Quotes about turn
page 6

“It is said that within the council chamber the judges were naturally leaning toward acquittal. It becomes clear why, at that point, as justification for the verdict, it became vitally important to turn up some damning evidence, a secret document that, like God, could not be shown, but which explained everything, and was invisible, unknowable, and incontrovertible. I deny the existence of that document…. a document concerning national defense that could not be produced without sparking an immediate declaration of war tomorrow? No! No! It is a lie, all the more odious and cynical in that its perpetrators are getting off free without even admitting it. They stirred up all of France, they hid behind the understandable commotion they had set off, they sealed their lips while troubling our hearts and perverting our spirit. I know of no greater crime against the state.”

Emile Zola J’accuse…!

J'accuse! (1898)

God, War, Lie, Secret

“The Caladrius is a bird of which it is related that, when it is carried into the presence of a sick person, if the sick man is going to die, the bird turns away its head and never looks at him; but if the sick man is to be saved the bird never loses sight of him but is the cause of curing him of all his sickness. Like unto this is the love of virtue. It never looks at any vile or base thing, but rather clings always to pure and virtuous things and takes up its abode in a noble heart; as the birds do in green woods on flowery branches. And this Love shows itself more in adversity than in prosperity; as light does, which shines most where the place is darkest.”

Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519) Italian Renaissance polymath

The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1883), XX Humorous Writings

Love, Bird, Light, Heart

“"Education to personality" has become a pedagogical ideal that turns its back upon the standardized-the collective and normal-human being. It thus fittingly recognizes the historical fact that the great, liberating deeds of world history have come from leading personalities and never from the inert mass that is secondary at all times and needs a demagogue if it is to move at all. The paean of the Italian nation is addressed to the personality of the Duce, and dirges of other nations lament the absence of great leaders.”

C.G. Jung (1875–1961) Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist who founded analytical psychology

Lecture, The Inner Voice, Kulturbund, Vienna (1932); quoted in The Integration of Personality, Farrar & Rinehart, NY (1939)

World, Education, History, Time

“He spent the whole time sitting on a log in the woodshed, sometimes starting straight ahead with the fixity of a blind man who knows that even if he turns his head in the other direction he will still not see anything”

José Saramago book The Cave

Source: The Cave (2000), p. 30 (Vintage 2003)

Time

“We have a better story to tell. But to say that our vision for the future is better is not to say that it will inevitably win. Because history also shows the power of fear. History shows the lasting hold of greed and the desire to dominate others in the minds of men. Especially men. History shows how easily people can be convinced to turn on those who look different, or worship God in a different way. So, if we’re truly to continue Madiba’s long walk towards freedom, we’re going to have to work harder and we’re going to have to be smarter.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

2018, Nelson Mandela Annual Lecture (2018)

Men, God, People, Fear

“Well, I knew it was going to be important. That much I knew. In fact, I had thought about sealing it in a dated envelope with my predictions and then opening it 20-30 years later to see if my intuitions were right. I realized this paper marked a new direction. I used to think about it this way-that one day Fuzzy Logic would turn out to be one of the most important things to come out of our Electrical Engineering Computer Systems Division at Berkeley. I never dreamed it would become a worldwide phenomenon. My expectations were much more modest.”

Lotfi A. Zadeh (1921–2017) Electrical engineer and computer scientist

Answer to the question: "Back in 1965 when you published your initial paper on Fuzzy Logic, how did you think it would be accepted?"
1990s, Interview with Lotfi Zadeh, Creator of Fuzzy Logic (1994)

Dreams, Way, Thinking

“So true is it that all transactions of preeminent importance are wrapt in doubt and obscurity; while some hold for certain facts the most precarious hearsays, others turn facts into falsehood; and both are exaggerated by posterity.”

Tacitus book Annals

Book III, 19
Annals (117)
Variant: So obscure are the greatest events, as some take for granted any hearsay, whatever its source, others turn truth into falsehood, and both errors find encouragement with posterity.

“Then I would sing a little in the synagogue. See, if you're a singer, you love to turn your own ears on. You look for those rooms where the reverb is great. I remember the synagogue had a lot of wood and it was a great room. And it was a captive audience and you could sing these minor key songs and make them cry, and that was a thrill.”

Art Garfunkel (1941) American singer, poet, and actor

http://www.artgarfunkel.info/more.html

Love, Singing, Cry

“And now, ladies and gentlemen, that we've enjoyed some good times this evening, and enjoyed some laughter together, I feel it is my obligation to remind you of some of the negative, depressing, dangerous, life-threatening things that life is really all about; things you have not been thinking about tonight, but which will be waiting for you as soon as you leave the theater or as soon as you turn off your television sets. Anal rape, quicksand, body lice, evil spirits, gridlock, acid rain, continental drift, labor violence, flash floods, rabies, torture, bad luck, calcium deficiency, falling rocks, cattle stampedes, bank failure, evil neighbors, killer bees, organ rejection, lynching, toxic waste, unstable dynamite, religious fanatics, prickly heat, price fixing, moral decay, hotel fires, loss of face, stink bombs, bubonic plague, neo-Nazis, friction, cereal weevils, failure of will, chain reaction, soil erosion, mail fraud, dry rot, voodoo curse, broken glass, snake bite, parasites, white slavery, public ridicule, faithless friends, random violence, breach of contract, family scandals, charlatans, transverse myelitis, structural defects, race riots, sunspots, rogue elephants, wax buildup, killer frost, jealous coworkers, root canals, metal fatigue, corporal punishment, sneak attacks, peer pressure, vigilantes, birth defects, false advertising, ungrateful children, financial ruin, mildew, loss of privileges, bad drugs, ill-fitting shoes, widespread chaos, Lou Gehrig's disease, stray bullets, runaway trains, chemical spills, locusts, airline food, shipwrecks, prowlers, bathtub accidents, faulty merchandise, terrorism, discrimination, wrongful cremation, carbon deposits, beef tapeworm, taxation without representation, escaped maniacs, sunburn, abandonment, threatening letters, entropy, nine-mile fever, poor workmanship, absentee landlords, solitary confinement, depletion of the ozone layer, unworthiness, intestinal bleeding, defrocked priests, loss of equilibrium, disgruntled employees, global warming, card sharks, poisoned meat, nuclear accidents, broken promises, contamination of the water supply, obscene phone calls, nuclear winter, wayward girls, mutual assured destruction, rampaging moose, the greenhouse effect, cluster headaches, social isolation, Dutch elm disease, the contraction of the universe, paper cuts, eternal damnation, the wrath of God, and PARANOIAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!”

George Carlin (1937–2008) American stand-up comedian

Playing With Your Head (1986)

Life, God, Bad luck, Children

“The whole visible world is perhaps nothing other than a motivation of man’s wish to rest for a moment — an attempt to falsify the fact of knowledge, to try to turn the knowledge into the goal.”

Franz Kafka book The Zürau Aphorisms

86
The Zürau Aphorisms (1917 - 1918)

World, Motivation, Knowledge

“And the city was lovely, highly ornamented, like Paris, and untouched by war. It was supposedly an “open” city, not to be attacked since there were no troop concentrations or war industries there. But high explosives were dropped on Dresden by American and British planes on the night of February 13, 1945, just about twenty-one years ago, as I now write. There were no particular targets for the bombs. The hope was that they would create a lot of kindling and drive firemen underground. And then tens of thousands of tiny incendiaries were scattered over the kindling, like seeds on freshly turned loam. More bombs were dropped to keep firemen in their holes, and all the little fires grew, joined one another, became one apocalyptic flame. Hey presto: fire storm. It was the largest massacre in European history, by the way. … Everything was gone but the cellars where 135,000 Hansels and Gretels had been baked like gingerbread men.”

Kurt Vonnegut book Mother Night

Introduction (1966)
Mother Night (1961)

Love, Men, War, Hope

“The man changed position, turned his back on the wardrobe blocking the door and let his right arm slide down toward the side on which the dog is lying. A minute later, he was awake. He was thirsty. He turned on his bedside light, got up, shuffled his feet into the slippers which were, as always, providing a pillow for the dog's head, and went into the kitchen. Death followed him. The man filled a glass with water and drank it. At this point, the dog appeared, slaked his thirst in the water-dish next to the back door and then looked up at his master. I suppose you want to go out, said the cellist. He opened the door and waited until the animal came back. A little water remained in his glass. Death looked at it and made an effort to imagine what it must be like to feel thirsty, but failed. She would have been equally incapable of imagining it when she'd had to make people die of thirst in the desert, but at the time she hadn't even tried. The dog returned, wagging his tail. Let's go back to sleep, said the man. They went into the bedroom again, the dog turned around twice, then curled up into a ball. The man drew the sheet up to his neck, coughed twice and soon afterward was asleep again. Sitting in her corner, death was watching. Much later, the dog got up from the carpet and jumped onto the sofa. For the first time in her life, death knew what it felt like to have a dog on her lap.”

José Saramago book Death with Interruptions

Source: Death with Interruptions (2005), p. 172

Life, Death, People, Dogs

“To me the great divide is between the talkative and the quiet. Do they just say everything that’s on their minds, even before it’s on their minds? Sometimes I think I could just turn up my head like a walkman so what’s going on there could be heard by others. But there would still be a difference. For inside the head they are talking to people like them, and I am talking to someone like me: he is quiet and doesn’t much like being talked at; he can’t conceal how easily he gets bored.”

James Richardson (1950) American poet

#127
Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001)

People, Thinking

“And if you should say that the shells were carried by the waves, being empty and dead, I say that where the dead went they were not far removed from the living; for in these mountains living ones are found, which are recognisable by the shells being in pairs; and they are in a layer where there are no dead ones; and a little higher up they are found, where they were thrown by the waves, all the dead ones with their shells separated, near to where the rivers fell into the sea, to a great depth; like the Arno which fell from the Gonfolina near to Monte Lupo, where it left a deposit of gravel which may still be seen, and which has agglomerated; and of stones of various districts, natures, and colours and hardness, making one single conglomerate. And a little beyond the sandstone conglomerate a tufa has been formed, where it turned towards Castel Florentino; farther on, the mud was deposited in which the shells lived, and which rose in layers according to the levels at which the turbid Arno flowed into that sea. And from time to time the bottom of the sea was raised, depositing these shells in layers, as may be seen in the cutting at Colle Gonzoli, laid open by the Arno which is wearing away the base of it; in which cutting the said layers of shells are very plainly to be seen in clay of a bluish colour, and various marine objects are found there. And if the earth of our hemisphere is indeed raised by so much higher than it used to be, it must have become by so much lighter by the waters which it lost through the rift between Gibraltar and Ceuta; and all the more the higher it rose, because the weight of the waters which were thus lost would be added to the earth in the other hemisphere. And if the shells had been carried by the muddy deluge they would have been mixed up, and separated from each other amidst the mud, and not in regular steps and layers — as we see them now in our time.”

Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519) Italian Renaissance polymath

The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1883), XVI Physical Geography

Mountain, Nature, Water, Time

“Evil – to exploit the knowledge of your own vulnerability by turning it on others' vulnerability in order to bring more pain into the world.”

Jordan Peterson (1962) Canadian clinical psychologist, cultural critic, and professor of psychology

Other

Pain, World, Knowledge, Evil

“Flogging. The only solution to every problem. I warrant even the culprit himself doesn't know! It was just — his turn!”

Peter Ustinov (1921–2004) English actor, writer, and dramatist

Dansker
Billy Budd (1962)

Problem

“Supernaturalism can never provide a sufficient explanation of anything. There is never an instance where we can blame anything on the supernatural. Once we found the real reason behind anything that was once attributed to miracles, curses or omens, witchcraft or demonic possession, it always turned out to be a revelation of whole new fields of study previously unimagined and vastly more complex than the simple excuses we were told before. In each of these cases, the supernatural explanation was already wrong before the natural explanation was known. So you should never resort to the god-of-the-gaps fallacy that anything science can’t explain is explained by magic, because that doesn’t explain it either. If you call it a miracle, it means you don’t what it really is. Goddidit is not an explanation of anything, and it never was. Science can only ever work with natural explanations, not because of any unfair prejudice, but because natural explanations are the only ones that can be tested.”

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

Patheos, Correspondence with a Creationist http://www.patheos.com/blogs/reasonadvocates/2017/06/06/correspondence-with-a-creationist/ (June 6, 2017)

God, Nature, Study, Science

“The hunger for peace is too great, the hour in history too late, for any government to mock men's hopes with mere words and promises and gestures. […] There is, before all peoples, a precarious chance to turn the black tide of events. If we failed to strive to seize this chance, the judgment of future ages will be harsh and just. If we strive but fail and the world remains armed against itself, it at least would need be divided no longer in its clear knowledge of who has condemned humankind to this fate.”

Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890–1969) American general and politician, 34th president of the United States (in office from 1953 to 1961)

1950s, The Chance for Peace (1953)

Men, Hunger, Fate, People

“Death is the side of life which is turned away from us.”

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) Austrian poet and writer

Letter to W. von Hulewicz

Life, Death

“In our eyes, individual terror is inadmissible precisely because it belittles the role of the masses in their own consciousness, reconciles them to their own powerlessness, and turns their eyes and hopes toward a great avenger and liberator who someday will come and accomplish his mission.”

Leon Trotsky (1879–1940) Marxist revolutionary from Russia

Why Marxists oppose Individual Terrorism http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1911/11/tia09.htm, article published in the Austrian Social Democratic paper Der Kampf (1909)

Hope

“The true education is consequently the science of linking up the integral parts of man, and also of linking him up in turn with his immediate environment, and then with the greater whole in which he has to play his part. Each aspect, regarded as a lower aspect, can ever be simply the expression of the next higher. p. 6”

Alice A. Bailey (1880–1949) esoteric, theosophist, writer

Education in the New Age (1954)

Education, Science, Parting

“Some American writer has said “the snakes in this district may be divided into one species—the venomous”. The same principle applies here. Postage-Stamp-Cases may be divided into one species, the “Wonderland”. Imitations of it will soon appear, no doubt: but they cannot include the two Pictorial Surprises, which are copyright.You don't see why I call them 'Surprises'? Well, take the Case in your left hand, and regard it attentively. You see Alice nursing the Duchess's Baby? (An entirely new combination, by the way : it doesn't occur in the book.) Now, with your right thumb and forefinger, lay hold of the little book, and suddenly pull it out. The Baby has turned into a Pig I If that doesn't surprise you, why, I suppose you wouldn't be surprised if your own Mother-in-law suddenly turned into a Gyroscope!”

Lewis Carroll (1832–1898) English writer, logician, Anglican deacon and photographer

Eight or Nine Wise Words About Letter-Writing (1890)

Books, Law, Way, Appearance

“Something in all human beings makes them want to do the right thing. Not that this desire always prevails; oftentimes it is overcome and they turn towards evil. But some power is constantly calling them back. Ever there comes a resistance to wrongdoing. When bad conditions begun to accumulate, when the forces of darkness become prevalent, always they are ultimately doomed to fail, as the better angels of human nature are roused to resistance.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

1920s, Authority and Religious Liberty (1924)

Angels, Nature, Evil

“European anti-Semites, Zionism believes that European Jews, unlike European Christians, are not Europeans but foreigners who need to leave Europe to its 'real' people and be 'repatriated' to their own state in Palestine. Today's Israeli Jewish supremacists are reviving anti-Semitic ideas of the turn of the century that had accused Jews of seeking to control the world. From the infamous czarist Protocols of the Elders of Zion to genocidal Nazi propaganda, Jews as a 'power-hungry' people was a notion that was part and parcel of the anti-Semitic lexicon. Today's Israeli Jewish supremacists seem to agree with the anti-Semites that, if Jews do not control the world, they at least control America.”

Joseph Massad (1963) Associate Professor of Arab Studies

Ibid.
"The Ends of Zionism: Racism and the Palestinian Struggle"

People, World, Idea, Parting

“Only a seaman realises to what great extent an entire ship reflects the personality and ability of one individual, her Commanding Officer. To a landsman, this is not understandable—and sometimes it is even difficult for us to comprehend—but it is so! A ship at sea is a different world in herself, and in consideration of the protracted and distant operations of the fleet units, the Navy must place great power, responsibility and trust in the hands of those leaders chosen for command. In each ship there is one man who, in the hour of emergency or peril at sea, can turn to no other man. There is one who alone is ultimately responsible for the safe navigation, engineering performance, accurate gunfire and morale of the ship. He is the Commanding Officer. He is the ship. This is the most difficult and demanding assignment in the Navy. There is not an instant during his tour as Commanding Officer that he can escape the grasp of command responsibility. His privileges, in view of his obligations, are almost ludicrously small; nevertheless, this is the spur which has given the Navy its great leaders. It is a duty which richly deserves the highest, time-honoured title of the seafaring world—Captain.”

Joseph Conrad (1857–1924) Polish-British writer

Command at Sea: the Prestige, Privilege and Burden of Command

World, Understanding, Distant, Time

“How would I have turned out, I sometimes wonder, had I grown up in a house that stifled enterprise by imposing harsh and senseless discipline? Or in an atmosphere of overindulgence, in a household where there were no rules, no boundaries drawn? My mother certainly understood the importance of discipline, but she always explained why some things were not allowed. Above all, she tried to be fair and to be consistent.”

Jane Goodall (1934) British primatologist, ethologist, and anthropologist

Source: Reason for Hope: a Spiritual Journey (2000), p. iv

Housing

“I was once asked for my autograph in the shower on one of my rare visits to the gym. I was washing my hair, facing the wall, when I was tapped on the shoulder so already it's quite inappropriate. I turned round and there was another naked man standing there with a piece of paper. And I think 'if you can't see how inappropriate this I am just going to have to play along' so I took the paper, which is slowly becoming mulch, and carved my name in it.”

David Tennant (1971) Scottish actor

David Tennant on fan obsession, The Graham Norton Show, 14 April 2011 Source: Graham Norton welcomes David Tennant, Catherine Tate, Josh Groban and Jon Richardson, BBC Press Office, 15 April 2011, 15 April 2011 http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2011/04_april/15/norton.shtml,

Thinking

“You don't change the course of history by turning the faces of portraits to the wall.”

Jawaharlal Nehru (1889–1964) Indian lawyer, statesman, and writer, first Prime Minister of India

Statement to Nikita Khrushchev, as quoted in The New York Post (1 April 1959), and in The Cynic's Lexicon : A Dictionary of Amoral Advice (1984) by Jonathon Green, p. 184

History, Change

“Very well then! Emancipation from huckstering and money, consequently from practical, real Judaism, would be the self-emancipation of our time. An organization of society [such as communism] which would abolish the preconditions for huckstering, and therefore the possibility of huckstering, would make [this] Jew impossible. His religious consciousness would be dissipated like a thin haze in the real, vital air of society. On the other hand, if the Jew recognizes that this practical nature of his is futile and works to abolish it, he extricates himself from his previous development and works for human emancipation as such and turns against the supreme practical expression of human self-estrangement.”

Karl Marx book On the Jewish Question

On the Jewish Question (1843)

Money, Communication, Nature, Time

“[…]his back is fairly turned?
The pair of goodly palaces are burned,
The gardens ravaged, and your Guelf is drunk
A week with joy; the next, his laughter sunk
In sobs of blood, for he found, some strange way,
Old Salinguerra back again; I say
Old Salinguerra in the town once more
Uprooting, overturning, flame before
Blood fetlock-high beneath him; Azzo fled;
Who scaped the carnage followed; then the dead
Were pushed aside from Salinguerra's throne.
He ruled once more Ferrara, all alone.
Till Azzo, stunned awhile, revived, would pounce;
Coupled with Boniface, like lynx and ounce.”

Robert Browning book Sordello

Book the First
Sordello (1840)

Way, Laughter, Joy, Dead

“The entire method consists in the order and arrangement of the things to which the mind’s eye must turn so that we can discover some truth.”

René Descartes book Rules for the Direction of the Mind

Rules for the Direction of the Mind: X.379
As quoted in [Clarke, Desmond M., 2006, Descartes : a Biography, Cambridge Press, 67, ISBN 978-0-521-82301-2]

Truth

“While the recent attacks are not connected by common networks, they are connected in one important sense. They are bound together by the single evil ideology of Islamist extremism that preaches hatred, sows division and promotes sectarianism. It is an ideology that claims our Western values of freedom, democracy and human rights are incompatible with the religion of Islam. It is an ideology that is a perversion of Islam and a perversion of the truth. Defeating this ideology is one of the great challenges of our time, but it cannot be defeated by military intervention alone. It will not be defeated by the maintenance of a permanent defensive counter-terrorism operation, however skillful its leaders and practitioners. It will only be defeated when we turn people’s minds away from this violence and make them understand that our values – pluralistic British values – are superior to anything offered by the preachers and supporters of hate.”

Theresa May (1956) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech after the London Bridge attack (4 June 2017)

Hate, People, Truth, Religion

“Everything I touch seems destined to turn into something mean and farcical.”

Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906) Norwegian playwright, theatre director, and poet

Hedda, Act IV
Hedda Gabler (1890)

“For two years I have lived outside the world: in a dream world. One by one, I let each strand tying me to the world and to my fellow men be cut. I live entirely for the mind, for the. heart not at all …. I turned myself into a bear, inside and outside … other people did not exist for me. For perhaps two years, I didn’t laugh once and I didn’t cry … but I never hurt anyone but myself.”

Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937) Italian writer, politician, theorist, sociologist and linguist

Gramsci cited in Davidson, 1977, p. 70.

Men, People, World, Dreams

“Islam is in its origins an Arab religion. Everyone not an Arab who is a Muslim is a convert. Islam is not simply a matter of conscience or private belief. It makes imperial demands. A convert’s worldview alters. His holy places are in Arab lands; his sacred language is Arabic. His idea of history alters. He rejects his own; he becomes, whether he likes it or not, a part of the Arab story. The convert has to turn away from everything that is his. The disturbance for societies is immense, and even after a thousand years can remain unresolved; the turning away has to be done again and again. People develop fantasies about who and what they are; and in the Islam of converted countries there is an element of neurosis and nihilism. These countries can be easily set on the boil.”

V.S. Naipaul (1932–2018) Trinidadian-British writer of Indo-Nepalese ancestry

Prologue
Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples (1998)

People, Religion, History, Idea

“Every man is proud of what he does well; and no man is proud of what he does not do well. With the former, his heart is in his work; and he will do twice as much of it with less fatigue. The latter performs a little imperfectly, looks at it in disgust, turns from it, and imagines himself exceedingly tired. The little he has done, comes to nothing, for want of finishing.”

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States

1850s, Address before the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society (1859)

Imagination, Heart

“"Trotter its all wrong. Nothing turned out the way it was supposed to." "How do you mean supposed to? Life ain't supposed to be nothing, 'cept maybe tough." [.. ] "If life is so bad, how come you're so happy?" "Did I say bad? I said it was tough. Nothing to make you happy like doing good on a tough job, now is there?"”

Katherine Paterson book The Great Gilly Hopkins

Gilly Hopkins and Trotter
The Great Gilly Hopkins (1978)

Life, Happiness, Way

“Desire, even the basest, kind, required the notion of futurity if it was ever to come off. A man without a future, a dying man, was no longer desirable. And however stupid such a reaction might have seemed, Paul knew that if the situation was ever reversed, he would feel the same way about the woman. Desire would have turned into compassion. Which is tantamount to saying that desire would vanish into thin air.”

Françoise Sagan (1935–2004) French writer

Un chagrin de passage (1994, A Fleeting Sorrow, translated 1995)

Stupidity, Way, Feeling, Future

“Weather is a literary specialty, and no untrained hand can turn out a good article on it.”

Mark Twain book The American Claimant

The American Claimant, foreword (1892)

Weather

“As soon as an opinion becomes common it is sufficient reason for men to abandon it and to uphold the opposite opinion until that in its turn grows old, and they require to distinguish themselves by other things. Thus if they attain their goal in some art or science, we must expect them soon to cast it aside to acquire some fresh fame, and this is partly the reason why the most splendid ages degenerate so quickly, and, scarcely emerged from barbarism, plunge into it again.”

Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues (1715–1747) French writer, a moralist

Source: Reflections and Maxims (1746), p. 179.

Men, Age, Art, Science

“I know this place. … Here it is on the chart. Look, it says here: "Continue until you come to the square of a walled town which is the end of the Camino Real and the beginning of the Camino Real. Halt there," it says, "and turn back, Traveler, for the spring of humanity has gone dry in this place…”

Tennessee Williams Camino Real

Sancho
Camino Real (1953)

Travel, Spring

“This sophism derives much, perhaps the whole, of its currency from the assumption that there is some omnipotent and sacred supremacy pertaining to a State — to each State of our Federal Union. Our States have neither more nor less power than that reserved to them in the Union by the Constitution, no one of them ever having been a State out of the Union. The original ones passed into the Union even before they cast off their British colonial dependence, and the new ones each came into the Union directly from a condition of dependence, excepting Texas; and even Texas, in its temporary independence, was never designated a State. The new ones only took the designation of States on coming into the Union, while that name was first adopted for the old ones in and by the Declaration of Independence. Therein the "United Colonies" were declared to be "free and independent States;" but even then the object plainly was not to declare their independence of one another or of the Union, but directly the contrary, as their mutual pledge and their mutual action before, at the time, and afterwards abundantly show. The express plighting of faith by each and all of the original thirteen in the Articles of Confederation, two years later, that the Union shall be perpetual is most conclusive. Having never been States, either in substance or in name, outside of the Union, whence this magical omnipotence of "State rights," asserting a claim of power to lawfully destroy the Union itself? Much is said about the "sovereignty" of the States, but the word even is not in the National Constitution, nor, as is believed, in any of the State constitutions. What is a "sovereignty" in the political sense of the term? Would it be far wrong to define it "a political community without a political superior"? Tested by this, no one of our States, except Texas, ever was a sovereignty; and even Texas gave up the character on coming into the Union, by which act she acknowledged the Constitution of the United States and the laws and treaties of the United States made in pursuance of the Constitution to be for her the supreme law of the land. The States have their status in the Union, and they have no other legal status. If they break from this, they can only do so against law and by revolution. The Union, and not themselves separately, procured their independence and their liberty. By conquest or purchase the Union gave each of them whatever of independence and liberty it has. The Union is older than any of the States, and, in fact, it created them as States. Originally some dependent colonies made the Union, and in turn the Union threw off their old dependence for them and made them States, such as they are. Not one of them ever had a State constitution independent of the Union. Of course it is not forgotten that all the new States framed their constitutions before they entered the Union, nevertheless dependent upon and preparatory to coming into the Union.”

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States

1860s, Fourth of July Address to Congress (1861)

Faith, Law, Communication, Sense

“If they (children) smash, the flower vase assumes a smile
while turning into pieces.
For a chance to be spilled by their hands,
anything they hold gets spilled itself full of happiness.
For a chance to play with them,
water forgets about its own colourlessness.”

Suman Pokhrel (1967) Nepali poet, lyricist, playwright, translator and artist

Children http://www.occupypoetry.net/children_1/ From Poetry

Happiness, Children, Smile, Flowers

“And a quick glance in the mirror turns out to be a mistake. Oh God, is that my face?”

Delia Ephron (1944) American writer and film producer

Hanging Up, Delia Ephron

God

“Truth is the precious harvest of the earth.
But once, when harvest waved upon a land,
The noisome cankerworm and caterpillar,
Locusts, and all the swarming foul-born broods,
Fastened upon it with swift, greedy jaws,
And turned the harvest into pestilence,
Until men said, What profits it to sow?”

George Eliot book Felix Holt, the Radical

Verse heading up the start of Chapter 11 (at page 111)
Felix Holt, the Radical (1866)

Men, Truth

“For ourselves, who are ordinary men and women, let us return thanks to Nature for her bounty by using every one of the senses she has given us; vary our state as much as possible; turn now this side, now that, to the warmth, and relish to the full before the sun goes down the kisses of youth and the echoes of a beautiful voice singing Catullus. Every season is likeable, and wet days and fine, red wine and white, company and solitude. Even sleep, that deplorable curtailment of the joy of life, can be full of dreams; and the most common actions—a walk, a talk, solitude in one’s own orchard—can be enhanced and lit up by the association of the mind. Beauty is everywhere, and beauty is only two finger’s-breadth from goodness.”

Virginia Woolf The Common Reader

"Montaigne" http://teaching.quotidiana.org/essays/Woolf_Montaigne.html The Common Reader (1925)

Life, Women, Men, Youth

“I just realized that I hadn't posted about the film "An Inconvenient Truth" for those of you who don't know, this movie talks about global warming. I went into the movie a little skeptical, wondering if I was going to be preached at by Al Gore, the narrator and spokesperson for the film. It's a documentary, too, so I wasn't expecting anything too exciting. As it turns out, this movie is a must-see. it's not about Al Gore, tree-hugging hippies, George Clooney, Julia Roberts, George Bush, or U. S. issues. This film and the movement surrounding it is about being aware of the nasty turn our world and weather seems to be taking, and what we can do to turn it around before we ruin the only pace we have to live. The information in this film is shocking. Parts of our planet that I assumed were covered in ice are now melting, and the photos of these places, seen in the movie, make me nervous. The links from this past year's natural disasters to the overall direction of global warming is an issue that is worth looking at. The ten hottest years ever measured were in the last 14 years. The hottest was last year, but it doesn't take a genius to tell that this year is hotter.”

Mike Shinoda (1977) American musician

LP/FM MB 2006

Truth, World, Photo, Nature

“Turn the other cheek too often and you get a razor through it.”

John Lydon (1956) English singer, songwriter, and musician

Source: [John, Tobler, 1992, NME Rock 'N' Roll Years, 1st, Reed International Books Ltd, London, 303, CN 5585]

“If the Conservative Party were your refrigerator, all your food would go bad. If it were your car or bicycle, you would be stranded by the side of the road. If it were your accountant, you would be bankrupt. If it were your lawyer, you would be in prison. If any consumer good, service or profession so consistently and predictably disappointed or failed in its ostensible main purpose, people would turn their backs on it. It would be overtaken, replaced and driven out of business by a better competitor.”

Peter Hitchens (1951) author, journalist

From 'The Cameron Delusion' (2010)

People, Food, Disappointment, Cars

“I knew if I quit, nobody would ever believe that women had the capability to run 26-plus miles. If I quit, everybody would say it was a publicity stunt. If I quit, it would set women’s sports back, way back, instead of forward. If I quit, I’d never run Boston. If I quit, Jock Semple and all those like him would win. My fear and humiliation turned to anger.”

Kathrine Switzer (1947) American distance runner

Source: http://kathrineswitzer.com/about-kathrine/1967-boston-marathon-the-real-story/

Women, Fear, Way, Sport

“But take a brief glance at real life. In present-day economic life you will find, not only competition and monopoly, but also their synthesis, which is not a formula but a movement. Monopoly produces competition, competition produces monopoly. That equation, however, far from alleviating the difficulties of the present situation, as bourgeois economists suppose, gives rise to a situation even more difficult and involved. Thus, by changing the basis upon which the present economic relations rest, by abolishing the present mode of production, you abolish not only competition, monopoly and their antagonism, but also their unity, their synthesis, the movement whereby a true balance is maintained between competition and monopoly.

Let me now give you an example of Mr Proudhon's dialectics. Freedom and slavery constitute an antagonism. There is no need for me to speak either of the good or of the bad aspects of freedom. As for slavery, there is no need for me to speak of its bad aspects. The only thing requiring explanation is the good side of slavery. I do not mean indirect slavery, the slavery of proletariat; I mean direct slavery, the slavery of the Blacks in Surinam, in Brazil, in the southern regions of North America. Direct slavery is as much the pivot upon which our present-day industrialism turns as are machinery, credit, etc. Without slavery there would be no cotton, without cotton there would be no modern industry. It is slavery which has given value to the colonies, it is the colonies which have created world trade, and world trade is the necessary condition for large-scale machine industry. Consequently, prior to the slave trade, the colonies sent very few products to the Old World, and did not noticeably change the face of the world. Slavery is therefore an economic category of paramount importance. Without slavery, North America, the most progressive nation, would he transformed into a patriarchal country. Only wipe North America off the map and you will get anarchy, the complete decay of trade and modern civilisation. But to do away with slavery would be to wipe America off the map. Being an economic category, slavery has existed in all nations since the beginning of the world. All that modern nations have achieved is to disguise slavery at home and import it openly into the New World. After these reflections on slavery, what will the good Mr Proudhon do? He will seek the synthesis of liberty and slavery, the true golden mean, in other words the balance between slavery and liberty. Mr Proudhon understands perfectly well that men manufacture worsted, linens and silks; and whatever credit is due for understanding such a trifle! What Mr Proudhon does not understand is that, according to their faculties, men also produce the social relations in which they produce worsted and linens. Still less does Mr Proudhon understand that those who produce social relations in conformity with their material productivity also produce the ideas, categories, i. e. the ideal abstract expressions of those same social relations. Indeed, the categories are no more eternal than the relations they express. They are historical and transitory products. To Mr Proudhon, on the contrary, the prime cause consists in abstractions and categories. According to him it is these and not men which make history. The abstraction, the category regarded as such, i. e. as distinct from man and his material activity, is, of course, immortal, immutable, impassive. It is nothing but an entity of pure reason, which is only another way of saying that an abstraction, regarded as such, is abstract. An admirable tautology! Hence, to Mr Proudhon, economic relations, seen in the form of categories, are eternal formulas without origin or progress. To put it another way: Mr Proudhon does not directly assert that to him bourgeois life is an eternal truth; he says so indirectly, by deifying the categories which express bourgeois relations in the form of thought. He regards the products of bourgeois society as spontaneous entities, endowed with a life of their own, eternal, the moment these present themselves to him in the shape of categories, of thought. Thus he fails to rise above the bourgeois horizon. Because he operates with bourgeois thoughts and assumes them to be eternally true, he looks for the synthesis of those thoughts, their balance, and fails to see that their present manner of maintaining a balance is the only possible one.”

Karl Marx (1818–1883) German philosopher, economist, sociologist, journalist and revolutionary socialist

Letter to Pavel Vasilyevich Annenkov, (28 December 1846), Rue d'Orleans, 42, Faubourg Namur, Marx Engels Collected Works Vol. 38, p. 95; International Publishers (1975). First Published: in full in the French original in M.M. Stasyulevich i yego sovremenniki v ikh perepiske, Vol. III, 1912

Life, Men, Truth, World

“This hunger for novelty — which makes sensuous love equally changeful and rapacious, which makes us seek the same emotion in other bodies which we cast off as fast as they fall — turns life into an infernal succession of disenchantments, spites and scorn; and it is chiefly that hunger for novelty which leaves us a prey to unrealizable hope and irrevocable regret. Those lovers who persist in remaining together execute themselves; the name of their common death, which at first was Absence, becomes Presence.”

Henri Barbusse (1873–1935) French novelist

Light (1919), Ch. XXIII - Face To Face

Love, Life, Death, Hunger

“One of the funniest examples of these kinds of statistics comes from Evolution: Possible or Impossible by James F. Coppedge [who] cites an article by Ulric Jelinek … which claims that the odds are 1 in 10^243 against "two thousand atoms" (the size of one particular protein molecule) ending up in precisely that particular order "by accident." Where did Jelenik get that figure? From Pierre Lecompte du Nouy… who in turn got it from Charles-Eugene Guye, a physicist who died in 1942. Guye had merely calculated the odds of these atoms lining up by accident if "a volume" of atoms the size of the Earth were "shaken at the speed of light." In other words, ignoring all the laws of chemistry, which create preferences for the formation and behavior of molecules, and ignoring that there are millions if not billions of different possible proteins--and of course the result has no bearing on the origin of life, which may have begun from an even simpler protein. This calculation is thus useless for all these reasons, and is typical in that it comes to Coppedge third-hand (and thus to us fourth-hand), and is hugely outdated (it was calculated before 1942, even before the discovery of DNA), and thus fails to account for over half a century of scientific progress.”

Pierre Lecomte du Noüy (1883–1947) French philosopher

Richard Carrier, "Bad Science, Worse Philosophy", Addendum B, http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/richard_carrier/addendaB.html#et_al at The Secular Web (Internet Infidels: 2000) About

Life, Law, Behavior, Light

“When we think of eternity, and of the future consequences of all human conduct, what is there in this life that should make any man contradict the dictates of his conscience, the principles of justice, the laws of religion, and of God? Sir, the nature and all the circumstances of this trade are now laid open to us; we can no longer plead ignorance, we can not evade it; it is now an object placed before us, we can not pass it; we may spurn it, we may kick it out of our way, but we can not turn aside so as to avoid seeing it; for it is bro directly before our eyes that this House must decide, and must justify to all the world, and to their own consciences, the rectitude of the grounds and principles of their decision.”

William Wilberforce (1759–1833) English politician

"On the Horrors of the Slave Trade", speech delivered in the House of Commons (12 May 1789).

Life, God, World, Religion

“HR professionals help turn aspirations into actions by focusing on three things:
[1] talent: do we have the competence (skills and abilities), commitment (willingness to engage and work hard), and contribution (ability to find meaning from the work we do) of our people,
[2] culture: do we have the right organization capabilities that enable us to shape an identity outside and pattern of behavior inside the company, and
[3] leadership: do we have a depth of leadership throughout the company who are focused on the right things.”

Dave Ulrich (1953) American academic

Dave Ulrich in: Dan Schawbel. " Dave Ulrich on the Future of Human Resources http://www.forbes.com/sites/danschawbel/2012/07/18/dave-ulrich-on-the-future-of-human-resources/#79dd32073b0a," in Forbes, July 18, 2012

People, Behavior, Help

“I don't consider myself a great singer--but I have a connection with the audience. There's the artist, and then a void and the audience; but I like to be part of the audience. I'd like to be them, and I'd like them to be me for an hour and a half. I get criticized for being the antichrist, causing kids to commit suicide, but that's total bullsh-t. My intentions are not that. Every year they have Halloween, and all I do is take Halloween night out on the road every night. It's like a Halloween party every night. If that was the case on Halloween night, the police cells would be full--everyone would have turned Satanic for the night!”

Ozzy Osbourne (1948) English heavy metal vocalist and songwriter

Launch.com October 8 2003

Suicide, Parting, Night

“"What is care?" asked the Princess, with a smile.
"It is a god", replied the Physician, "invisible, but omnipotent. It steals the bloom from the cheek and lightness from the pulse — it takes away the appetite, and turns the hair grey".”

Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881) British Conservative politician, writer, aristocrat and Prime Minister

The Wondrous Tale of Alroy, pt. 5, ch. 5 (1833).
Books

God, Smile, Light, Princess

“In India, the negationists have managed what European negationists can only dream of: turn the tables on honest historians and marginalize them. People who have specialized in adapting history to the party-line, are lecturing others about the political abuse of history. By contrast, genuine historians who have refused to tamper with the record of Islam (like Jadunath Sarkar, R. C. Majumdar, K. S. Lal) are held us as examples of communalist historywriting in textbooks which are required reading in all history departments in India.”

Koenraad Elst (1959) orientalist, writer

1990s, Negationism in India, (1992)

People, Dreams, History, Reading

“The smallest worm will turn, being trodden on.”

William Shakespeare Henry VI (play) Part 1-3

Clifford, Act II, scene ii.
Henry VI, Part 3 (1592)

“The eye which turns from a white object in the light of the sun and goes into a less fully lighted place will see everything as dark.”

Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519) Italian Renaissance polymath

The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1883), I Prolegomena and General Introduction to the Book on Painting

Light, Sun

“It was only in the nineteenth century that Western Indologists and Christian missionaries separated the Buddhists, the Jains, and the Sikhs from the Hindus who, in their turn, were defined as only those subscribing to Brahmanical sects…. Nowhere in the voluminous Muslim chronicles do we find the natives of this country known by a name other than Hindu. There were some Jews, and Christians, and Zoroastrians settled here and there… The chronicles distinguish these communities from the Muslims on the one hand, and from the natives of this country on the other. It is only when they come to the natives that no more distinctions are noticed; all natives are identified as ahl-i-Hunûd-Hindu!… In all their narratives, all natives are attacked as Hindus, massacred as Hindus, plundered as Hindus, converted forcibly as Hindus, captured and sold in slave markets as Hindus, and subjected to all sorts of malice and molestation as Hindus. The Muslims never came to know, nor cared to know, as to which temple housed what idol. For them all temples were Hindu but-khãnas, to be desecrated or destroyed as such. They never bothered to distinguish the idol of one God or Goddess from that of another. All idols were broken or burnt by them as so many buts, or deposited in the royal treasury if made of precious metals, or strewn at the door-steps of the mosques if fashion from inferior stuff. In like manner, all priests and monks, no matter to what school or order they belonged, were for the Muslims so many “wicked Brahmans” to be slaughtered or molested as such. In short, the word “Hindu” acquired a religious connotation for the first time within the frontiers of this country. The credit for this turn-out goes to the Muslim conquerors. With the coming of Islam to this country all schools and sects of Sanãtana Dharma acquired a common denominator - Hindu!… Once again, it goes to the credit of the Muslim conquerors that the word “Hindu” acquired a national connotation within the borders of this country.”

Sita Ram Goel (1921–2003) Indian activist

Hindu Temples – What Happened to Them, Volume II (1993)

God, School, Communication, Fashion

“DW is based on a slew of old myths, which reach their most 'refined' form in Hindu mythology, which in turn of course derived from the original Star Trek episode 'Planet of Wobbly Rocks where the Security Guard Got Shot.”

Terry Pratchett (1948–2015) English author

Usenet

Star

“Terrorists will never be able to defeat the United States. Their only hope is to terrorize us into changing who we are or our way of life. That’s why we Americans will never give in to fear. And it’s why this weekend we remember the true spirit of 9/11. We’re still the America of heroes who ran into harm’s way; of ordinary folks who took down the hijackers; of families who turned their pain into hope. We are still the America that looks out for one another, bound by our shared belief that I am my brother’s keeper, I am my sister’s keeper.
In the face of terrorism, how we respond matters. We cannot give in to those who would divide us. We cannot react in ways that erode the fabric of our society. Because it’s our diversity, our welcoming of all talent, our treating of everybody fairly — no matter their race, gender, ethnicity, or faith — that’s part of what makes our country great. It’s what makes us resilient. And if we stay true to those values, we’ll uphold the legacy of those we’ve lost, and keep our nation strong and free.
God bless you, and God bless the United States of America.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

2016, Upholding the Legacy of Those We Lost on September 11th (September 2016)

Life, God, Pain, Fear

“To whatever extent a person's knowledge increases, his attention will be turned more towards his soul.”

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

Husayn al-Nuri al-Tabarsi, Mustadrak al-Wasā'il, vol. 11, p. 323
Regarding Knowledge & Wisdom, Religious

Soul, Knowledge, Personality

“Anita had the mechanics of marriage down pat, even to the subtlest conventions. If her approach was disturbingly rational, systematic, she was thorough enough to turn out a credible counterfeit of warmth.”

Kurt Vonnegut book Player Piano

Source: Player Piano (1952), Chapter 1 (p. 25)

Marriage

“I suppose, to use our national motto, something will turn up.”

Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881) British Conservative politician, writer, aristocrat and Prime Minister

Popanilla http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/7816 (1827) Ch. 7 referring to the Motto of "Vraibleusia". Books

“The [Soviet Union] bureaucracy not only has not disappeared, yielding its place to the masses, but has turned into an uncontrolled force dominating the masses.”

Leon Trotsky book The Revolution Betrayed

Source: The Revolution Betrayed (1936), p. 40 in Doubleday, Doran & Company edition (1937)

“If other thoughts rise, one should, without attempting to complete them, enquire, 'To whom did they arise?', it will be known 'To me'. If one then enquires 'Who am I?', the mind (power of attention) will turn back to its source. By repeatedly practising thus, the power of the mind to abide in its source increases.”

Ramana Maharshi (1879–1950) Indian religious leader

Nan Yar = Who am I?

“The young watch television twenty-four hours a day, they don't read and they rarely listen. This incessant bombardment of images has developed a hypertrophied eye condition that's turning them into a race of mutants. They should pass a law for a total reeducation of the young, making children visit the Galleria Borghese on a daily basis.”

Federico Fellini (1920–1993) Italian filmmaker

"Younger Generation"
I'm a Born Liar (2003)

Children, Law, Reading

“Things do not turn out the way you think they will.”

Michael Crichton Prey

Prey (2002)

Way, Thinking

“You may turn a bad idea into a good idea — don't kill the bad idea prematurely. A bad idea can evolve into a good idea.”

Martin Lewis Perl (1927–2014) American scientist

Essay on Creativity in Science and Engineering

Idea

“And so, supposing that light impinging on a refracting or reflecting ethereal superficies puts it into a vibrating motion, that physical superficies being by the perpetual applause of rays always kept in a vibrating motion, and the ether therein continually expanded and compressed by turns, if a ray of light impinge on it when it is much compressed, I suppose it is then too dense and stiff to let the ray through, and so reflects it; but the rays that impinge on it at other times, when it is either expanded by the interval between two vibrations or not too much compressed and condensed, go through and are refracted.”

Isaac Newton (1643–1727) British physicist and mathematician and founder of modern classical physics

"Hypothesis explaining the Properties of Light" (1675)

Light, Time

“I believe what really happens in history is this: the old man is always wrong; and the young people are always wrong about what is wrong with him. The practical form it takes is this: that, while the old man may stand by some stupid custom, the young man always attacks it with some theory that turns out to be equally stupid.”

G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) English mystery novelist and Christian apologist

Illustrated London News (3 June 1922)

People, Stupidity, History

“Do you think it interests me that this painting represents two figures? These two figures existed, they exist no more. The sight of them gave me an initial emotion, little by little their real presence grew indistinct they became a fiction for me, then they disappeared, or rather, were turned into problems of all kinds. For me they are no longer two figures but shapes and colours, don’t misunderstand me, shapes and colours, though, that sum up the idea of the two figures and preserve the vibration of their”

Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer

Boisgeloup, winter 1934
Richard Friedenthal, (1963, p. 258)
Quotes, 1930's, "Conversations avec Picasso," 1934–35

Idea, Problem, Thinking, Winter

“It is likely that America will be more important during the next century or two, but after that it may well be the turn of China.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

Letter to Rachel Gleason Brooks, May 5, 1930
1930s

“If you wish to thoroughly accustom yourself to correct and good positions for your fingers, fasten a frame or a loom divided into squares by threads between your eye and the nude figure which you are representing, and then make the same squares upon the paper where you wish to draw the said nude but very faintly. You should then put a pellet of wax on a part of the network to serve as a mark which as you look at your model should always cover the pit of the throat, or if he should have turned his back make it cover one of the vertebrae of the neck. …The squares you draw may be as much smaller than those of the network in proportion as you wish your figure to be less than life size…”

Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519) Italian Renaissance polymath

The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci (1938), XXIX Precepts of the Painter

Life, Parting, Drawing

“We’re taught in the Jewish tradition the same story over and over, whether it’s the Holocaust or the Maccabees, we have to rise above persecution and do our best, just as the magic is about making people dream, we learned to take things that aren’t supposed to be and turn them into something beautiful.”

David Copperfield (1956) American illusionist

Jews in the News http://letmypeoplegrow.org/2011/11/jews-news-anton-yelchin-david-copperfield-billy-crystal/

People, Beauty, Dreams, Learning

“Why have stockholders?… What contribution do they make, entitling them to heirship of half the profits of the industrial system, receivable partly in the form of dividends, and partly in the form of increased market values resulting from undistributed corporate gains? Stockholders toil not, neither do they spin, to earn that reward. They are beneficiaries by position only. Justification for their inheritance must be sought outside classic economic reasoning…. [and] can be founded only upon social grounds… that justification turns on the distribution as well as the existence of wealth. Its force exists only in direct ratio to the number of individuals who hold such wealth. Justification for the stockholder's existence thus depends on increasing distribution within the American population. Ideally the stockholder's position will be impregnable only when every American family has its fragment of that position and of the wealth by which the opportunity to develop individuality becomes fully actualized.”

Adolf A. Berle (1895–1971) American diplomat

1967, p. xxiii
The Modern Corporation and Private Property. 1932/1967

Family, Dependency, Wealth

“In assuming that peace will be maintained, I assume also that no Great Power would shrink from its responsibilities. If there be a country, for example, one of the most extensive and wealthiest of empires in the world—if that country, from a perverse interpretation of its insular geographical position, turns an indifferent ear to the feelings and the fortunes of Continental Europe, such a course would, I believe, only end in its becoming an object of general plunder. So long as the power and advice of England are felt in the councils of Europe, peace, I believe, will be maintained, and maintained for a long period. Without their presence, war, as has happened before, and too frequently of late, seems to me to be inevitable. I speak on this subject with confidence to the citizens of London, because I know that they are men who are not ashamed of the Empire which their ancestors created; because I know that they are not ashamed of the noblest of human sentiments, now decried by philosophers—the sentiment of patriotism; because I know they will not be beguiled into believing that in maintaining their Empire they may forfeit their liberties. One of the greatest of Romans, when asked what were his politics, replied, Imperium et Libertas.”

Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881) British Conservative politician, writer, aristocrat and Prime Minister

That would not make a bad programme for a British Ministry. It is one from which Her Majesty's advisers do not shrink.
Source: Speech at the Guildhall, London (9 November 1879), cited in William Flavelle Monypenny and George Earle Buckle, The Life of Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield, Vol. 2 (1929), pp. 1366-7.

Men, War, World, Peace

“Just as the creative artist is not allowed to choose, neither is he permitted to turn his back on anything: a single refusal, and he is cast out of the state of grace and becomes sinful all the way through.”

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) Austrian poet and writer

Letter to his wife, reprinted in Rilke’s Letters on Cézanne (1952, trans. 1985). (October 23, 1907)
Rilke's Letters

Way

“No, we are not related. No, we are not related. Do I walk? Have I feet still? I raise my eyes, I let them move round, and turn myself with them, one circle, one circle, and I stand in the midst. All is usual. Only the Militiaman Stanislaus Katczinsky has died. Then I know nothing more.”

Erich Maria Remarque book All Quiet on the Western Front

All Quiet on the Western Front (1929)

“1992 is not a year on which I shall look back with undiluted pleasure. In the words of one of my more sympathetic correspondents, it has turned out to be an 'Annus Horribilis'.”

Isabel II do Reino Unido (1926–2022) queen of the UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, and head of the Commonwealth of Nations

After a fire at Windsor Castle and several personal scandals in the royal family. Annus horribilis is Latin for "horrible year"; the letter to which the Queen was referring was sent by Sir Edward Ford.
Speech at the Guildhall, London, to mark the 40th anniversary of her Accession (24 November 1992)

Pleasure

“Though I be a woman yet I have as good a courage answerable to my place as ever my father had. I am your anointed Queen. I will never be by violence constrained to do anything. I thank God I am endued with such qualities that if I were turned out of the Realm in my petticoat I were able to live in any place in Christendom.”

Elizabeth I of England (1533–1603) Queen regnant of England and Ireland from 17 November 1558 until 1603

Response to Parliament (October 1566).

God, Courage

“It is not without reason that this verse [Ps 70:1] has been chosen from the whole of Scripture as a device. It carries within it all the feelings of which human nature is capable…. 'Come to my help, O God; Lord, hurry to my rescue'…. The thought of this verse should be turning unceasingly in your heart. Never cease to recite it in whatever task or service or journey you find yourself. Think upon it as you sleep, as you eat, as you submit to the most basic demands of nature. This heartfelt thought will prove to be a formula of salvation for you. Not only will it protect you against all devilish attack, but it will purify you from the stain of all earthly sin, and will lead you on to the contemplation of the unseen and the heavenly and to that fiery urgency of prayer which is indescribable and which is experienced by very few. Sleep should come upon you as you meditate on this verse until as a result of your habit of resorting to its words you get in the habit of repeating them even in your slumbers.”

John Cassian (360–435) Christian monk and theologian

Conferences X

God, Feeling, Nature, Thinking

“It turns out, by the way, that oil rigs today generally don't cause spills. They are technologically very advanced.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

Reforms Slow to Arrive at Drilling Agency http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/31/us/politics/31drill.html (April 2, 2010) 2010, 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill (April 2010)

Way

“No anthropologist of standing insists on the uniformly advanced evolution of the Nordic as compared with that of other Caucasian and Mongolian races. As a matter of fact, it is freely conceded that the Mediterranean race turns out a higher percentage of the aesthetically sensitive and that the Semitic groups excel in sharp, precise intellectation. It may be, too, that the Mongolian excels in aesthetick capacity and normality of philosophical adjustment. What, then, is the secret of pro-Nordicism among those who hold these views? Simply this—that ours is a Nordic culture, and that the roots of that culture are so inextricably tangled in the national standards, perspectives, traditions, memories, instincts, peculiarities, and physical aspects of the Nordic stream that no other influences are fitted to mingle in our fabric. We don't despise the French in France or Quebec, but we don't want them grabbing our territory and creating foreign islands like Woonsocket and Fall River. The fact of this uniqueness of every separate culture-stream—this dependence of instinctive likes and dislikes, natural methods, unconscious appraisals, etc., etc., on the physical and historical attributes of a single race—is to obvious to be ignored except by empty theorists.”

H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American author

Letter to James F. Morton (18 January 1931), quoted in "H.P. Lovecraft, a Life" by S.T. Joshi, p. 587
Non-Fiction, Letters, to James Ferdinand Morton, Jr.

Secret, Nature, Memory, Dependency

“Authoritarian, paralyzing, circular, occasionally elliptical, stock phrases, also jocularly referred to as nuggets of wisdom, are malignant plague, one of the very worst ever to ravage the earth. We say to the confused, Know thyself, as if knowing yourself was not the fifth and most difficult of human arithmetical operations, we say to the apathetic, Where there’s a will, there’s a way, as if the brute realities of the world did not amuse themselves each day by turning that phrase on its head, we say to the indecisive, Begin at the beginning, as if that beginning were the clearly visible point of a loosely wound thread and that all we had to do was to keep pulling until we reached the other end, and as if, between the former and the latter, we had held in our hands a smooth, continuous thread with no knots to untie, no snarled to untangle, a complete impossibility in the life of a skien, or indeed, if we may be permitted on more stock phrase, in the skien of life. … These are the delusions of the pure and unprepared, the beginning is never the clear, precise end of a thread, the beginning is a long, painfully slow process that requires time and patience in order to find out in which direction it is heading, a process that feels its way along the path ahead like a blind man the beginning is just the beginning, what came before is nigh on worthless.”

José Saramago book The Cave

Source: The Cave (2000), p. 54 (Vintage 2003)

Life, Wisdom, World, Way

“The biggest threat to America today is not communism. It's moving America toward a fascist theocracy, and everything that's happened during the Reagan administration is steering us right down that pipe … I really think that. … When you have a government that prefers a certain moral code derived from a certain religion and that moral code turns into legislation to suit one certain religious point of view, and if that code happens to be very, very right wing, almost toward Attila the Hun…”

Frank Zappa (1940–1993) American musician, songwriter, composer, and record and film producer

Crossfire debate on censorship (1986)

Religion, Communication, Thinking

“Things have a way of turning out so badly.”

Tennessee Williams The Glass Menagerie

Amanda, Scene Seven
The Glass Menagerie (1944)

Way

“[Unlike the] utilitarian… I judge pleasure and pain to be of small importance compared to knowledge, the appreciation and contemplation of beauty, and a certain intrinsic excellence of mind which, apart from its practical effects, appears to me to deserve the name of virtue. [For] many years it seemed to me perfectly self-evident that pleasure is the only good and pain the only evil. Now, however, the opposite seems to me self-evident.
What first turned me away from utilitarianism was the persuasion that I myself ought to pursue philosophy, although I had (and have still) no doubt that by doing economics and the theory of politics I could add more to human happiness. It appeared to me that the dignity of which human existence is capable is not attainable by devotion to the mechanism of life, and that unless the contemplation of eternal things is preserved, mankind will become no better than well-fed pigs. But I do not believe that such contemplation on the whole tends to happiness. It gives moments of delight, but these are outweighed by years of effort and depression.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

Letter to Gilbert Murray, April 3, 1902
1900s

Life, Pain, Happiness, Pleasure

“Let us turn our backs on power and treachery.”

Pope Francis (1936) 266th Pope of the Catholic Church

As Reported by Vatican Insider, August 11, 2016 http://www.lastampa.it/2016/11/08/vaticaninsider/eng/the-vatican/pope-let-us-turn-our-backs-on-power-and-treachery-FkcClnspuyJ3TVX9NFgBmI/pagina.html 2010s, 2016

“Political parties exist to secure responsible government and to execute the will of the people. From these great tasks both of the old parties have turned aside. Instead of instruments to promote the general welfare they have become the tools of corrupt interests, which use them impartially to serve their selfish purposes. Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people.”

Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) American politician, 26th president of the United States

"The Progressive Covenant With The People" http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/r?ammem/papr:@filreq(@field(NUMBER+@band(trrs+1146))+@field(COLLID+roosevelt)) speech (August 1912) 1910s Context: Political parties exist to secure responsible government and to execute the will of the people. From these great tasks both of the old parties have turned aside. Instead of instruments to promote the general welfare they have become the tools of corrupt interests, which use them impartially to serve their selfish purposes. Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. To destroy this invisible government, to dissolve the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics, is the first task of the statesmanship of the day.

People, Selfishness

“Suddenly I am pushed by a movement of the horse on which I am lying. I see that he has turned his great head aside; he is mournfully eating grass. I saw this horse but lately in the middle of the regiment — I know him by the white in his mane — rearing and whinnying like the true battle-chargers; and now, broken somewhere, he is silent as the truly unhappy are.”

Henri Barbusse (1873–1935) French novelist

Light (1919), Ch. XIV - The Ruins

Lying, Grass, Horse

“Then Jesus slowly turned to look at her and said, I have never been with a woman. Mary held his hands, This is how everyone has to begin, men who have never known a woman, women who have never known a man, until the day comes for the one who knows to teach the one who does not.”

José Saramago book The Gospel According to Jesus Christ

Então Jesus voltou lentamente o rosto para ela e disse. Não conheço mulher. Maria segurou-lhe as mãos, Assim temos de começar todos, homens que não conheciam mulher, mulheres que não conheciam homem, um dia o que sabia ensinou, o que não sabia aprendeu.
Source: The Gospel According to Jesus Christ (1991), p. 235

Women, Men

“"Do you think it was a coincidence?"
"Do I think what was a coincidence?"
"That we wound up in Pandemonium the same night that Jace and the others just happened to be there, pursuing a demon? The night before Valentine came for my mother?"
Simon shook his head. "I don't believe in coincidences."
"Neither do I."
"But I have to admit, coincidence or not, it turned out to be a fortuitous occurrence."”

Cassandra Clare The Mortal Instruments

Clary and Simon, pg. 474
The Mortal Instruments, City of Bones (2007)

Thinking, Night

“Art furnishes us with eyes and hands and above all the good conscience to be able to turn ourselves into such a phenomenon.”

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) German philosopher, poet, composer, cultural critic, and classical philologist

Sec. 107
The Gay Science (1882)

Art

“Tragically, the rights of those who were here long before us were not always respected. For those peoples and their nations, from the heart of American democracy, I wish to reaffirm my highest esteem and appreciation. Those first contacts were often turbulent and violent, but it is difficult to judge the past by the criteria of the present. Nonetheless, when the stranger in our midst appeals to us, we must not repeat the sins and the errors of the past. We must resolve now to live as nobly and as justly as possible, as we educate new generations not to turn their back on our 'neighbors' and everything around us.”

Pope Francis (1936) 266th Pope of the Catholic Church

2010s, Address to the United States Congress

People, Education, Error, Democracy

“We had principles in mathematics that were granted to be absolute in mathematics for over 800 years, but new science has gotten rid of those absolutism, gotten — forward other different logics of looking at mathematics, and sort of turned the way we look at it as a science altogether after 800 years.”

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (1956) 6th President of the Islamic Republic of Iran

Columbia University speech, 24 September 2007
[24 September 2007, http://www.azstarnet.com/sn/hourlyupdate/202820.php, "Iran's president at Columbia University - a transcript", azstarnet.com, 2007-09-25]
2007

Way, Mathematics, Science

“In the old days pictures went forward toward completion by stages. Every day brought something new. A picture used to be a sum of additions. In my case a picture is a sum of destructions. I do a picture — then I destroy it. In the end though, nothing is lost: the red I took away from one place turns up somewhere else”

Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer

Herschel Browning Chip (1968, p. 267)
Other translation:
Formerly pictures used to move towards completion in progressive stages. Each day would bring something new. A picture was a sum of additions. With me, picture is a sum of destructions. I do a picture, then I destroy it. But in the long run nothing is lost; the red that I took away from one place turns up somewhere else.
Richard Friedenthal (1968, p. 256); Also quoted in: John Bowker (1988), Is anybody out there?: religions and belief in God in the contemporary world. p. 57.
1930s, "Conversations avec Picasso," 1934–35

“It was one of those nights
One of those nights
When you feel the world stop turning
You were standing there
There was music in the air
I should have been away
But I knew I had to stay”

Jeff Lynne (1947) British rock musician

Discovery (1979)

World, Music, Feeling, Night

Quotes about turn page 6

Quotes about turn
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