. We have to turn toward our own inner darkness. For only by abandoning its attachments and facing the darkness does the caterpillar's body begin to spread out and its light, beautiful wings begin to form.”

Julia Butterfly Hill book The Legacy of Luna

Source: The Legacy of Luna (2000), Ch. 8

Beauty, Reality, Light, Falseness

“I never deal in transformations, for they are not honest, and no respectable sorceress likes to make things appear to be what they are not.”

L. Frank Baum book The Marvelous Land of Oz

The Marvelous Land of Oz (1904)
Later Oz novels

Appearance

“The master class, which transforms everything and everyone into its instruments, imposes its views and values upon the wage slaves, who come to see the world through the eyes of their oppressors.”

George Novack (1905–1992) American politician

Existentialism Versus Marxism (1966), p. 20

World

“They [great works of literature] are invalidated not because of their literary obsolescence. Some of these images pertain to contemporary literature and survive in its most advanced creations. What has been invalidated is their subversive force, their destructive content—their truth. In this transformation, they find their home in everyday living. The alien and alienating oeuvres of intellectual culture become familiar goods and services. Is their massive reproduction and consumption only a change in quantity, namely, growing appreciation and understanding, democratization of culture? The truth of literature and art has always been granted (if it was granted at all) as one of a “higher” order, which should not and indeed did not disturb the order of business. What has changed in the contemporary period is the difference between the two orders and their truths. The absorbent power of society depletes the artistic dimension by assimilating its antagonistic contents. In the realm of culture, the new totalitarianism manifests itself precisely in a harmonizing pluralism, where the most contradictory works and truths peacefully coexist in indifference. Prior to the advent of this cultural reconciliation, literature and art were essentially alienation, sustaining and protecting the contradiction—the unhappy consciousness of the divided world, the defeated possibilities, the hopes unfulfilled, and the promises betrayed. They were a rational, cognitive force, revealing a dimension of man and nature which was repressed and repelled in reality.”

Herbert Marcuse book One-Dimensional Man

Source: One-Dimensional Man (1964), pp. 60-61

Truth, World, Hope, Art

“Later came 'the hour of solitude'. Inside my tiny bedroom-studio, I began my forty days in the desert; I do not know if they are over yet. With a desperate, feverish rage I took formal experimentation to maniacal levels. Each canvas was a battlefield where wounds multiplied ad infinitum. And then came the surprise. All that frenetic movement, all that gesticulation, all that unending dynamism, by dint of the scratches, blows, scars, divisions and subdivisions…. suddenly took a qualitative leap. My eye no longer perceived differences. Everything congealed in a uniform mass. What had been ardent ebullition transformed itself into static silence. It was like a great lesson in humility for the pride of my unbridled quest.”

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

1945 - 1970, A Report on the Wall' 1970

Solitude, Silence, Rage

“It is a question of the systematic and interpretive organization of the sensational, scattered and narcissist surrealist experimental material, - that is to say, of everyday surrealist events:, br>nocturnal pollution, false recollection, dream, diurnal fantasy, the concrete transformation of nocturnal phosphene into a hypnagogic image or of "waking phosphene" into an objective image, - the nutritive caprice, - inter-uterine claims, - anamorphic hysteria, - the voluntary retention of the urine, - the involuntary retention of insomnia - the fortuitous image of exclusively exhibitionist tendency, -the incomplete action, - the frantic manner, - the regional sneeze, the anal wheelbarrow, the minimal mistake, the liliputian malaise, the super-normal physiological state, - the picture one leaves off painting, that which one paints, the territorial ringing of the telephone, "the deranging image", etc., etc.,
all these things, I say, and a thousand other instantaneous or successive sollicitations, revealing a minimum of irrational intentionalety or, on the contrary, a minimum of suspect phenomenal nullity, are associated, by the mechanisms of paranoiac-critical activity, in an indestructible delirious-interpretive system of political problems, paralytic images, more or less mammiferous questions, playing the role of the obsessing idea.”

Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) Spanish artist

Source: Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1931 - 1940, My Pictorial Struggle', S. Dali, 1935, Chapter: 'My Pictorial Struggle', pp. 15-16

Dreams, Idea, Question, Problem

“In sum, social actors knowledgeably and actively use, interpret and implement rule systems. They also creatively reform and transform them. In such ways they bring about institutional innovation and transformation and shape the ‘deep structures’ of human history.”

Tom R. Burns (1937) American sociologist

Source: The shaping of social organization (1987), p. ix; as cited in: Simon Guy and John Henneberry (2000) " Understanding Urban Development Processes: Integrating the Economic and the Social in Property Research http://bentboolean.com/people/mm/private/SOA/548_DS/StrataProposal/research%20doct's/world_urban/UrbanDevtProperty.pdf," Urban Studies, Vol. 37, No. 13, 2399–2416, 2000.

Way, History, Knowledge

“How can the establishment protect an electrical supply line and the thousands of transformers, etc.? Effective positioning of the guards is militarily impossible. … We must call strikes to enforce our demands on capital. To enforce the strike we must stop the plant's power source. Standing in the gateway with a placard and a pamphlet alone will not dull a worker's short-term interest in wage slavery.”

George Jackson (activist) (1941–1971) activist, Marxist, author, member of the Black Panther Party, and co-founder of the Black Guerrilla Family

Source: Blood in My Eye (1971), p. 83

“[T]he effects of general change [in literature] are most tellingly recorded not in alteration of the best products, but in the transformation of the most ordinary workaday books; for when potboilers adopt the new style, then the revolution is complete.”

Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) American evolutionary biologist

"Good Sports & Bad", p. 335; originally published in The New York Review of Books (1995-03-02)
Triumph and Tragedy in Mudville (2003)

Books, Literature, Change

“Today, for the mass of humanity, science and technology embody 'miracle, mystery, and authority'. Science promises that the most ancient human fantasies will at last be realized. Sickness and ageing will be abolished; scarcity and poverty will be no more; the species will become immortal. Like Christianity in the past, the modern cult of science lives on the hope of miracles. But to think that science can transform the human lot is to believe in magic. Time retorts to the illusions of humanism with the reality: frail, deranged, undelivered humanity. Even as it enables poverty to be diminished and sickness to be alleviated, science will be used to refine tyranny and perfect the art of war.”

John Gray book Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

The unsaved: The Grand Inquisitor and Flying Fish (p. 123)
Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (2002)

War, Age, Hope, Art

“Recently a courageous group of Arab and Muslim intellectuals wrote me a letter. In it, they said this: "The shore of reform is the only one on which any lights appear, even though the journey demands courage and patience and perseverance." The United Nations was created to make that journey possible. Together we must support the dreams of good and decent people who are working to transform a troubled region -- and by doing so, we will advance the high ideals on which this institution was founded.”

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

2000s, 2006, United Nations General Assembly speech (September 2006)

People, Dreams, Courage, Support

“It was early in the Seventeenth Century that Francis Bacon remarked on three recent inventions already transforming the world: the compass, gunpowder and the printing press. Now the links between the nations first forged by the compass have made us all citizens of the world, the hopes and threats of one becoming the hopes and threats of us all. In that one world's efforts to live together, the evolution of gunpowder to its ultimate limit has warned mankind of the terrible consequences of failure.
And so it is to the printing press — to the recorder of man's deeds, the keeper of his conscience, the courier of his news — that we look for strength and assistance, confident that with your help man will be what he was born to be: free and independent.”

John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) 35th president of the United States of America

Kennedy here references Francis Bacon’s Aphorism 129 of Novum Organum: Again, we should notice the force, effect, and consequences of inventions, which are nowhere more conspicuous than in those three which were unknown to the ancients; namely, printing, gunpowder, and the compass. For these three have changed the appearance and state of the whole world; first in literature, then in warfare, and lastly in navigation: and innumerable changes have been thence derived, so that no empire, sect, or star, appears to have exercised a greater power and influence on human affairs than these mechanical discoveries.
1961, Address to ANPA

World, Hope, Confidence, Failure

“This law (regarding the theoretical efficiency of heat engines by Mr. Joule), and the law of the maximum efficiency of heat engines, are particular cases of a general law which regulates all transformation of energy, and is the basis of the Science of Energetics.”

William John Macquorn Rankine (1820–1872) civil engineer

Manual of Applied Mechanics, (1858) London and Glasgow : Richard Griffin and Company, p. 630

Law, Science

“In the infinitely complex economic system on which we rely for our daily bread, no productive function is more important than that of our business leaders. These men are charged with the responsibility of giving direction and unity to the efforts of the many who participate in economic activity. It is their job to make the plans and decisions which will transform economic effort into the particular goods and services wanted by a myriad of consumers. Conversely, it is their job also to translate consumers' needs into employment opportunities for labor and other economic resources”

Robert Aaron Gordon (1908–1978) American economist

Source: Business Leadership in the Large Corporation (1945), p. 3

Men, Business, Decision, Effort

“So there is a big transformation. Also if you see the average lifespan, which was 28–29 in 1947, is now 64–65. In Kerala it is 74 or so. I am sure soon it will become 80–90. That is partly also because of food, because without nutrition, it is not possible. So we have had a transformation in our economic wellbeing. But that is not spread evenly in society; there are still very poor people, the highly deprived. In my view, the first task of both science and society is to address this issue”

M. S. Swaminathan (1925) Indian scientist

On changes in the living conditions in India since Indepencnce in 1947 pdf, In Conversation: M. S. Swaminathan, 25 October 2011, Current Science http://www.currentscience.ac.in/Volumes/101/08/0996.pdf,

People, Food, Science

“Capitalism subordinates men to machines instead of using machines to liberate men from the burden of mechanical and repetitive work. it subordinates all, inherent in every commodity, fully unfolds itself in this contradictory nature of capitalist machinery. When capitalism is not overthrown once it has created the material and social preconditions for a classless society of associated producers, this contradiction implies the possibility of a steadily increasing transformation of the forces of production into forces of destruction, in the most literal sense of the word: not only forces of destruction of wealth (crises and wars), of human wealth and human happiness, but also forces of destruction of life tout court.”

Ernest Mandel (1923–1995) Belgian economist and Marxist philosopher

Introduction to Capital. Introduction to volume 1 (1976)

Life, Men, War, Nature

“in general, the hegemony of immaterial labor tends to transform the organization of production from the linear relationships of assembly line to the innumerable and indeterminate relationships of distributed networks.”

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

113
Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

“Louis Althusser puts it this way: because "class instinct is subjective and spontaneous," the class instinct of the middle classes and "thus of intellectuals" must undergo a painful and "revolutionary" transformation in order to become oppositional—that is, in order to become aligned with the methodology of the oppressed.”

Chela Sandoval (1956) Chicana and post-colonial feminist and theoretician

Methodology of the Oppressed (2000), p. 181

Pain, Way

“For wide classes of organizations there are very strong inertial pressures on structure arising from both internal arrangements (for example, internal politics) and from the environment (for example, public legitimation of organizational activity). To claim otherwise is to ignore the most obvious feature of organizational life. Failing churches do not become retail stores nor do firms transform themselves into churches.”

Michael T. Hannan (1943) US-American sociologist of Stanford University

Source: "The Population Ecology of Organizations," 1977, p. 957

Life, Strong

“There are moments in life where the question of knowing whether one might think otherwise than one thinks and perceive otherwise than one sees is indispensable if one is to continue to observe or reflect… What is philosophy today… if it does not consist in, instead of legitimizing what we already know, undertaking to know how and how far it might be possible to think otherwise?… The ‘essay’ —which must be understood as a transforming test of oneself in the play of truth and not as a simplifying appropriation of someone else for the purpose of communication—is the living body of philosophy, if, at least, philosophy is today still what it was once, that is to say, an askesis, an exercise of the self, in thought.”

Michel Foucault (1926–1984) French philosopher

Il y a des moments dans la vie où la question de savoir si on peut penser autrement qu’on ne pense et percevoir autrement qu’on ne voit est indispensable pour continuer à regarder ou à réfléchir… Qu’est-ce donc que la philosophie aujourd’hui… si elle ne consiste pas, au lieu de légitimer ce qu’on sait déjà, à entreprendre de savoir comment et jusqu’où il serait possible de penser autrement ?… L’ « essai »—qu’il faut entendre comme épreuve modificatrice de soi-même dans le jeu de la vérité et non comme appropriation simplificatrice d’autrui à des fins de communication—est le corps vivant de la philosophie, si du moins celle-ci est encore maintenant ce qu’elle était autrefois, c’est-à-dire une « ascèse », un exercice de soi, dans la pensée.
Vol. II : L’usage des plaisirs p. 15-16.
History of Sexuality (1976–1984)

Life, Truth, Exercises, Communication

“From the preceding examples, we may get some idea of the change in perspective that may occur in our reading and interpretation of the philosophical works of antiquity when we consider them from the point of view of the practice of spiritual exercises. Philosophy then appears in its original aspect: not as a theoretical construct, but as a method for training people to live and to look at the world in a new way. It is an attempt to transform mankind. Contemporary historians of philosophy are today scarcely inclined to pay attention to this aspect, although it is an essential one. The reason for this is that, in conformity with a tradition inherited from the Middle Ages … they consider philosophy to be purely abstract-theoretical activity.”

Pierre Hadot (1922–2010) French historian and philosopher

trans. Michael Chase (1995), p. 107
La Philosophie comme manière de vivre (2001)

People, Age, World, Way

“Our world is not an optimal place, fine tuned by omnipotent forces of selection. It is a quirky mass of imperfections, working well enough (often admirably); a jury-rigged set of adaptations built of curious parts made available by past histories in different contexts. […] A world optimally adapted to current environments is a world without history, and a world without history might have been created as we find it. History matters; it confounds perfection and proves that current life transformed its own past.”

Stephen Jay Gould book The Flamingo's Smile

"Only His Wings Remained", p. 54
The Flamingo's Smile (1985)

Life, World, History, Optimism

“[The goal of the LOT (lattice of theories) is to create a framework] which can support an open-ended number of theories (potentially infinite) organized in a lattice together with systematic metalevel techniques for moving from one to another, for testing their adequacy for any given problem, and for mixing, matching, combining, and transforming them to whatever form is appropriate for whatever problem anyone is trying to solve.”

John F. Sowa (1940) artificial intelligence researcher

Cited in: Roberto Poli, Michael Healy, Achilles Kameas (2010) Theory and Applications of Ontology: Computer Applications . p. 533
Knowledge representation, 2000

Support, Problem

“He who must be what he is, may curse his fate, but cannot change it; on the other hand, he who can transform himself has no one in the world but himself to blame for his failings, no one but himself to hold responsible for his dissatisfaction.”

Stanisław Lem book The Cyberiad

In "Tale of the Three Storytelling Machines of King Genius", §3
The Cyberiad (1967)

Fate, World, Change

“Superstition has caused so much confusion, darkness, and deception. Dogma has been used to tyrannize over the lives of the people. So, this is the time for change and of some transformation based on reason, science, critical thinking, and humanity. People are yearning for freedom and emancipation. Humanism is critical in delivering that change and in the realization of social renewal.”

Leo Igwe (1970) Nigerian human rights activist

An Interview with Dr. Leo Igwe — Founder, Nigerian Humanist Movement (2017)

People, Thinking, Freedom, Science

“It remains true that Michelangelo's intensely personal use of the nude greatly altered its character. He changed it from a means of embodying ideas to a means of expressing emotions; he transformed it from the world of living to the world of becoming. And he projected his world of the imagination with such unequaled artistic power that its shadow fell on every male nude in art for three hundred and fifty years. Painters either imitated his heroic poses and proportions or they reacted against them self-consciously and sought a new repertoire of attitudes in the art of fifth-century Greece. In the nineteenth century the ghost of Michelangelo was still posing the models in art schools.”

Kenneth Clark (1903–1983) Art historian, broadcaster and museum director

Source: The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form (1951), Ch. V: Energy

World, School, Art, Imagination

“im not owned! im not owned!!', i continue to insist as i slowly shrink and transform into a corn cob”

Dril Twitter user

[ Link to tweet https://twitter.com/dril/status/134787490526658561] Tweets by year, 2011

“A corporation is a living organism; it has to continue to shed its skin. Methods have to change. Focus has to change. Values have to change. The sum total of those changes is transformation.”

Andrew S. Grove (1936–2016) Hungarian-born American businessman, engineer, and author

Andrew Grove, in: " What I've Learned: Andy Grove http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/interviews/a1449/learned-andy-grove-0500/", Esquire magazine, May 1, 2000 New millennium

Change

“"The myths," says Horace in his Ars Poetica, "have been invented by wise men to strengthen the laws and teach moral truths." While Horace endeavored to make clear the very spirit and essence of the ancient myths, Euhemerus pretended, on the contrary, that "myths were the legendary history of kings and heroes, transformed into gods by the admiration of the nations." It is the latter method which was inferentially followed by Christians when they agreed upon the acceptation of euhemerized patriarchs, and mistook them for men who had really lived.”

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky book Isis Unveiled

Source: Isis Unveiled (1877), Volume II, Chapter IX

Men, God, Truth, Law

“Citizens who refuse to obey anything but their own conscience can transform countries, it is the basis of any real democracy.”

Gloria Steinem (1934) American feminist and journalist

Revolution From Within

Democracy, Country

“If you ask me abruptly
Why write poetry
Why not do
Something useful
Then I won't know
How to answer you
I am like a goldsmith hammering day and night
Just so I can extend pain
Into a gold ornament as thin as a cicada's wing
I don't know if working so hard
To transform sorrows into
Shimmering words and phrases
Is also
Beautifully worthwhile.”

Xi Murong (1943) Taiwanese poet and painter

"Poetry's Value", in Where Books Fall Open: A Reader's Anthology of Wit & Passion (David R. Godine Publisher, 2003), p. 56

Pain, Night

“The task is not to win the political centre ground – it is gridlocked and dead – but to transform it. A new social politics of democracy must be capable of creating the conditions for recovery, and setting out a set of principles and a political direction for the future, and it must also address the threat of global warming. The boom is over. In the future there will be less to go round and so let us share it out fairly amongst ourselves and embark on the deep and long transformation that will bring about a good society. It will be the great challenge of our time, and it will shape the lives of generations to come.”

Jon Cruddas (1962) British politician

The Independent, The time has come for a new socialism, 31 March 2009 http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/commentators/jon-cruddas-amp-jonathan-rutherford-the-time-has-come-for-a-new-socialism-1658938.html

Democracy, Time, Future, Dead

“LSD is a unique and powerful tool for the exploration of the human mind and human nature. Psychedelic experiences mediate access to deep realms of the psyche that have not yet been discovered and acknowledged by mainstream psychology and psychiatry. They also reveal new possibilities and mechanisms of therapeutic change and personality transformation.”

Stanislav Grof (1931) Czech pychiatrist

LSD psychotherapy (1980), MAPS 2001 edition, Epilogue, p. 299.

Nature, Change, Personality

“I use the metaphor "markets as politics" to create a sociological view of action in markets. I develop a conceptual view of the social institutions that comprise markets, discuss a sociological model of action in which market participants try to create stable worlds and find social solutions to competition, and discuss how markets and states are intimately linked. From these foundations, I generate propositions about how politics in markets work during various stages of market development-- formation, stability, and transformation. At the formation of markets, when actors in firms are trying to create a status hierarchy that enforces noncompetitive forms of competition, political action resembles social movements. In stable markets, incumbent firms defend their positions against challengers and invaders. During periods of market transformation, invaders can reintroduce more fluid social-movement-like conditions.”

Neil Fligstein (1951) American sociologist

Source: Markets as politics: A political-cultural approach to market institutions, 1996, p. 656; Abstract

World

“Great problems are now being handled, keeping every thinking man in suspense; the unity or multiplicity of human races; the creation of man 1,000 years or 1,000 centuries ago; the fixity of species, or the slow and progressive transformation of one species into another; the eternity of matter; the idea of a God unnecessary: such are some of the questions that humanity discusses nowadays.”

Louis Pasteur (1822–1895) French chemist and microbiologist

Translation from The Life of Pasteur, p. 140 https://archive.org/stream/cu31924012227595#page/n153/mode/2up Soirées scientifiques de la Sorbonne (1864)

God, Idea, Question, Problem

“To reform society, and with it humanity, there is only one mean; to transform the mentality of men, to direct them ("les orienter", Fr.) in a new spirit.”

African Spir (1837–1890) Russian philosopher

Source: Words of a Sage : Selected thoughts of African Spir (1937), p. 60.

Men

“The system of constraints that governs the projections and transformations of… bodies in space must long ago have become internalized as a powerful, though largely unconscious, part of our perceptual machinery.”

Roger Shepard (1929) American psychologist

R.N. Shepard (1978). "The mental image." American Psychologist 33, 125-137. Shepard, 1978, p. 136.

Parting

“Not only does reality resist those who still criticize it, but it also abandons those who defend it. Maybe it is a way for reality to get its revenge from those who claim to believe in it for the sole purpose of eventually transforming it: sending back its supporters to their own desires.”

Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007) French sociologist and philosopher

1990s, Radical Thought (1994)

Way, Support, Revenge, Reality

“Certain knowledge of what to fight for, and what to fight against, gives meaning to life and provides its own version of discipline: never give up. That kind of meaning is illusory, I now believe, and blinkered. Fealty to a mystical absolute is a formula for disaster, especially in transformative times.”

Stewart Brand book Whole Earth Discipline

Whole Earth Discipline (2009), page 210.

Life, Knowledge, Time, Fight

“Vertically striped sheets of paper, the bands of which are 8.7 cms wide, alternate white and colored, are stuck over internal and external surfaces: walls, fences, display windows, etc.; and/or cloth/canvas support, vertical stripes, white and colored bands each 8.7 cms, the two ends covered with dull white paint.
I record that this is my work for the last four years, without any evolution or way out. This is the past: it does not imply either that it will be the same for another ten or fifteen years or that it will change tomorrow.
The perspective we are beginning to have, thanks to these past four years, allows a few considerations of the direct and indirect implications for the very conception of art. This apparent break (no research, or any formal evolution for four years) offers a platform that we shall situate at zero level, when the observations both internal (conceptual transformation as regards the action/praxis of a similar form) and external (work/production presented by others) are numerous and rendered all the easier as they are not invested in the various surrounding movements, but are rather derived from their absence.”

Daniel Buren (1938) sculptor from France

" Beware!" ("Mise en garde!") http://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/buren1.pdf, in Konzeption/Conception, translated by Charles Harrison and Peter Townsend (Leverkusen: Stadtischer Museum, 1969. 1960s

Art, Color, Way, Support

“Cajal revealed the precision of the interconnections between populations of individual nerve cells. Mountcastle, Hubel, and Wiesel revealed the functional significance of those patterns of interconnections. They showed that the connections filter and transform sensory information on the way to and within the cortex, and that the cortex is organized into functional compartments, or modules.”

Eric R. Kandel (1929) American neuropsychiatrist

In Search of Memory (2006)

Way

“The essence of liberalism is negotiation, a cautious half measure, in the hope that the definitive dispute, the decisive bloody battle, can be transformed into a parliamentary debate and permit the decision to be suspended forever in an everlasting discussion.”

Carl Schmitt (1888–1985) German jurist, political theorist and professor of law

Political Theology (1922), Ch. 4 : On the Counterrevolutionary Philosophy of the State

Hope, Decision

“God is not a basis for interpreting the world, but the fact which really transforms it.”

Friedrich-Wilhelm Marquardt (1928–2002) German theologian

"Socialism in the Theology of Karl Barth"

God, World

“My dear friends! We move everything back to front. What we are doing is wrong and contrary to Nature. Nature moves in other ways. She primarily employs drawing, i. e. sucking energies, since these are indispensable to Nature for the growth and maintenance of life. Nature uses pressure energies and explosive forces only for reducing quality and destruction. Atomic physicists also work upside down. They would be more correct if they started with simple nuclear fusion. They should set about the cold transformation of hydrogen into helium, as Nature has done over the millions of years of Creation. Today's technology has a tiger by the tail, because it splits the heaviest atoms with the greatest development of heat and an enormous expenditure of energy.”

Viktor Schauberger (1885–1958) austrian philosopher and inventor

Alick Bartholomew: The Schauberger Keys

Life, Way, Nature, Drawing

“The university is being called upon to educate previously unimagined numbers of students; to respond to the expanding claims of national service; to merge its activities with industry as never before. Characteristic of this transformation is the growth of the knowledge industry, which is coming to permeate government and business, and to draw into it more and more people raised to higher and higher levels of skill. The production, distribution and consumption of knowledge is said to account for 29 percent of gross national product, and knowledge production is growing at about twice the rate of the rest of the economy. What the railroads did for the second half of the last century, and the automobile for the first half of this century, may be done for the second half of this century by the knowledge industry; and that is, to serve as the focal point for national growth.”

Clark Kerr (1911–2003) American academic

David Lance Goines, 1993, The Free Speech Movement: Coming of Age in the 1960's, Ten Speed Press, p. 49.

People, Education, Business, Knowledge

“Transformation: Compassion and loving kindness can transform an enemy into a friend, while right view and wisdom can transform suffering into happiness.”

Thich Nhat Tu (1969) Vietnamese philosopher

Buddhist Socteriological Ethics: A Study of the Buddha’s Central Teachings (1999)

Love, Wisdom, Suffering, Happiness

“We find here the final application of the doctrine of objective immortality. Throughout the perishing occasions in the life of each temporal Creature, the inward source of distaste or of refreshment, the judge arising out of the very nature of things, redeemer or goddess of mischief, is the transformation of Itself, everlasting in the Being of God. In this way, the insistent craving is justified — the insistent craving that zest for existence be refreshed by the ever-present, unfading importance of our immediate actions, which perish and yet live for evermore.”

Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) English mathematician and philosopher

1920s, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (1929)

Life, God, Way, Nature

“From the power to transform him into a thing by killing him there proceeds another power, and much more prodigious, that which makes a thing of him while he still lives.”

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

Du pouvoir de transformer un homme en chose en le faisant mourir procède un autre pouvoir, et bien autrement prodigieux, celui de faire une chose d'un homme qui reste vivant.
in The Simone Weil Reader, p. 155
Simone Weil : An Anthology (1986), The Iliad or The Poem of Force (1940-1941)

“I had become interested in economics, an interest that was transformed into a lifetime dedication when I met with the mathematical theory of general economic equilibrium.”

Gérard Debreu (1921–2004) French economist and mathematician

" Gerard Debreu - Biographical http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economic-sciences/laureates/1983/debreu-bio.html". in: Les Prix Nobel. The Nobel Prizes 1983, Editor Wilhelm Odelberg, [Nobel Foundation], Stockholm, 1984; Republished at Nobelprize.org. Nobel Media AB 2014.

Mathematics

“Repression is the response of an increasingly desperate imperialist ruling clique to contain an otherwise uncontrollable and growing popular disaffection leading ultimately, we think, to the revolutionary transformation of society.”

Angela Davis (1944) American political activist, scholar, and author

If They Come in The Morning (1971)

Thinking

“Vyasa’s words had trasnsformatory power according to legend. A group of people in Bengal regard themselves as brahmins, because Vyasa once called them Brahmins; hence they are “Vyasokta” brahmins. The myth of their origin tells how Vyasa once hailed some people on the opposite bank of a river, mistaking them for brahmins in the early morning-mist. In fact, they were fishermen mending their nets rather than Brahmins doing their morning worship rites, but because he had greeted them as Brahmins and his words could not be false, his speech transformed them to Brahmins.”

Vyasa central and revered figure in most Hindu traditions

Prof Ralph Nicholos, in p. 50.
Sources, Seer of the Fifth Veda: Kr̥ṣṇa Dvaipāyana Vyāsa in the Mahābhārata

People, Falseness

“Sometimes I wonder, laying in a great black stripe on a canvas, what animal bones (or horns) are making the furrows of my picture… black grows deeper and deeper, darker and darker before me. It menaces me like a black gullet. I can bear it no longer. It is monstrous. It is unfathomable. As the thought comes to me to exorcise and transform this black with a white drawing, it has already become a surface.”

Hans Hofmann (1880–1966) American artist

Robert Motherwell, in a catalog note to the show Black or White (1950)
Misattributed

Animals, Drawing

“The significance of feminist movement (when it is not co-opted by opportunistic, reactionary forces) is that it offers a new ideological meeting ground for the sexes, a space for criticism, struggle, and transformation.”

Bell Hooks (1952) American author, feminist, and social activist

(1984)

Sex

“I wish to propose a doctrine which may, I fear, appear wildly paradoxical and subversive. The doctrine in question is this: that it is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it true. I must, of course, admit that if such an opinion became common it would completely transform our social life and our political system; since both are at present faultless, this must weigh against it.”

Carl Sagan book Contact

Source: Contact (1985), Chapter 2 (p. 15, quoting Bertrand Russell)

Life, Fear, Question, Appearance

“Only what is fated to die is capable of living. Only what dies lives. Why do you think Christ was killed? They killed him to prove that he wasn’t a god. But in killing him, they immortalized the perishable and transformed man into a god.”

Giannina Braschi (1953) Puerto Rican writer

Empire of Dreams (prose poetry, 1988)

God, Fate, Thinking, Christ

“By necrophilia is meant love for all that is violence and destruction; the desire to kill; the worship of force; attraction to death, to suicide, to sadism; the desire to transform the organic into the inorganic by means of "order." The necrophile, lacking the necessary qualities to create, in his impotence finds it easy to destroy because for him it serves only one quality: force.”

Erich Fromm (1900–1980) German social psychologist and psychoanalyst

Credo (1965)

Love, Death, Suicide

“Inherent in human beings are possibilities which we now can't even entertain. Before the space launch, space travel to many of us was the stuff of fantasy, of science fiction. We know what it is to explore the limits of what we consider to be a human being, but if we were to transform our understanding of ourselves, if we were to transform what we knew a human being to be, new possibilities of expression would open. We could function in a more creative way. In a more humane way. In the past we were transformed by the thrust of evolution or by accidental forces. This time we should transform ourselves with a conscious, committed degree of self-awareness.”

Werner Erhard (1935) Critical Thinker and Author

Interview with USA Today, "Mankind Must Find a New Self Awareness", Dan Neuharth and Miles White, December 14, 1982

Way, Travel, Understanding, Science

“I am concerned about information and technical processes that affect the change in human behavior, the changing forms of interaction between people. Mankind is in a hectic state, and the concentration of people’s attention exclusively on their internal thinking processes is transformed into a permanent meditative state in which people remain even when they go out and appear in public. I’ve watched it many times. These changes will ultimately change humans, and such people as me or you, most probably, will cease to exist. There will be others, and we will most likely be the last of Homo sapiens.”

Nicholas Ovcharov (1988) Ukrainian writer and film director

"The Interaction: modern media art in Ukraine" in EMPR (19 March 2018) https://empr.media/culture/movie/the-inetraction-modern-media-art-in-ukraine/

People, Behavior, Thinking, Appearance

“What "late" generally conveys is rather the sense that something has changed, that things are different, that we have gone through a transformation of the life world which is somehow decisive but incomparable with the older convulsions of modernization and industrialization, less perceptible and dramatic, somehow, but more permanent precisely because more thoroughgoing and all-pervasive.”

Fredric Jameson (1934) American academic

Introduction
Postmodernism: Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991)

Life, World, Decision, Sense

“To explore the countercurrents of consciousness in a given circumstance—uncertain promises of other futures; to trace the struggle between spirit and structure in every domain of social and cultural life; to show how vision becomes embodied in institutions and practices and, in being embodied, is both undermined and corrected, but in any event transformed; to reveal how we forfeit our freedom to imagine and reconstruct, and then regain it, even against our will; to commandeer alien wisdom the better to criticize the established order and present experience; to give voice to what has lost a voice or not yet gained one; to display in every department of our experience, from the micro to the macro and from passion to calculation, the revolt of the infinite within us against the finite around us—all this is the work of the humanities when they recognize us for what we are and might become.”

Roberto Mangabeira Unger book The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound

124
The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound (2007)

Life, Wisdom, Imagination, Freedom

“It is a special kind of secret how these Asiatic elements [of American Indians] came over the Bering Strait long ago. It's the same with the coyote. When I worked with the coyote [this quote refers to the performance by Beuys when he was locked up together with a coyote in a cage for a few days in René Block Gallery, New York City in 1974], I had the idea that it was not an indigenous animal. It came as a wolf with the Indians over the Bering Strait. And this Asiatic wolf, or step wolf, changed his whole biological configuration and behavior. Then it was my idea to import the coyote once more back to Europe, and you could see it [the coyote] change back to the European wolf or Siberian wolf. It is a transformed European wolf, the coyote, how it came to the character of a brush wolf.”

Joseph Beuys (1921–1986) German visual artist

Quote of Beuys in an interview with Alan Moore and Edit deAk, 1974; as cited in: Joseph Beuys in America: Energy Plan for the Western Man., Carin Kuoni; New York, 1993, p. 213
1970's

Secret, Behavior, Quotes, Idea

“Masculine process has at its foundation externalization. The young boy is focused away from his inner and personal self and into achievement, performance, competition, success, emotional control (being "cool"), autonomy (not being dependent or needy), fearlessness, action, and an ethic that only values time spent in doing. Anything else is suspect and viewed as lazy, worthless, time-wasting, or meaningless.Externalization, or the process of being pushed outside of oneself, amplifies and eventually becomes disconnection. Personal relationships are then objectified and founded on the role another can play in his life. Relationships are based on doing and are therefore fairly readily interchangeable with anyone else who can do.Disconnection leads men to the experience of being loners, where it's "lonely at the top," and freedom, space, and "doing one's thing," are the rationalized values. Disconnection transforms a man into someone who has everything he wanted externally, but has nothing that is bonded or connected on a personal level. He is "out of touch," so he doesn't know why he's unhappy, and may conclude that the cause of his malaise is that he needs "more." He sets out to get it, but when he gets it he feels deader and more isolated than ever.The end stage of this journey of masculine process is personal oblivion, which can occur early in his life or may not appear full blown until he's an older man, depending on how extreme his externalized process is. At this point, personal connection becomes impossible. He doesn't know he rationalizes his personal emptiness with cynical philosophies and escapes painful awareness through non-relationships he can control by buying. In the end state of oblivion, he is beyond personal reach and can only relate in abstract, depersonalized, intellectualized ways. The only way he is "loved" is in return for providing or taking care of others.”

Herb Goldberg (1937–2019) American psychologist

The Personal Journey of Masculinity: From Externalization to Disconnection to Oblivion, pp. 10–11
What Men Still Don't Know About Women, Relationships, and Love (2007)

Love, Life, Men, Pain