Quotes about transition
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“Europe could be Islamic by the end of the twenty-first century. … Will tourists in Paris in the year 2015 take a moment to visit the "mosque of Notre Dame" and the "Eiffel Minaret?" Through massive immigration and official dhimmitude from European leaders, Muslims are accomplishing today what they have failed to do at the time of the Crusaders: conquer Europe. If demographic trends continue, France, Holland, and other Western European nations could have Muslim majorities by middle of this century. … What Europe has long sown it is now reaping. In her book Eurabia, Bat Ye'or, the pioneering historian of dhimmitude, chronicles how this has come to pass. Europe, she explains, began thirty years ago to travel down a path of appeasement, accommodation, and cultural abdication in pursuit of shortsighted political and economic benefits. She observes that today, "Europe has evolved from a Judeo-Christian civilization, with important post-Enlightenment/secular elements, to a 'civilization of dhimmitude,' i. e., Eurabia: a secular-Muslim transitional society with its traditional Judeo-Christian mores rapidly disappearing." … France and Germany have pursued a different strategy, attempting to establish the European Union as a global counterweight of the United States—a strategy that involves close cooperation with the Arab League.”

Robert Spencer (1962) American author and blogger

The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam, 2005, ISBN 0-89526-013-1, pp. 221-224 http://books.google.com/books?id=_7RD2jwMU2wC&pg=PA221

Books, Travel, Time

“There is no death! Death only exists for those who cannot accept evolution. Everything changes. Death is a transition from movement to movement. Death is static. Death is movement. Death is static. Death is movement.”

Jean Tinguely (1925–1991) Swiss painter and sculptor

reprinted in 'Zero', ed. Otto Piene and Heinz Mack, Cambridge, Mass; MIT Press 1973, p. 119
Quotes, 1960's, untitled statements in 'Zero 3', (1961)

Death, Change

“Gandhi arrived in South Africa in 1893 at the age of 23. Within a week he collided head on with racism. His immediate response was to flee the country that so degraded people of color, but then his inner resilience overpowered him with a sense of mission, and he stayed to redeem the dignity of the racially exploited, to pave the way for the liberation of the colonized the world over and to develop a blueprint for a new social order.
He left 21 years later, a near maha atma (great soul). There is no doubt in my mind that by the time he was violently removed from our world, he had transited into that state.
He was no ordinary leader. There are those who believe he was divinely inspired, and it is difficult not to believe with them. He dared to exhort nonviolence in a time when the violence of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had exploded on us; he exhorted morality when science, technology and the capitalist order had made it redundant; he replaced self-interest with group interest without minimizing the importance of self. In fact, the interdependence of the social and the personal is at the heart of his philosophy. He seeks the simultaneous and interactive development of the moral person and the moral society.”

Nelson Mandela (1918–2013) President of South Africa, anti-apartheid activist

2000s, The Sacred Warrior (2000)

People, Age, World, Color

“I was pretty health-conscious even before going vegan. The transition came after I watched '. After that I went pescatarian for a while, but I went deeper and deeper with research. … Part of why I stopped eating meat is because the more acid is in your body, the harder it is for muscles to recover.”

Wilson Chandler (1987) American basketball player

"The Real-Life Diet of Wilson Chandler, Nuggets Forward and Vegan" https://www.gq.com/story/wilson-chandler-real-life-vegan-diet, interview with GQ (December 6, 2016).

Health, Parting

“We should therefore, with grace and optimism, embrace NOMA's tough-minded demand: Acknowledge the personal character of these human struggles about morals and meanings, and stop looking for definite answers in nature's construction. But many people cannot bear to surrender nature as a “transitional object”—a baby's warm blanket for our adult comfort. But when we do (for we must), nature can finally emerge in her true form: not as a distorted mirror of our needs, but as our most fascinating companion. Only then can we unite the patches built by our separate magisteria into a beautiful and coherent quilt called wisdom.”

Stephen Jay Gould book Rocks of Ages

Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life (Ballantine, 1999), p. 178

Wisdom, People, Beauty, Optimism

“To comprehend evolutionary Theory, one must first understand that it’s only ever a matter of changing proportions –altering or enhancing existing features to build on what is already there. Developmental biology, genetics, and comparative morphology combine to confirm many of these taxonomic stages such that organs do not seem to have appeared abruptly or fully-formed as if out of nowhere, because there is an implied evolutionary origin evident in every case. Even the transition of fish-to-tetrapods, dinosaurs-to-birds, or apes-to-men are each are just a matter of incremental, superficial changes being slowly compiled atop successive tiers of fundamental similarities. These represent monophyletic clades which will forever encompass all the descendants of that clade. This is why birds are still dinosaurs, and humans are still apes, and both are still stegocephalian chordates.”

Aron Ra (1962) Aron Ra is an atheist activist and the host of the Ra-Men Podcast

"11th Foundational Falsehood of Creationism" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dm277H3ot6Y, Youtube (June 26, 2008) Youtube, Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism

Men, Understanding, Bird, Fish

“This theme of mismeasurement interacts with the designation of the one hundred years between 1870 and 1970 as the “special century.” Measurement errors are greatest in the early years, both in the scope of the standard of living and in the extent of price index bias. Clearly the welfare benefits to consumers in the categories of life entirely omitted from GDP were greatest long ago: the transition from the scrub board to the automatic washing machine was a more important contributor to consumer welfare than the shift from manual to electronic washing machine controls or from a twelve-pound tub to an eighteen pound tub. The most important unmeasured benefit of all, the extension of life expectancy, occurred much more rapidly from 1890 to 1950 than afterward.”

Robert J. Gordon (1940) American economist

Source: The Rise and Fall of American Growth, 2016, p. 13

Life, Error

“There's that popular misconception of man as something between a brute and an angel. Actually man is in transit between brute and God.”

Norman Mailer book The Naked and the Dead

Gen. Edward Cummings, in Pt. 1, Ch. 11
The Naked and the Dead (1948)

God, Angels

“And I often dream of chemistry at night, dreams that conflate the past and the present, the grid of the periodic table transformed to the grid of Manhattan. […] Sometimes, too, I dream of the indecipherable language of tin (a confused memory, perhaps, of its plaintive “cry”). But my favorite dream is of going to the opera (I am Hafnium), sharing a box at the Met with the other heavy transition metals—my old and valued friends—Tantalum, Rhenium, Osmium, Iridium, Platinum, Gold, and Tungsten.”

Oliver Sacks book Uncle Tungsten

Source: Uncle Tungsten (2001), p. 317

Dreams, Memory, Past, Cry

“What constitutes the primordium of the adult parasite [ Rhizocephala ]? What can be injected through the narrow opening of the dart's hypodermic device? …Imagine going through such complexity as nauplius, cyprid, and kentrogon - and then paring yourself down to just a few cells for a quick and hazardous transition to the adult stage. What a minimal bridge at such a crucial transition! …But other species have achieved the ultimate reduction to a single cell! The dart injects just one cell into the host's interior, and the two parts of the life cyle maintain their indispensable continuity by an absolutely minimal connection - as though, within the rhizocephalan life cycle, nature has inserted a stage analogous to the fertilized egg that establishes minimal connection between generations in ordinary sexual organisms.”

Stephen Jay Gould book Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms

Triumph of the Root-Heads, p. 363
Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms (1998)

Life, Imagination, Nature, Parting

“If I don't get a chance to play with my son in the morning, I feel like I missed something that I'll never get back. It's such a joy to wake up and be in the mindset of a five-year-old before transitioning into the role of "executive."”

Biz Stone (1974) American blogger; co-founder of Twitter

"The co-founder of Twitter plays with his son for an hour every morning—here's why" https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/22/twitter-co-founder-biz-stone-starts-each-morning-playing-with-his-son.html, in CNBC.com (22 May 2018).

Feeling, Chance, Joy

“An autonomous electorate, free because it is free from indoctrination and manipulation, would indeed be on a “level of articulate opinion and ideology” which is not likely to be found. Therefore, the concept has to be rejected as “unrealistic”—has to be if one accepts the factually prevailing level of opinion and ideology as prescribing the valid criteria for sociological analysis. And—if indoctrination and manipulation have reached the stage where the prevailing level of opinion has become a level of falsehood, where the actual state of affairs is no longer recognized as that which it is, then an analysis which is methodologically committed to reject transitive concepts commits itself to a false consciousness. Its very empiricism is ideological.”

Herbert Marcuse book One-Dimensional Man

Source: One-Dimensional Man (1964), p. 117

Falseness

“The land of the living was not far removed from the domain of the ancestors. There was coming and going between them, especially at festivals and also when an old man died, because an old man was very close to the ancestors. A man's life from birth to death was a series of transition rites which brought him nearer and nearer to his ancestors.”

Chinua Achebe book Things Fall Apart

Source: Things Fall Apart (1958), Chapter 13 (p. 115)

Life, Death, Birth

“We have entered a time of global transition marked by uniquely contradictory trends. Regional and continental associations of States are evolving ways to deepen cooperation and ease some of the contentious characteristics of sovereign and nationalistic rivalries. National boundaries are blurred by advanced communications and global commerce, and by the decisions of States to yield some sovereign prerogatives to larger, common political associations. At the same time, however, fierce new assertions of nationalism and sovereignty spring up, and the cohesion of States is threatened by brutal ethnic, religious, social, cultural or linguistic strife. Social peace is challenged on the one hand by new assertions of discrimination and exclusion and, on the other, by acts of terrorism seeking to undermine evolution and change through democratic means.”

Boutros Boutros-Ghali (1922–2016) 6th Secretary-General of the United Nations

An Agenda for Peace : Preventive diplomacy, peacemaking and peace-keeping (1992) - online text https://archive.is/20120530041405/www.un.org/Docs/SG/agpeace.html. 1990s

Peace, Way, Spring, Communication

“Ever since prehistoric antiquity one field of study after another has crossed the divide between what the historian might call its prehistory as a science and its history proper. These transitions to maturity have seldom been so sudden or so unequivocal as my necessarily schematic discussion may have implied. But neither have they been historically gradual, coextensive, that is to say, with the entire development of the fields within which they occurred.”

Thomas Kuhn book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

Source: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), II. The Route to Normal Science, p. 22 (2012 ed.)

History, Study, Science

“Cynthia: To be honest, I've been rethinking things lately. I mean, I'm still a Christian, but I'm definitely transitioning.
Janis: Really? Is your mom letting you do hormones? Mine won't.”

Alison Bechdel book Dykes to Watch Out For

#457, "Son Goddess" (2005), collected in Invasion of the DTWOF (2005).
Dykes to Watch Out For

Moms

“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

“To approach Chopin, you have to separate him completely from Schumann. Schumann admired Chopin very much and saw him as friend, but - what only few people know - Chopin himself had much less interest in and esteem for Schumann. In detail: Schumann’s works follow on from a transitional period determined by the successors of Viennese Classicism, particularly Beethoven. Just as the sons of Bach espoused the ‘galant,’ ornamented style of their generation, so the pupils of Mozart and Beethoven - Hummel, Ries, Czerny, Moscheles - took pains to compensate for a thinner musical substance with increased instrumental brilliance and thus prepared the ground for the golden age of the piano and the era of the Romantic virtuoso. Among the multitude of composers writing for the piano at that time, only two - Weber and Schubert - stand out as original creative forces.”

Burkard Schliessmann classical pianist

Talkings about Chopin and Schumann

Pain, People, Age, Music

“As the city continues to grow, the costs of congestion – to our health, to our environment, and to our economy – are only going to get worse. The question is not whether we want to pay but how do we want to pay. With an increased asthma rate? With more greenhouse gases? Wasted time? Lost business? And higher prices? Or, do we charge a modest fee to encourage more people to take mass transit?”

Michael Bloomberg (1942) American businessman and politician, former mayor of New York City

http://mikebloomberg.com/en/issues/environment_sustainability/mayor_michael_bloomberg_delivers_planyc_a_greener_greater_new_york
Environment

People, Health, Question, Business

“My narrative may be invaded by inaccuracy and confusion; but if I live no longer, I will, at least, live to complete it. What but ambiguities, abruptnesses, and dark transitions, can be expected from the historian who is, at the same time, the sufferer of these disasters?”

Charles Brockden Brown (1771–1810) American novelist, historian and editor

Wieland; or, the Transformation (1798)

Suffering, Time

“Some people have come to me and said: "O leader, we wish you would form a party, thus saving us from these parties and groupings. My answer was that we are in a period of transition and that my party is the entire people, and I belong to the party of the people. All of us are the party of God, party of right and justice.”

Abd al-Karim Qasim (1914–1963) Prime Minister of Iraq

Speech delivered in the gardens of the Shaab Hall (May 1, 1959)
Principles of the 14th July Revolution (1959)

God, People, Justice

“I say looking at the next 100 years that there are two trends in the world today. The first trend is toward what we call a type one civilization, a planetary civilization… The danger is the transition between type zero and type one and that’s where we are today. We are a type zero civilization. We get our energy from dead plants, oil and coal. But if you get a calculator you can calculate when we will attain type one status. The answer is: in about 100 years we will become planetary. We’ll be able to harness all the energy output of the planet earth. We’ll play with the weather, earthquakes, volcanoes. Anything planetary we will play with. The danger period is now, because we still have the savagery. We still have all the passions. We have all the sectarian, fundamentalist ideas circulating around, but we also have nuclear weapons. …capable of wiping out life on earth. So I see two trends in the world today. The first trend is toward a multicultural, scientific, tolerant society and everywhere I go I see aspects of that birth. For example, what is the Internet? Many people have written about the Internet. Billions and billions of words written about the Internet, but to me as a physicist the Internet is the beginning of a type one telephone system, a planetary telephone system. So we’re privileged to be alive to witness the birth of type one technology… And what is the European Union? The European Union is the beginning of a type one economy. And how come these European countries, which have slaughtered each other ever since the ice melted 10,000 years ago, how come they have banded together, put aside their differences to create the European Union? …so we’re beginning to see the beginning of a type one economy as well…”

Michio Kaku (1947) American theoretical physicist, futurist and author

"Will Mankind Destroy Itself?" http://bigthink.com/videos/will-mankind-destroy-itself (29 September 2010)

Life, People, World, Idea

“When closed societies collapse but fail to make the transition to openness the reason need not be that they languish in anarchy or suffer a return to dictatorship. It may be that they adopt an illiberal form of democracy. Along with the liberal democratic tradition that goes back to Locke and the English civil war there is a tradition, originating in the French Revolution and formulated theoretically by Rousseau, which understands democracy as the expression of popular will. The elective theocracy that is emerging in much of post-Saddam Iraq is a democratic polity in the latter sense, as is the current regime in Iran; so is the Hamas government in Palestine… To be sure, these regimes often lack freedom of information and expression and legal limitations on government power, which are essential features of democracy in the liberal tradition. In these respects they are closed societies, but they are not dictatorships. It is often forgotten that democracy, defined chiefly by elections and the exercise of power in the name of the majority, can be as repressive of individual freedom and minority rights as dictatorship - sometimes more so.”

John Gray (1948) British philosopher

'George Soros and the Open Society' (p.116-7)
Gray's Anatomy: Selected Writings (2009)

War, Exercises, Democracy, Understanding

“The kingdom is not an amorphous jumble of regions, but a closely organized state in which the character of one region is close to that of its neighbor. There are few sharp boundaries. Rather, the landscape is largely characterized by transitions …”

Peter Atkins (1940) British chemist

Source: Periodic Kingdom (1995), Chapter 1. The Terrain

“We have reached that delightful moment when 'Impressionism' is about to be born, when its light (the formula for which has yet to be found) is still only a hint, a caress, in the silvery snows of Monet or in the pale skies of Pissarro. Ah, how one would like to prolong this moment of hesitation for ever, this moment of transition, when transparent blue shadows are putting black shadows to flight and bitumen disappears!”

Edouard Manet (1832–1883) French painter

Source: Posthumous publications, Portrait of Manet by himself and his contemporaries (1960), p. 212.

Light

“I hope that in Egypt there can be a transition toward a more democratic system without a break from President Mubarak, who in the West, above all in the United States, is considered the wisest of men and a precise reference point.”

Silvio Berlusconi (1936) Italian politician

On Hosni Mubarak, in the relation to the 2011 Egyptian protests, as quoted in Berlusconi: Hosni Mubarak Is 'The Wisest Of Men http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/02/04/silvio-berlusconi-hosni-m_n_818651.html, in The Huffington Post (4 February 2011), and Berlusconi: Mubarak is a wise man at al Jazeera (February 2011) http://english.aljazeera.net/news/europe/2011/02/201124194950335734.html 2011

Men, Hope

“The last monk, upon entering, paused in the lock. He stood in the open hatchway and took off his sandals. "Sic transit mundus," he murmured, looking back at the glow. He slapped the soles of his sandals together, beating the dirt out of them.”

Walter M. Miller, Jr. book A Canticle for Leibowitz

Ch 30
A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959), Fiat Voluntas Tua

“Theresa May confirmed today that for years to come Britain will not have control of its borders. Instead we will have an unspecified transitional period after we leave, with no timeframe planned or announced. Yet again voters are being ignored by the political establishment. If Theresa May genuinely wanted to leave the EU then she would have used her speech today to announce that she is going to repeal the 1972 European Communities Act. We could be out of the EU within a single week. It is now over 200 days since the British people voted to leave the EU on June 23rd. The Tories seem to be doing everything they can to stall Brexit as long as they possibly can. We must be careful about Theresa May. When she was Home Secretary she gave several big speeches about controlling immigration. Then she opened the borders wider than the Labour Party. While some of the statements today sound good, her record for delivery is one of the worst for any politician in Westminster. We simply can’t trust her.”

Tim Aker (1985) British politician

Theresa May doesn’t want to control immigration http://www.timakermep.org/site/theresa-may-doesnt-want-to-control-immigration/ (January 17, 2017)

People, Home, Communication

“As a transitional condition, skepticism is logical insurrection; as a system, it is anarchy. Skeptical method would therefore be much the same as rule by insurgents.”

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829) German poet, critic and scholar

Als vorübergehender Zustand ist der Skeptizismus logische Insurrektion; als System ist er Anarchie. Skeptische Methode wäre also ungefähr wie insurgente Regierung.
#97, as translated in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings (1996), vol. 1, p. 136
Athenäum (1798 - 1800)

“All told, thanks to these various forms of freedom from the old-fashioned logistical dependence on one’s parents, children in Nordic countries have an easier time successfully managing the transition to adulthood. What a disaster, an American might think, that young people could end up on welfare straight out of school.”

Anu Partanen (1975) journalist

Source: The Nordic Theory of Everything, Chapter 3

Children, People, School, Fashion

“We are approaching a more fluid state. I have talked about cultural boiling. The idea of the phase-transition period which, in fractal mathematics, is the chaotic flux between one state and another. …Culturally, and as a species, we are approaching a phase-transition. I don’t know quite what that means, on a human level.”

Alan Moore (1953) English writer primarily known for his work in comic books

De Abaitua interview (1998)

Mathematics, Idea

“Today, the countries that had kept up a civilised relationship with Modi despite the US’s strictures—these include Japan, Singapore, Canada, Australia, Israel[, ] and even China—are happy with the knowledge that their transition to a new regime will be extra smooth. Nor will the others who changed their tune midway feel disadvantaged. It is only the US that invested politically in the witch-hunt against Modi that feels seriously threatened.”

Swapan Dasgupta (1955) Indian politician, journalist and columnist

"A mighty fall from a moral high ground", 2014

Feeling, Knowledge, Change, Country

“The Orestia shows that society is a defense against nature. Everything intelligible -- institutions, objects, persons, ideas -- is the result of Apollonian clarification, adjudication, and action. Western politics, science, psychology and art are creations of arrogant Apollo. Through every century, winning or losing, western mind has struggled to keep nature at bay. The Orestia’s sexist transition from matriarchy to patriarchy records the rebellion every imagination must make against nature. Without that rebellion, we as a species are condemned to regression or stasis. Even rebelling, we cannot get far. But vying with fate is godlike.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 101

Fate, Art, Imagination, Intelligence

“We are in rapid transition today to a new world which threatens to be dominated by technological advance. In that new World. (1) man will have learned so much about nature's store of energy and its release that he will have the ability to virtually destroy civilization; (2) production, communication and transportation will all be "automatic" --these operations of man's material world will have become so vast and complex that they will have to proceed with a minimum of participation by man, his muscles, brains and senses; and (3) man will conquer space.”

Simon Ramo (1913–2016) Father of the ICBM

Ramo, Simon. " A new technique of education http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/1767/1/ramo.pdf." Engineering and science 21.1 (1957): 17-22.

World, Communication, Nature, Sense

“It should be underlined that while the democratic or state socialist believes that socialist governments will be peaceloving and nonviolent, the Marxist-Leninist believes this true of only the final, communist stage of stateless anarchy. The socialist transition period may well involve war with capitalist states, but while this inter-state war is to be avoided if at all possible in this age of nuclear weapons, the world-wide struggle against capitalism must be pursued by all means short of inter-state war. This would involve not only the arts of deception, disinformation, subversion, and demoralization, against capitalist states, but also terrorism and domestic wars through ‘national liberation fronts’. For the Marxist-Leninist, then, it is the communist system that is inherently peaceful, not the socialist intermediary state. This socialist stage means the purposeful, aggressive use of force and violence to pursue the final, global stage of communist peace and freedom.”

Rudolph Rummel (1932–2014) American academic

“Political Systems, Violence, and War,” chap. 14 in "Approaches to Peace: An Intellectual Map", edit, W. Scott Thompson and Kenneth M. Jensen, Washington, D.C., United States Institute of Peace, 1991, pp. 347-370; and “The Politics of Cold Blood,” Society, Vol. 27 (November/December, 1989) pp. 32-40

War, Age, World, Peace

“Suppose the reasoning centers of the brain can get their hands on the mechanisms that plop shapes into the array and that read their locations out of it. Those reasoning demons can exploit the geometry of the array as a surrogate for keeping certain logical constraints in mind. Wealth, like location on a line, is transitive: if A is richer than B, and B is richer than C, then A is richer than C. By using location in an image to symbolize wealth, the thinker takes advantage of the transitivity of location built into the array, and does not have to enter it into a chain of deductive steps. The problem becomes a matter of plop down and look up. It is a fine example of how the form of a mental representation determines what is easy or hard to think.”

Steven Pinker book How the Mind Works

Source: How the Mind Works (1997), p. 291

Problem, Thinking, Reading, Wealth

“We Europeans have to toil to achieve it, at least as a transitional stage, for it is what we feed our dreams upon. These Orientals [from India] have it in their blood, perhaps because they spend their lives I the sun. We poor wretched Europeans must sacrifice body and soul for even a shadow of it… It is not a question of trying to reproduce objective features, only of good practice for the fingers and for the perceptive faculty, and that too is very useful. You must have read how Van Gogh was always getting his brother to send him drawings to copy. And how Rembrandt used to copy Indian an Italian pictures. Not of course, because they were short of material, but to get 'du corps'. So one should be always drawing… Oh, you'd love the Indians. The pure, Aryan Indians, not those one could see in Berlin, whose forms had become rigid and sterile through mingling with the Chinese.”

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880–1938) German painter, sculptor, engraver and printmaker

Letter to Nele van de Velde ((daughter of Henry van de Velde), from Frauenkirch, 1919/20; as quoted in Letters of the great artists – from Blake to Pollock, Richard Friedenthal, Thames and Hudson, London, 1963, pp. 224-225
1916 - 1919

Love, Dreams, Soul, Question

“Bridges are thresholds to other realities, archetypal, primal symbols of shifting consciousness. They are passageways, conduits, and connectors that connote transitioning, crossing borders, and changing perspectives. Bridges span liminal (threshold) spaces between worlds, spaces I call nepantla, a Nahuatl word meaning tierra entre medio. Transformations occur in this in-between space, an unstable, unpredictable, precarious, always-in-transition space lacking clear boundaries. Nepantla es tierra desconocida, and living in this liminal zone means being in a constant state of displacement--an uncomfortable, even alarming feeling. Most of us dwell in nepantla so much of the time it’s become a sort of “home.””

Gloria E. Anzaldúa (1942–2004) Chicana cultural theory, feminist theory, and queer theory

Though this state links us to other ideas, people, and worlds, we feel threatened by these new connections and the change they engender.
Original: (Un)natural bridges from This bridge we call home

People, World, Feeling, Home

“The historical record suggests that the transition to to a new hegemon has always been attended by what I have elsewhere called hegemonic war.”

Robert Gilpin (1930–2018) Political scientist

Source: The Political Economy of International Relations (1987), Chapter Nine, transformation Of The Global Economy, p. 351

War

“Many people think there are no transitional species because the only fossil forms they’re aware of at all are a handful of plastic pieces in a prehistoric play set. They’ve no idea how rich the fossil record is! We know of several hundred species just within dinosaurs, to say nothing of the thousands of examples of each of hundreds more taxa apart from that. Experts estimate that all the collective genera still roaming around now only amount to about 1% of all the species that have ever lived. Practically everything there ever was ain’t no more. Every species living today has definite relatives both extant and extinct, and evident in the fossil record. And in one sense, all of them, even the things still alive, count as transitional species.”

Aron Ra (1962) Aron Ra is an atheist activist and the host of the Ra-Men Podcast

"9th Foundational Falsehood of Creationism" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qfoje7jVJpU, Youtube (May 8, 2008) Youtube, Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism

People, Idea, Thinking, Sense

“It's been warmer than today's climate in the past, much warmer. It has been colder than this climate in the past, much colder. We know this for a fact. We know that this happens with or without our activities…. So why do we insist that we are the ones causing it when for over half a million years it happened several times and we’ve only had this supposedly evil earth killing CO2 belching technology a mere speck of that time? Because, many believe global warming is real and there are people in our political world who want the masses to hand over power over their lives to them, so they say "let us handle it". To make that transition easier, they trot out this false premise, that we are totally responsible for natural occurrences in the long span of our planetary history.”

Anthony Watts (1958) American television meteorologist

The adapability of man to his climate http://wattsupwiththat.com/2007/04/07/the-adapability-of-man-to-his-climate/, wattsupwiththat.com, April 7, 2007. 2007

People, World, History, Nature

“Chaos provides order. Chaotic agitation and motion are needed to create overall, repetitive order. This ‘order through fluctuations’ keeps dynamic markets stable and evolutionary processes robust. In essence, chaos is a phase transition that gives spontaneous energy the means to achieve repetitive and structural order.”

L. K. Samuels (1951) American writer

Source: In Defense of Chaos: The Chaology of Politics, Economics and Human Action, (2013), p. 135

“Social democrats will not lead European societies into socialism. Even if workers would prefer to live under socialism, the process of transition must lead to a crisis before socialism could be organized.”

Adam Przeworski (1940) Polish-American academic

Capitalism and social democracy (1985), Ch 1. Social Democracy as a Historical Phenomenon

“Interviewer: France has announced that it is planning to withdraw its troops from the Central African Republic at the end of the year. Is this good or bad news?
Catherine Samba-Panza: The international community, be it the United Nations, the European Union or friendly countries like France, has been helping us from the very first hours of the crisis. Regional organizations like the African Union have accompanied us throughout all our difficulties. However, this is very expensive. So all these countries and organizations need to consider up to which limit they are able to continue with their efforts. We took note of France's intention to start withdrawing their troops right at the end of the transitional period. We can all see that the French Sangaris mission is still of great help for the mission of the European Union as well as the UN peacekeeping mission MINUSCA. So I would say that it is a withdrawal, but not a total withdrawal”

Catherine Samba-Panza (1954) Central African politician

2010s, 2016

Communication, Effort, Help, Country

“No Bolshevik, no Communist, no intelligent socialist has ever entertained the idea of violence against the middle peasants. All socialists have always spoken of agreement with them and of their gradual and voluntary transition to socialism.”

Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) Russian politician, led the October Revolution

"Reply to a Peasant’s Question" (15 February 1919) http://marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1919/feb/14b.htm; Collected Works, Vol. 36, p. 501. 1910s

Intelligence, Idea

“We in South Africa had a relatively peaceful transition. If our madness could end as it did, it must be possible to do the same everywhere else in the world. If peace could come to South Africa, surely it can come to the Holy Land.”

Desmond Tutu (1931) South African churchman, politician, archbishop, Nobel Prize winner

Speech in Boston (2002)

World, Peace, Madness

“Among the various paradigmatic changes in science and mathematics in this century, one such change concerns the concept of uncertainty. In science, this change has been manifested by a gradual transition from the traditional view, which insists that uncertainty is undesirable in science and should be avoided by all possible means, to an alternative view, which is tolerant of uncertainty and insists that science cannot avoid it. According to the traditional view, science should strive for certainty in all its manifestations (precision, specificity, sharpness, consistency, etc.); hence, uncertainty (imprecision, nonspecificity, vagueness, inconsistency, etc.) is regarded as unscientific. According to the alternative (or modem) view, uncertainty is considered essential to science; it is not only an unavoidable plague, but it has, in fact, a great utility.”

George Klir (1932–2016) American computer scientist

Source: Fuzzy sets and fuzzy logic (1995), p. 1.

Mathematics, Science, Change

“Yet science is going to tell you that the only things worth describing are those phenomena that can be repeatedly triggered. This is being these are the only phenomena that science can describe and that's the name of the game as far as they are concerned. But we, to claim our freedom, to take advantage of the tiny moment between immense abysses of unknowability, perhaps death, perhaps other reincarnations, perhaps transitions into other life forms, these things we don't know, but in the moment of being human we have the unique opportunity to figure things out. And I have the faith that it is possible, sometime, somewhere, to have a conversation, perhaps no progress will be made until the ninth hour, but to have a conversation in which reality could be literally pulled to pieces, beyond the point of reconstructing.”

Terence McKenna (1946–2000) American ethnobotanist

Psychedelic Society (1984)

Life, Death, Faith, Game

“The first stage of the transition from the traditional view to the modem view of uncertainty began in the late 19th century, when physics became concerned with processes at the molecular level.”

George Klir (1932–2016) American computer scientist

Source: Fuzzy sets and fuzzy logic (1995), p. 1.

“Childhood is that time in which we never question the fact that every adult act is not only an autonomous occurrence in the universe, but that it is also filled, packed, overflowing with meaning, whether that meaning works for ill or good, whether the ill or good is or is not comprehended.
Adulthood is that time in which we see that all human actions follow forms, whether well or badly, and it is the perseverance of the forms that is, whether for better or worse, their meaning.
Various cultures make the transition at various ages, which transition period lasts for varying lengths of time, one accomplishing it in a week with careful dances, ancient prayers, and isolate and specified rituals; another, letting it take its own course, offering no help for it, and allowing it to run on frequently for years. But at the center of the changeover there is a period—whether it be a moment’s vision or a year-long suspicion—where the maturing youth sees all adult behavior as merely formal and totally meaningless.”

Samuel R. Delany book Tales of Nevèrÿon

Section 3 (p. 114)
Tales of Nevèrÿon (1979)

Youth, Age, Behavior, Question

“Money is always transitively valued. More money is supposedly always better than less money.”

Gregory Bateson (1904–1980) English anthropologist, social scientist, linguist, visual anthropologist, semiotician and cyberneticist

Source: Mind and Nature, a necessary unity, 1988, p. 56

Money

“Rosen would still demand, no doubt, an explanation of why the ruling class is so good at identifying and promoting its interests, while the majority is not. But, again, there is an obvious answer: for isn’t it generally quite easy to identify your short-term interests when the status quo is to your benefit? In such circumstances, you favor the status quo! In other words, if the status quo provides tangible benefits to the few—lots of money, prestige, and power—is it any surprise that the few are well-disposed to the status quo, and are particularly good at thinking of ways to tinker with the status quo (e. g., repeal the already minimal estate tax) to increase their money, prestige, and power? (The few can then promote their interests for exactly the reasons Marx identifies: they own the means of mental production.) By contrast, it is far trickier for the many to assess what is in their interest, precisely because it requires a counterfactual thought experiment, in addition to evaluating complex questions of socio-economic causation. More precisely, the many have to ascertain that (1) the status quo—the whole complex socio-economic order in which they find themselves--is not in their interests (this may be the easiest part); (2) there are alternatives to the status quo which would be more in their interest; and (3) it is worth the costs to make the transition to the alternatives—to give up on the bad situation one knows in order to make the leap in to a (theoretically) better unknown. Obstacles to the already difficult task of making determinations (1) and (2)—let alone (3)—will be especially plentiful, precisely because the few are strongly, and effectively (given their control of the means of mental production), committed to the denial of (1) and”

Brian Leiter (1963) American philosopher and legal scholar

2
"The Hermeneutics of Suspicion: Recovering Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud"

Money, Way, Question, Thinking

“Democracy for the cast majority of the people, and suppression by force, i. e., exclusion from democracy, of the exploiters and oppressors of the people - this is the change democracy undergoes during the transition from capitalism to Communism.”

Vladimir Lenin book The State and Revolution

Marxism: Essential Writings, "The State and Revolution"
The State and Revolution (1917)

People, Democracy, Communication, Change

“The young people of this revolution have made their demands clear: authority must be handed over to a transitional presidential council approved by the people…Yemen’s people have charted the course of revolution and we will follow this course to its end. We have left our authoritarian past behind. Now, we ask our friends in Washington and Riyadh to help us build a democratic future.”

Tawakkol Karman (1979) Yemeni journalist, politician, human rights activist, and Nobel Peace Prize recipient

2010s, Yemen’s Unfinished Revolution, 2011

People, Past, Future, Help

“Many, and I think the determining, constitutive facts remain outside the reach of the operational concept. And by virtue of this limitation—this methodological injunction against transitive concepts which might show the facts in their true light and call them by their true name—the descriptive analysis of the facts blocks the apprehension of facts and becomes an element of the ideology that sustains the facts. Proclaiming the existing social reality as its own norm, this sociology fortifies in the individuals the “faithless faith” in the reality whose victims they are.”

Herbert Marcuse book One-Dimensional Man

Source: One-Dimensional Man (1964), p. 119

Faith, Thinking, Reality, Light

“Since we proposed punctuated equilibria to explain trends, it is infuriating to be quoted again and again by creationists—whether through design or stupidity, I do not know—as admitting that the fossil record includes no transitional forms. Transitional forms are generally lacking at the species level, but they are abundant between larger groups.”

Stephen Jay Gould book Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes

"Evolution as Fact and Theory", p. 260
Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes (1983)

Stupidity, Quotes

“We are now in a period of social transition, a period characterized, that is, by an unusually rapid rate of change of the most important economic, social, political, and cultural institutions of society. This transition is from the type of society which we have called capitalist or bourgeois to a to a type of society which we shall call managerial.”

James Burnham (1905–1987) American philosopher

Source: The Managerial Revolution, 1941, p. 71; cited in: Robert Manley (ed) (1962) Age of the manager http://archive.org/stream/ageofmanager00manl#page/n15/mode/2up. p. xiii

Change

“How could I have died and gone to hell without noticing the transition?”

Lois McMaster Bujold Vorkosigan Saga

Vorkosigan Saga, Borders of Infinity (1989)

Hell

“On reflection, it is not even clear if military power is a transitive relationship. Until we have defined more explicitly how we are going to measure military power, it is not clear that if A is more powerful than B, and B more powerful than C, that A is more powerful than C.”

Andrew Marshall (1921–2019) the director of the United States Department of Defense's Office of Net Assessment

Problems of Estimating Military Power, August 1966
Problems of Estimating Military Power (August 1966)

“We are harassing them and will go on harassing them until they are totally exhausted. This is not merely tactics of a definite kind—it is a strategy with a broad perspective, directed at definitive and total victory. The Russian defence always had preparation for the counter-offensive as its aim. The Russian war plan here follows the commandmant of Clausewitz, "Swift and powerful transition to the attack—the lightning sword of retribution — that is the most brilliant part of the defense.”

Semyon Timoshenko (1895–1970) Soviet military commander

Autumn, 1941. Quoted in "The Great Offensive: The Strategy of Coalition Warfare" - Page 116 - by Max Werner, Alexander Schriffin, Heinz Norden, Ruth Norden - 1943

War, Victory, Parting

“Second, in order that a macroscopic apparatus can be influenced by the presence of a microscopic event it has to be prepared in a metastable initial state—think of the Wilson camera and the Geiger counter. The microscopic event triggers a macroscopically visible transition into the stable state. Of course this is irreversible and is accompanied by a thermodynamic increase of entropy.”

Nico van Kampen (1921–2013) Dutch theoretical physicist

The Scandal of Quantum Mechanics (2008)

Thinking

“Chen is not only ahead of Steve Jobs in terms of turnaround speed, he has done something that both HP and Sun failed at: turned a hardware company into a software and services company, arguably something Jobs couldn't have done. … Jobs smartly decided to kill the process at Apple to transition that company to software and services. Jobs didn't understand how to do that and would have likely failed because he was just a hardware guy.”

Rob Enderle (1954) American financial analyst

BlackBerry's John Chen: Beating Jobs by Doing the Impossible in Three Years http://itbusinessedge.com/blogs/unfiltered-opinion/blackberrys-john-chen-beating-jobs-by-doing-the-impossible-in-three-years.html in IT Business Edge (26 January 2017)

Guy, Understanding, Sun, Speed

“The most effective leaders of companies in transition are the quiet, unassuming people whose inner wiring is such that the worst circumstances bring out their best. They're unflappable, they're ready to die if they have to. But you can trust that, when bad things are happening, they will become clearheaded and focused.”

James C. Collins book Good to Great

Source: Good to Great, 2001, p. 46

People

“Summing up, Nanoscale Communication Networks is a demanding but also very interesting book, an ambitious primer. It is definitely a good starting point for further reading. The author guides the reader through all the aspects of nanonetworks, giving in most cases a clear description of his thinking process within transitions between equations. There are also many cross references between chapters and sections which give a broader view of the topic and help to memorize it. One can also find many pictures, diagrams and tables throughout this book in order to systematize the presented knowledge.”

Stephen F Bush

Book Reviews, REVIEWER: JAKUB PALIDER, NANOSCALE COMMUNICATION NETWORKS STEPHEN F. BUSH, ARTECH HOUSE, 2010, ISBN-13: 978-1-60807-003-9, HARDCOVER, 308 PAGES, IEEE Communications Magazine, August 2011.

Books, Communication, Knowledge, Thinking

“Whatever "Cold War system" there might once have been here is already defunct. There was never such a system in the minds of the opposed leaders, despite the peninsula’s tragic importance to Moscow and Washington. It might have been better if there had been. I’m not being flippant. Germans in East and West benefited from how each system tried to prove itself more compassionate and democratic, more conducive to its citizens' realization of their potential than the other. The relevant standards could hardly have been more different, but still. In contrast North and South Korea slid quickly into mutual nationalist recrimination, with each side accusing the other of subservience to a foreign power. This (not the over-weighted fact that Ossis and Wessis never clashed on the battlefield) is the main reason Bonn and East Berlin were able to maintain a coldly civil working relationship, routinizing mail service, family reunions, transit, etc, even at the height of Cold War tension.”

Brian Reynolds Myers (1963) American professor of international studies

2010s, Confederation Again (July 2018)

War, Family

“The current time is a period of transition, with a distinctive quality, characterizing the end of an epoch. Something – some age – is coming quite rapidly to an end.”

Nick Land (1962) British philosopher

"Time in Transition" https://web.archive.org/web/20121113235339/http://www.thatsmags.com/shanghai/article/777/time-in-transition (2011)

Age, Time

“The clean power plan is something that Senator Sanders has said he would delay implementing, which makes absolutely no sense. We need to implement all of the president’s executive actions and quickly move to make a bridge from coal to natural gas to clean energy. That is the way we will keep the lights on while we are transitioning to a clean energy future. And when I talk about resilience, I think that is an area we can get Republican support on.”

Hillary Clinton (1947) American politician, senator, Secretary of State, First Lady

Presidential campaign (April 12, 2015 – 2016), Democratic Presidential Debate in Miami (March 9, 2016)

Way, Support, Nature, Thinking

“The transition from proprietary architecture to open modular architecture just happens over and over again. It happened in the personal computer. Although it didn’t kill Apple’s computer business, it relegated Apple to the status of a minor player. … You also see modularity organized around the Android operating system that is growing much faster than the iPhone. So I worry that modularity will do its work on Apple.”

Clayton M. Christensen (1952–2020) Mormon academic

"Why Clayton Christensen Worries About Apple" in Forbes (7 May 2012) http://forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2012/05/07/why-clayton-christensen-worries-about-apple 2010s

Business, Personality

“The most remarkable aspect of the transition we are living through is not so much the passage from want to affluence as the passage from labour to leisure”

Henri Lefebvre (1901–1991) French philosopher

Henri Lefèbvre (2000) Everyday Life in the Modern World Second Revised Edition. p. 52
Other quotes

“We will work within the legal ambit to ensure that the transition of power takes place through an election. I believe that the judges at the courts played an active role in the coup. I think [the judges] were under the assumption that our government was planning on dismissing all the judges and was working towards replacing them. In fact, some judges have even told me that they thought that this was our plan. The judges thought that we were trying to take over the judiciary.”

Mohamed Nasheed (1967) Maldivian politician, 4th president of the Maldives

Quoted on Haveeru, "Nasheed warns of another 'possible coup'" http://www.haveeru.com.mv/news/53603, February 9, 2014.

Thinking

“Don't ever forget the moment you began to doubt, transitioning from fitting in to standing out.”

Drake (1986) Canadian rapper, singer, songwriter, record producer, and actor

"Say What's Real," So Far Gone (2009)
2000s

Forgetting

“These individual actions are really trans-actions instead of either individual behavior or the "exchange" of commodities. It is this shift from commodities and individuals to transactions and working rules of collective action that marks the transition from the classical and hedonic schools to the institutional schools of economic thinking. The shift is a change in the ultimate unit of economic investigation. The classic and hedonic economists, with their communistic and anarchistic offshoots, founded their theories on the relation of man to nature, but institutionalism is a relation of man to man. The smallest unit of the classic economists was a commodity produced by labor. The smallest unit of the hedonic economists was the same or similar commodity enjoyed by ultimate consumers. One was the objective side, the other the subjective side, of the same relation between the individual and the forces of nature. The outcome, in either case, was the materialistic metaphor of an automatic equilibrium, analogous to the waves of the ocean, but personified as "seeking their level." But the smallest unit of the institutional economists is a unit of activity -- a transaction, with its participants. Transactions intervene between the labor of the classic economists and the pleasures of the hedonic economists, simply because it is society that controls access to the forces of nature, and transactions are, not the "exchange of commodities," but the alienation and acquisition, between individuals, of the rights of property and liberty created by society, which must therefore be negotiated between the parties concerned before labor can produce, or consumers can consume, or commodities be physically exchanged.”

John R. Commons (1862–1945) United States institutional economist and labor historian

"Institutional Economics," 1931

Pleasure, School, Behavior, Nature

“Gaskell… had to keep his stately soldiers upright and uniformly oriented… by crafting the brain and spinal cord from an arthropod digestive tube, while forming a completely new gut below. …Gaskell thought that his move would rescue the theory of linear progress, with its necessary transition of arthropod into vertebrate, from the absurdities of the old inversion theory.”

Stephen Jay Gould book Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms

"Brotherhood by Inversion", p. 327
Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms (1998)

“I am not convinced that we need to shell out almost Php54 billion of public funds just to take over MRT-3. Mag-usap lang ng maayos ang DOTC (Department of Transportation and Communications) at MRTC (Metro Rail Transit Corporation), analyze and agree on terms and conditions to improve the state of affairs of our mass transport system.”

Francis Escudero (1969) Filipino politician

Escudero, F. [Francis]. (2014, October 14). Retrieved from Official Facebook Page of Francis Escudero https://www.facebook.com/senchizescudero/posts/10152749622355610/ 2014, Facebook

Communication

“A transition from an author's book to his conversation, is too often like an entrance into a large city, after a distant prospect. Remotely, we see nothing but spires of temples and turrets of palaces, and imagine it the residence of splendour, grandeur and magnificence; but when we have passed the gates, we find it perplexed with narrow passages, disgraced with despicable cottages, embarrassed with obstructions, and clouded with smoke.”

Samuel Johnson The Rambler

No. 14 (5 May 1750) http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/etcbin/toccer-new2?id=Joh1Ram.sgm&images=images/modeng&data=/texts/english/modeng/parsed&tag=public&part=14&division=div1 The Rambler (1750–1752)

Books, Imagination, Distant

“The fact that nobody asks you to sing is not an indication that you should sing louder. This sounds obvious until it's applied to matters like mass transportation. There are virtually no private mass transit companies. This does not represent the failure of the market to provide a needed service, it represents the failure of an unneeded service to go away!”

L. Neil Smith (1946) American writer

"Some New Tactical Reflections".

Failure, Singing

“Transit, Gallimard, Paris 2003”

Abdourahman A. Waberi (1965) Djiboutian writer

Works

“The New Deal is a phase of the transition process from capitalism to managerial society. The New Deal is not Stalinism and not Nazism. But no candid observer, friend or enemy of the New Deal, can deny that in terms of economic, social, political, ideological changes from traditional capitalism, the New Deal moves in the same direction as Stalinism and Nazism.”

James Burnham (1905–1987) American philosopher

Source: The Managerial Revolution, 1941, p. 203, as cited in: Albert Lepawsky (1949), Administration, p. 13

Change

“The nature of unemployment today is totally different from what it was a year ago. It is no longer caused by a deficiency of demand. There is no longer a potential surplus supply of the things we want. The transition to full employment is hindered by two obstacles. The first is due to the difficulty of shifting labour to the points where it is wanted. The second— and, for the time being, the chief—-obstacle is caused by the difficulties, other than the shortage of labour, in the way of existing demand becoming effective.”

John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) British economist

Source: How to Pay for the War (1940), Ch. 3 : Our Output Capacity and the National Income

Way, Nature, Time

“It’s hard to stand behind a people and culture in revolutionary transition when you are constantly worried about their irreplaceable and breakable artifacts.”

Grace Paley (1922–2007) American writer and activist

"The Expensive Moment"

People

“At issue is not whether the global economy will pass away. It is passing away. Rising populations and debt combined with depletion of freshwater sources and fossil fuel make the status quo untenable. The only question is whether civil society will survive the transition.”

Daniel Suarez book Freedom™

Source: Freedom™ (2010), Chapter 6: Waymeet

Question

“As for myself, I confess to a preference for clear-cut situations, for radical and even extreme positions. But I also feel a secret and very strong attraction to ambiguous situations… for example, that hovering moment when it is no longer day and not yet night, the shades of emotion between indifference and friendship… (they) are so fascinating because they are so indefinable. That which is pure transition, is all the more appealing to the mind because of its elusiveness. It is the same in the cases of Mondrian, Kandinsky and the Cubists: abstraction and figuration have a common frontier in their work that is so tenuous that we often do not know which side we are on. It is this ambiguity that imports a rare poetic charm to their paintings. Artists like Klee, Miro and Dubuffet have also pitched their tents on this borderline and constantly travel from one side tot the other.”

Michel Seuphor (1901–1999) designer, draughtsman, painter

Source: Abstract Painting (1964), pp. 43/44: (1962)

Friendship, Secret, Travel, Feeling

“We all know the type of American executive or professional man who does not allow himself to age, but by what appears to be almost sheer will keeps himself “well-preserved,” as if in creosote. … The will which burns within him, while often admirable, cannot be said to be truly “his”: it is compulsive; he has no control over it, but it controls him. He appears to exist in a psychological deep-freeze; new experience cannot get at him, but rather he fulfills himself by carrying out ever-renewed tasks which are given by his environment: he is borne along on the tide of cultural agendas. So long as these agendas remain, he is safe; he does not acquire wisdom, as the old of some cultures are said to do, but he does not lose skill—or if he does, is protected by his power from the consequences, perhaps the awareness, of loss of skill. In such a man, responsibility may substitute for maturity. Indeed, it could be argued that the protection furnished such people in the united States is particularly strong since their “youthfulness” remains a social and economic prestige-point and wisdom might actually, if it brought awareness of death and which the culture regarded as pessimism, be a count against them. … They prefigure … the cultural cosmetic that makes Americans appears youthful to other peoples. And, since they are well-fed, well-groomed, and vitamin-dosed, there may be an actual delay-in-transit of the usual physiological declines to partly compensate for lack of psychological growth. Their outward appearance of aliveness may mask inner sterility.”

David Riesman (1909–2002) American Sociologist

“Clinical and Cultural Aspects of the Aging Process,” p. 486
Individualism Reconsidered (1954)

Death, Wisdom, People, Youth

“I want to try to live my own values as consciously and purposefully as I can. Being vegan for me is a cleaner way of not participating in practices that don’t align with my values. … As soon as I said publicly that I was trying this experiment, so many vegans out there, hundreds and hundreds of people, have been reaching out to me with incredible support and encouragement as well as practical tips of how to do this without having to sacrifice that much in terms of the food and what I like. I've discovered some really delicious things—recipes, stores, and restaurants—that have made this transition far easier. … There's too much judgment out there. Really what we need to be doing is just all of us finding our own paths towards living the best lives we can live as clearly and boldly in accordance with our own personal values.”

Cory Booker (1969) 35th Class 2 senator for New Jersey in U.S. Congress

" Talking Tofurky With Newly Vegan Cory Booker http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/11/26/talking-tofurky-with-newly-vegan-cory-booker.html", interview with Vlad Chituc, in The Daily Beast (26 November 2014) 2014

People, Food, Way, Support

“Brothers! The Army and the people have merged into a single entity. They have become a source of strength which is worrying the foreigners. The foreigner, along with imperialism, therefore began to resort to other means to split up our ranks so as to overcome us. But these attempts on the part of the imperialists to split up our ranks have gone long ago. Imperialism now tries to split up our ranks by calling for narrow parties and restricted groupings. The purpose of this is to play one against the other, while the foreigners and the imperialists will sit as spectators. But we shall thrust a stone in the mouth of imperialism. We shall overcome imperialism and we shall close this gap in its face. The parochial groupings and party affiliation at this time are of no benefit to the country… the purpose of this is to create disunity and weaken our strength and play one against the other. We are in a period of transition. We have resolved to protect the gains of our Revolution at any rate.”

Abd al-Karim Qasim (1914–1963) Prime Minister of Iraq

Speech delivered in the gardens of the Shaab Hall (May 1, 1959).
Principles of the 14th July Revolution (1959)

People, Time, Parting, Country

“The Scottish Communist is a much misunderstood person. When he is a true Caledonian, and not a Pole or an Irishman, he is simply the lineal descendant of the old Radical. The Scottish Radical was a man who held a set of inviolable principles on which he was entirely unable to compromise. It did not matter what the principles were; the point was that they were like the laws of Sinai, which could not be added to or subtracted from. When the Liberal party began to compromise, he joined Labour; when Labour began to compromise, by a natural transition he became a Communist. Temperamentally he has not changed. He is simply the stuff which in the seventeenth century made the unyielding Covenanter, and in the eighteenth the inflexible Jacobite. He is honesty incarnate, but his mind lacks flexibility.”

John Buchan book Castle Gay

Source: Castle Gay (1930), Ch. 14

Law, Nature, Change, Personality

“When something dies, it is usually disassembled, digested, and decomposed. Only rarely is anything ever fossilized, and even fewer things are very well-preserved. Because the conditions required for that process are so particular, the fossil record can only represent a tiny fraction of everything that has ever lived. Darwin provided many environmental dynamics explaining why no single quarry could ever provide a continuous record of biological events, and why it would be impossible to find all the fossilized ancestors of every lineage. But despite this, he predicted that future generations, -having the benefit of better understanding- would discover a substantial number of fossil species which he called “intermediate” or “transitional” between what we see alive today and their taxonomic ancestors at successive levels in paleontological history. In fact, in the century-and-a-half since then, we’ve found millions of evolutionary intermediaries in the fossil record, much more than Darwin said he could reasonably hope for. There are three different types of transitional forms and we have ample examples of each. But creationists still insist that we’ve never found a single one, because what they usually ask us to present are impossible parodies which evolution would neither produce nor permit.”

Aron Ra (1962) Aron Ra is an atheist activist and the host of the Ra-Men Podcast

"9th Foundational Falsehood of Creationism" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qfoje7jVJpU, Youtube (May 8, 2008) Youtube, Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism

Hope, History, Understanding, Success

“In contrast to the punctuated equilibrium model of change, this inductive study of multiple-product innovation in six firms in the computer industry examines how organizations engage in continuous change. Comparisons of successful and less-successful firms show, first, that successful multiple-product innovation blends limited structure around responsibilities and priorities with extensive communication and design freedom to create improvisation within current projects. This combination is neither so structured that change cannot occur nor so unstructured that chaos ensues. Second, successful firms rely on a wide variety of low-cost probes into the future, including experimental products, futurists, and strategic alliances. Neither planning nor reacting is as effective. Third, successful firms link the present and future together through rhythmic, time-paced transition processes. We develop the ideas of "semistructures," "links in time," and "sequenced steps" to crystallize the key properties of these continuously changing organizations and to extend thinking about complexity theory, time-paced evolution, and the nature of core capabilities.”

Shona Brown (1960) businessperson

Source: "The art of continuous change", 1997, p. 1; Abstract

Communication, Idea, Nature, Thinking

“I understand there is a need for a stable and orderly transition to that leadership, but that people should give me the space to ensure that happens and that this debate is not best conducted in the pages of the Mail on Sunday.”

Tony Blair (1953) former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Michael White, "I will go in my own time – Blair", The Guardian, 12 May 2005, p. 2.
Speech to the Parliamentary Labour Party, 11 May 2005; the 'leadership' referred to was that of his successor, who was widely assumed to be Gordon Brown.
2000s

People, Understanding

“Language use is a curious behavior, but once the transition to language is made, literature is a likely consequence, since it is linked to the dynamic of the linguistic symbol through the functioning of the imagination.”

Russell Berman (1950) American academic

Source: Fiction Sets You Free: Literature, Liberty and Western Culture (2007), p. 45

Behavior, Imagination, Literature

“A specimen of research that is to be examined with the help of a microscope has first to be carefully prepared, cleaned, freed from extraneous matter, and firmly kept under the lens. In a similar way, the “bare object” to be examined by wisdom, is prepared by Bare Attention. It cleans the object of investigation from the impurities of prejudice and passion; it frees it from alien admixtures and from points of view not pertaining to it; it holds it firmly before the Eye of Wisdom, by slowing down the transition from the receptive to the active phase of the perceptual or cognitive process, thus giving a vastly improved chance for close and dispassionate investigation.”

Nyanaponika Thera (1901–1994) German Buddhist monk

Source: The Heart of Buddhist Meditation (1965), pp. 34-35

Wisdom, Way, Passion, Chance

“For the present at least [1909] I shall restrict my work to the ordinary world of the senses, since that is the world in which we still live. But nevertheless art even now form a transition to the finer regions, which perhaps I am incorrect in calling spiritual, for everything that has form is not yet spiritual, as I read somewhere. But it is nonetheless the path of ascension away from matter. Well dear Querido, with many heartfelt wishes, Piet Mondriaan.”

Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) Peintre Néerlandais

Quote from Mondrian's letter to Israel Querido, Summer of 1909; published in the weekly magazine 'De Controleur' 23 Oct, 1909; as cited in Mondrian, - The Art of Destruction, Carel Blotkamp, Reaktion Books LTD. London 2001, p. 36
1900's

World, Art, Sense, Reading

“You may succeed in delaying, but never in preventing the transition of South Africa to a democracy.”

Nelson Mandela (1918–2013) President of South Africa, anti-apartheid activist

1990s, Long Walk to Freedom (1995)

Democracy

“The world is changing and we are awakening. These statistics give us a numerical glimpse at the visceral dissatisfaction that most of us feel. Now is the time to express it. These corrupt structures cannot be maintained without our compliance. You could vote against them, if there was anything to vote for, but there isn’t, or you could stop paying your mortgage, stop paying your taxes, stop buying stuff you don’t need. When we, the majority, unite and demonstrate our new intention, we will be invincible. If we, who are complicit by our silence, become active and disobedient. This is a pivotal time in the history of our species. We are transitioning from an ideology that places power and responsibility in the hands of the few to one where we all collectively have power. It is important that we clarify, in a manner accessible to all, which institutions and systems are beneficial and which ones have to go. It is important that we propose ideas and systems that will be advantageous, like the handful in this book, and ensure that they are presented properly. When they are inevitably disparaged by the fearful enemies of change, we must remain unified and insistent. At this climactic time, we have no choice but change. This book, written by a twerp, with minimal interaction with brilliant thinkers and uncorrupted minds, demonstrates that. Now, what are you going to do about it?”

Russell Brand book Revolution

Revolution (2014)

Books, World, Fear, Feeling

“(On gender transition:) "It's hard, but it's possible."”

Abby Stein (1991) Trans activist, speaker, and educator

In an interview with CNN, June 17, 2017 http://www.cnn.com/2017/06/17/health/transgender-orthodox-upbringing-trnd/index.html, 2017

“The transition from the concept of information in the technical (communication engineering) sense to the semantic (theory of meaning) sense was indeed difficult, if not impossible.”

Anatol Rapoport (1911–2007) Russian-born American mathematical psychologist

Anatol Rapoport (1956), as quoted in: Richard C. Huseman (1977) Readings in interpersonal & organizational communication. p. 35
1950s

Communication, Sense

“We live in a predominately Christian culture which has lost its living connection to the symbolism of wafer and wine. Lacking spiritual sustenance there is a genuine hunger and thirst. The archetypal structure behind the wafer and wine is slowly giving way to a new configuration, but we are in chaos during the transition. That chaos breeds loneliness, fear and alienation. While that sense of aloneness is hard to endure, it can be of supreme value in the analytic process. The new life always comes out of the dispossessed, as Christ came from the cow stable.”

Marion Woodman (1928–2018) Canadian writer

Source: Addiction to Perfection (1982), p. 28

Life, Hunger, Fear, Way

“When I went vegetarian at age eleven, it was a remarkably easy transition. A boy at my school was attempting to kill creatures in the pond. When I tried to stop him, he said, “You eat animals,” like that meant I had no right to try and save something that could end up on my plate later. The hypocrisy of my actions became crystal clear in that moment. I decided, no more meat. … When I first started working for two organizations supporting anti-factory farming, vegan outreach and humane education, my choice to go vegan became that much clearer. I realized veganism is the only diet that can change the world. … You can expect a healthier body, and the feeling of pride that goes hand-in-hand with living according to your values. That’s something that many people aspire to, but few people achieve.”

Alicia Silverstone (1976) American actress

"How to Transition from Vegetarianism to Veganism", in The Kind Life (9 April 2013) http://thekindlife.com/blog/2013/04/how-to-transition-from-vegetarian-to-vegan/

People, Age, World, Education

“The revolution of 1832 was, therefore, in its ultimate results, a democratic revolution, though its earlier form was transitional and incomplete. This form was productive of great advantages for the time: indeed, for some years it might be said, without exaggeration, that the accidental equilibrium of political forces which it had produced presented the highest ideal of internal government the world had hitherto seen. But it was not the less provisional on that account. The forces by which political organisms are destroyed were, for the time, balanced by influences which still lingered, and were, therefore, neutralised. But these were increasing, and the others were decaying, and the balance could not last for any length of time. It has now been finally upset, and we have now fully reached the phase of political transformation to which the revolution of 1832 logically led.”

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

Quarterly Review, 130, 1871, pp. 279-280
1870s

World, Time

“In any transition period there is a clash of realities. In the 1930s people considered the eventual solutions, at first, to be unrealistic. It’s the same this time round. At first, in the euro crisis there was to be no bailout. Then no buying of government debt. Then no QE. Each of these things have happened. Some things which are now seen as unrealistic will change with the political balance of forces.”

Euclid Tsakalotos (1960) Greek economist and politician

" Inside Syriza’s economic brain http://blogs.channel4.com/paul-mason-blog/Greece-syriza-election/2941" (20 January 2015) Quoted during an interview, via Skype, between Tsakalotos and a number of other economists. Hosted at the London School of Economics.

People, Reality, Change, Time

Quotes about transition page 2

Quotes about transition
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