Quotes about university
page 44

“This age of globalisation is marked by the adoption of universal principles governing such matters as democracy, human rights, trade and development. Today, I reaffirm here that Fiji accepts these precepts. But we also say that countries like ours should not be held to unrealistic standards, we need time to evolve to adapt and to adhere. Do not judge us by what might be inappropriate at our stage of development.”

Laisenia Qarase (1941) Prime Minister of Fiji

Address to the United Nations General Assembly, 17 September 2005 (excerpts)

Age, Democracy, Universe, Time

“We're just a weed in the universe”

Karl Pilkington (1972) English television personality, social commentator, actor, author and former radio producer

Podcast Series 5 Episode 4
On the Earth

Universe

“But, as we consider the totality of similarly broad and fundamental aspects of life, we cannot defend division by two as a natural principle of objective order. Indeed, the “stuff” of the universe often strikes our senses as complex and shaded continua, admittedly with faster and slower moments, and bigger and smaller steps, along the way. Nature does not dictate dualities, trinities, quarterings, or any “objective” basis for human taxonomies; most of our chosen schemes, and our designated numbers of categories, record human choices from a cornucopia of possibilities offered by natural variation from place to place, and permitted by the flexibility of our mental capacities. How many seasons (if we wish to divide by seasons at all) does a year contain? How many stages shall we recognize in a human life?”

Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) American evolutionary biologist

The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magister's Pox: Mending the Gap between Science and the Humanities (Harmony, 2003), p. 82

Life, Way, Nature, Sense

“I think I’m more committed now. Some things are just serendipitous. My mother had the disease and I got involved with the organization, and then I met this splinter group out of the University of Minnesota Hospital, Dr. Karen Ashe and the team at the Grossman Center (for Memory Research and Care). I became sort of their spokesperson and then I got published. I published a first essay and a second essay and I’m up to my sixth essay. I speak all over the country and sometimes all over the world. It’s grown and blossomed into something that feels right. I’ve had a really good life and a wonderful career. I’ve been comfortable and I’ve been healthy. And I adored my mother. So this is my way to give back.”

Kate Mulgrew (1955) American actress

Catching Up with Kate Mulgrew http://www.startrek.com/article/catching-up-with-kate-mulgrew-part-2 (January 19, 2011)

Life, World, Disease, Way

““The Devil” is, historically, the God of any people that one personally dislikes. This has led to so much confusion of thought that THE BEAST 666 has preferred to let names stand as they are, and to proclaim simply that AIWAZ, the solar-phallic-hermetic “Lucifer,” is His own Holy Guardian Angel, and “The Devil” SATAN or HADIT, the Supreme Soul behind RA-HOOR-KHUIT the Sun, the Lord of our particular unit of the Starry Universe. This serpent, SATAN, is not the enemy of Man, but He who made Gods of our race, knowing Good and Evil; He bade “Know Thyself!” and taught Initiation. He is “the Devil” of the Book of Thoth, and His emblem is BAPHOMET, the Androgyne who is the hieroglyph of arcane perfection.”

Aleister Crowley (1875–1947) poet, mountaineer, occultist

Source: Magick Book IV : Liber ABA, Part III : Magick in Theory and Practice (1929), Ch. 21 : Of Pacts with the Devil

God, People, Books, Angels

“Man reacts upon and toward the external universe in three ways, namely, by his active nature; by his intellectual nature; by his moral nature — that is, he acts upon it, thinks about it, and feels toward it.”

Richard Maurice Bucke (1837–1902) prominent Canadian psychiatrist in the late 19th century

Source: Man's Moral Nature (1879), Ch. 1 : Lines of Cleavage

Way, Feeling, Nature, Thinking

“To say categorically, 'There is no God,' is to make an absolute statement. For the statement to be true, I must know for certain that there is no God in the entire universe. No human being has all knowledge. Therefore, none of us is able to truthfully make this assertion.”

Ray Comfort (1949) New Zealand-born Christian minister and evangelist

God doesn't believe in atheists (2002)

God, Knowledge, Universe

“There are then based on this common foundation three main religions, Brahmanism, Buddhism and Jainism. Of the second, a great and universal faith, it has been said that, with each fresh acquirement of knowledge, it seems more difficult to separate it from the Hinduism out of which it emerged and into which (in Northern Buddhism) it relapsed. This is of course not to say that there are no differences between the two, but that they share in certain general and common principles as their base.”

John Woodroffe (1865–1936) English orientalist

Sir John Woodroffe (originally under pseudonym Arthur Avalon): Shakti and Shakta, p.5., quoted in Elst, Koenraad (2002). Who is a Hindu?: Hindu revivalist views of Animism, Buddhism, Sikhism, and other offshoots of Hinduism. ISBN 978-8185990743

Faith, Religion, Knowledge, Universe

“The force of universalism is in you Basques, not in the Spanish state”

Slavoj Žižek (1949) Slovene philosopher

Interview in ARGIA (27 June 2010) https://www.dropbox.com/s/cihuwrieedr8s1j/44101916-LAPIKO-TXOSTENAK-ZIZEK.pdf

Universe

“… non-Christian scientists are really barring from the Christian worldview any way to carry out their experimental or observational science. Think about it: when they're doing observational science using the scientific method, they have to assume the laws of logic, they have to assume the laws of nature, they have to assume the uniformity of nature. I mean, think about it, if the universe came about through natural processes, where did the laws of logic come from? Did they just pop into existence? Are we in a stage now where we only have half of logic? So, you see, I have a question for Bill Nye: How do you account for the laws of logic and laws of nature from a naturalistic worldview that excludes the existence of God?”

Ken Ham (1951) Australian young Earth creationist

"Bill Nye Debates Ken Ham" (February 4, 2014)

God, Law, Way, Question

“Every person I met believes if there is any disagreement between the Koran and science, then the Koran wins. It's just utterly deplorable. These are now British children who are having their minds stuffed with alien rubbish. Occasionally, my colleagues lecturing in universities lament having undergraduate students walk out of their classes when they talk about evolution. This is almost entirely Muslims.”

Richard Dawkins (1941) English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author

"Dawkins attacks 'alien rubbish' taught in Muslim faith schools", Daily Mail (8 October 2011) http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2046715/Richard-Dawkins-attacks-alien-rubbish-taught-Muslim-faith-schools.html

Children, Universe, Science, Personality

“This is the Unix philosophy: Write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work together. Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface.”

Doug McIlroy (1932) American computer scientist, mathematician, engineer, and programmer

Doug McIlroy (2003). The Art of Unix Programming: Basics of the Unix Philosophy http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/html/ch01s06.html

Universe

“The third argument, enclosing and defending the other two, consists in the development of those principles of logic according to which the humble argument is the first stage of a scientific inquiry into the origin of the three Universes, but of an inquiry which produces, not merely scientific belief, which is always provisional, but also a living, practical belief, logically justified in crossing the Rubicon with all the freightage of eternity.”

Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) American philosopher, logician, mathematician, and scientist

Source: A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God (1908), V

Universe

““Isn’t there anything you can do about the predator?” Carmody asked.
“Nothing. Nor would I if I could. Predation is a necessary circumstance. Even the Gods are eventually eaten by Fate. You will not be an exception to the universal rule.””

Robert Sheckley book Dimension of Miracles

Source: Dimension of Miracles (1968), Chapter 21 (p. 136)

God, Fate, Universe

“But every day I go to work I'm making a bet that the universe is simple, symmetric, and aesthetically pleasing—a universe that we humans, with our limited perspective, will someday understand.”

George Smoot (1945) American astrophysicist and cosmologist

as quoted by Joel Achenbachin The God Particle, At the Heart of All Matter http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2008/03/god-particle/achenbach-text, National Geographic, March 2008.

Understanding, Universe

“The universal jargon, in the sense explained above, is the same for the child and for the adult. It is the same for a Robinson Crusoe as for a human society. If Robinson wants to join what is in a protocol of yesterday with what is in his protocol today, that is, if he wants to make use of language at all, he must make use of the ‘intersubjective’ language. The Robinson of yesterday and the Robinson of today stand precisely in the same relation in which Robinson stands to Friday.”

Otto Neurath (1882–1945) austrian economist, philosopher and sociologist

Source: 1930s, "Protocol Statements" (1932), p. 96

Sense, Universe

“I am obliged to confess I should sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University.”

William F. Buckley Jr. (1925–2008) American conservative author and commentator

Listen the to actual quoted words: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2nf_bu-kBr4
1963 statement, as quoted in The Quote Verifier : Who Said What, Where, and When (2006) by Ralph Keyes, p. 82
Meet the Press (1965), as quoted in The Quote Verifier : Who Said What, Where, and When (2006) by Ralph Keyes, p. 82
The numbers cited in paraphrases of this quote often vary from 100 to 2000.
Unsourced variant: I would rather be governed by the first 2000 names in the Boston phone book than by the 2000 members of the faculty of Harvard University.
Variant: I would rather be governed by the first two thousand people in the Boston telephone directory than by the two thousand people on the faculty of Harvard University.

Universe

“I recalled the myth that I had once heard as a university student — thirty-six hidden saints in the world, all of them doing the work of humble men, carpenters, cobblers, shepherds. They bore the sorrows of the earth and they had a line of communication with God, all except one, the hidden saint, who was forgotten. The forgotten one was left to struggle on his own, with no line of communication to that which he so hugely needed. Corrigan had lost his line with God: he bore the sorrows on his own, the story of stories.”

Colum McCann book Let the Great World Spin

Let the Great World Spin (2009), Book One: All Respects to Heaven, I Like it Here

Men, God, World, Communication

“God forgives; forgives not capriciously, but with wise, definite, Divine prearrangement; forgives universally, on the ground of an atonement, and on the condition of repentance and faith.”

Richard Salter Storrs (1821–1900) American Congregational clergyman

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 440.

God, Faith, Forgiveness, Universe

“Perhaps the artist is nothing more than the personification of this universal maladjustment, this universal disequilibrium.”

Henry Miller (1891–1980) American novelist

Henry Miller on Writing (1964)

Universe

“To feel oneself so tiny, so fragile, so inherently losable, was at first spiritually crushing. But, by the same token, this realisation was also strangely liberating: if an individual human existence meant so little, if one’s actions were so cosmically irrelevant, then the notion of some absolute moral framework made about as much sense as the universal ether. Measured against the infinite, therefore, people were no more capable of meaningful sin—or meaningful good—than ants, or dust.
Worlds barely registered sin. Suns hardly deigned to notice it. On the scale of solar systems and galaxies, it meant nothing at all. It was like some obscure subatomic force that simply petered out on those scales.”

Alastair Reynolds book Absolution Gap

Source: Absolution Gap (2003), Chapter 6 (p. 84)

People, World, Feeling, Sense

“The London office of the International Council for University Development was in Queen Street. Edwin hesitated outside, adjusting his cap, tightening the knot of his tie, smoothing his pyjama collar. The portals, a naked sculptural group above them emblematic of the Tutorial System, were designed to intimidate. The doors were all glass and hence appeared to be ever-open; this again must be emblematic of something.”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Fiction, The Doctor is Sick (1960)

Universe, Appearance

“In some respects, science has far surpassed religion in delivering awe. How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, "This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant. God must be even greater than we dreamed"? Instead they say, "No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way."”

Carl Sagan book Pale Blue Dot

Source: Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space (1994), p. 50

God, Religion, Dreams, Way

“[El Greco 'confined to his bed'].. holding, believing and confessing the Faith of the Holy Church of Rome.... in whose Faith I have lived and die, as a faithful and Catholic Christian.... because of the gravity of my sickness I was unable to make a will and gives power to Jorge Manuel Teotocopuli my son, and of Doña Jerónima de las Cuevas [his wife he never married], who is a person of honesty and virtue [to make his testament, arrange his burial, and pay his debts, and the] remainder of my possessions to go to Jorge Manuel, as universal heir..”

El Greco (1541–1614) Greek painter, sculptor and architect

Quote of El Greco, 31 March 1614; as cited in Outline Biography of El Greco - documented facts of his life https://www.wga.hu/tours/spain/greco1.html

Faith, Universe, Personality

“The Buddhists maintain that there is no Creator but an infinitude of creative powers, which collectively form the one eternal substance, the essence of which is inscrutable — hence not a subject for speculation for any true philosopher. Socrates invariably refused to argue upon the mystery of universal being, yet no one would ever have thought of charging him with atheism, except those who were bent upon his destruction. Upon inaugurating an active period, says the Secret Doctrine, an expansion of this Divine essence, from within outwardly, occurs in obedience to eternal and immutable law, and the phenomenal or visible universe is the ultimate result of the long chain of cosmical forces thus progressively set in motion. In like manner, when the passive condition is resumed, a contraction of the Divine essence takes place, and the previous work of creation is gradually and progressively undone. The visible universe becomes disintegrated, its material dispersed; and "darkness," solitary and alone, broods once more over the face of the "deep." To use a metaphor which will convey the idea still more clearly, an outbreathing of the "unknown essence" produces the world; and an inhalation causes it to disappear. This process has been going on from all eternity, and our present universe is but one of an infinite series which had no beginning and will have no end.”

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky book Isis Unveiled

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

Secret, World, Law, Idea

“Two things inspire me to awe: the starry heavens and the moral universe within.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

If Einstein said this, he was almost certainly quoting philosopher Immanuel Kant's words from the conclusion to the Critique of Practical Reason (1788), translated in Paul Guyer's The Cambridge Companion to Kant ( p. 1 http://books.google.com/books?id=pYE5rVzrPNgC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA1#v=onepage&q&f=false) as: "Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and steadily we reflect upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me." Misattributed

Universe

“Jesus does not give us a discourse on the nature of the universe, he gives us a set of active verbs. And yet what better discourse on the real nature of the universe could there be?”

John R. Platt (1918–1992) American physicist

Cited in: Rex Robert Dolan (1967). The big change: the challenge to radical change in the Church.
Source: The step to man, 1966, p.178.

Nature, Universe

“The Six Faces of the FUTURE are: Fast, Urban, Tribal, Universal, Radical and Ethical”

Patrick Dixon book Futurewise

Futurewise (1998)

Universe, Future

“The brain is the medium of expression of the human mind. Similarly the entire physical universe would be the medium of expression of the mind of a natural God.”

Paul Davies book God and the New Physics

Source: God and the New Physics (1983), Ch. 17: 'The physicist's conception of nature', p. 223

God, Nature, Universe

“If you believe something, passionately, people will follow you because they think you know something they don't, some clue to the meaning of the universe. Passion is tricky, though, because it can point to nothing just as easily as it points to something”

Donald Miller book Blue Like Jazz: nonreligious thoughts on Christian spirituality

Blue Like Jazz (2003, Nelson Books)

People, Thinking, Universe, Passion

“We can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves. From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes.”

Aldous Huxley book The Doors of Perception

Page 159
The Doors of Perception (1954)

Family, Universe

“The soul contains few secrets and longings which cannot be sensibly discussed, analyzed, and polled. Solitude, the very condition which sustained the individual against and beyond his society, has become technically impossible. Logical and linguistic analysis demonstrate that the old metaphysical problems are illusory problems; the quest for the “meaning” of things can be reformulated as the quest for the meaning of words, and the established universe of discourse and behavior can provide perfectly adequate criteria for the answer.”

Herbert Marcuse book One-Dimensional Man

Source: One-Dimensional Man (1964), p. 71

Secret, Behavior, Soul, Problem

“You know what I wish for? I wish for an NFL that produced a man like Pat Tillman! Y'all remember him, chances are these young folks do not. Pat Tillman was an outstanding college football athlete from Arizona State University, the Sun Devils. Tillman played professional football for the Arizona Cardinals but he answered a greater call of duty – and not a video game.”

Allen West (politician) (1961) American politician; retired United States Army officer

2010s, Folks, you’re missing the point about the NFL protests (19 October 2017)

Game, Universe, Chance, Sun

“O the one who from whom there was pain on the head of the [Jayanta] crow (kākakāka); O the one from whom there is pleasure in [all] beings (kaka); please come, please come (āka āka); O the one from whom there is pleasure for Sītā (kukāka); please come (āka); O the one from whom there is pleasure for the universe (kaka); please come (āka); O Lord (ka); O one who invites to himself those who find pleasure in the [mortal] world (kukaka); please come, please come (āka āka); O the one from whom there is pleasure for both Brahmā and Viṣṇu (kāka); please come (āka); O the one from whom there is pleasure on the earth (kauka); please come, please come (āka āka); O the one who is called out to [for protection] by the evil crow [Jayanta] (kukākaka), [please come]. ॥ 20.93 ॥”

Rāmabhadrācārya (1950) Hindu religious leader

kākakāka kakākāka kukākāka kakāka ka ।
kukakākāka kākāka kaukākāka kukākaka ॥
Śrībhārgavarāghavīyam

Pain, Pleasure, World, Universe

“Racist oppression invades the lives of Black people on an infinite variety of levels. Blacks are imprisoned in a world where our labor and toil hardly allow us to eke out a decent existence, if we are able to find jobs at all. When the economy begins to falter, we are forever the first victims, always the most deeply wounded. When the economy is on its feet, we continue to live in a depressed state. Unemployment is generally twice as high in the ghettos as it is in the country as a whole and even higher among Black women and youth. The unemployment rate among Black youth has presently skyrocketed to 30 per cent. If one-third of America’s white youth were without a means of livelihood, we would either be in the thick of revolution or else under the iron rule of fascism. Substandard schools, medical care hardly fit for animals, overpriced, dilapidated housing, a welfare system based on a policy of skimpy concessions, designed to degrade and divide (and even this may soon be cancelled)—this is only the beginning of the list of props in the overall scenery of oppression which, for the mass of Blacks, is the universe.”

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

If They Come in The Morning (1971)

Women, People, Youth, World

“Each civilization may choose one of two roads to travel, that is, either fret itself to death, or pet itself to death. And in the course of doing one or the other, it eats its way into the Universe, turning cinders and flinders of stars into toilet seats, pegs, gears, cigarette holders and pillowcases, and it does this because, unable to fathom the Universe, it seeks to change that Fathomlessness into Something Fathomable.”

Stanisław Lem book The Cyberiad

In "Tale of the Three Storytelling Machines of King Genius", §10
The Cyberiad (1967)

Death, Way, Travel, Star

“Quirini, in 1676, contended in opposition to Scilla, that the diluvian waters could not have conveyed heavy bodies to the summit of mountains, since the agitation of the sea never (as Boyle had demonstrated) extended to great depths, and still less could the testacea, as some pretended, have lived in these diluvian waters, for 'the duration of the flood was brief, and the heavy rains must have destroyed the saltness of the sea! He was the first writer who ventured to maintain that the universality of the Noachian cataclysm ought not to be insisted upon. …Visionary as was this doctrine, it gained many proselytes even amongst the more sober reasoners of Italy and Germany, for it conceded both that fossil bodies were organic, and that the diluvial theory could not account for them.”

Charles Lyell book Principles of Geology

Chpt.3, p. 35
Principles of Geology (1832), Vol. 1

Mountain, Universe, Water, Sea

“If God should turn away from himself as the Source of infinite joy, he would cease to be God. He would deny the infinite worth of his own glory. He would imply that there is something more valuable outside himself. He would commit idolatry… Where will we find a Rock of integrity in the universe when the heart of God has ceased to value supremely the supremely valuable?”

John Piper (1946) American writer

Desiring God: Meditations of a Christian Hedonist (Multnomah, 1986, ISBN 1590521196.

God, Universe, Heart, Joy

“Suppose then I want to give myself a little training in the art of reasoning; suppose I want to get out of the region of conjecture and probability, free myself from the difficult task of weighing evidence, and putting instances together to arrive at general propositions, and simply desire to know how to deal with my general propositions when I get them, and how to deduce right inferences from them; it is clear that I shall obtain this sort of discipline best in those departments of thought in which the first principles are unquestionably true. For in all 59 our thinking, if we come to erroneous conclusions, we come to them either by accepting false premises to start with—in which case our reasoning, however good, will not save us from error; or by reasoning badly, in which case the data we start from may be perfectly sound, and yet our conclusions may be false. But in the mathematical or pure sciences,—geometry, arithmetic, algebra, trigonometry, the calculus of variations or of curves,—we know at least that there is not, and cannot be, error in our first principles, and we may therefore fasten our whole attention upon the processes. As mere exercises in logic, therefore, these sciences, based as they all are on primary truths relating to space and number, have always been supposed to furnish the most exact discipline. When Plato wrote over the portal of his school. “Let no one ignorant of geometry enter here,” he did not mean that questions relating to lines and surfaces would be discussed by his disciples. On the contrary, the topics to which he directed their attention were some of the deepest problems,—social, political, moral,—on which the mind could exercise itself. Plato and his followers tried to think out together conclusions respecting the being, the duty, and the destiny of man, and the relation in which he stood to the gods and to the unseen world. What had geometry to do with these things? Simply this: That a man whose mind has not undergone a rigorous training in systematic thinking, and in the art of drawing legitimate inferences from premises, was unfitted to enter on the discussion of these high topics; and that the sort of logical discipline which he needed was most likely to be obtained from geometry—the only mathematical science which in Plato’s time had been formulated and reduced to a system. And we in this country [England] have long acted on the same principle. Our future lawyers, clergy, and statesmen are expected at the University to learn a good deal about curves, and angles, and numbers and proportions; not because these subjects have the smallest relation to the needs of their lives, but because in the very act of learning them they are likely to acquire that habit of steadfast and accurate thinking, which is indispensable to success in all the pursuits of life.”

Joshua Girling Fitch (1824–1903) British educationalist

Source: Lectures on Teaching, (1906), pp. 291-292

Life, God, Truth, World

“Beautiful Healy Hall—part of, and all around where we sit now—was named after this great university’s 29th President, Patrick Francis Healy. Healy was born into slavery, in Georgia, in 1834. His father was an Irish immigrant plantation owner and his mother, a slave. Under the laws of that time, Healy and his siblings were considered to be slaves. Healy is believed to be the first African-American to earn a Ph. D., the first to enter the Jesuit order, and the first to be president of Georgetown University or any predominantly white university.”

James Comey (1960) American lawyer and the seventh director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)

2010s, Hard Truths: Law Enforcement (2015)

Law, Beauty, Universe, Time

“Turkmens claim that they have the lowest life expectancy in Iran and that they are denied fair access to higher education. Those who manage to apply for university places are often turned away because they fail religious tests based on Shiism; their inadequate mastery of Persian reduces their chances further. Tehran authorities blame the Turkmen revolt on “secessionists” and “counterrevolutionaries,” allegedly supported by the United States. In fact, the revolt highlights the failure of a narrowly based ideological regime to understand the pluralist nature of Iranian society and the legitimate aspirations of its diverse component parts for dignity, equal opportunity and a fair share in decision-making.”

Amir Taheri (1942) Iranian journalist

"Iran's latest ethnic revolt" http://nypost.com/2008/01/14/irans-latest-ethnic-revolt/, New York Post (January 14, 2008). New York Post

Life, Education, Failure, Understanding

“American university presidents are a nervous breed; I have never thought well of them as a class.”

John Kenneth Galbraith (1908–2006) American economist and diplomat

Source: The Age of Uncertainty (1977), Chapter 2, p. 60

Universe

“The authenticity and universal applicability of these guarantees were never questioned by a democratic power — until recently, and by America! Instead of honoring the historic restraints, our political leaders decided to violate them, using the excuse that we are at war against terrorism. It is obvious that the Geneva Conventions were designed specifically to protect prisoners of war, not prisoners of peace.”

Jimmy Carter (1924) American politician, 39th president of the United States (in office from 1977 to 1981)

Pages 126-127
Post-Presidency, Our Endangered Values (2005)

War, Peace, Question, Universe

“DiLorenzo is absolutely wrong in saying that the 13 states were recognized as independent separate sovereignties. They were not. In 1826, Madison and Jefferson together, in making rules for the University of Virginia, resolved that the first of the documents that should be studied by the law faculty of the University of Virginia, was the Declaration of Independence as the Act of Union of the States. The Declaration was a declaration of separation from Great Britain and union with each other. And the state legislatures, or state revolutionary colonial legislatures on the road to independence—almost all of them passed resolutions calling for independence and for union.”

Harry V. Jaffa (1918–2015) American historian and collegiate professor

2000s, The Real Abraham Lincoln: A Debate (2002), Q&A

Law, Study, Universe

“It is better to be destroyed than to triumph in slaying the spirit. Such as it is, the spirit that we have achieved is fair; and it is indestructibly woven into the tissue of the cosmos. We die praising the universe in which at least such an achievement as ours can be.”

Olaf Stapledon book Star Maker

Source: Star Maker (1937), Chapter IX: The Community of Worlds; 3. A Crisis in Galactic History (p. 117)

Universe

“Do you want an absolute prediction? Then you want only today, and you reject tomorrow. You are the ultimate conservative. You are trying to hold back movement in an infinitely changing universe. The verb to be does make idiots of us all.”

Frank Herbert (1920–1986) American writer

Dune Genesis (1980)

Universe, Change

“Meanwhile, from our federal government, there was a plan of the National Council of Public Security to resolve the worst and most urgent problem, which is the number of homicides in Brazil, for which we are already in the first place. The first place belonged to Russia, but we are now, with our 50,000 homicides a year, first. Russia has whatever, 42. Russia still was a little bit ahead, but we've got 50. Not saying it's 50, it is 49,999. So we are record-breakers. I already told you, our students take the last places on international tests, and we practice more homicides. Then it is not wrong to conclude: The Brazilian is the dumbest and most murderous of people in the universe!”

Olavo de Carvalho (1947) Brazilian journalist, essayist and professor of philosophy

True Outspeak - 7m58s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_KCwlovX0Y#t=7m58s (4 January 2012)

People, Problem, Universe

“The ancient covenant is in pieces; man knows at last that he is alone in the universe's unfeeling immensity, out of which he emerged only by chance. His destiny is nowhere spelled out, nor is his duty. The kingdom above or the darkness below: it is for him to choose.”

Jacques Monod (1910–1976) French biologist

Monod (1971) Chance and necessity: an essay on the natural philosophy of modern biology. p. 180

Universe, Chance

“We… come to the conclusion… that the actual universe is neither the static nor the empty one. It differs so much from both of these that neither can be used as an appropriate grand scale model. We must thus look for other solutions of the general field-equations. On account of the expansion our solution must necessarily be a non-static one, and it must have a finite density. There is only one possible static solution possessing a finite density, viz. our old friend A, but of non-static solutions with finite density there exists a great variety.”

Willem de Sitter (1872–1934) Dutch cosmologist

Kosmos (1932), Above is Beginning Quote of the Last Chapter: Relativity and Modern Theories of the Universe -->

Universe

“An intrinsic problem, similar to the one we discussed in connexion with tradition in general, presents itself with the process of transmission of the symbolic universe from one generation to another. Socialization is never completely successful. Some individuals 'inhabit' the transmitted universe more definitely than others.”

Peter L. Berger book The Social Construction of Reality

1991; 124
The Social Construction of Reality, 1966

Problem, Universe, Success

“The range of emotions parents can arouse in their children – affection, rebellion, indifference, fear, adulation, their disturbing combinations – suggest a repertory of subjective universals, cutting in each individual case at random across cultures. What children know – as opposed to feel – about their parents, on the other hand, is likely to be a function of objective constraints that vary more systematically: tradition, place, life-span.”

Perry Anderson (1938) British historian

Debts 2. "An Anglo-Irishman In China: J.C. O’G. Anderson" (1998;2005)
Ref: en.wikiquote.org - Perry Anderson / Quotes / Spectrum: From Right to Left in the World of Ideas (2005), Debts 2. "An Anglo-Irishman In China, J.C. O’G. Anderson" (1998;2005)
Spectrum: From Right to Left in the World of Ideas (2005)

Life, Children, Fear, Feeling

“Religion claims to help us understand things about the universe, but, unlike science has no way to test or verify its claims. Both science and religion compete to understand reality, but only science has the method to verify its findings, while religion merely buttresses emotional and epistemic commitments made in advance, commitments impervious to evidence.”

Jerry Coyne (1949) American biologist

" Jeffrey Tayler continues making Salon friendlier to anti-theism https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2015/04/13/jeffrey-tayler-continues-making-salon-friendlier-to-anti-theism/" April 13, 2015

Religion, Way, Understanding, Reality

“One of our universities recently made a survey of the reading habits of the American public; it decided that forty-eight percent of all Americans read, during a year, no book at all. I picture to myself that reader — that non-reader, rather; one man out of every two — and I reflect, with shame: "Our poems are too hard for him." But so, too, are Treasure Island, Peter Rabbit, pornographic novels — any book whatsoever.”

Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) poet, critic, novelist, essayist

"The Obscurity of the Poet," Harvard University lecture (15 August 1950), published in Poetry and the Age (1953)
General sources

Books, Universe, Reading

“André Weil suggested that there is a logarithmic law at work: first-rate people attract other first-rate people, but second-rate people tend to hire third-raters, and third-rate people hire fifth-raters. If a dean or a president is genuinely interested in building and maintaining a high-quality university (and some of them are), then he must not grant complete self-determination to a second-rate department; he must, instead, use his administrative powers to intervene and set things right. That's one of the proper functions of deans and presidents, and pity the poor university in which a large proportion of both the faculty and the administration are second-raters; it is doomed to diverge to minus infinity.”

Paul R. Halmos (1916–2006) American mathematician

I Want to be a Mathematician: An Automathography (1985)

People, Law, Universe

“I know nothing of music; I would not give a farthing for all the music in the universe.”

Jonathan Swift (1667–1745) Anglo-Irish satirist, essayist, and poet

Observations on Lord Orrery's Remarks on Life of Swift, Delany, (1754), p. 192.
Disputed

Music, Universe

“If the “universe” contains everything that exists, what can be outside it? If the answer is “Things that don’t exist”, then “multiverse” becomes an idea in the domain of psychology, not physics.”

Frank Wilczek (1951) physicist

"Multiversality" (2013)

Idea, Universe

“The truth about the world about us.' 'Truth' is a word used in many different ways - 'You’re not telling the truth.' 'The truth about conditions in Russia.' 'Beauty is truth, truth beauty.' I want to use it here in the sense of what lies behind and outward show. I. et me hasten to explain by giving an example. The sun rises in the east and sets in the west. That is what we see; that is the ‘outward show'. In the past the outward show was regarded as the truth. But then a scientist came along to question it and then to announce that the truth was quite different from the appearance: the truth was that the earth revolved and the sun remained still -the outward show was telling a lie. The curious thing about scientific truths like this is that they often seem so useless. It makes no difference to the average man whether the sun moves or the earth moves. He still has to rise at dawn and stop work at dusk. But because a thing is useless it does not mean that it is valueless. Scientists still think it worthwhile to pursue truth. They do not expect that laws of gravitation and relativity are going to make much difference to everyday life, but they think it is a valuable activity to ask their eternal questions about the universe. And so we say that truth - the thing they are looking for—is a value.”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Non-Fiction, English Literature: A Survey for Students (1958, revised 1974)

Life, Truth, Lie, World

“I could issue manifestos summoning seraphim to revolt against the Haavenly State we're in, or trumpets to summon American mankind to rebellion against the Authority which has frozen all skulls in the cold war, That is, I could, make sense, invoke politics and try organize a union of opinion about what to do to Cuba, China, Russia, Bolivia, New Jersey, etc. However since in America the folks are convinced their heaven is all right, those manifestos make no dent except in giving authority & courage to the small band of hipsters who are disaffected like gentle socialists. Meanwhile the masses the proletariat the people are smug and the source of the great Wrong. So the means then is to communicate to the grand majority- and say I or anybody did write a balanced documented account not only of the lives of America but the basic theoretical split from the human body as Reich has done- But the people are so entrenched in their present livelihood that all the facts in the world-such as that China will be 1/4 of world pop makes no impression at all as a national political fact that intelligent people can take counsel on and deal with humorously & with magnificence. So that my task as a politician is to dynamite the emotional rockbed of inertia and spiritual deadness that hangs over the cities and makes everybody unconsciously afraid of the cops- To enter the Soul on a personal level and shake the emotion with the Image of some giant reality-of any kind however irrelevant to transient political issue- to touch & wake the soul again- That soul which is asleep or hidden in armor or unable to manifest itself as free life of God on earth- To remind by chord of deep groan of the Unknown to most Soul- then further politics will take place when people seize power over their universe and end the long dependence on an external authority or rhetorical set sociable emotions-so fixed they don't admit basic personal life changes-like not being afraid of jails and penury, while wandering thru gardens in high civilization.”

Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997) American poet

Gordon Ball (1977), Journals: Early Fifties Early Sixties, Grove Press NY
Journals: Early Fifties Early Sixties

Life, God, War, People

“Without Satan, with God only, how poor a universe, how trite a music!”

Olaf Stapledon book Last Men in London

Source: Last Men in London (1932), Chapter VII: After the War.

God, Music, Universe

“The new masters paint a subject as they please,
And Veronese is prosecuted by the Inquisition
For the dogs playing at the feet of Christ,
The earth is a planet among galaxies.
Later Christ disappears, the dogs disappear: in abstract
Understanding, without adoration, the last master puts
Colors on canvas, a picture of the universe
In which a bright spot somewhere in the corner
Is the small radioactive planet men called Earth.”

Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) poet, critic, novelist, essayist

"The Old and the New Masters," lines 53-61
The Lost World (1965)

Men, Dogs, Color, Understanding

“Guru: Today I will discourse upon the violence in astronomy.
Disciple: Revered Sir! Will you be describing the violent phenomenon in the Universe?
Guru: Yes, and I will also dwell upon the controversies amongst the astronomers about what these events imply – controversies which are no less violent than the phenomena themselves

The one aspect of the star-studded night sky which impresses the casual observer most is its tranquility. The peace and quiet of the heavens with the marked contrast to the hurly burly of life on the earth have inspired poets, philosophers, and religious thinkers from time immemorial. Even the amateur astronomer viewing the night sky from his proverbial roof top telescope sees a picture which changes very slowly from night to night. The occasional visit of comet, the fall of a meteorite, or in these modern times the passing of a man made satellite are examples of events which introduce transitory variation on an apparently steady cosmic theme.”

Jayant Narlikar (1938) Indian physicist

Source: Jayant V. Narlikar Violent Phenomena in the Universe http://books.google.com/books?id=VFbCAgAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover, Courier Dover Publications, 16 October 2012, p. 1

Life, Peace, Star, Universe

“Whether the universe is really a paying concern, or whether it is an inflated bubble that must burst sooner or later, this is another matter. If people were to demand cash payment in irrefragable certainty for everything that they have taken hitherto as paper money on the credit of the bank of public opinion, is there money enough behind it all to stand so great a drain even on so great a reserve?”

Samuel Butler (1835–1902) novelist

Ramblings In Cheapside (1890)

Money, People, Universe

“Various threats come along with the development of information technologies. Connecting people with machines, such a cyborgization of societies, creates a new type of threats – such threats that bring us back a little bit to the Orwellian universe of Nineteen Eighty-Four, in which someone gets very strong tools to control everything. If every human being will be appropriately chipped and our nervous systems, or even our minds, will be incorporated into a global network – one can imagine that sooner or later someone would like to take these technological possibilities in order to get some unprecedented concentration of power and domination. The possibilities of direct physical control may be created, especially if we are connected to a network in a way that interferes with the structure of our nervous system – then we can imagine different possibilities of exerting direct influence. For now, this is the field of speculation.”

Zygmunt Vetulani (1950) Polish mathematician

Polish Press Agency (July 17, 2018): Polish Scientist warns against cyborgization perils https://polandinenglish.info/38094623/polish-scientist-warns-against-cyborgization-perils.

People, Way, Imagination, Strong

“Comics were the source of my entertainment and interest. But they’re the kind of standard Japanese stuff that Japanese kids enjoy. When I got to university, there was a layer of culture shock that hit me. I began to learn about modern and abstract art. Until that time my drawings were more realistic in style. Then I was opened up to abstract images. I was encountering things I’ve never paid attention to or recognized before. I liked that, behind those abstract images, there was always an idea. That set me thinking about art in terms of ideas, rather than depictions. What could I make that had a clear idea behind it, looked unique, and yet wasn’t alienating? All of that led me to the aesthetic of my games.”

Fumito Ueda (1970) Japanese video game designer

Fumito Ueda: Colossus in the Shadow https://medium.com/@SimonParkin/fumito-ueda-colossus-in-the-shadow-80e200a727dd (December 13, 2016)

Art, Game, Idea, Thinking

“Each boat is worth the price of a new university and they are watched by gin-soaked yachting types, male and female, in captain's hats lounging in deckchairs inside Perspex covered enclosures at the front of yet more expensive, floating country houses representing nothing more than elegantly vulgar expressions of dodgy wealth. The America's Cup.”

Ralph Steadman book The Joke's Over

The America's Cup, p. 45
The Joke's Over (2006)

Universe, Housing, Country, Wealth

“My drawings [c. 1945 - 1955] were almost always figures, many pseudo-self-portraits, which I often set against a kind of sun or focus, as if the whole universe radiated from my head, from a point between my eyes. My few oils make even clearer this vision of an axial character, centrally placed, facing the spectator, or turned around, with symmetrical postures, as one in prayer; they show the influence of [medieval] Catalan Romanesque art. In general, molecular rays from the periphery appear to form the central figure and converge in his head, or come out of it, and give life to his surroundings.”

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

as quoted in 'Tàpies: From Within', June/November 2013 - Presse Release text, Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya (MNAC), p. 9
1971 - 1980, Memòria Personal', 1977

Life, Art, Universe, Appearance

“And of universal nature, the notion I would offer, should be something like this. Nature is the aggregate of the bodies, that make up the world, in its present state, considered as a principle, by virtue whereof, they act and suffer, according to the laws of motion, prescribed by the author of things.”

Robert Boyle (1627–1691) English natural philosopher, chemist, physicist, and inventor

"A Free Inquiry into the Vulgar Notion of Nature" Sect.2 ibid.

World, Law, Nature, Suffering

“With the historicization of the heavens the age-old idea of discovering universal laws of behavior applicable everywhere and always seems to have lost plausibility, whether for sub-atomic particles or for human beings. …all such patterns and regularities, it seems to me, should be understood to be limited, local, evanescent — including, now, even the laws of physics.”

William H. McNeill (1917–2016) Canadian historian

Discrepancies among the Social Sciences (1981)

Age, Law, Behavior, Idea

“For my students at the University of Chicago and in memoriam the Dead at Tiananmen Square June 4, 1989”

Anthony C. Yu (1938–2015) American scholar of literature and religion

Dedication, p. v; quoted by John Minford in his essay In Memoriam https://www.thechinastory.org/2015/06/in-memoriam-anthony-yu-余國藩/ (30 May 2015). Rereading the Stone (1997)

Universe, Dead

“They are at least proof of the inalienable part played, in the functioning of our complex vision, by sensation as an organ of research. But they have a further interest. They are an illuminating revelation of the inherent character and personal bias of the individual soul who is philosophizing. I suppose to a great many minds what we call "the universe" presents itself as a colossal circle, without any circumference, filled with an innumerable number of material objects floating in some thin attenuated ether. I suppose the centre of this circle with no circumference is generally assumed to be the "self" or "soul" of the person projecting this particular image.”

John Cowper Powys (1872–1963) British writer, lecturer and philosopher

Source: The Complex Vision (1920), Chapter I

Soul, Universe, Parting, Personality

“A thermonuclear war cannot be considered a continuation of politics by other means (according to the formula of Clausewitz). It would be a means of universal suicide.”

Andrei Sakharov (1921–1989) Soviet nuclear physicist and human rights activist

Progress, Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom (1968), Dangers, The Threat of Nuclear War

War, Suicide, Universe

“The origins of the Internet are to be found in ARPANET, a computer network set up by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) in September 1969. ARPA was formed i 1958 by the Defense Department of the United States with the task of mobilizing research resources, particularly from the university world, toward building technological military superiority over the Soviet Union in the wake of the launching of the first Sputnik in 1957.”

Manuel Castells (1942) Spanish sociologist (b.1942)

Source: The Internet Galaxy - Reflections on the Internet, Business, and Society (2001), Chapter 1, Lessons from the History of the Internet, p. 10

World, Universe

“The performance of Mozart's Don Giovanni Tuesday night at the University of NH, Johnson Theatre, was absolutely stunning. Lithuanian baritone, Vytautas Juozapaitis, (Don Giovanni) not only had the necessary voice, but he played the boastfully lecherous rake to great fanfare.”

Vytautas Juozapaitis (1963) Lithuanian opera singer

"A perversely stunning Don Giovanni", Portsmouth Herald (February, 2004) http://www.jennykellyproductions.com/prod_mozart_review.htm

Universe, Night

“It is for philosophy of religion to find out whether the convictions of the religious seers fit in with the tested laws and principles of the universe.”

Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan (1888–1975) Indian philosopher and statesman who was the first Vice President and the second President of India

Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Religion, Law, Universe

“I have been surprised at the unanimity with which the notion of the unacceptability of a Doomsday Machine is greeted. I used to be wary of discussing the concept for fear that some colonel would get out a General Operating Requirement or Development Planning Objective for the device, but it seems that I need not have worried. Except by some scientists and engineers who have overemphasized the single objective of maximizing the effectiveness of deterrence, the device is universally rejected. It just does not look professional to senior military officers, and it looks even worse to senior civilians. The fact that more than a few scientists and engineers do seem attracted to the idea is disquieting, but as long as the development project is expensive, even these dedicated experts are unlikely to get one under way.”

Herman Kahn (1922–1983) American futurist

The Magnum Opus; On Thermonuclear War

Fear, Way, Idea, Universe

“No religion I ever encountered made any sense. None are consistent. Most gods are megalomaniacs and paranoid psychotics by their worshipers’ description. I don’t see how they could survive their own insanity. But it’s not impossible that human beings are incapable of interpreting a power so much greater than themselves. Maybe religions are twisted and perverted shadows of truth. Maybe there are forces which shape the world. I myself have never understood why, in a universe so vast, a god would care about something so trivial as worship or human destiny.”

Glen Cook book The White Rose

Source: The White Rose (1985), Chapter 39, “A Guest at Charm” (pp. 624-625)

God, Truth, World, Religion

“Libraries raised me. I don't believe in colleges and universities. I believe in libraries because most students don't have any money. When I graduated from high school, it was during the Depression and we had no money. I couldn't go to college, so I went to the library three days a week for 10 years.”

Ray Bradbury (1920–2012) American writer

The New York Times (2009)

Money, School, Universe

“The market universe is composed of two types of oceans: red oceans and blue oceans. Red oceans are all the industries in existence today; they are increasingly characterized by intense competition. Blue oceans are all the industries not in existence today; they are untouched and uncontested. To prosper in the future, companies need to go beyond competing; they need to create blue oceans. The issue is how to do so.”

W. Chan Kim (1951) South Korean economist

Kim, W. Chan, and Renée Mauborgne. "Blue ocean strategy: from theory to practice." California Management Review 47.3 (2005). p. 105

Universe, Future

“DYING AND DEATH are the most universal and personally relevant experiences for every single individual. In the course of life, we all lose relatives, friends, teachers, and acquaintances and eventually face our own biological demise. Yet it is quite extraordinary that until the late 1960es, the Western industrial civilization showed an almost complete lack of interest in the subject of death and dying. This attitude has been displayed not only by the general public, but also by scientists and professionals for whom this subject should be of great interest - medical doctors, psychiatrists, psychologists, anthropologists, philosophers, and theologicians. The only plausible explanation for this situation is massive denial of death and psychological repression of everything related to it. This disinterest is even more striking when we compare it to the attitude toward mortality in preindustrial societies…”

Stanislav Grof (1931) Czech pychiatrist

Introduction to The Ultimate Journey: Consciousness and the Mystery of Death (2006).

Life, Death, Teachers, Universe

“An international socialism is the stated ideal of most socialists; an international liberalism is the unstated tendency of the liberal. To neither system is it thinkable that men live, not by universal aspirations but by local attachments; not by a “solidarity” that stretches across the globe from end to end, but by obligations that are understood in terms which separate men from most of their fellows—in terms such as national history, religion, language, and the customs that provide the basis of legitimacy.”

Roger Scruton (1944–2020) English philosopher

"How to be a Non-Liberal, Anti-Socialist Conservative," Intercollegiate Review: A Journal of Scholarship and Opinion (Spring 1993).

Men, Religion, History, Universe

“Since time immemorial, questions regarding the relationship between free will and destiny have plagued the minds of great philosophers. How do we reconcile these two apparently contradictory concepts: free will and destiny? In the higher realms of understanding, any deep philosophical or spiritual subject matter will present seemingly paradoxical perspectives at first. However, the more we genuinely explore and analyze these questions, we see that their resolutions lie less in the realm of ‘either/or,’ and more in an interplay between both concepts. Some contemporary philosophers call such an idea ‘diunital,’ as it encapsulates seemingly opposing terms. Often, when we study different polarities, we notice that taken together, they give us a greater understanding of the whole. This is particularly applicable to the nature of the soul and of God. For example, sometimes it may seem that God’s laws for governing the universe are at odds with those prescribed by humankind, but if we explore the situation in a prayerful mood, we will often be able to appreciate the congruency that emerges between them.”

Bhakti Tirtha Swami (1950–2005) American Hindu writer

Sri Isopanisad - Mantra Two
Books, Reflections on Sacred Teachings, Volume IV: Sri Isopanisad (Hari-Nama Press, )

God, Lie, Law, Soul

“I began to feel lighthearted. Don’t ever do that; it tempts some dark and evil force abroad in the universe.”

Tanith Lee book Don't Bite the Sun

Part 4, Chapter 4 (p. 122)
Don't Bite the Sun (1976)

Feeling, Universe, Evil

“As a result our graduates leave us without having formed the habit of seeking wide generalizations related to diverse variables in the social situations which surround them. Because they lack both habits and methods which lead them to seek generalizations, they become, after they leave us, Specialists themselves and make decisions without the guides to action within their special fields which wider viewpoints might give. To develop them as we must, the artificial dividing lines between social sciences must in large measure be broken down. Specialized training must be both counteracted and supplemented by training which brings in the widest social implications. Otherwise men will not be trained to meet the problems faced by public and private administrators.
The only way these things can be attempted in our universities without resulting in a vast amount of sheer unrealistic sentimentality is, I believe, by paying more attention to the great intellectual field of administration.”

Wallace Brett Donham (1877–1954) American academic

Source: "Training for Leadership in a Democracy", 1936, p. 65-70, as cited in: Albert Lepawsky (1949), Administration, p. 663

Men, Way, Problem, Decision

“From that time, the universe has steadily become more complex and less reducible to a central control. With as much obstinacy as though it were human, it has insisted on expanding its parts; with as much elusiveness as though it were feminine, it has evaded the attempt to impose on it a single will. Modern science, like modern art, tends, in practice, to drop the dogma of organic unity. Some of the mediaeval habit of mind survives, but even that is said to be yielding before the daily evidence of increasing and extending complexity. The fault, then, was not in man, if he no longer looked at science or art as an organic whole or as the expression of unity. Unity turned itself into complexity, multiplicity, variety, and even contradiction.”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

Mont Saint Michel and Chartres (1904)

Art, Universe, Science, Time

“In Mussolini's Italy of the nineteen-thirties, when it meant long terms of improsonment, and perhaps torture or even death, to be in any way connected with the Communist Party, and when not only all the works of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin, but the works of all Italian and foreign democrats and progressive were strictly banned from Italian libraries and bookshops, the works of Trotsky, on the "new kind of communism" were "freely" and widely translated and distributed. I remember vividly how in 1938, passing through Italy on the way to meet the anti-fascist and Communist students of Belgrade University, and spending a few hours in Mussolini's Milan, the word "communism" caught my eye on a number of books prominently displayed in a bookshop window. They were the newly translated works of Trotsky.”

James Klugmann (1912–1977) British writer

From Trotsky to Tito (1951)

Death, Books, Way, Communication

“In March 2012 I met Torbjorn Loden, the Swedish professor of Chinese language and culture, in Hong Kong. He told me that while briefly teaching at Hong Kong's City University he asked the 40 students from China in his class what they knew about the June 4 Incident, the pro-democracy movement that ended in bloodshed in 1989, and if they were familiar with the names Liu Binyan and Fang Lizhi, two prominent democracy advocates of that era. All the students from China looked around at one another, mute and puzzled.
That reminded me of something another teacher told me. She had asked her students from China if they had heard about the death by starvation of 30 to 40 million people during the so-called "three years of natural disasters" in the early 1960s. Her students responded with stunned silence, as if she, a teacher in Hong Kong, was brazenly fabricating history to attack their mother country.”

Yan Lianke (1958) Chinese novelist and satirist

"On China's State-Sponsored Amnesia"

Death, People, Democracy, History

“I say, then, that the universe and all its parts both received their first order from divine providence, and are at all times administered by it.”
Dico igitur providentia deorum mundum et omnes mundi partes et initio constitutas esse et omni tempore administrari.

Marcus Tullius Cicero (-106–-43 BC) Roman philosopher and statesman

Book II, section 30
De Natura Deorum – On the Nature of the Gods (45 BC)

Universe, Time, Parting

“It had been suggested to her that the flaw lay not in the universe but in herself.”

Jack Vance Dying Earth

Source: Dying Earth (1950-1984), The Dying Earth (1950), Chapter 3, "T'Sais"

Universe

“The majority of men prefer delusion to truth. It soothes. It is easy to grasp. Above all, it fits more snugly than the truth into a universe of false appearances—of complex and irrational phenomena, defectively grasped.”

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

1940s–present, Introduction to Nietzsche's The Antichrist

Men, Truth, Universe, Appearance

“There is no one doctrine of administration for business and another for affairs of state; administrative doctrine is universal. Principles and general rules which hold good for business hold good for the state too, and the reverse applies.”

Henri Fayol (1841–1925) Developer of Fayolism

Henri Fayol (1917) "Préface à Administration industrielle et générale" in: Dunod and Pinat eds. (1918) l’éveil de l’esprit public. p. 6

Business, Universe

“Whether computers are used for engineering design, medical data processing, composing music, or other purposes, the structure of computing is much the same. We are extremely short of talented people in this field, and so we need departments, curricula, and research and degree programs in computer science… I think of the Computer Science Department as eventually including experts in Programming, Numerical Analysis, Automata Theory, Data Processing, Business Games, Adaptive Systems, Information Theory, Information Retrieval, Recursive Function Theory, Computer Linguistics, etc., as these fields emerge in structure… Universities must respond [to the computer revolution] with far reaching changes in the educational structure.”

George Forsythe (1917–1972) Stanford University computer scientist

As cited in Donald Knuth (1972). "George Forsythe and the Development of Computer Science" http://www.stanford.edu/dept/ICME/docs/history/forsythe_knuth.pdf. Comms. ACM. "Educational implications of the computer revolution," 1963

People, Education, Music, Game

“Man is that link of the chain of universal existence, by which spiritual and corporeal Beings are united … How will man, that sanguinary tyrant, be able to excuse himself from the charge of those innumerable cruelties inflicted on his unoffending subjects committed to his care, formed for his benefit, and placed under his authority by their common Father?”

Soame Jenyns (1704–1787) British writer

Disquisitions on Several Subjects (1782), Disquisition II: "On Cruelty to Inferior Animals", p. 11

Universe

“The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, vesting every individual with equal rights, was directly opposed to the hierarchical social structure of indigenous Fijian society. Chiefs were at the apex by virtue of their birth and rank. The rest of the people had a communal functional role in this hierarchy.”

Laisenia Qarase (1941) Prime Minister of Fiji

Excerpts from an address to the Commonwealth Workshop in Nadi, 29 August 2005

People, Communication, Birth, Universe

“There is a plan, it seems to me, that reaches out of the electron to the rim of the universe and what this plan may be or how it came about is beyond my feeble intellect. But if we are looking for something on which to pin our faith — and, indeed, our hope — the plan might well be it. I think we have thought too small and have been too afraid…”

Clifford D. Simak book A Choice of Gods

A Choice of Gods (1972)
Context: I have become a student of the sky and know all the clouds there are and have firmly fixed in mind the various hues of blue that the sky can show — the washed-out, almost invisible blue of a hot, summer noon; the soft robin's egg, sometimes almost greenish blue of a late springtime evening, the darker, almost violet blue of fall. I have become a connoisseur of the coloring that the leaves take on in autumn and I know all the voices and the moods of the woods and river valley. I have, in a measure, entered into communion with nature, and in this wise have followed in the footsteps of Red Cloud and his people, although I am sure that their understanding and their emotions are more fine-tuned than mine are. I have seen, however, the roll of seasons, the birth and death of leaves, the glitter of the stars on more nights than I can number and from all this as from nothing else I have gained a sense of a purpose and an orderliness which it does not seem to me can have stemmed from accident alone.
It seems to me, thinking of it, that there must be some universal plan which set in motion the orbiting of the electrons about the nucleus and the slower, more majestic orbit of the galaxies about one another to the very edge of space. There is a plan, it seems to me, that reaches out of the electron to the rim of the universe and what this plan may be or how it came about is beyond my feeble intellect. But if we are looking for something on which to pin our faith — and, indeed, our hope — the plan might well be it. I think we have thought too small and have been too afraid...

Ch 24

Faith, Hope, Thinking, Universe

“I am well aware of the fact that the human race has known about the existence of a universal energy related to life for many ages. However, the basic task of natural science consisted of making this energy usable.”

Wilhelm Reich (1897–1957) Austrian-American psychoanalyst

Archives of the Orgone Institute; quoted in "The New American Medicine" in Journal of The Mindshift Institute (2002) http://mindshiftinstitute.org/Article_New_American_Medicine.htm Context: I am well aware of the fact that the human race has known about the existence of a universal energy related to life for many ages. However, the basic task of natural science consisted of making this energy usable. This is the sole difference between my work and all preceding knowledge.

Life, Age, Nature, Universe

“It is not, happily, within our power thus to work destruction in the universal womb of things; still within the sphere of human influence — which extends to the uttermost limit of our world's circumambient atmosphere — we can, and do, modify all nature's kingdom; bending towards good or ill, health or disease, harmony or discord, each part, each unit of the universal plan.”

Frances Wright (1795–1852) American activist

"An Exposition of the Mission of England: Addressed to the Peoples of Europe" in The Reasoner, Vol. 3, No. 54 (1847), p. 321
Context: It is not, happily, within our power thus to work destruction in the universal womb of things; still within the sphere of human influence — which extends to the uttermost limit of our world's circumambient atmosphere — we can, and do, modify all nature's kingdom; bending towards good or ill, health or disease, harmony or discord, each part, each unit of the universal plan. Upon our just or erroneous comprehension then, of the laws of nature, must depend our adaptation of art for the right improvement or for the ignorant deterioration of Nature's works. And moreover, upon our just or erroneous interpretation of these in the first division of truth — the physical — will depend our interpretation of them in the intellectual and in the moral; from all which it follows, that our system of human economy will present, even as it has ever presented, a practical exhibition of that of the universe. There is more consistency in the human mind, as in the course of events, than is supposed. In both, the first link in the chain decides the last. Man hath ever made a cosmogony in keeping with his views in physics; a scheme of government in keeping with his cosmogony; a theory of ethics in keeping with his government, and a code of law and theology in keeping with his ethics. Every perception of the human mind modifies human practice. Science is but the theory of art.

Health, World, Disease, Nature

“It is universally held that the unicorn is a supernatural being and of auspicious omen; so say the odes, the annals, the biographies of worthies, and other texts whose authority is unimpeachable.”

Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator, and a key figure in Spanish language literature

Book of Imaginary Beings (1957), as translated by Norman Thomas di Giovanni
Context: It is universally held that the unicorn is a supernatural being and of auspicious omen; so say the odes, the annals, the biographies of worthies, and other texts whose authority is unimpeachable. Even village women and children know that the unicorn is a lucky sign. But this animal does not figure among the barnyard animals, it is not always easy to come across, it does not lend itself to zoological classification. Nor is it like the horse or bull, the wolf or deer. In such circumstances we may be face to face with a unicorn and not know for sure that we are. We know that a certain animal with a mane is a horse and that a certain animal with horns is a bull. We do not know what the unicorn looks like.

Universe

“I believe we need a long-term national commitment to explore the universe. And I believe this is an essential investment in the future of our nation — and our beautiful, but environmentally challenged planet.”

Gene Kranz (1933) NASA Flight Director and manager

Source: "Space Lifeguard : An Interview with Gene Kranz" at Space.com (11 April 2000)
Context: In many ways we have the young people, we have the talent, we have the imagination, we have the technology. But I don't believe we have the leadership and the willingness to accept risk, to achieve great goals. I believe we need a long-term national commitment to explore the universe. And I believe this is an essential investment in the future of our nation — and our beautiful, but environmentally challenged planet.

Beauty, Universe, Future

“No other conclusion of modern research testifies more clearly to mankind’s intimate connections with the universe at large and with the cosmic forces at work among the stars.”

Nigel Calder (1931–2014) British science writer

The Key to the Universe (1977)
Context: In a sense, human flesh is made of stardust.
Every atom in the human body, excluding only the primordial hydrogen atoms, was fashioned in stars that formed, grew old and exploded most violently before the Sun and the Earth came into being. The explosions scattered the heavy elements as a fine dust through space. By the time it made the Sun, the primordial gas of the Milky Way was sufficiently enriched with heavier elements for rocky planets like the Earth to form. And from the rocks atoms escaped for eventual incorporation in living things: carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulphur for all living tissue; calcium for bones and teeth; sodium and potassium for the workings of nerves and brains; the iron colouring blood red… and so on.
No other conclusion of modern research testifies more clearly to mankind’s intimate connections with the universe at large and with the cosmic forces at work among the stars.

Star, Universe

“This law cannot be contradicted by any other law, and is not liable either to derogation or abrogation. Neither the senate nor the people can give us any dispensation for not obeying this universal law of justice. It needs no other expositor and interpreter than our own conscience.”
Est quidem vera lex recta ratio naturae congruens, diffusa in omnes, constans, sempiterna, quae vocet ad officium iubendo, vetando a fraude deterreat; quae tamen neque probos frustra iubet aut vetat nec improbos iubendo aut vetando movet. Huic legi nec obrogari fas est neque derogari ex hac aliquid licet neque tota abrogari potest, nec vero aut per senatum aut per populum solvi hac lege possumus, neque est quaerendus explanator aut interpres eius alius, nec erit alia lex Romae, alia Athenis, alia nunc, alia posthac, sed et omnes gentes et omni tempore una lex et sempiterna et immutabilis continebit, unusque erit communis quasi magister et imperator omnium deus, ille legis huius inventor, disceptator, lator; cui qui non parebit, ipse se fugiet ac naturam hominis aspernatus hoc ipso luet maximas poenas, etiamsi cetera supplicia, quae putantur, effugerit.

Marcus Tullius Cicero book De Legibus

De Re Publica [Of The Republic], Book III Section 22; as translated by Francis Barham
Variant translations:
True law is right reason in agreement with nature; it is of universal application, unchanging and everlasting; it summons to duty by its commands, and averts from wrongdoing by its prohibitions. And it does not lay its commands or prohibitions upon good men in vain, though neither have any effect on the wicked. It is a sin to try to alter this law, nor is it allowable to attempt to repeal any part of it, and it is impossible to abolish it entirely. We cannot be freed from its obligations by senate or people, and we need not look outside ourselves for an expounder or interpreter of it. And there will not be different laws at Rome and at Athens, or different laws now and in the future, but one eternal and unchangeable law will be valid for all nations and all times, and there will be one master and ruler, that is, God, over us all, for he is the author of this law, its promulgator, and its enforcing judge. Whoever is disobedient is fleeing from himself and denying his human nature, and by reason of this very fact he will suffer the worst penalties, even if he escapes what is commonly considered punishment.
As translated by Clinton W. Keyes (1928)
Context: There is a true law, a right reason, conformable to nature, universal, unchangeable, eternal, whose commands urge us to duty, and whose prohibitions restrain us from evil. Whether it enjoins or forbids, the good respect its injunctions, and the wicked treat them with indifference. This law cannot be contradicted by any other law, and is not liable either to derogation or abrogation. Neither the senate nor the people can give us any dispensation for not obeying this universal law of justice. It needs no other expositor and interpreter than our own conscience. It is not one thing at Rome and another at Athens; one thing to–day and another to–morrow; but in all times and nations this universal law must for ever reign, eternal and imperishable. It is the sovereign master and emperor of all beings. God himself is its author,—its promulgator,—its enforcer. He who obeys it not, flies from himself, and does violence to the very nature of man. For his crime he must endure the severest penalties hereafter, even if he avoid the usual misfortunes of the present life.

People, Justice, Law, Universe

Quotes about university page 44

Quotes about university
page 44