Quotes about turn
page 59

“I feel proud to have turned that down. I wish I could remember what it was. Let’s say Hamlet. Yeah, I turned down Hamlet.”

Rik Mayall (1958–2014) British comedian and actor

Well who fucking wouldn’t? I mean how many gags are there in that? The Stage, January 17, 2007 https://www.thestage.co.uk/features/2007/bad-politics-rik-mayall-in-the-new-statesman/

Feeling

“The method of the science not being practiced much nowadays, except what logic prescribes to all sciences generally, that fitted for the peculiar nature of metaphysics being simply ignored, it is no wonder that those who everlastingly turn the Sisyphean stone of this inquiry do not seem so far to have made much progress. Though here I neither can nor will expatiate upon so important and extensive a subject, I shall briefly shadow forth what constitutes no despicable part of this method, namely, the infection between sensuous and intellectual cognition, not only as creeping in on those incautious in the application of principles, but even producing spurious principles under the appearance of axioms.”

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) German philosopher

Kant's Inaugural Dissertation (1770), Section V On The Method Respecting The Sensuous And The Intellectual In Metaphysics

Nature, Appearance, Science, Parting

“The question of the principle of the form of the intelligible world turns, therefore, upon making apparent in what manner it is possible for several substances to be in mutual commerce, and for this reason to pertain to the same whole, which is called world. We do not here consider the world, let it be understood, as to matter, that is, as to the nature of the substances of which it consists, whether they be material or immaterial, but as to form, that is to say, how among several things taken separately a connection, and among them all, totality can have place.”

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) German philosopher

Kant's Inaugural Dissertation (1770), Section IV On The Principle Of The Form Of The Intelligible World

World, Making love, Intelligence, Question

“They’re turning me into the Queen of England.”

Jair Bolsonaro (1955) Brazilian president elect

On 22 June 2019 https://riotimesonline.com/brazil-news/rio-politics/national-politics/bolsonaro-says-congress-seeks-to-turn-him-into-the-queen-of-england/, about the Congress. Democracy Bedevils Brazil’s President Bolsonaro https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-07-01/democracy-bedevils-brazil-s-bolsonaro. Bloomberg (1 July 2019).

“Every time I touch a wound, an army of influential people turns against me.”

Jair Bolsonaro (1955) Brazilian president elect

In a speech to businessmen in Rio de Janeiro, on 20 May 2019. Brazil's Bolsonaro says political class is an impediment https://www.reuters.com/article/us-brazil-politics/brazils-bolsonaro-says-political-class-is-an-impediment-idUSKCN1SQ1VA. Reuters (20 May 2019).

People, Time

“The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.... Certainly it would be difficult to imagine any committee of relatively young men, of thirty or thirty-five, showing the unbroken childishness, ignorance and lack of humor of the Supreme Court of the United States. The average age of the learned justices must be well beyond sixty, and all of them are supposed to be of finished and mellowed sagacity. Yet their knowledge of the most ordinary principles of justice often turns out to be extremely meager, and when they spread themselves grandly upon a great case their reasoning powers are usually found to be precisely equal to those of a respectable Pullman conductor.”

H.L. Mencken (1880–1956) American journalist and writer

"Advice to Young Men" in Prejudices: Third Series (1922).
1920s, Prejudices, Third Series (1922)

Wisdom, Men, Age, Justice

“It’s a combination of things that are happening now, Amy, that make it clear to more and more members of Congress that you can’t keep a straight face on all of this incredible indebtedness, talk about all the money that we’ve shoveled out to Wall Street, and credit isn’t loosening up, unemployment is still at all-time highs. We’re projected in Detroit to have more foreclosures on homes than last year. And so, we’ve got to turn with — especially with all the shouts about being fiscally conservative, the way to climb out of this is to reduce the obligations of our government. Here we are in hundreds of billions of dollars of war debt, and our president is saying we now have to have an emergency funding, which is merely another way of saying we’re going to specially fund the Afghanistan surge. It makes no sense. And I think militarily, it is not logical. And, of course, morally, I can’t remember anything like this since Korea and Vietnam…”

John Conyers (1929–2019) American politician from Michigan

Rep. John Conyers and Out of Afghanistan Caucus Oppose Obama Admin’s $33B Escalation of Afghan War, DemocracyNow! https://www.democracynow.org/2010/7/1/conyers (1 July 2010)

Money, War, Making love, Way

“It is very difficult to tuck a bugle call back into a bugle. Pandora’s Box is a one-way proposition. You can turn a pig into sausage, but not sausage into pig. Broken eggs stay broken.”

Robert A. Heinlein book Solution Unsatisfactory

Solution Unsatisfactory (p. 67)
Short fiction, Off the Main Sequence (2005)

Way, Box

“During my travels, I find a general belief that to turn a Christian is to turn European; to become self-willed, and give up self-restraint, use only foreign cloth, dress oneself in European style and start taking meat and brandy. But I think the fact is, if a person discards his country, his customs and his old connections and manners when he changes his religion, he becomes all the more unfit to gain a knowledge of God. For, a change of religion means really a conversion of the heart. When there is a real conversion, a man’s heart grows. But in this country one finds that conversion brings about deep disdain for one’s old religion and its followers, i. e., one’s old friends and relatives. The next change that takes place is that of dress and manners and behaviour. All that does great harm to the country.”

Mahatma Gandhi (1869–1948) pre-eminent leader of Indian nationalism during British-ruled India

Mahatma Gandhi in Mahadev Desai, Day-to-Day with Gandhi,Volume 7, Varanasi, 1969, as quoted in Goel, S.R. History of Hindu-Christian Encounters (1996)
Posthumous publications (1950s and later)

God, Religion, Travel, Knowledge

“My sympathies are all with the Jews. I have known them intimately in South Africa. Some of them became life-long companions. Through these friends I came to learn much of their age-long persecution. They have been the untouchables of Christianity. The parallel between their treatment by Christians and the treatment of untouchables by Hindus is very close. Religious sanction has been invoked in both cases for the justification of the inhuman treatment meted out to them. Apart from the friendships, therefore, there is the more common universal reason for my sympathy for the Jews…. If I were a Jew and were born in Germany and earned my livelihood there, I would claim Germany as my home even as the tallest gentile German may, and challenge him to shoot me or cast me in the dungeon; I would refuse to be expelled or to submit to discriminating treatment. And for doing this, I should not wait for the fellow Jews to join me in civil resistance but would have confidence that in the end the rest are bound to follow my example. If one Jew or all the Jews were to accept the prescription here offered, he or they cannot be worse off than now. And suffering voluntarily undergone will bring them an inner strength and joy which no number of resolutions of sympathy passed in the world outside Germany can. Indeed, even if Britain, France and America were to declare hostilities against Germany, they can bring no inner joy, no inner strength. The calculated violence of Hitler may even result in a general massacre of the Jews by way of his first answer to the declaration of such hostilities. But if the Jewish mind could be prepared for voluntary suffering, even the massacre I have imagined could be turned into a day of thanksgiving and joy that Jehovah had wrought deliverance of the race even at the hands of the tyrant. For to the godfearing, death has no terror. It is a joyful sleep to be followed by a waking that would be all the more refreshing for the long sleep.”

Mahatma Gandhi (1869–1948) pre-eminent leader of Indian nationalism during British-ruled India

Mahatma Gandhi, Harijan, 26 November 1938. Quoted from Hinduism and Judaism compilation https://web.archive.org/web/20060423090103/http://www.nhsf.org.uk/images/stories/HinduDharma/Interfaith/hinduzion.pdf 1930s

Life, Death, Friendship, Hostility

“Countless families were broken apart and ruined by AIDS, leaving many AIDS orphans. They had no one to turn to.”

Shuping Wang (1959–2019) Chinese-American medical researcher

Dr. Wang wrote in 2014. Shuping Wang, Who Helped Expose China’s Rural AIDS Crisis, Dies at 59 https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/30/world/asia/shuping-wang-dead.html Quote

Family

“The tragedy of the War is now to be followed by the greater tragedy of peace. The ostensible plea for the War as a struggle for the freedom of small nations now becomes clear as a War of Imperialism. The War for the so-called democratisation of Germany has now turned into a War for the crushing of the rising working class of Europe.”

Arthur MacManus (1889–1927) British trade unionist

Fourteen Points https://www.marxists.org/archive/mcmanus/articles/points.htm, Halifax Division of the Socialist Labour Party, (1918)

War, Peace, Freedom

“Origen taught that all souls were created at the beginning of creation as angelic spirits. In this condition they sinned and for their apostasy were transferred into material bodies. It was this view of preexistence which was proclaimed heretical. In any case, heresy thus condemned so long ago need not be regarded today as of major importance. Truth matters a great deal more and a condemned heresy may turn out to be a truth, as happened, for example, when a local church of Rome condemned Galileo’s heliocentric doctrine and forced him to recant. Galileo was right and the church in question was wrong. It is therefore quite legitimate for both clergy and laity of the Christian faith to preach and believe in both preexistence and reincarnation.”

Geoffrey Hodson (1886–1983) New Zealand occultist

Source: Reincarnation & Christianity https://www.theosophical.org/files/resources/articles/ReincarnationChristianity.pdf (1967)

Truth, Faith, Angels, Soul

“We have long accepted the doctrine of the evolution of the forms in which dwells the Divine Life; here is the complementary and far greater idea of the evolution of that Life itself, showing that the very reason for that wondrous development of higher and higher forms is that the ever-swelling Life needs them in order to express itself. Forms are born and die, forms grow, decay and break; but the Spirit grows on eternally, ensouling those forms, and developing by means of experience gained in and through them, and as each form has served its turn and is outgrown, it is cast aside that another and better form may take its place.”

Charles Webster Leadbeater (1854–1934) English theosophist

Source: The Masters and the Path (1925), Ch. 1

Life, Idea

“Let no man.. despair because he thinks the task too great for him; what man has done man can do, and just in proportion as we extend our aid to those whom we can help, so will those who have already attained be able in their turn to help us. So from the lowest to the highest we who are treading the steps of the path are bound together by one long chain of mutual service, and none need feel neglected or alone, for though sometimes the lower flights of the great staircase may be wreathed in mist, we know that it leads up to happier regions and purer air, where the light is always shining.”

Charles Webster Leadbeater (1854–1934) English theosophist

Source: Invisible Helpers (1915), Ch. 17

Feeling, Thinking, Light, Help

“Many of the dead very considerably retard the process of dissolution by clinging passionately to the earth which they have left; they simply will not turn their thoughts and desires upward, but spend their time in struggling with all their might to keep in full touch with the physical plane, thus causing great trouble to any one who may be trying to help them. Earthly matters are the only ones in which they have had any living interest, and they cling to them with desperate tenacity even after death. Naturally as time passes on they find it increasingly difficult to keep hold of things down here, but instead of welcoming and encouraging this process of gradual refinement and spiritualization they resist it vigorously by every means in their power… thereby not only causing themselves a vast amount of entirely unnecessary pain and sorrow, but also very seriously delaying their upward progress and prolonging their stay in astral regions to an almost indefinite extent. In convincing them that this ignorant and disastrous opposition to the cosmic will is contrary to the laws of nature, and persuading them to adopt an attitude of mind which is the exact reversal of it, lies a great part of the work of those who are trying to help.”

Charles Webster Leadbeater (1854–1934) English theosophist

Source: Invisible Helpers (1915), Ch. 12

Death, Pain, Law, Nature

“The thoughtful student, in scanning the religious history of the race has one fact continually forced upon his notice, viz., that there is an invariable tendency to deify whomsoever shows himself superior to the weakness of our common humanity. Look where we will, we find the saint like man exalted into a divine personage and worshiped for a god. Though perhaps misunderstood, reviled and even persecuted while living, the apotheosis is almost sure to come after death: and the victim of yesterday’s mob, raised to the stage of an Intercessor in Heaven, is besought with prayer and tears, and placatory penances to mediate with God for the pardon of human sin. This is a mean and vile trait of human nature, the proof of ignorance, selfishness, brutal cowardice, and a superstitious materialism. It shows the base instinct to put down and destroy whatever or whoever makes men feel their own imperfections; with the alternative of ignoring and denying these very imperfections by turning into gods men who have merely spiritualized their natures, so that it may be supposed that they were heavenly incarnations and not mortal like other men.”

Henry Steel Olcott (1832–1907) Union United States Army officer

Life of Buddha and Its Lessons https://cdn.website-editor.net/e4d6563c50794969b714ab70457d9761/files/uploaded/AdyarPamphlet_No15.pdfThe (May 1912)

Death, Men, God, Making love

“People in the present day will be slow to believe that any knowledge worth considering can be found outside the bright focus of Western culture. Modern science has accomplished grand results by the open method of investigation, and is very impatient of the theory that persons who ever attained to real knowledge, either in sciences or metaphysics, could have been content to hide their light under a bushel. So the tendency has been to conceive that occult philosophers of old- Egyptian priests, Chaldean Magi, Essenes, Gnostics, theurgic Neo-Platonists, and the rest-who kept their knowledge secret, must have adopted that policy to conceal the fact that they knew very little. Mystery can only have been loved by charlatans who wished to mystify. The conclusion is pardonable from the modern point of view, but it has given rise to an impression in the popular mind that the ancient mystics have actually been turned inside out, and found to know very little. This impression is absolutely erroneous.”

Alfred Percy Sinnett book The Occult World

Introduction
The Occult World

Love, People, Secret, Making love

“There are fewer potential adepts in an epoch than the superficial imagine. The fate of those who tread this dizzy precipice of wisdom with weak and faltering steps may be readily inferred. What happens to the dizzy-brained and slippery-footed alpine climber? His brain turns, and he falls headlong into the chasm, with a last shriek and a clutching at the air.”

Henry Steel Olcott (1832–1907) Union United States Army officer

The Source and Value of the "Mysteries" (1888)

Wisdom, Fate, Imagination

“You might say that esotericism is the philosophy, or the science, of the evolutionary process, as it pertains to the human and the subhuman kingdoms. But it is about the evolution of consciousness, not of the physical form. If you want to know about the evolution of the physical form, turn to Darwin — he has pretty well summed up the nature of evolution as regards the form of the animal and the human kingdoms. But in terms of the evolution of consciousness, you have to turn to the esoteric — esoteric only so far; for that which is esoteric gradually becomes exoteric.”

Benjamin Creme (1922–2016) artist, author, esotericist

The Ageless Wisdom, An Introduction to Humanity's Spiritual Legacy (1996)

Nature, Science, Animals

“In my own constituency (where I estimate that about 10 per cent of the population are immigrants from Asia or the Caribbean) I have the impression that, as no doubt elsewhere, the first phase, the sudden impact of Commonwealth immigration, is over. I am going to prophesy, however, that there will be subsequent phases, when the problem will resume its place in public concern and in a more intractable form, when it can no longer be dealt with simply by turning the inlet tap down or off. Long before the coloured population reaches 5 per cent of the total, a proportion will have filtered into the general population, mingled with it in occupation, residence, habits and intermarriage. On the other hand, the rest, numerically perhaps much the greater part, will be in larger or smaller colonies, in certain areas and cities, more separated than now in habits, occupation and way of life. The irregular pattern of population and living which grew up higgledy-piggledy in the early years of immigration will have been tidied up. It is for these colonies, and the problems thereby entailed on our descendants, that they will curse the improvident years, now gone, when we could have avoided it all.”

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

'Facing Up to Britain's Race Problem', The Daily Telegraph (16 February 1967), quoted in Still to Decide (Elliot Right Way Books, 1972), p. 295
1960s

Life, Way, Problem, Parting

“To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree. When it was first said that the sun stood still and the world turned round, the common sense of mankind declared the doctrine false; but the old saying of Vox populi, vox Dei, as every philosopher knows, cannot be trusted in science. Reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a simple and imperfect eye to one complex and perfect can be shown to exist, each grade being useful to its possessor, as is certainly the case; if further, the eye ever varies and the variations be inherited, as is likewise certainly the case; and if such variations should be useful to any animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, should not be considered as subversive of the theory. How a nerve comes to be sensitive to light, hardly concerns us more than how life itself originated; but I may remark that, as some of the lowest organisms, in which nerves cannot be detected, are capable of perceiving light, it does not seem impossible that certain sensitive elements in their sarcode should become aggregated and developed into nerves, endowed with this special sensibilites.”

Charles Darwin book On the Origin of Species (1859)

On the Origin of Species (1859)

Life, World, Imagination, Nature

“Any three-year-old can see how unsatisfactory and clumsy is this whole business of reproducing and dying by the billions. We have not yet encountered any god who is as merciful as a man who flicks a beetle over on its feet. There is not a people in the world that behaves as badly as praying mantises. But wait, you say, there is no right and wrong in nature; right and wrong is a human concept. Precisely: we are moral creatures, then, in an amoral world. The universe that suckled us is a monster that does not care if we live or die—does not care if it itself grinds to a halt. It is fixed and blind, a robot programmed to kill. We are free and seeing; we can only try to outwit it at every turn to save our skins.”

Annie Dillard (1945) American writer

" The Force That Drives the Flower https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1973/11/the-force-that-drives-the-flower/308963/", The Atlantic, Nov. 1973

God, People, World, Business

“I do therefore recommend the third Thursday in August next, as a convenient day to be set apart for the devout purposes of rendering to the Sovereign of the Universe and the Benefactor of mankind, the public homage due to his holy attributes; of acknowledging the transgressions which might justly provoke the manifestations of His divine displeasures; of seeking His merciful forgiveness, His assistance in the great duties of repentance and amendment; and especially of offering fervent supplications, that in the present season of calamity and war, He would take the American People under his peculiar care and protection; that he would guide their public councils, animate their patriotism, and bestow His blessing on their arms; that He would inspire all nations with a love of justice and of concord, and with a reverence for the unerring precept of our holy religion, to do to others as they would require others to do to them; and finally, that, turning the hearts of our enemies from the violence and injustice which sway their councils against us, He would hasten a restoration of the blessings of Peace.”

James Monroe (1758–1831) American politician, 5th President of the United States (in office from 1817 to 1825)

Proclamation – Humiliation and Prayer https://wallbuilders.com/proclamation-humiliation-prayer-1812-2/ (20 August 1812)

Love, War, People, Making love

“England will soon show us her true face: It is a fight for existence between us. England wants to destroy Germany, her most serious rival in the world market, and, if not today or tomorrow, will do so soon, before the German fleet has been further strengthened. I do not believe that the matter will be taken so seriously in official circles with us. As in their way, the Liberal papers try to disguise the gravity of the situation; it is really too hard on them that their paragon, England, should want to break with free trade. A bitter revenge is now in store for those who have sought to turn Germany into an industrial country pure and simple.”

Alfred von Waldersee (1832–1904) Prussian Field Marshal

Waldersee in his diary, 19 February 1904, shortly before his death.

World, Way, Revenge, Fight

“There are some of our own people who still think that the Communists are the left wing of the Socialist movement. They are not. The Socialist movement was a movement for freedom in its widest sense. From the point of view of freedom, Communists are on the extreme right—more reactionary than some of the old tyrannies which we knew in the past. What is the thing for which we fight, for which the men with whom we feel the stir of sympathy throughout the ages have fought? Freedom. But that fight changes from age to age and the freedom that some men fought for may turn out to be tyranny. Communists, concentrating solely on the economic aspects of freedom…have produced the ghastly travesty of Socialism in the lands behind the iron curtain.”

Clement Attlee (1883–1967) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech in Glasgow (10 April 1949), quoted in The Times (11 April 1949), p. 4
Prime Minister

Men, People, Age, Feeling

“The face of danger is brightest when turned so its features cannot be seen.”

Fredric Brown (1906–1972) American novelist, short story author

Etaoin Shrdlu (p. 33)
Short fiction, From These Ashes (2000)

“He had been cheated out of his compensation, on a technicality, by the corrupt officialdom of the spaceways. He’d turned criminal then, and had been as ruthless to society as it had been to him.”

Fredric Brown (1906–1972) American novelist, short story author

Source: Short fiction, Gateway to Glory (1950), p. 607

Cheating

“I believe, so I was taught, by my late father Prof. Benzion Netanyahu, and so he was taught by my grandfather of blessed memory, Rabbi Natan Milikowsky Netanyahu, I believe that the Holy One Blessed Be He and history have given the Jewish people another opportunity, a golden opportunity, to turn our country into a strong nation, one of the strongest nations of the world and it is to that end that I do what I do. A strong country, a country in which it is good to live, a country that it is good and safe to live in, for our sake and for the sake of the coming generations, for the sake of the eternal Israel.”

Benjamín Netanyahu (1949) Israeli prime minister

As quoted in, All 3 Major Israeli TV Channels Declare Netanyahu Victor In Election, April 9 2019, The Daily Wire
2010s, 2019

People, World, History, Strong

“All I knew about his life was that he had had the kind of childhood that turns people into psychological time bombs. How would I react when he started to go off? Did I have my own time bomb ticking away in me?”

Michael Nava (1954) American writer

Source: Henry Rios series of novels, Rag and Bone (2001), p.174

Life, People, Time, Childhood

“Or, if you enjoy living with Greeks also, spend your time with Socrates and with Zeno: the former will show you how to die if it be necessary; the latter how to die before it is necessary. Live with Chrysippus, with Posidonius: they will make you acquainted with things earthly and things heavenly; they will bid you work hard over something more than neat turns of language and phrases mouthed forth for the entertainment of listeners; they will bid you be stout of heart and rise superior to threats. The only harbour safe from the seething storms of this life is scorn of the future, a firm stand, a readiness to receive Fortune’s missiles full in the breast, neither skulking nor turning the back.”

Seneca the Younger book Epistulae morales ad Lucilium

Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium (Moral Letters to Lucilius), Letter CIV: On Care of Health and Peace of Mind

Life, Making love, Time, Future

“At any rate, if you wish to sift doubtful meanings of this kind, teach us that the happy man is not he whom the crowd deems happy, namely, he into whose coffers mighty sums have flowed, but he whose possessions are all in his soul, who is upright and exalted, who spurns inconstancy, who sees no man with whom he wishes to change places, who rates men only at their value as men, who takes Nature for his teacher, conforming to her laws and living as she commands, whom no violence can deprive of his possessions, who turns evil into good, is unerring in judgment, unshaken, unafraid, who may be moved by force but never moved to distraction, whom Fortune when she hurls at him with all her might the deadliest missile in her armoury, may graze, though rarely, but never wound.”

Seneca the Younger book Epistulae morales ad Lucilium

Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium (Moral Letters to Lucilius), Letter XLV: On sophistical argumentation

Men, Happiness, Law, Soul

“The West suffers from an autoimmune disease. A part of our organism — an important part: our immune system, which ought to protect us — has turned itself against us. At every level, we are being weakened, undermined, and surrendered. Malicious, aggressive elements are led into our social bodies in unheard numbers, and the actual circumstances and consequences are obscured.”

Thierry Baudet (1983) Dutch writer and jurist

Het Westen lijdt aan een auto-immuunziekte. Een deel van ons organisme – een belangrijk deel: ons afweersysteem, datgene wat ons zou moeten beschermen – heeft zich tegen ons gekeerd. Op elk vlak worden we verzwakt, ondermijnd, overgeleverd. Kwaadwillende, agressieve elementen worden ons maatschappelijk lichaam in ongehoorde aantallen binnengeloodst, en de werkelijke toedracht en gevolgen worden verdoezeld. Thierry Baudet: Westen lijdt aan auto-immuunziekte. https://forumvoordemocratie.nl/actueel/toespraak-thierry-baudet-alv-fvd-2017 Address to the first Forum voor Democratie party congress on 14 January 2017.

Disease, Suffering, Parting

“Say to Icbi-Erra: this is what your lord, Ibbi-Suen, says: As long as Enlil was my lord, what course were you following? And is this how you alter your word? Today Enlil detests me, he detests his son Suen (the principal deity of Urim), and is handing Urim over to the enemy. Its central part is gone, the enemy has risen up, and all the lands are thrown into disarray. But on the day when Enlil turns again towards his son Suen, you and your word will be marked out!”

Ibbi-Sin King of Sumer and Akkad

Letter from Ibbi-Suen to Ishbi-Erra about his bad conduct http://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/section3/tr3118.htm Correspondence of the Kings of Ur

Parting

“We must not draw general conclusions from certain particular principles, though, in the main, true ones. We must not suppose that, because a man is a rational animal, he will therefore always act rationally; or, because he has such or such a predominant passion, that he will act invariably and consequentially in the pursuit of it. No. We are complicated machines: and though we have one main-spring, that gives motion to the whole, we have an infinity of little wheels, which, in their turns, retard, precipitate, and sometimes stop that motion.”

Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield (1694–1773) British statesman and man of letters

19 December 1749
Letters to His Son on the Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman (1774)

Spring, Passion, Animals, Drawing

“By making us aware of the futility of this wishful thinking, the psychotechnologies help free us from unhealthy dependencies. We increase our capacity to love without bargaining or expectations, to enjoy without emotional mortgages. At the same time, enhanced awareness adds luster to simple things and everyday events, so that what may seem a turn toward a more austere life is often the discovery of subtler, less perishable riches.”

Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) American writer

The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Four, People Changing

Love, Life, Making love, Thinking

“But today the fashion is to ascribe the extinction of Buddhism to the persecution of Buddhists by Hindus, to the destruction of their temples by the Hindus. One point is that the Marxist historians who have been perpetrating this falsehood have not been able to produce even an iota of evidence to substantiate the concoction. In one typical instance, Romila Thapar had cited three inscriptions. The indefatigable Sita Ram Goel looked them up. Two of these turned out to have absolutely no connection with Buddhist viharas or their destruction, and the one that did deal with an object being destroyed had been held by authorities to have been a concoction; in any event, it told a story which was as different from what the historian had insinuated as day from night.”

Arun Shourie (1941) Indian journalist and politician

Eminent Historians: Their Technology, Their Line, Their Fraud

Fashion, Night

“The powers of the mind should be concentrated and the mind turned back upon itself; as the darkest places reveal their secrets before the penetrating rays of the sun, so will the concentrated mind penetrate its own innermost secrets.”

Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902) Indian Hindu monk and phylosopher

Pearls of Wisdom

Secret, Sun

“It is never quite safe to think we have done with life. When we imagine we have finished our story fate has a trick of turning the page and showing us yet another chapter.”

Lucy Maud Montgomery (1874–1942) Canadian fiction writer

Source: Rainbow Valley (1919), Ch. 13

Life, Fate, Imagination, Thinking

“The strength of the alliance on which our security depends is dependent in turn on our willingness to meet our commitments to them.”

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

1961, Berlin Crisis speech

Dependency

“All ancient Indian belief and veneration were directed to the mid-Himalayan region, the only original sacred outside land, and it was thither that rishis and kings turned their steps in devotion, never to the northwest.”

F. E. Pargiter (1852–1927) British civil servant and orientalist

Ancient Indian Historical Tradition (1962)

“The above provides the most perfect illustration of Witzel’s mode of academic(?) discussion: he does not raise points because he believes in them and wants to get them either clarified or accepted; he raises them only to heckle and raise a din, like a speaker in a political harangue or a schoolboy in a school slanging match between two rival groups, where the same accusation is repeated again and again with a deaf ear turned to the response or clarification.”

Shrikant Talageri (1958) Indian author

Michael Witzel – An Examination of his Review of my Book (2001)

School, Perfection

“Go out into the field and bring in the rest of the workers, that they may be fully equipped for their great mission. We will wrest what we can, step by step, from the capitalists, but with out eye fixed upon the goal; we will press forward, keeping step together with the inspiring music of the new emancipation; and when we have enough of this kind of organization, as Brother DeLeon said so happily the other day, when we are lined up in battle array and the capitalists try to lock us out, we will turn the tables on the gentlemen and lock them out. We can run the mills without them but they cannot run them without us.”

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

"Industrial Unionism" (1905), Eugene Debs Speaks

Music

“The chaplain had mastered, in a moment of divine intuition, the handy technique of protective rationalization, and he was exhilarated by his discovery. It was miraculous. It was almost no trick at all, he saw, to turn vice into virtue and slander into truth, impotence into abstinence, arrogance into humility, plunder into philanthropy, thievery into honor, blasphemy into wisdom, brutality into patriotism, and sadism into justice. Anybody could do it; it required no brains at all. It merely required no character.”

Joseph Heller book Catch-22

Catch-22 (1961)

Wisdom, Truth, Justice

“The main preparation to be made for receiving in the physical vehicle the vibrations of the higher consciousness are: its purification from grosser materials by pure food and pure life; the entire subjugation of the passions, and the cultivation of an even, balanced temper and mind, unaffected by the turmoil and vicissitudes of external life; the habit of quiet meditation on lofty topics, turning the mind away from the objects of the senses, and from the mental images arising from them, and fixing it on higher things; the cessation of hurry, especially of that restless, excitable hurry of the mind, which keeps the brain continually at work and flying from one subject to another; the genuine love for the things of the higher world, that makes them more attractive than the objects of the lower, so that the mind rests contentedly in their companionship as in that of a well-loved friend.”

Annie Besant (1847–1933) British socialist, theosophist, women's rights activist, writer and orator

The Ageless Wisdom (1897)

Love, Life, World, Making love

“The onset of the Civil War, the greatest preponderance, the greatest population per capita of millionaires and multimillionaires in this country was in the Mississippi River Valley. It wasn’t in Boston, wasn’t in Chicago, wasn’t in New York. The richest people in this country were slaveholders. Most of our earliest presidents were slaveholders. And the fact that they were presidents is not incidental to the fact that they—to their slaveholding. That was how they built their wealth. That was how Thomas Jefferson built his wealth. That was how George Washington built his wealth. Individual slaves were the equivalent of, say, owning a home today. They were people, but turned into objects of extreme wealth. So, just from the economic perspective, there’s that.”

Ta-Nehisi Coates (1975) writer, journalist, and educator

Ta-Nehisi Coates: Reparations Are Not Just About Slavery But Also Centuries of Theft & Racial Terror, Democracy Now (20 June 2019)

War, People, Home, Country

“He was the only player I saw who the manager never had a go at. We all went to a film premiere and were told to wear black ties. Eric turned up in a cream lemon suit with Nike trainers. The manager told him that he looked fantastic!”

Eric Cantona (1966) French actor and association football player

http://www.insideworldsoccer.com/2009/10/fergie-never-had-go-at-cantona-andy.html
Andy Cole, former Manchester United teammate of Cantona.

“He who comes into the presence of God to pray must divest himself of all vainglorious thoughts, lay aside all idea of worth; in short, discard all self- confidence, humbly giving God the whole glory, lest by arrogating any thing, however little, to himself, vain pride cause him to turn away his face.”

John Calvin book Institutes of the Christian Religion

Book 3, Chapter 20, Section 8
Institutes of the Christian Religion (1536; 1559)

God, Confidence, Idea, Self-confidence

“Röhm deceived himself when he thought that his closeness to Hitler would allow him to survive while other German homosexual men were being persecuted. Röhm was not murdered because he was homosexual, but the fact that he was so gave his enemies a means of turning Hitler against him and securing his destruction.”

Ernst Röhm (1887–1934) German Nazi and military officer

Robert Aldrich, "Who's who in Gay and Lesbian History from Antiquity to World War II", London and New York, Routledge, 2001, p. 377.

Men

“The logic of arguments from :en:Naturalness (physics) resembles the attempt to. predict the plot of a long-running TV series. If the hero -- here, naturalness --is in a pickle, certainly he will survive, so something must happen to turn around a situation that looks bleak.”

Sabine Hossenfelder (1976) German theoretical physicist

Lost in Math, Chapter 4, p. 78, 2018 hardcover ed.
Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray (2018)

Nature

“Alefantis estimates, he bought 12 tons of Toigo tomatoes, which Stello turned into sauce and canned before trucking the jars to the basement at Buck’s Fishing & Camping, Alefantis’s other restaurant just a few steps down the block on Connecticut Avenue NW.”

James Alefantis American chef and restaurateur

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/food/san-marzanos-the-bible-of-tomatoes/2013/08/12/85485c1a-fa32-11e2-9bde-7ddaa186b751_story.html

Fish

“God … desires His creature to be able to oppose Him. He has given that creature freedom. … When man turns away from evil with that whole measure of power with which he is able to rebel against God, then he has truly turned to God.”

Martin Buber (1878–1965) German Jewish Existentialist philosopher and theologian

Source: For The Sake of Heaven (1945), p. 44

God, Freedom, Evil

“The argument, in essence, is that protected speech may be banned as a means to ban unprotected speech. This analysis turns the First Amendment upside down. The Government may not suppress lawful speech as the means to suppress unlawful speech. Protected speech does not become unprotected merely because it resembles the latter. The Constitution requires the reverse.”

Anthony Kennedy (1936) Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition, 535 U.S. 234 (2002) (Opinion of the Court).

Law

“The shortcoming thus acknowledged to attach to the content turns out at the same time to be a shortcoming in respect of form. Spinoza puts substance at the head of his system, and defines it to be the unity of thought and extension, without demonstrating how he gets to this distinction, or how he traces it back to the unity of substance. The further treatment of the subject proceeds in what is called the mathematical method. Definitions and axioms are first laid down: after them comes a series of theorems, which are proved by an analytical reduction of them to these unproved postulates. Although the system of Spinoza, and that even by those who altogether reject its contents and results, is praised for the strict sequence of its method, such unqualified praise of the form is as little justified as an unqualified rejection of the content. The defect of the content is that the form is not known as immanent in it, and therefore only approaches it as an outer and subjective form. As intuitively accepted by Spinoza without a previous mediation by dialectic, Substance, as the universal negative power, is as it were a dark shapeless abyss which engulfs all definite content as radically null, and produces from itself nothing that has a positive subsistence of its own.”

Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) Dutch philosopher

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences: The Logic
G - L, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Mathematics, Universe, Time

“A religion of life had come to replace a religion of penance and emaciation, of fasting and prayer. The crucified body had risen in its turn and was no longer abashed Man had reached a harmonious unity: he had discovered that he is a single being not made, like a pendulum, of two different metals,= that check each other; he realised that the foe in his members had ceased to exist.”

Alexander Herzen book My Past and Thoughts

ibid, Ch. 8, s. 12
My Past and Thoughts(1852-1870)

Life, Religion

“ICELANDER: So say all the philosophers. But since that which is destroyed suffers, and that which is born from its destruction also suffers in due course, and finally is in its turn destroyed, would you enlighten me on one point, about which hitherto no philosopher has satisfied me? For whose pleasure and service is this wretched life of the world maintained, by the suffering and death of all the beings which compose it?”

Giacomo Leopardi (1798–1837) Italian poet, philosopher and writer

Essays and Dialogues (1882), Dialogue between Nature and an Icelander

Life, Death, Pleasure, World

“Having disburdened his heart, the Inquisitor waits for some time to hear his prisoner speak in His turn. His silence weighs upon him. He has seen that his captive has been attentively listening to him all the time, with His eyes fixed penetratingly and softly on the face of his jailer, and evidently bent upon not replying to him. The old man longs to hear His voice, to hear Him reply; better words of bitterness and scorn than His silence. Suddenly He rises; slowly and silently approaching the Inquisitor, He bends towards him and softly kisses the bloodless, four-score and-ten-year-old lips. That is all the answer…”

Fyodor Dostoyevsky book The Grand Inquisitor

The Brothers Karamazov (1879–1880), The Grand Inquisitor

Kiss, Silence, Time, Waiting

“A crisis is taking place in the contemporary world in a variety of forms, cutting across the realms of culture, ethics, politics, and so forth. At the ground of these problems is the fact that the essence of being human has turned into a question mark for humanity itself.”

Keiji Nishitani (1900–1990) Japanese philosopher

Source: The Self-Overcoming of Nihilism (1990), p. 188

World, Question, Problem

“The mention made by Maulana Abdul Hai of Hindu temples turned into mosques, is only the tip of an iceberg, The iceberg itself lies submerged in the writings of medieval Muslim historians, accounts of foreign travellers and the reports of the Archaeological Survey of India. A hue and cry has been raised in the name of secularism and national integration whenever the iceberg has chanced to surface, inspite of hectic efforts to keep it suppressed. Marxist politicians masquerading as historians have been the major contributors to this conspiracy of silence.”

Sita Ram Goel (1921–2003) Indian activist

.... The vast cradle of Hindu culture is literally littered with ruins of temples and monasteries belonging to all sects of Sanatana Dharma - Buddhist, Jain, Saiva, Shakta, Vaishnava and the rest. ... The story of how Islamic invaders sought to destroy the very foundations of Hindu society and culture is long and extremely painful. It would certainly be better for everybody to forget the past, but for the prescriptions of Islamic theology which remain intact and make it obligatory for believers to destroy idols and idol temples.
Hindu Temples – What Happened to Them, Volume I (1990)

Travel, Effort, Silence, Chance

“Should it seem to me that truth has been put to silence, and virtue trampled under foot, and that folly and vice will certainly triumph; should it happen, when all hearts were filled with hope for the human race, that the horizon should suddenly darken around them as it had never done before; should the work, well and happily begun, on which all eyes were fixed with joyous expectation, suddenly and unexpectedly be turned into a deed of shame, — yet will I not be dismayed; nor if the good cause should appear to grow and flourish, the lights of freedom and civilization be diffused, and peace and good-will amongst men be extended, shall yet my efforts be relaxed.”

Johann Gottlieb Fichte book The Vocation of Man

Jane Sinnett, trans 1846 p.123
The Vocation of Man (1800), Faith

Men, Truth, Peace, Hope

“Do you not know that close to your doors a great multitude of men and women, flesh of your flesh, live lives that are one agony from birth to death? Listen! their dwellings are so near that if you hush your laughter you will hear their grievous voices, the piteous crying of the little ones that suckle poverty, the hoarse curses of men sodden in misery turned half-way back to brutes, the chaffering of an army of women selling themselves for bread. With what have you stopped your ears that you do not hear these doleful sounds?”

Edward Bellamy (1850–1898) American author and socialist

Source: Looking Backward, 2000-1887 http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/25439 (1888), Ch. 28.

Death, Women, Men, Way

“The actual expense of your colleges appears to have been very low, and would have been far lower if their patronage had been greater. The higher education nowadays is as cheap as the lower, as all grades of teachers, like all other workers, receive the same support. We have simply added to the common school system of compulsory education, in vogue in Massachusetts a hundred years ago, a half dozen higher grades, carrying the youth to the age of twenty-one and giving him what you used to call the education of a gentleman, instead of turning him loose at fourteen or fifteen with no mental equipment beyond reading, writing, and the multiplication table.”

Edward Bellamy (1850–1898) American author and socialist

Source: Looking Backward, 2000-1887 http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/25439 (1888), Ch. 21.

Youth, Age, Education, School

“There is neither private property, beyond personal belongings, now, nor buying and selling, and therefore the occasion of nearly all the legislation formerly necessary has passed away. Formerly, society was a pyramid poised on its apex. All the gravitations of human nature were constantly tending to topple it over, and it could be maintained upright, or rather upwrong (if you will pardon the feeble witticism), by an elaborate system of constantly renewed props and buttresses and guy-ropes in the form of laws. A central Congress and forty state legislatures, turning out some twenty thousand laws a year, could not make new props fast enough to take the place of those which were constantly breaking down or becoming ineffectual through some shifting of the strain. Now society rests on its base, and is in as little need of artificial supports as the everlasting hills.”

Edward Bellamy (1850–1898) American author and socialist

Source: Looking Backward, 2000-1887 http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/25439 (1888), Ch. 19

Making love, Law, Guy, Support

“Now that her claims of being of Indian heritage have turned out to be a scam and a lie, Elizabeth Warren should apologize for perpetrating this fraud against the American Public.”

Elizabeth Warren (1949) 28th United States Senator from Massachusetts

Donald Trump, twitter, 11:16 PM · Oct 16, 2018

Lie, Fraud

“For those who take the vegetarian option seriously and adopt it as their own, it may well connect with their spiritual or religious orientation, even their sense of meaning and purpose in life. Some might see these as grandiose claims, but the point is that vegetarianism sheds light upon, and is in turn reflected by, our philosophical outlook on ourselves, our world, and our place in it.”

Michael Allen Fox (1940)

Source: Deep Vegetarianism (1999), p. 181

Life, World, Sense, Light

“A thought struck me: if my new album sounds this good on a walkman, what would Roxy Music sound like? A mere two years later I bought one and found out. However, on a train, a few years later still, I had negative synaesthesia eating a bacon sandwich and listening to a solo Ferry album, which turned me vegetarian.”

Robyn Hitchcock (1953) English singer-songwriter and guitarist

I Wanna Go Backwards CD booklet (Chapel Hill, NC: Yep Roc Records, 2007) p. 4.

Music, Training

“My cousin Zygmunt found a distant relative in Italy, Professor Vettolani, who works as an astrophysicist in Bologna. When we contacted him, it turned out that our family traditions are quite compatible. So I think we are really connected by Etruscan blood. Although Zygmunt, who is a tireless researcher of family history, has several other theories about our origins. It turns out that in Italy there were two, no longer existing, settlements called Vetulani: one in Lazio, and the other in Tuscany, near Pisa.”

Zygmunt Vetulani (1950) Polish mathematician

Jerzy Vetulani, Mózg i błazen, Wydawnictwo Czarne, Wołowiec 2015, ISBN 978-83-8049-092-5, p. 7.

Family, History, Thinking, Distant

“Unlawful revenue which, after being conveniently cleaned, is then reinvested within the legal economy: polluting it, corrupting it, forging it, killing it. Whether it’s reinvested in the London property market, in Parisian restaurants, or in hostels on the French Riviera. Drug trafficking money will buy homes that honest folk can no longer afford; it will open shops that will sell at more competitive prices than legitimate shops; it will start businesses that can afford to be more competitive than clean businesses. But one thing must be clear: these businesses are not interested in being successful; the main purpose for which they were created was to launder money, turning money that shouldn’t even exist into clean and usable money. In silence, illegal assets are moving around and undermining our economy and our democracies. In silence. But it doesn’t stop here; organised crime is providing us with a winning economic model. Organised crime is the only segment of global economy to have not been affected by the financial crisis; to have profited from the crisis, to have fed on the crisis, to have contributed to the crisis. And it’s in the crisis that it finds its satellite activities, such as usury, gambling, counterfeiting. But the most important – and most alarming – aspect of this issue is that it’s exactly in times of crisis that criminal organisations find their safe haven in banks.”

Roberto Saviano (1979) Italian journalist, writer and essayist

Dirty Money in London event (2016)

Money, Democracy, Home, Business

“Even after his conversion to Islam, the Hindu remained an object of abhorrence… Barani is so maliciously vituperative against Hindus that even many modem Muslim scholars feel embarrassed at his language and find it difficult to defend him. It must, however, be remembered that Barani belonged to the common run of Muslim theologians and chroniclers. He was a personal friend of men like Amir Khusrau and Ala Hasan Sijzi and was a disciple of no less a Sufi than Shaikh Nizamuddin Auliya. He possessed charming manners and was known for his wit and humour. But in the case of Hindus, his wit turned into rage. He is copiously quoted by future chroniclers like Nizamuddin Ahmad, Badaoni and Farishtah, who all praise him highly. Most of medieval Muslim chroniclers wrote in the idiom of Barani; only he excelled them all. All medieval chroniclers were scholars of Islamic scriptures and law. They often quote from these to defend or justify the actions of their kings in relation to their non-Muslim subjects.”

Ziauddin Barani (1285–1357) Indian Muslim historian and political thinker (1285–1357)

Lal, K. S. (1992). The legacy of Muslim rule in India. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan. Chapter 3

Men, Law, Feeling, Quotes

“I am still far from being the type of the positively new women who take their experience as females with a relative lightness and, one could say, with an enviable superficiality, whose feelings and mental energies are directed upon all other things in life but sentimental love feelings. After all I still belong to the generation of women who grew up at a turning point in history. Love with its many disappointments, with its tragedies and eternal demands for perfect happiness still played a very great role in my life. An all-too-great role! It was an expenditure of precious time and energy, fruitless and, in the final analysis, utterly worthless. We, the women of the past generation, did not yet understand how to be free. The whole thing was an absolutely incredible squandering of our mental energy, a diminution of our labor power which was dissipated in barren emotional experiences. It is certainly true that we, myself as well as many other activists, militants and working women contemporaries, were able to understand that love was not the main goal of our life and that we knew how to place work at its center. Nevertheless we would have been able to create and achieve much more had our energies not been fragmentized in the eternal struggle with our egos and with our feelings for another. It was, in fact, an eternal defensive war against the intervention of the male into our ego, a struggle revolving around the problem-complex: work or marriage and love? We, the older generation, did not yet understand, as most men do and as young women are learning today, that work and the longing for love can be harmoniously combined so that work remains as the main goal of existence. Our mistake was that each time we succumbed to the belief that we had finally found the one and only in the man we loved, the person with whom we believed we could blend our soul, one who was ready fully to recognize us as a spiritual-physical force. But over and over again things turned out differently, since the man always tried to impose his ego upon us and adapt us fully to his purposes. Thus despite everything the inevitable inner rebellion ensued, over and over again since love became a fetter. We felt enslaved and tried to loosen the love-bond. And after the eternally recurring struggle with the beloved man, we finally tore ourselves away and rushed toward freedom. Thereupon we were again alone, unhappy, lonesome, but free–free to pursue our beloved, chosen ideal …work. Fortunately young people, the present generation, no longer have to go through this kind of struggle which is absolutely unnecessary to human society. Their abilities, their work-energy will be reserved for their creative activity. Thus the existence of barriers will become a spur.”

Alexandra Kollontai (1872–1952) Soviet diplomat

The Autobiography of a Sexually Emancipated Communist Woman (1926)

Love, Life, Women, Men

“Religious he was but bigot, he was not. Some of us in the family turned into Shirdi Saibaba devotees and he did not demur.”

Basappa Danappa Jatti (1912–2002) Indian politician

Simple man with a lofty office

Family

“Visitors from Bijapur could count on his hospitality and receive roti and sabji and sometimes stay overnight with us. One frequent visitor would have none of the roti and halva. She would break an egg, swallow the contents, and top it off with a glass of milk from one of grandmother’s cows. That would be Indira Gandhi’s breakfast whenever she turned up in the mornings.”

Basappa Danappa Jatti (1912–2002) Indian politician

Simple man with a lofty office

“In the first 48 to 72 hours, no one including the Prime Minister turned up at Rashtrapati Bhavan to brief the President as is the convention even now in India.”

Zail Singh (1916–1994) Indian politician and former President of India

Giani Zail Singh's daughter [Dr. Gurdeep Kaur] says PM, govt ignored his pleas for help

“A brimming pool running disturbingly deep…His voice is urgent and keen… He turned interested speculation into awe as soon as he started to speak.”

Richard Burton (1925–1984) Welsh actor

Kenneth Tynan of British theatre, in “Life: Richard Burton”

“I have just concluded my series of paintings, I look at them constantly. I who made them often find them horrible. I understand them only at rare moments, when I have forgotten all about them, on days when I feel kindly disposed and indulgent to their poor maker. Sometimes I am horribly afraid to turn round canvases which I have piled against the wall; I am constantly afraid of finding monsters where I believed there were precious gems!... Thus it does not astonish me that the critics in London relegate me to the lowest rank. Alas! I fear that they are only too justified!”

Camille Pissarro (1830–1903) French painter

However, at times I come across works of mine which are soundly done and really in my style, and at such moments I find great solace. But no more of that. Painting, art in general, enchants me. It is my life. What else matters?
Quote in a letter, 20 Nov. 1883; as quoted in Painting Outside the lines, Patterns of Creativity in Modern Art, ed. David W. Galenson, Harvard University Press, 30 Jun 2009, p. 84
1880's

Fear, Feeling, Understanding, Painting

“We might perhaps be more tolerant of rulers turning preachers if they were moral giants. But what citizen looks at the government today thinking how wise and virtuous it is? Public respect for politicians has long been declining, even as the population at large has been seduced into responding to each new problem by demanding that the government should act. That we should be constantly demanding that an institution we rather despise should solve large problems argues a notable lack of logic in the demos.”

Kenneth Minogue (1930–2013) Australian political theorist

The statesmen of times past have been replaced by a set of barely competent social workers eager to help 'ordinary people' solve daily problems in their lives. This strange aspiration is a very large change in public life. The electorates of earlier times would have responded with derision to politicians seeking power in order to solve our problems. Today, the demos votes for them.
Introduction, p. 3
The Servile Mind: How Democracy Erodes the Moral Life

Problem, Thinking

“Throat surgery left her with a masculine voice, but the doyenne of the Kirana gharana turned it into an advantage through years of hard work.”

Gangubai Hangal (1913–2009) Indian singer

Deepa Ganesh, in "Gangubai's search for perfection."

“An astute Marwari businessman domiciled in Madras, he turned a media baron, assiduously accumulating credits by rendering political or monetary favours or putting in a word for someone who needed assistance, asking for nothing in return.”

Ramnath Goenka (1904–1991) Indian politician

Ramnath Goenka — Media Baron, 1904-1991

“As sound as what one might expect from the distinguished engineer who drew them up. He has shown the way to turn dire misfortune into a positive blessing. The proposals are without blemish. I strongly advocate carrying out the scheme.”

Mokshagundam Visveshvaraya (1860–1962) Indian engineer, scholar, statesman and the Diwan of Mysore

Allen, a well-known engineer in Madras service, while commenting on Visvesvaraya's schemes for Hyderabad as quoted in The Most Celebrated Indian Engineer:Mokshagundam Visvesvaraya, 22 November 2013, Official web site of Government of India: Vigyan Prasar http://www.vigyanprasar.gov.in/dream/feb2000/article1.htm,

Way

“For twelve months now, since I first began the practice of law, since I became an attorney, a man who speak for others, a counselor at law who has the power to address the court, that’s right, a big man, a mature person who helps others in distress—for approximately 365 days time has been nothing but a never-ending experience that meets me in the morning just like it left me off the night before. No longer am I the clear-headed mathematician of my college years. I used to have the answers; and if I didn’t, I could always turn to the back of the book or ask Professor Blackburn at Wednesday morning’s advanced algebra class. For a year now, my only conscious concern has been the pain in my stomach, the arguments of Dr. Serbin, and the schedules of the television shows. I know them all by heart. I can quote every single fucking show on Channels 2, 4, 5, 7, and, you won’t believe it, even on the educational station, Channel 9. I am the world’s only living T. V. Guide, that’s really what I am. And they want me to counsel them!”

Oscar Zeta Acosta book Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo

Source: Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo (1972), p. 24.

Pain, Books, World, Education

“No mathematical idea has ever been published in the way it was discovered. Techniques have been developed and are used, if a problem has been solved, to turn the solution procedure upside down, or if it is a larger complex of statements and theories, to turn definitions into propositions, and propositions into definitions, the hot invention into icy beauty. This then if it has affected teaching matter, is the didactical inversion, which as it happens may be anti-didactical.”

Hans Freudenthal (1905–1990) Dutch mathematician

Rather than behaving anti-didactically, one should recognise that the learner is entitled to recapitulate in a fashion of mankind. Not in the trivial matter of an abridged version, but equally we cannot require the new generation to start at the point where their predecessors left off.
Source: The Concept and the Role of the Model in Mathematics and Natural and Social Sciences (1961), p. ix

Beauty, Way, Mathematics, Idea

“The gracious mistress turned bitch in summer heat.”

Roger Kahn (1927–2020) American baseball writer

Source: The Boys Of Summer, Chapter 2, Ceremonies of Innocence, p. 84

Summer, Bitch

“The war between the two fan clubs stopped only about 15 years ago. We both told them to stop after there were stray incidents of violence on both sides. Considering fans have killed each other for our distinguished predecessors, MGR and Shivaji Ganesan, our fans can be considered pacifists (laughs). I went ahead and set a new precedent. I turned my fan club into a social service organisation.”

Rajinikanth (1950) Indian actor

Kamal Haasan, on the role of their fiercely possessive fans, in "I'd do anything Rajni asks me to: Kamal Haasan (14 December 2011)."

War

“It is always dangerous to draw too precise parallels between one historical period and another; and among the most misleading of such parallels are those which have been drawn between our own age in Europe and North America and the epoch in which the Roman empire declined into the Dark Ages. Nonetheless certain parallels there are. A crucial turning point in that earlier history occurred when men and women of good will turned aside from the task of shoring up the Roman imperium and ceased to identify the continuation of civility and moral community with the maintenance of that imperium.”

Alasdair MacIntyre book After Virtue

What they set themselves to achieve instead - often not recognizing fully what they were doing - was the construction of new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness. If my account of our moral condition is correct, we ought also to conclude that for some time now we too have reached that turning point.
Source: After Virtue (1981), p. 263

Women, Men, Age, History

“Some of the very heroic and colourful figures in our history are sons of Sabaragamuwa - Parakramabahu I, born in Dedigama, the warrior King Rajasinghe I also known as Sitawaka Rajasingha, Edirille Rala born in Colombo and baptised Domingo Corea, who returned to the village of his ancestors Atulugama near Sitawaka and turned against the Portuguese.”

Dominicus Corea (1565–1596) King of Kotte and Sitawaka

'Sabaragamuwa - in Legend and History published by the Sabaragamuwa Provincial Council. http://www.sundayobserver.lk/2004/09/26/fea19.html

History

“If life turns her back on you, grab her ass.”

Nélson Rodrigues (1912–1980) Brazilian writer and playwright

"Flor de Obsessão: as 1000 melhores frases de Nelson Rodrigues" - Published by Companhia das Letras, 1992 ISBN 8571646678, 9788571646674

Life

“A highly competent Bitch often deprecates herself by refusing to recognize her own superiority…. Bitches are among the most unsung of the unsung heroes of this society. They are the pioneers, the vanguard, the spearhead. Whether they want to be or not this is the role they serve just by their very being. Many would not choose to be the groundbreakers for the mass of women for whom they have no sisterly feelings but they cannot avoid it. Those who violate the limits, extend them; or cause the system to break…. Their major psychological oppression is not a belief that they are inferior but a belief that they are not…. Like most women they were taught to hate themselves as well as all women. In different ways and for different reasons perhaps, but the effect was similar. Internalization of a derogatory self-concept always results in a good deal of bitterness and resentment. This anger is usually either turned in on the self —making one an unpleasant person or on other women — reinforcing the social cliches about them. Only with political consciousness is it directed at the source — the social system…. We must be strong, we must be militant, we must be dangerous. We must realize that Bitch is Beautiful and that we have nothing to lose. Nothing whatsoever.”

Jo Freeman (1945) writer, lawyer

The BITCH Manifesto (Fall, 1968, © 1969) http://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/bitch.htm, as accessed Aug. 22, 2010 (also published as Joreen, The Bitch Manifesto, in Notes From the Second Year (N.Y.: Shulamith Firestone & Anne Koedt, 1970))

Women, Hate, Making love, Beauty

“I can sculpt a birthday cake out of shit and insist that I obviously mean cake, that my real intent is to wish you a happy birthday, but my intentions and protestations cannot turn crap into a delicious dessert.”

Laura Penny (1975) Canadian journalist

Source: More Money than Brains (2010), Chapter Seven, If You're So Smart, Why Ain't You Rich?, p. 212

Happiness, Birthday

“Besides these improvements,… there are others,… which may… be interesting to those… engaged in those departments… Among these may be ranked, in the division of mechanics, properly so called, a simple demonstration of the law of the force by which a body revolves in an ellipsis; another of the properties of cycloidal pendulums; an examination of the mechanism of animal motions; a comparison of the measures and weights of different countries; and a convenient estimate of the effect of human labour: with respect to architecture, a simple method of drawing the outline of a column: an investigation of the best forms for arches; a determination of the curve which affords the greatest space for turning; considerations on the structure of the joints employed in carpentry, and on the firmness of wedges; and an easy mode of forming a kirb roof: for the purposes of machinery of different kinds, an arrangement of bars for obtaining rectilinear motion; an inquiry into the most eligible proportions of wheels and pinions; remarks on the friction of wheel work, and of balances; a mode of finding the form of a tooth for impelling a pallet without friction; a chronometer for measuring minute portions of time; a clock escapement; a calculation of the effect of temperature on steel springs; an easy determination of the best line of draught for a carriage; an investigation of the resistance to be overcome by a wheel or roller; and an estimation of the ultimate pressure produced by a blow.”

Thomas Young (scientist) (1773–1829) English polymath

Preface
A Course of Lectures on Natural Philosophy and the Mechanical Arts (1807)

Law, Spring, Time, Animals

“We say what happens now. We’re taking control. We’re turning around; we’re heading home. Your orders to proceed…are in-fucking-validated.”

China Miéville book The Scar

Part 7 “The Lookout”, chapter 47 (p. 557)
The Scar (2002)

Home

“Even before string theory, especially as physics developed in the 20th century, it turned out that the equations that really work in describing nature with the most generality and the greatest simplicity are very elegant and subtle.”

Edward Witten (1951) American theoretical physicist

in a NOVA interview Viewpoints on String Theory, Edward Witten http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/elegant/view-witten.html, July 2003.

Nature

“On we read, confusing the characters with the incidents and neglecting the outcome, but tickled by the images and the turns of the talk. It is frivolous stuff, and how rare, how precious is frivolity! How few writers can prostitute all their powers!”

Ronald Firbank (1886–1926) British novelist

E. M. Forster, "Ronald Firbank", in Abinger Harvest (1936; London: Edward Arnold, 1961) p. 139.

Reading

“Manson arrived at the déjeuner given by the minister of Beaux Arts fantastically drunk—punctuated the ceremony with cat-calls and cock-a-doodle-doos, and finally staggered to his feet, hurled obscene insults at the company in general and the minister in particular, and precipitated himself on the ambassadress, Lady Phipps, some say with amorous intent others with lethal intent… the guests fled ices uneaten, coffee undrunk… I hope an example will be made, and that they will seize the opportunity for turning the sot out of the Tate, not because he is a sot, but because he has done nothing but harm to modern painting.”

James Bolivar Manson (1879–1945) British artist

Clive Bell, quoted in Frances Spalding, The Tate: A History (1998), pp. 62–70. Tate Gallery Publishing, London. ISBN 1854372319.

Hope, Art, Cats, Coffee

“Once upon a time a Georgian printed a couple of books that attracted notice, but immediately it turned out that he was little more than an amanuensis for the local blacks--that his works were really the products, not of white Georgia, but of black Georgia. Writing afterward as a white man, he swiftly subsided into the fifth rank.”

Joel Chandler Harris (1848–1908) Journalist, children's writer

H. L. Mencken, The Sahara of the Bozart.

Books, Time

“After 19 days of interrogation, they put me in a cell. They would carry by the bodies of tortured people. With the point of a boot, Barbie would turn their heads to look at their faces, and if he saw someone he believed to be a Jew, he would crush it with his heel.”

Klaus Barbie (1913–1991) SS-Hauptsturmführer, soldier and Gestapo member

Lise Lesevre

People

“If the Zionist crusader missionaries of hate and counter-Islam consultants like Daniel Pipes, Robert Spencer, Michael Scheuer, Steven Emerson, and yes, even the crusader-in-chief George W. Bush were to abandon their unbelief and repent and enter into the light of Islam and turn their swords against the enemies of God, it would be accepted of them and they would be our brothers in Islam. And we send a special invitation to all of you fighting Bush’s crusader pipe dream in Afghanistan, Iraq, and wherever else W. has sent you to die.”

Robert Spencer (1962) American author and blogger

Adam Gadahn My Invitation From al-Qaeda http://archive.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=2739

God, Hate, Dreams, Light

“Artaud sought to remove aesthetic distance, bringing the audience into direct contact with the dangers of life. By turning theatre into a place where the spectator is exposed rather than protected, Artaud was committing an act of cruelty upon them.”

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

Lee Jamieson, Antonin Artaud: From Theory to Practice, Greenwich Exchange, 2007, p. 23.

Life

“I started taking cocaine and drink … I turned into a babbling fucking wreck.”

Damien Hirst (1965) artist

On the Way to Work, Faber and Faber, 2001.

Drink

“It was not that the figure had been removed, not that the figures had been swept away, but the symbols for the figures, and in turn the shapes in the later canvases were substitutes for the figures.... these new shapes say.... what the symbols said.”

Mark Rothko (1903–1970) American painter

Rothko, explaining Seitz his new way of painting during the mid-1940s
Abstract Expressionist Painting in America, W.C, Seitz, Cambridge Massachusetts, 1983, p. 142
after 1970, posthumous

“His book has the force of a mob-protest; an outcry from anonymous throats. The wheel turns and turns and it does not matter, one hardly notices that the captain of the company, killed on page 159, is alive again a hundred pages later. It does not matter that every stock situation of the war, suicide, the murder of an officer, the slaughter of prisoners, a vision of Christ, is apportioned to Company K, because the book is not written in any realistic convention. It is the only War-book I have read which has found a new form to fit the novelty of the protest. The prose is bare, lucid, without literary echoes, not an imitation but a development of eighteenth-century prose.”

William March (1893–1954) United States Marine, novelist, short story writer

In a Graham Greene review of the novel Company K for the newspaper The Spectator.

War, Books, Suicide, Reading

Quotes about turn page 59

Quotes about turn
page 59