Quotes about use (10000 quotes, page 35)

“I guess we were kinda poor when we were kids, but we didn't know it. That's because my dad always refused to let us look at the family's financial records.”

Jack Handey (1949) American comedian

Fuzzy Memories (1996), Andrews McMeel Publishing, ISBN 0-8362-1040-9

Family

“I have spent most of my life as a Democrat. I recently have seen fit to follow another course. I believe that the issues confronting us cross party lines.”

Ronald Reagan (1911–2004) American politician, 40th president of the United States (in office from 1981 to 1989)

1960s, A Time for Choosing (1964)

Life

“The ways in which these economic processes, largely originating in the US, have, in short order, flowed around the world is breathtaking and, unfortunately, well illustrates this book's major themes.”

George Ritzer (1940) American sociologist

Preface, p. xiii
Globalization - A Basic Text (2010)

Books , World , Way

“Mandela taught us the power of action, but he also taught us the power of ideas; the importance of reason and arguments; the need to study not only those who you agree with, but also those who you don’t agree with. He understood that ideas cannot be contained by prison walls, or extinguished by a sniper’s bullet. He turned his trial into an indictment of apartheid because of his eloquence and his passion, but also because of his training as an advocate. He used decades in prison to sharpen his arguments, but also to spread his thirst for knowledge to others in the movement. And he learned the language and the customs of his oppressor so that one day he might better convey to them how their own freedom depend upon his.”

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

2013, Eulogy of Nelson Mandela (December 2013)

Idea , Knowledge , Study , Freedom

“Beneath our feet and o'er our head
Is equal warning given:
Beneath us lie the countless dead,
Above us is the heaven! Death rides on every passing breeze,
And lurks in every flower;
Each season has its own disease,
Its peril every hour.”

Reginald Heber (1783–1826) English clergyman

"At a Funeral", No. I.
need further publication dates

Death , Lie , Disease , Flowers

“We're slow to believe what wounds us.”
Tarde quae credita laedunt credimus.

Ovid book Heroides

II, 9-10; translation by A. S. Kline
Heroides (The Heroines)

“Belief in spooks who threaten us if we don't worship them and demand we turn over our destiny and daily lives must be categorized as spookism and condemned.”

Maulana Karenga (1941) Political activist

Kawaida Theory: An Introductory Outline (1980)

“Some people may still ask: Would the Soviets ever use their formidable military power? Well, again, can we afford to believe they won't? There is Afghanistan, and in Poland, the Soviets denied the will of the people and, in so doing, demonstrated to the world how their military power could also be used to intimidate.
The final fact is that the Soviet Union is acquiring what can only be considered an offensive military force. They have continued to build far more intercontinental ballistic missiles than they could possibly need simply to deter an attack. Their conventional forces are trained and equipped not so much to defend against an attack as they are to permit sudden, surprise offensives of their own.”

Ronald Reagan (1911–2004) American politician, 40th president of the United States (in office from 1981 to 1989)

1980s, First term of office (1981–1985), Address on the Strategic Defense Initiative (1983)

People , World , Training

“Throughout human history, societies have grappled with fundamental questions of how to organize themselves, the proper relationship between the individual and the state, the best means to resolve inevitable conflicts between states. And it was here in Europe, through centuries of struggle -- through war and Enlightenment, repression and revolution -- that a particular set of ideals began to emerge: The belief that through conscience and free will, each of us has the right to live as we choose. The belief that power is derived from the consent of the governed, and that laws and institutions should be established to protect that understanding. And those ideas eventually inspired a band of colonialists across an ocean, and they wrote them into the founding documents that still guide America today, including the simple truth that all men -- and women -- are created equal. But those ideals have also been tested -- here in Europe and around the world. Those ideals have often been threatened by an older, more traditional view of power. This alternative vision argues that ordinary men and women are too small-minded to govern their own affairs, that order and progress can only come when individuals surrender their rights to an all-powerful sovereign. Often, this alternative vision roots itself in the notion that by virtue of race or faith or ethnicity, some are inherently superior to others, and that individual identity must be defined by “us” versus “them,” or that national greatness must flow not by what a people stand for, but by what they are against. In many ways, the history of Europe in the 20th century represented the ongoing clash of these two sets of ideas, both within nations and among nations. The advance of industry and technology outpaced our ability to resolve our differences peacefully, and even among the most civilized of societies, on the surface we saw a descent into barbarism.”

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

2014, Address to European Youth (March 2014)

Women , Men , War , People

“It is necessary for us to explain the involuntary repugnance we possess for the nature and personality of the Jews … The Jews have never produced a true poet. Heinrich Heine reached the point where he duped himself into a poet, and was rewarded by his versified lies being set to music by our own composers. He was the conscience of Judaism, just as Judaism is the evil conscience of our modern civilization.”

Richard Wagner book Das Judenthum in der Musik

Judaism in Music (1850)

Music , Nature , Evil , Personality

“We humans are, at bottom, carriers of the time, because we take it with us, we use it, sometimes we waste it and sometimes something remains, though everything is doomed to oblivion.”

José Saramago (1922–2010) Portuguese writer and recipient of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Literature

"Efe" report, Folha de São Paulo http://www1.folha.uol.com.br/folha/ilustrada/ult90u68178.shtml, 2007.

Time

“If we cannot live entirely like human beings, at least let us do everything in our power not to live entirely like animals.”

José Saramago book Blindness

Se não formos capazes de viver inteiramente como pessoas, ao menos façamos tudo para não viver inteiramente como animais.
Source: Blindness (1995), p. 116

Animals

“I know as a writer how valuable a tool is the wastebasket. Perhaps God throws away many experiments before He finds the right expression. Perhaps we are the discards — or we could be the part He keeps. This mystery is what keeps us all going, to see what happens in the next chapter.”

Isaac Bashevis Singer (1902–1991) Polish-born Jewish-American author

"Isaac Singer’s Promised City" by Stefan Kanfer in City Journal (Summer 1997) http://www.city-journal.org/html/7_3_urbanities-isaac.html

God , Parting

“It was the greatest learning summer of my whole life, but then came the fall, and I was told that I’d have to go back to school again. “NO WAY, JOSÉ!” I screamed, because I now knew that at school they were trying to “break” us, not “amanzar” us.”

Victor Villaseñor (1940) American writer

Burro Genius: A Memoir (2004)

Life , School , Way , Learning

“Now when God sends forth his holy Gospel, He deals with us in a twofold manner, the first outwardly, then inwardly. Outwardly he deals with us through the oral word of the Gospel and through material sings, that is, baptism adndthe sacrament of the altar. Inwardly He deals with us through the Holy spirit, faith, and other gifts. But whatever their measure of order the outward factors should and must procede. The inward experience follows and is effected by the outward. God has determined to give the inward to no one except through the outward.”

Martin Luther (1483–1546) seminal figure in Protestant Reformation

Luthers Works, 40 p. 146 as quoted in Against the Idols: The Reformation of Worship from Erasmus to Calvin https://books.google.com/books?id=95sDFZbl4S4C&pg=PA55&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=3#v=onepage&q=Calvin&f=falseby Carlos M. N. Eire, p. 72

God , Faith , Singing

“When I write these notes, it is not to describe my own life. I am writing a study of the soul as I observe myself closely and use myself as an anatomical testing-ground. It would therefore be wrong to look on these notes as confessions. I have chosen – in accordance with Søren Kierkegaard – to split the work into two parts; the painter and his distraught friend the poet. Just as Leonarda da Vinci studied the recesses of the body and dissected human cadavers, I try from self-scrutiny to dissect what is the universal in the soul”

Edvard Munch (1863–1944) Norwegian painter and printmaker

written after 1908
in The Mad Poet's Diary, T 2734
1896 - 1930

Life , Soul , Study , Universe

“This dogma had first to be shattered before men could once more go out in quest of the historical Jesus, before they could even grasp the thought of His existence. That the historic Jesus is something different from the Jesus Christ of the doctrine of the Two Natures seems to us now self-evident. We can, at the present day, scarcely imagine the long agony in which the historical view of the life of Jesus came to birth. And even when He was once more recalled to life. He was still, like Lazarus of old, bound hand and foot with grave-clothes — the grave-clothes of the dogma of the Dual Nature.”

Albert Schweitzer book The Quest of the Historical Jesus

Source: The Quest of the Historical Jesus (1906), p. 3

Life , Men , Imagination , Birth

“Morphy and Capablanca had enormous talent, they are two of my favorites. Steinitz was very great too. Alekhine was great, but I am not a big fan of his. Maybe it’s just my taste. I’ve studied his games a lot, but I much prefer Capablanca and Morphy. Alekhine had a rather heavy style, Capablanca was much more brilliant and talented, he had a real light touch. Everyone I’ve spoken to who saw Capablanca play still speak of him with awe. If you showed him any position he would instantly tell you the right move. When I used to go to the Manhattan Chess Club back in the fifties, I met a lot of old-timers there who knew Capablanca, because he used to come around to the Manhattan club in the forties – before he died in the early forties. They spoke about Capablanca with awe. I have never seen people speak about any chess player like that, before or since. Capablanca really was fantastic. But even he had his weaknesses, especially when you play over his games with his notes he would make idiotic statements like 'I played the rest of the game perfectly.”

Bobby Fischer (1943–2008) American chess prodigy, chess player, and chess writer

But then you play through the moves and it is not true at all. But the thing that was great about Capablanca was that he really spoke his mind, he said what he believed was true, he said what he felt.
Radio Interview, October 16 2006 http://www.geocities.jp/bobbby_b/mp3/F_35_3.MP3

People , Game , Study , Light

“What's Bagism? It's like… a tag for what we all do, we're all in a bag ya know, and we realised that we came from two bags, I was in this pop bag going round and round in my little clique, and she was in her little avant-garde clique going round and round, and you're in your little tele clique and they're in their…ya know? and we all sort of come out and look at each other every now and then, but we don't communicate. And we all intellectualise about how there is no barrier between art, music, poetry… but we're still all "I'm a rock and roller, he's a poet" … so we just came up with the word so you would ask us what bagism is, and we'd say "WE'RE ALL IN A BAG BABY!"”

John Lennon (1940–1980) English singer and songwriter

Interview on The David Frost Show (14 June 1969) http://web.archive.org/web/20010719003543/http://homepage.ntlworld.com/carousel/pob07.html

Art , Music , Communication , Baby

“One thing I have frequently observed in children, that when they have got possession of any poor creature, they are apt to use it ill: they often torment, and treat it very roughly, young birds, butterflies, and such other poor animals which fall into their hands, and that with a seeming kind of pleasure. This I think should be watched in them, and if they incline to any such cruelty, they should be taught the contrary usage. For the custom of tormenting and killing of beasts, will, by degrees, harden their minds even towards men; and they will delight in the suffering and destruction of inferior creatures, will not be apt to be very compassionate or benign to those of their own kind. Our practice takes notice of this in the exclusion of butchers from juries of life and death.”

John Locke book Some Thoughts Concerning Education

Sec. 116
Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693)

Life , Death , Men , Children

“As human beings, we have the power to speak up for animals. They don’t speak our language, so I feel like it’s up to us to help them and give them a voice. Animals have feelings. They have souls. They have emotions. The way they’re killed for fur is very inhumane. … They’re electrocuted, beaten, drowned, skinned alive. Once you know that, how could you think wearing fur is cool? It’s not.”

Jhené Aiko (1988) American singer-songwriter and recording artist

Interview with PETA; as quoted in " Jhené Aiko Poses Nude for PETA Anti-Fur Campaign http://www.rap-up.com/2016/12/06/jhene-aiko-poses-nude-for-peta-anti-fur-campaign/", Rap-Up.com (6 December 2016).

Way , Feeling , Soul , Thinking

“It seems to me that I am being born into a new life and that all the methods and habits of the past can no longer be of any use. It seems to me that what was once a result is now only a preparation … It is as if I was stripped of all my past, of my errors as well as my conquests, as if all that had disappeared to give place to one new-born whose whole existence has yet to take shape … An immense gratitude rises from my heart. I seem to have at last arrived at the threshold which I have long sought.”

The Mother (1878–1973) spiritual collaborator of Sri Aurobindo

How she felt when she sat down at the feet of Sri Aurobindo, quoted in "Diary notes and Meeting with Sri Aurobindo" and also in The Mother (of Sri Aurobindo Ashram) Prema Nandakumar of National Book Trust, India, (1977) http://books.google.co.in/books?id=R1sqAAAAYAAJ, p. 23

Life , Error , Past , Heart

“I believe a government that suppresses peaceful dissent is not showing strength; it is showing weakness and it is showing fear. History shows that regimes who fear their own people will eventually crumble, but strong institutions built on the consent of the governed endure long after any one individual is gone. That's why our strongest leaders -- from George Washington to Nelson Mandela -- have elevated the importance of building strong, democratic institutions over a thirst for perpetual power. Leaders who amend constitutions to stay in office only acknowledge that they failed to build a successful country for their people -- because none of us last forever. It tells us that power is something they cling to for its own sake, rather than for the betterment of those they purport to serve.”

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

2015, Remarks to the United Nations General Assembly (September 2015)

People , Fear , Peace , History

“We are fully aware that war is not the only way to defend our values. But if those values are fundamentally endangered, as is the case today, then war is the only way to defend them. Everything that hinders us in our effort to defend ourselves is an injustice. We did not want this war, it was thrust upon us, like all others. Defending one's people is a holy duty”

Ratko Mladić (1943) Commander of the Bosnian Serb military

From interview with Robert Block, 1995
Interviews (1993 – 1995)

War , People , Way , Effort

“In the stage of manhood alone does the human race first appear in his dignity; only there are his principles fixed, his connections appropriate, he sees the full circumference of his sphere; there alone — after we have already learned through many detours, through long, repeated, sad experiences, what a calamity it is to arrogate the rights of others, to raise oneself over others through mere external advantages, to use his size to the detriment of others — there alone one recognizes, believes, feels what an honor, what a joy it is to be a human being.”

Adam Weishaupt (1748–1830) German philosopher and founder of the Order of Illuminati

Die neuesten Arbeiten des Spartacus und Philo in dem Illuminaten-Orden (1794) p. 20.

Sadness , Feeling , Learning , Appearance

“Whenever a Muslim called upon the Muslim society, he never faced any resistance-he called in the name of one God ‘Allah-ho-Akbar’. On the other hand, when we (Hindus) call will call, ‘come on, Hindus’, who will respond? We, the Hindus, are divided in numerous small communities, many barriers-provincialism-who will respond overcoming all these obstacles? “We suffered from many dangers, but we could never be united. When Mohammed Ghouri brought the first blow from outside, the Hindus could not be united, even in the those days of imminent danger. When the Muslims started to demolish the temples one after another, and to break the idols of Gods and Goddesses, the Hindus fought and died in small units, but they could not be united. It has been provided that we were killed in different ages due to out discord. Weakness harbors sin. So, if the Muslims beat us and we, the Hindus, tolerate this without resistance-then, we will know that it is made possible only by our weakness. For the sake of ourselves and our neighbour Muslims also, we have to discard our weakness. We can appeal to our neighbour Muslims, `Please don't be cruel to us. No religion can be based on genocide' - but this kind of appeal is nothing, but the weeping of the weak person. When the low pressure is created in the air, storm comes spontaneously; nobody can stop it for sake for religion. Similarly, if weakness is cherished and be allowed to exist, torture comes automatically - nobody can stop it. Possibly, the Hindus and the Muslims can make a fake friendship to each other for a while, but that cannot last forever. As long as you don’t purify the soil, which grows only thorny shrubs you can not expect any fruit.”

Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) Bengali polymath

“Swamy Shraddananda’, written by Rabindranath in Magh, 1333 Bangabda; compiled in the book ‘Kalantar’.

God , Friendship , Age , Religion

“My wife is a painter, and a very good one… and we’ve been working together for, oh, twelve years now, I guess…and at first I used to help and criticize things she was doing, and then she would help and criticize things I was doing, and we would… pitch in and do all the jiggering for each other and get it as people do… and then, gradually, things begin to sort of, you know, entropy… things began to get shuffled, and pretty soon you didn’t know, sort of, where one started and the other ended, and anything that we’ve looked at or talked about here, you know, I say that I’m doing it, but actually, she’s doing it just as much as I am, only she sort of goes under the same corporate type name…”

Charles Eames (1907–1978) American designer, half of duo the Eames

Charles Eames in a 1952 speech to a national assembly of the AIA; As cited in: Ray Eames http://eamesdesigns.com/library-entry/ray-eames/ at eamesdesigns.com, Accessed April 8, 2014; Charles Eames talks about Ray Eames

People , Help

“I was truly under Hitler's spell, that cannot be denied. I was impressed with him from the moment I first met him, in 1932. He had terrific power, especially in his eyes. Now the tribunal accuses us of conspiracy. I say, how can one have a conspiracy in a dictatorship government? One man and one man only made all the crucial decisions. That was the Fuhrer. In all my dealings with him I never discussed the exterminations or anything of that sort. What I shall never comprehend is that six weeks before the end of the war he assured me we'd win by a nose. I left his presence then and said that from that time forth I was completely at a loss — that I didn't understand a thing. Hitler always, until the end, and even now, had a strange fascination over me. Would you call it abnormal of me? Sometimes, in his presence, when he spoke of all his plans, the good things he would do for the Volk, vacations, highways, new buildings, cultural advantages and so forth, tears would come to my eyes. Would that be because I'm a hysterical weak man?”

Joachim von Ribbentrop (1893–1946) German general

To Leon Goldensohn, July 15, 1946, from "The Nuremberg Interviews" by Leon Goldensohn, Robert Gellately - History - 2004

War , Understanding , Decision , Tear

“We will hang the capitalists with the rope that they sell us.”

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

Often attributed to Lenin or Stalin, less often to Marx. According to the book, "They Never Said It", p. 64, the phrase derives from a rumour that Lenin said this to one of his close associates, Grigori Zinoviev, not long after a meeting of the Politburo in the early 1920s, but there is no evidence that he ever did. Experts on the Soviet Union reject the rope quote as spurious.
Misattributed

“When it comes to scientific matters the ready talkers simply run riot. There are a lot of pseudo-scientists who with a little technical jargon to spatter through their talk are always getting in the limelight by making startling predictions of what the future has in store, using as their text the most recent discovery or invention.”

Charles Proteus Steinmetz (1865–1923) Mathematician and electrical engineer

New York Times interview (1911)

Future

“No one thinks or feels or appreciates or lives a mental-emotional-imaginative life at all, except in terms of the artificial reference-points supply'd him by the enveloping body of race-tradition and heritage into which he is born. We form an emotionally realisable picture of the external world, and an emotionally endurable set of illusions as to values and directions in existence, solely and exclusively through the arbitrary concepts and folkways bequeathed to us through our traditional culture-stream. Without this stream around us we are absolutely adrift in a meaningless and irrelevant chaos which has not the least capacity to give us any satisfaction apart from the trifling animal ones... Without our nationality—that is, our culture-grouping—we are merely wretched nuclei of agony and bewilderment in the midst of alien and directionless emptiness... We have an Aryan heritage, a Western-European heritage, a Teutonic-Celtic heritage, an Anglo-Saxon or English heritage, an Anglo-American heritage, and so on—but we can't detach one layer from another without serious loss—loss of a sense of significance and orientation in the world. America without England is absolutely meaningless to a civilised man of any generation yet grown to maturity. The breaking of the saving tie is leaving these colonies free to build up a repulsive new culture of money, speed, quantity, novelty, and industrial slavery, but that future culture is not ours, and has no meaning for us... Possibly the youngest generation already born and mentally active—boys of ten to fifteen—will tend to belong to it, as indeed a widespread shift in their tastes and instincts and loyalties would seem to indicate. But to say all this has anything to do with us is a joke! These boys are the Bedes and Almins of a new, encroaching, and apparently inferior culture. We are the Boëthii and Symmachi and Cassiodori of an older and perhaps dying culture. It is to our interest to keep our own culture alive as long as we can—and if possible to reserve and defend certain areas against the onslaughts of the enemy.”

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

Letter to James F. Morton (6 November 1930), in Selected Letters III, 1929-1931 edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, p. 207
Non-Fiction, Letters, to James Ferdinand Morton, Jr.

Life , Money , World , Feeling

“I started contemplating or doing my Yoga from the age of 4. There was a small chair for me on which I used to sit still, engrossed in my meditation. A very brilliant light would then descend over my head and produce some turmoil inside my brain. Of course I understood nothing, it was not the age for understanding. But gradually I began to feel, "I shall have to do some tremendously great work that nobody yet knows."”

The Mother (1878–1973) spiritual collaborator of Sri Aurobindo

In Birth and Girlhood http://www.searchforlight.org/TheMother_lifeSketch1.htm, during her childhood days in when she was aware of her special purpose of life, her mission on earth, and also in On the Mother Divine by Pasupati Bhattacharya (1968) http://books.google.co.in/books?id=1loqAAAAYAAJ, p. 10

Age , Feeling , Understanding , Light

“Those of use who are, who have been so much influenced by violence in the media, in particular pornographic violence, are not some kinds of inherent monsters. We are your sons and we are your husbands. And we grew up in regular families. And pornography can reach out and snatch a kid out of any house today. It snatched me out of my home twenty, thirty years ago.”

Ted Bundy (1946–1989) American serial killer

1989 interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9LYL1PTrtXo with James Dobson

Family , Home , Housing

“Science has made us gods even before we are worthy of being men.”

Jean Rostand (1894–1977) French writer

La science a fait de nous des dieux avant même que nous méritions d'être des hommes.
[Jean Rostand, Thoughts of a Biologist, 1939]

Men , God , Science

“Drinking when not thirsty and making love all the time, madam, is all that distinguishes us from other animals.”

Pierre Beaumarchais The Marriage of Figaro

Boire sans soif et faire l'amour en tout temps, madame, il n'y a que ça qui nous distingue des autres bêtes.
Act II, scene ii
The Marriage of Figaro (1778)

Love , Making love , Drink , Time

“One of the very few things that I know I believe strongly is that we must learn how to make a better world out of usable pasts rather than dreaming of infinite futures. It’s a very late-Enlightenment view that says that the only way to make a better future is to believe that the future will be better. Smarter people than me used to believe very differently and I think it is time to listen to them once again.”

Tony Judt (1948–2010) British historian

in Tony Judt: the last interview http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/tony-judt-interview by Peter Jukes (2010)

People , World , Dreams , Way

“There will always be voices who say that what happens in the wider world is not our concern, nor our responsibility. But we must never forget that we are heirs to a struggle for freedom. Our democracy, our individual opportunity only exists because those who came before us had the wisdom and the courage to recognize that our ideals will only endure if we see our self-interest in the success of other peoples and other nations.”

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

2014, Address to European Youth (March 2014)

Wisdom , People , World , Democracy

“I won a nickname, "The Great Communicator." But I never thought it was my style or the words I used that made a difference: It was the content. I wasn't a great communicator, but I communicated great things, and they didn't spring full bloom from my brow, they came from the heart of a great nation — from our experience, our wisdom, and our belief in principles that have guided us for two centuries. They called it the Reagan revolution. Well, I'll accept that, but for me it always seemed more like the great rediscovery, a rediscovery of our values and our common sense.”

Ronald Reagan (1911–2004) American politician, 40th president of the United States (in office from 1981 to 1989)

1980s, Second term of office (1985–1989), Farewell Address (1989)

Wisdom , Spring , Communication , Sense

“Now we're sleeping near the edge
Holding something we don't need
All this delusion in our heads
Is gonna bring us to our knees
So come on, let it go
Just let it be
Why don't you be you
And I'll be me?”

James Bay (1990) British singer-songwriter

Let It Go
Lyrics

Sleep

“So then, let us not attribute to God's actions and His dealings with us any idea of requital. Rather, we should speak of fatherly provision, a wise dispensation, a perfect will which is concerned with our good, and complete love. If it is a case of love, then it is not one of requital; and if it is a case of requital, then it is not one of love. Love, when it operates, is not concerned with the requiting of former things by means of its own good deeds or correction; rather, it looks to what is most advantageous in the future: it examines what is to come, and not things that are past.”

Isaac of Nineveh (640–700) Eastern Orthodox saint

XXXIX, 17, p. 170
‘The Second Part’, Chapters IV-XLI

Love , God , Idea , Past

“There are two fundamentally different ways for the strong to bend down to the weak, for the rich to help the poor, for the more perfect life to help the “less perfect.” This action can be motivated by a powerful feeling of security, strength, and inner salvation, of the invincible fullness of one’s own life and existence. All this unites into the clear awareness that one is rich enough to share one’s being and possessions. Love, sacrifice, help, the descent to the small and the weak, here spring from a spontaneous overflow of force, accompanied by bliss and deep inner calm. Compared to this natural readiness for love and sacrifice, all specific “egoism,” the concern for oneself and one’s interest, and even the instinct of “self-preservation” are signs of a blocked and weakened life. Life is essentially expansion, development, growth in plenitude, and not “self-preservation,” as a false doctrine has it. Development, expansion, and growth are not epiphenomena of mere preservative forces and cannot be reduced to the preservation of the “better adapted.” … There is a form of sacrifice which is a free renunciation of one’s own vital abundance, a beautiful and natural overflow of one’s forces. Every living being has a natural instinct of sympathy for other living beings, which increases with their proximity and similarity to himself. Thus we sacrifice ourselves for beings with whom we feel united and solidary, in contrast to everything “dead.” This sacrificial impulse is by no means a later acquisition of life, derived from originally egoistic urges. It is an original component of life and precedes all those particular “aims” and “goals” which calculation, intelligence, and reflection impose upon it later. We have an urge to sacrifice before we ever know why, for what, and for whom! Jesus’ view of nature and life, which sometimes shines through his speeches and parables in fragments and hidden allusions, shows quite clearly that he understood this fact. When he tells us not to worry about eating and drinking, it is not because he is indifferent to life and its preservation, but because he sees also a vital weakness in all “worrying” about the next day, in all concentration on one’s own physical well-being. … all voluntary concentration on one’s own bodily wellbeing, all worry and anxiety, hampers rather than furthers the creative force which instinctively and beneficently governs all life. … This kind of indifference to the external means of life (food, clothing, etc.) is not a sign of indifference to life and its value, but rather of a profound and secret confidence in life’s own vigor and of an inner security from the mechanical accidents which may befall it. A gay, light, bold, knightly indifference to external circumstances, drawn from the depth of life itself—that is the feeling which inspires these words! Egoism and fear of death are signs of a declining, sick, and broken life. …
This attitude is completely different from that of recent modern realism in art and literature, the exposure of social misery, the description of little people, the wallowing in the morbid—a typical ressentiment phenomenon. Those people saw something bug-like in everything that lives, whereas Francis sees the holiness of “life” even in a bug.”

Max Scheler (1874–1928) German philosopher

Source: Das Ressentiment im Aufbau der Moralen (1912), L. Coser, trans. (1961), pp. 88-92

Love , Life , Death , People

“Everybody knows that we like those who resemble us, those who think and feel as we do. But the opposite is no less true. It very often happens that we feel kindly towards those who do not resemble us, precisely because of this lack of resemblance.”

Émile Durkheim (1858–1917) French sociologist (1858-1917)

Source: The Division of Labor in Society (1893), p. 54

Feeling , Thinking

“Wherefore, since nothing but blows will do, for God's sake let us come to a final separation.”

Thomas Paine (1737–1809) English and American political activist

1770s, Common Sense (1776)

God

“A word in conclusion about the relations between the whites and blacks. What must be the general character of the intercourse between them? Am I to treat the black man as my equal or my inferior? I must show him that I can respect the dignity of human personality in every one, and this attitude in me he must be able to see for himself; but the essential thing is that there shall be a real feeling of brotherliness. How far this is to find complete expression in the sayings and doings of daily life must be settled by circumstances. The negro is a child, and with children nothing can be done without the use of authority. We must, therefore, so arrange the circumstances of daily life that my natural authority can find expression. With regard to the negroes, then, I have coined the formula: "I am your brother, it is true, but your elder brother."”

Albert Schweitzer (1875–1965) French-German physician, theologian, musician and philosopher

Ch. VII, Social Problems in the Forest, p. 130 https://archive.org/stream/ontheedgeofthepr007259mbp#page/n163/mode/2up (1924 translation by Ch. Th. Campion); Schweitzer later repudiated such statements, saying "The time for speaking of older and younger brothers has passed.", as quoted in [Forrow, Lachlan, Foreword, Russell, C.E.B., African Notebook, Syracuse University Press, Albert Schweitzer library, 2002, 978-0-8156-0743-4, http://books.google.com/books?id=qa-TVXEkY3sC&pg=PR13, 23 June 2017, xiii]
Variant:
The African is my brother — but he is my younger brother by several centuries.
As quoted in The Observer (23 October 1955)
On the Edge of the Primeval Forest (1922)

Life , Children , Feeling , Nature

“We cannot understand what happens in the universe. What is glorious in it is united with what is full of horror. What is full of meaning is united to what is senseless. The spirit of the universe is at once creative and destructive — it creates while it destroys and destroys while it creates, and therefore it remains to us a riddle. And we must inevitably resign ourselves to this.”

Albert Schweitzer (1875–1965) French-German physician, theologian, musician and philosopher

Source: The Spiritual Life (1947), p. 5

Understanding , Universe

“Sensitivity is the principle of all action. A being, albeit animated, who would feel nothing, would never act, for what would its motive for acting be? God himself is sensitive since he acts. All men are therefore sensitive, and perhaps to the same degree, but not in the same manner. There is a purely passive physical and organic sensitivity which seems to have as its end only the preservation of our bodies and of our species through the direction of pleasure and pain. There is another sensitivity that I call active and moral which is nothing other than the faculty of attaching our affections to beings who are foreign to us. This type, about which study of nerve pairs teaches nothing, seems to offer a fairly clear analogy for souls to the magnetic faculty of bodies. Its strength is in proportion to the relationships we feel between ourselves and other beings, and depending on the nature of these relationships it sometimes acts positively by attraction, sometimes negatively by repulsion, like the poles of a magnet. The positive or attracting action is the simple work of nature, which seeks to extend and reinforce the feeling of our being; the negative or repelling action, which compresses and diminishes the being of another, is a combination produced by reflection. From the former arise all the loving and gentle passions, and from the latter all the hateful and cruel passions.”

Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) Genevan philosopher

Second Dialogue; translated by Judith R. Bush, Christopher Kelly, Roger D. Masters
Dialogues: Rousseau Judge of Jean-Jacques (published 1782)

Love , Men , God , Pain

“Nearly unlimited supernatural power, and all you do is use it to watch reruns. What a waste.”

Cassandra Clare The Mortal Instruments

Jace to Magnus, pg. 136
The Mortal Instruments, City of Ashes (2008)

“Now, I don't know, not having been there and not seeing all the facts, what role race played in that. But I think it's fair to say, number one, any of us would be pretty angry; number two, that the Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home; and, number three, what I think we know separate and apart from this incident is that there's a long history in this country of African-Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately. That's just a fact.”

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

Press conference http://www.boston.com/news/politics/politicalintelligence/2009/07/obama_cambridge.html addressing Henry Louis Gates's arrest by the Cambridge, MA police. (22 July 2009)
2009

Law , Home , History , Thinking

“I believe that disabled people should concentrate on things that their handicap doesn’t prevent them from doing and not regret those they can’t do … I visited the Soviet Union seven times. The first time I went with a student party in which one member, a Baptist, wished to distribute Russian-language Bibles and asked us to smuggle them in. We managed this undetected, but by the time we were on our way out the authorities had discovered what we had done and detained us for a while. However, to charge us with smuggling Bibles would have caused an international incident and unfavorable publicity, so they let us go after a few hours.”

Stephen Hawking (1942–2018) British theoretical physicist, cosmologist, and author

http://www.reclaimingthemind.org/blog/2013/09/stephen-hawking-detained-in-russia-for-bible-smuggling/

People , Way , Time

“H. A. Lorentz has found out the Relativity theorem and has created the Relativity postulate as a hypothesis that electrons and matter suffer contractions in consequence of their motion according to a certain law. A. Einstein has brought out the point very clearly, that this postulate is not an artificial hypothesis but is rather a new way of comprehending the time-concept, which is forced upon us by observation of natural phenomena.”

Hermann Minkowski The Fundamental Equations for Electromagnetic Processes in Moving Bodies

The Fundamental Equations for Electromagnetic Processes in Moving Bodies (1907)

Law , Way , Nature , Suffering

“With the aid of our transmitter, we heard a marvelous report on our fighting by the Shavit radio station. The fact that we are remembered beyond the ghetto walls encourages us in our struggle. Peace go with you my friend! Perhaps we may still meet again! The dream of my life has risen to become fact. Self-defense in the Ghetto will have been a reality. Jewish armed resistance and revenge are facts! I have been a witness to the magnificent, heroic fighting of Jewish men of battle.”

Mordechai Anielewicz (1919–1943) Leader of the Jewish Combat Organization

Life , Men , Peace , Dreams

“In order to get what we've got, Anita, we have, in effect, traded these people out of what was the most important thing on earth to them — the feeling of being needed and useful, the foundation of self-respect.”

Kurt Vonnegut book Player Piano

Source: Player Piano (1952), Chapter 18 (p. 169)

People , Feeling

“Personally, I do not believe that our civilization will fall. I think that on the whole we have grown better and not worse. I think that on the whole the future holds more for us than even the great past has held. But, assuredly, the dreams of golden glory in the future will not come true unless, high of heart and strong of hand, by our own mighty deeds we make them come true. We can not afford to develop any one set of qualities, any one set of activities, at the cost of seeing others, equally necessary, atrophied. Neither the military efficiency of the Mongol, the extraordinary business ability of the Phoenician, nor the subtle and polished intellect of the Greek availed to avert destruction.”

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

1910s, The World Movement (1910)

Dreams , Business , Thinking , Strong

“So we have a choice to make. We can once again let Washington's bad habits stand in the way of progress. Or we can pull together and say that in America, our destiny isn't written for us but by us. We can place good ideas ahead of old ideological battles, and a sense of purpose above the same narrow partisanship. We can act boldly to turn crisis into opportunity and, together, write the next great chapter in our history and meet the test of our time.”

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

"The Action Americans Need" in The Washington Post (5 February 2009), p. A17 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02/04/AR2009020403174.html
2009

Way , History , Idea , Sense

“Would you like to know, for instance, to what extent higher mathematics is used in our two great industries? Well, it is never used at all. Having found this to be the case in my own experience, after quite a long career, I wondered whether I was not an exception; so I made enquiries, and I found that it was a general rule that neither engineers nor managers used higher mathematics in carrying out their duties. We must, of course, learn mathematics that goes without saying but the question is how much must we learn? Up to the present this point has nearly always been decided simply by professors, but it seems to me to be a question in which professors do not count very much, and in which they count less as they become more learned and more devoted to their work. They would like to pass on all their scientific knowledge and they find that their pupils always leave them too soon.”

Henri Fayol (1841–1925) Developer of Fayolism

Source: Henri Fayol addressed his colleagues in the mineral industry, 1900, p. 909

Mathematics , Question , Knowledge , Learning

“A solemn scene it was indeed… He seemed to enjoy a triumph over me. Methought I heard him think, "Ay! I am fairly out and you are fairly in! See which of us will be the happiest!"”

George Washington (1732–1799) first President of the United States

John Adams, in a letter to his wife Abigail was here expressing his impression of what Washington seemed to be thinking after Adams was inaugurated as President. These impressions have sometimes been quoted as if they were something Washington had actually said to Adams. Quoted in A History of the United States and Its People: From Their Earliest Records to the Present Time (1904) by William Abbatt and Elroy McKendree Avery, p. 177; John Adams (2002) by David G. McCullough, p. 469; and The Portable John Adams (2004) edited by John Patrick Diggins, p. xi

Unsourced variants: Well, I am fairly out and you are fairly in. Now we shall see who enjoys it the most!
Ah! I am fairly out and you are fairly in! See which of us will be the happiest!
Misattributed

Thinking

“These citizens remind us why civil society is so essential. When people are free to speak their minds and hold their leaders accountable, governments are more responsive and more effective. When entrepreneurs are free to create and develop new ideas, then economies are more innovative, and attract more trade and investment, and ultimately become more prosperous. When communities, including minorities, are free to live and pray and love as they choose; when nations uphold the rights of all their people -— including, perhaps especially, women and girls -— then those countries are more likely to thrive. If you want strong, successful countries, you need strong, vibrant civil societies. When citizens are free to organize and work together across borders to make our communities healthier, our environment cleaner, and our world safer, that's when real change comes.”

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

2014, Remarks at Clinton Global Initiative (September 2014)

Love , Women , People , World

“I believe that America holds within her the truth that regardless of race, religion, or station in life, all of us share common aspirations - to live in peace and security; to get an education and to work with dignity; to love our families, our communities, and our God. These things we share. This is the hope of all humanity.”

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

2009, A New Beginning (June 2009)

Love , Life , God , Truth

“… love one another, as the Lord says: "This is My commandment, that you love one another, as I have loved you." And let them show their love by the works they do for each other, according as the Apostle says: "let us not love in word or in tongue, but in deed and in truth."”

Francis of Assisi (1182–1226) Catholic saint and founder of the Franciscan Order

Francis of Assisi, Rule of 1221, Rule 11 http://www.sacred-texts.com/chr/wosf/wosf06.htm/ - That the Brothers ought not to speak or detract, but ought to love one another.
Disputed, Preach the gospel, and if necessary, use words.

Love , Truth

“When we are equipped with leadership skills that complement traditional rank, we are appropriately prepared to provide the inspiration, the motivation and guidance expected of us. The ethos of 'vakaturaga' (chiefly way) will then retain its true place in Fijian culture in this new millennium.”

Josefa Iloilo (1920–2011) President of Fiji

Opening address to the Great Council of Chiefs meeting, 27 July 2005 (excerpts)

Way , Motivation

“In times of peace, the capitalists used to guarantee their interests by means of the "peaceful" robbery of hired labor. During the war they served those same interests by means of the destruction of countless human lives.”

Leon Trotsky book Terrorism and Communism

Source: Terrorism and Communism (1920), Ch. 3

War , Peace , Time

“First of all, this is Duke's band, and this is Tchaikovsky. Knowing things in their original sources, I abhor taking a concert thing and trying to treat it in a jazz light. In the beginning they have a very nice orchestral usage, but the minute they start going into Johnny Hodges and 4/4, it just doesn't fit. It comes out neither fowl nor fish. The orchestration is enjoyable because, for one reason, they've done a nice job of getting nice, legitimate, straight-sounding things. The melodies are very lovely, but, of course, Duke is the master in this type of thing. But over-all, from a jazz standpoint, I don't appreciate it at all. If I didn't know it was Tchaikovsky, for instance, with the tambourine bit and all, I would feel it was straight out of an MGM Arabian movie. The harmonies he used, particularly some of the background things, interested me more than the melodies, probably because the harmonic part of music interests me more than any. From an orchestrational standpoint I would give this somewhere around 3½ stars; but from a jazz standpoint, none.”

Clare Fischer (1928–2012) American keyboardist, composer, arranger, and bandleader

Reviewing "Arabesque Cookie" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJtWZ771OqA from Ellington's The Nutcracker Suite; as quoted in "Clare Fischer: Blindfold Test" http://www.mediafire.com/view/fix6ane8h54gx/Clare_Fischer#rjvay58eo774rhe by Leonard Feather, in Downbeat (October 25, 1962), p. 39

Love , Music , Feeling , Star

“Although many of us consider ourselves forward-thinkers, we still cling tenaciously to the old values of the monetary system.”

Jacque Fresco (1916–2017) American futurist and self-described social engineer

1. A design for the future.
The Best That Money Can't Buy: Beyond Politics, Poverty, & War (2002)

“Let us spell out the Magna Charta of which we humbly catch sight. Let us say to the people of whom all peoples are made: "Wake up and understand, look and see; and having begun again the consciousness which was mown down by slavery, decide that everything must be begun again!"”

Henri Barbusse (1873–1935) French novelist

Light (1919), Ch. XXII - Light

People , Understanding

“I just told [Ali] to stay calm. Remember that you’ve got more time than you think. In this format of the game the bowlers are under more pressure than you are. Stay nice and relaxed. Thankfully he managed to get us across the line.”

Joe Root (1990) English cricketer

JOE ROOT told Moeen Ali not to panic after he got out in England’s record run-chase against South Africa, quoted on Express.co.uk, "Revealed: What Joe Root said to inspire England to World T20 South Africa win" https://www.express.co.uk/sport/cricket/653851/Joe-Root-Moeen-Ali-World-T20-India-England-South-Africa-cricket-news, March 19, 2016.

Game , Thinking , Time

“There are more useful systems developed in languages deemed awful than in languages praised for being beautiful--many more.”

Bjarne Stroustrup (1950) Danish computer scientist, creator of C++

The Problem with Programming (Interview with Bjarne Stroustrup), MIT Technology Review, November 28, 2006, Jason Pontin, 2007-11-15 http://technologyreview.com/Infotech/17831/page3/,

Beauty

“For the men and women of Reverend Wright's generation, the memories of humiliation and doubt and fear have not gone away; nor has the anger and the bitterness of those years. That anger may not get expressed in public, in front of white co-workers or white friends. But it does find voice in the barbershop or around the kitchen table. At times, that anger is exploited by politicians, to gin up votes along racial lines, or to make up for a politician's own failings.
And occasionally it finds voice in the church on Sunday morning, in the pulpit and in the pews. The fact that so many people are surprised to hear that anger in some of Reverend Wright's sermons simply reminds us of the old truism that the most segregated hour in American life occurs on Sunday morning. That anger is not always productive; indeed, all too often it distracts attention from solving real problems; it keeps us from squarely facing our own complicity in our condition, and prevents the African-American community from forging the alliances it needs to bring about real change. But the anger is real; it is powerful; and to simply wish it away, to condemn it without understanding its roots, only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between the races.”

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

2008, A More Perfect Union (March 2008)

Life , Women , Men , People

“[I am] lover of his king and country, a lover of peace and the protestant interest…[Consent] is absolutely necessary to the very being and subsistance of our government and without which our peace and religion cannot possibly be any way secured…the miscarriages of the former reigns gave a rise and a right to King William's comeing and ushered him into the throne…Let us owne King William to be our King by right…[William came] to recover our oppressed and sinkeing laws, libertys, and Religion…They who would not betray England and expose it to popish rage and revenge, who have any regard to their country, their religion, their consciences, and their estates, must maintain the bulwarke have set up against it, and which alone preserves us against a more violent inundation of all sorts of misery than that we were soe lately delivered from.”

John Locke (1632–1704) English philosopher and physician

Letter to Edward Clarke (c. April 1690), quoted in James Farr and Clayton Roberts, 'John Locke on the Glorious Revolution: A Rediscovered Document', The Historical Journal, Vol. 28, No. 2 (Jun., 1985), pp. 385-398.

Peace , Religion , Law , Way

“The term fuzzy logic is used in this paper to describe an imprecise logical system, FL, in which the truth-values are fuzzy subsets of the unit interval with linguistic labels such as true, false, not true, very true, quite true, not very true and not very fake, etc…. As a consequence, the truth tables and the rules of inference in fuzzy logic are (i) inexact and (ii) dependent on the meaning associated with the primary truth-value true as well as the modifiers very quite.”

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

Lotfi Asker Zadeh, George Jiri Klir, Bo Yuan (1996) Fuzzy Sets, Fuzzy Logic, and Fuzzy Systems: Selected Papers. p. 238
1990s

Truth , Dependency , Falseness

“It is the pursuit of happiness that brings us happiness, and not the happiness achieved.”

Jack White (1975) American musician and record producer

A message he left on his website to his fans, dated September 18th, 2003
2003

Happiness

“What is tolerance? It is the consequence of humanity. We are all formed of frailty and error; let us pardon reciprocally each other's folly — that is the first law of nature.”

Voltaire (1694–1778) French writer, historian, and philosopher

Qu’est-ce que la tolérance? c’est l’apanage de l’humanité. Nous sommes tous pétris de faiblesses et d’erreurs; pardonnons-nous réciproquement nos sottises, c’est la première loi de la nature.
"Tolerance" (1764)
Citas, Dictionnaire philosophique (1764)

Law , Error , Nature

“Yiddish has not yet said its last word. It contains treasures that have not been revealed to the eyes of the world. It was the tongue of martyrs and saints, of dreamers and Cabalists — rich in humor and in memories that mankind may never forget. In a figurative way, Yiddish is the wise and humble language of us all, the idiom of frightened and hopeful Humanity.”

Isaac Bashevis Singer (1902–1991) Polish-born Jewish-American author

Nobel lecture (1978)

World , Hope , Way , Memory

“When we understand that privileged people derive material benefits from the exploitation of oppressed people, and that this means we benefit from the violence used to keep them down, we cannot sincerely condemn them for violently rebelling against the structural violence that privileges us.”

Peter Gelderloos (1982) American anarchist

Peter Gelderloos, How Nonviolence Protects the State http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/peter-gelderloos-how-nonviolence-protects-the-state (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2007), 37.

People , Understanding , Sincerity

“Thank you for your letter and for the enclosure which I return herewith. I have been wondering whether there is any means of preventing the confusion between you and me, and I half-thought that we might write a joint letter to The Times in the following terms: Sir, To prevent the continuation of confusions which frequently occur, we beg to state that neither of us is the other. Do you think this would be a good plan?”

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

Letter to Lord Russell of Liverpool, February 18, 1959
1950s

Thinking , Time

“My idea as far as comedy goes has always been to push the limits of what's acceptable for a woman to do or say or be. My hero in that would be Lenny Bruce, who teaches us that words have no meaning. It's the intent behind them that is what's important.”

Lea DeLaria (1958) American actress and singer

Interview http://www.breakupgirl.net/guest/9907.html, Breakup Girl (1999-07-15)

Idea

“We do not want our world to perish. But in our quest for knowledge, century by century, we have placed all our trust in a cold, impartial intellect which only brings us nearer to destruction. We have heeded no wisdom offering guidance. Only by learning to love one another can our world be saved. Only love can conquer all.”

Dora Russell (1894–1986) author, feminist, socialist campaigner

Challenge to the Cold War (1985) Vol. 3, Ch. 14

Love , Wisdom , World , Knowledge

“Thirty spokes unite at the single hub;
It is the empty space which makes the wheel useful.
Mold clay to form a bowl;
It is the empty space which makes the bowl useful.
Cut out windows and doors;
It is the empty space which makes the room useful.”

Laozi book Tao Te Ching

Source: Tao Te Ching, Ch. 11

“Scripture tells us that in our sufferings there is glory, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. Sometimes the truths of these words are hard to see. Right now, those words test us. Because the people of Dallas, people across the country, are suffering.”

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

2016, Memorial Service for Fallen Dallas Police Officers (July 2016)

People , Truth , Hope , Suffering

“On the way from the Renaissance to our days we have enriched our experience, but we have lost the concept of a Supreme Complete Entity which used to restrain our passions and our irresponsibility. We have placed too much hope in political and social reforms, only to find out that we were being deprived of our most precious possession: our spiritual life. In the East, it is destroyed by the dealings and machinations of the ruling party. In the West, commercial interests tend to suffocate it. This is the real crisis. The split in the world is less terrible than the similarity of the disease plaguing its main sections.”

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) Russian writer

Harvard University address (1978)

Life , World , Disease , Hope

“"Oh, but I've done some other unforgivable, unspeakable thing"? Google it. There's seven billion of us. Somebody has done exactly what you have done, and is currently on a book tour. You're never alone! ”

Maria Bamford (1970) American actress and comedian

Ask Me About My New God! (2013)

Books

“From this day forward, somebody propose it, liberals should not be allowed to buy guns. It's just that simple. Liberals should have their speech controlled and not be allowed to buy guns. I mean if we want to get serious about this, if we want to face this head on, we’re gonna have to openly admit, liberals should not be allowed to buy guns, nor should they be allowed to use computer keyboards or typewriters, word processors or e-mails, and they should have their speech controlled. If we did those three or four things, I can’t tell you what a sane, calm, civil, fun-loving society we would have. Take guns out of the possession, out of the hands of liberals, take their typewriters and their keyboards away from ‘em, don’t let ‘em anywhere near a gun, and control their speech. You would wipe out 90% of the crime, 85 to 95% of the hate, and a hundred percent of the lies from society.”

Rush Limbaugh (1951) U.S. radio talk show host, Commentator, author, and television personality

Radio show assertions, reported in "Rush Limbaugh: Here’s way to stop 100% of lies in society" at American Grand Jury (19 January 2011) http://americangrandjury.org/rush-limbaugh-heres-way-to-stop-100-of-lies-in-society

Love , Hate

“The serene and blessed mood which enables us to see into the life of things: that is imaginative reason, that is the Spirit of the Chinese People.”

Gu Hongming book The Spirit of the Chinese People

page 73
The Spirit of the Chinese People (1915), Chinese Spirit

Life , People , Imagination , Mood

“It is no use to preach to [children] if you do not act decently yourself.”

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

Speech to Holy Name Society, Oyster Bay, August 16, 1903 https://web.archive.org/web/20130210023816/http://www.trsite.org/content/pages/speaking-loudly
1900s

Children

“We need to reject any politics that targets people because of race or religion. This isn’t a matter of political correctness. It’s a matter of understanding what makes us strong. The world respects us not just for our arsenal; it respects us for our diversity and our openness and the way we respect every faith.”

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

2016, State of the Union address (January 2016)

People , World , Faith , Religion

“WHEREFORE, security being the true design and end of government, it unanswerably follows, that whatever FORM thereof appears most likely to ensure it to us, with the least expense and greatest benefit, is preferable to all others.”

Thomas Paine (1737–1809) English and American political activist

1770s, Common Sense (1776)

Appearance

“To our most bitter opponents we say: "We shall match your capacity to inflict suffering by our capacity to endure suffering. We shall meet your physical force with soul force. Do to us what you will, and we shall continue to love you. We cannot in all good conscience obey your unjust laws because noncooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good. Throw us in jail and we shall still love you. Bomb our homes and threaten our children, and we shall still love you. Send your hooded perpetrators of violence into our community at the midnight hour and beat us and leave us half dead, and we shall still love you. But be ye assured that we will wear you down by our capacity to suffer. One day we shall win freedom but not only for ourselves. We shall so appeal to your heart and conscience that we shall win you in the process and our victory will be a double victory."”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

1950s, Loving Your Enemies (Christmas 1957)

Love , Children , Law , Home

“The U. S. is a mere pup tent of a civilization. We’ve got two hundred years of stupidity behind us and we think we’re right up there with everyone else who’s been doing it for thousands of years.”

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

Oui interview (1979)

Stupidity , Thinking

“[When he saw animals being conveyed to his kitchen] Poor little innocent creatures, if you were reasoning beings and could speak, how you would curse us! For we are the cause of your death, and what have you done to deserve it?”

Richard of Chichester (1197–1253) Bishop of Chichester, Saint

Quoted in Alban Butler, Lives of the Saints, vol. II: April, May, June, Burns & Oates, 1956, p. 24.

Death , Animals

“You have experienced nothing that was not both lawful and obscure, and thus conforming perfectly to the human machine. Are we not organized fantasy? And is not our living system functioning incoherency, disorder in action? Do not events, desires, ideas interchange within us in the most necessary and incomprehensible ways?”

Paul Valéry (1871–1945) French poet, essayist, and philosopher

Eryximachus to Phaedrus, p. 43
L'Âme et la danse (1921)

Law , Way , Idea

“The negro is fundamentally the biological inferior of all White and even Mongolian races, and the Northern people must occasionally be reminded of the danger which they incur in admitting him too freely to the privileges of society and government. …The Birth of a Nation, … is said to furnish a remarkable insight into the methods of the Ku-Klux-Klan, that noble but much maligned band of Southerners who saved half of our country from destruction at the close of the Civil War. The Conservative has not yet witnessed the picture in question, but he has seen both in literary and dramatic form The Clansman, that stirring, though crude and melodramatic story by Rev. Thomas Dixon, Jr., on which The Birth of a Nation is based, and has likewise made a close historical study of the Klu-Klux-Klan, finding as a result of his research nothing but Honour, Chivalry, and Patriotism in the activities of the Invisible Empire. The Klan merely did for the people what the law refused to do, removing the ballot from unfit hands and restoring to the victims of political vindictiveness their natural rights. The alleged lawbreaking of the Klan was committed only by irresponsible miscreants who, after the dissolution of the Order by its Grand Wizard, Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest, used its weird masks and terrifying costumes to veil their unorganised villainies.
Race prejudice is a gift of Nature, intended to preserve in purity the various divisions of mankind which the ages have evolved.”

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

Response to observations made in In A Minor Key by Charles D. Isaacson, in The Conservative, Vol. I, No. 2, (1915), p. 4
Non-Fiction

War , People , Age , Law

“People always say: "You're a comedian, tell us a joke." They don't say: "You're an MP, tell us a lie."”

Bob Monkhouse (1928–2003) English entertainer

Independent on Sunday obituary http://web.archive.org/web/20100522031727/http://www.independent.co.uk/news/media/bob-monkhouse-jokewriter-to-the-stars-and-the-longreigning-king-of-primetime-comedy-dies-at-75-578058.html

People , Lie

“The idea of a God we infer from our experimental dependence on something superior to ourselves in wisdom, power and goodness, which we call God; our senses discover to us the works of God which we call nature, and which is a manifest demonstration of his invisible essence.”

Ethan Allen (1738–1789) American general

Source: Reason: The Only Oracle Of Man (1784), Ch. V Section II - Containing Observations on the Providence and Agency of God, as it Respects the Natural and Moral World, with Strictures on Revelation in General
Context: The idea of a God we infer from our experimental dependence on something superior to ourselves in wisdom, power and goodness, which we call God; our senses discover to us the works of God which we call nature, and which is a manifest demonstration of his invisible essence. Thus it is from the works of nature that we deduce the knowledge of a God, and not because we have, or can have any immediate knowledge of, or revelation from him.

Wisdom , God , Idea , Nature

“We always have the opportunity to choose our better history. We can always understand that most important decision -- the decision we make when we find our common humanity in one another. That’s always available to us, that choice.”

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

2013, Cape Town University Address (June 2013)
Context: We always have the opportunity to choose our better history. We can always understand that most important decision -- the decision we make when we find our common humanity in one another. That’s always available to us, that choice. [... ] it can be heard in the confident voices of young people like you. It is that spirit, that innate longing for justice and equality, for freedom and solidarity -- that’s the spirit that can light the way forward. It's in you.

History , Understanding , Decision

“The rite, therefore, enjoins upon us who are celestial by our nature, but who have been carried down to earth, to reap virtue joined with piety from our conduct upon earth, and to aspire upwards unto the deity, the primal source of being and the fount of life.”

Julian (emperor) (331–363) Roman Emperor, philosopher and writer

Upon The Mother Of The Gods (c. 362-363)
Context: When the Sun touches the equinoctial circle, where that which is most definite is placed (for equality is definite, but inequality indefinite and inexplicable); at that very moment (according to the report), the Sacred Tree is cut down; then come the other rites in their order; whereof some are done in compliance with rules that be holy and not to be divulged; others for reasons allowable to be discussed. The "Cutting of the Tree;" this part refers to the legend about the Gallos, and has nothing to do with the rites which it accompanies; for the gods have thereby, I fancy, taught us symbolically that we ought to pluck what is most beautiful on earth, namely virtue joined with piety, and offer the same unto the goddess, for a token of good government here below. For the Tree springs up out of the earth and aspires upwards into the air; it is likewise beautiful to see and be seen, and to afford us shade in hot weather; and furthermore to produce, and regale us with its fruit; thus a large share of a generous nature resides in it. The rite, therefore, enjoins upon us who are celestial by our nature, but who have been carried down to earth, to reap virtue joined with piety from our conduct upon earth, and to aspire upwards unto the deity, the primal source of being and the fount of life.

Life , Nature

“My conception of freedom. — The value of a thing sometimes does not lie in that which one attains by it, but in what one pays for it — what it costs us.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Twilight of the Idols

Variant translation: Liberal institutions straightway cease from being liberal the moment they are soundly established: once this is attained no more grievous and more thorough enemies of freedom exist than liberal institutions.
Expeditions of an Untimely Man, 38
Twilight of the Idols (1888)
Context: My conception of freedom. — The value of a thing sometimes does not lie in that which one attains by it, but in what one pays for it — what it costs us. I give an example. Liberal institutions cease to be liberal as soon as they are attained: later on, there are no worse and no more thorough injurers of freedom than liberal institutions. One knows, indeed, what their ways bring: they undermine the will to power; they level mountain and valley, and call that morality; they make men small, cowardly, and hedonistic [genüsslich] — every time it is the herd animal that triumphs with them. Liberalism: in other words, herd-animalization...

Lie , Freedom

“Music has taken a bad turn; these young people have no idea how to write a melody, they just give us shavings”

Richard Wagner (1813–1883) German composer, conductor

21 June 1880
Cosima Wagner's Diaries (1978)
Context: Music has taken a bad turn; these young people have no idea how to write a melody, they just give us shavings, which they dress up to look like a lion's mane and shake at us... It's as if they avoid melodies, for fear of having perhaps stolen them from someone else.

People , Music , Idea

“There were times when I had to remind myself that our parents and grandparents brought us up without trendy theories and they didn't make such a bad job of it.”

Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013) British stateswoman and politician

Speech to Conservative Women's Conference (24 May 1978) http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/103696.
Leader of the Opposition
Context: Perhaps [the] most important reason for the fall in standards and increase in crime—the attack on traditional values. It is not surprising that sometimes parents have been confused about the endless advice and the many rival theories on how to bring up children. There were times when I had to remind myself that our parents and grandparents brought us up without trendy theories and they didn't make such a bad job of it. So it would seem that the tried and trusted values and commonsense application would lead to far better results than we are now experiencing. We must teach that each of us is a responsible person who can choose his own course of action and who has a duty to others to do as he would be done by. That morality is largely based on religious values. Cut the stem and the plant withers. That is why we have been so keen to keep religious teaching in our schools. To those who say that is indoctrinating children, I would reply—it is no such thing. It is a practical recognition of the truth that while an adult may, if he wishes, reject the faith in which he has been brought up, a child will find it difficult to acquire any faith at all without some instruction in the discipline of belief and practice.

Parent , Time

“What strategy does the brain use to read itself out?”

Eric R. Kandel (1929) American neuropsychiatrist

In Search of Memory (2006)
Context: What strategy does the brain use to read itself out? That question, which is central to the unitary nature of conscious experience, remains one of the many unresolved mysteries of the new science of mind.

Reading

“I don't use very many of those claim checks. There's nothing material I want very much. And I'm going to give virtually all of those claim checks to charity when my wife and I die.”

Warren Buffett (1930) American business magnate, investor, and philanthropist

As quoted in Warren Buffett Speaks: Wit and Wisdom from the World's Greatest Investor (1997) by Janet C. Lowe, pp. 165-166
Context: I don't have a problem with guilt about money. The way I see it is that my money represents an enormous number of claim checks on society. It is like I have these little pieces of paper that I can turn into consumption. If I wanted to, I could hire 10,000 people to do nothing but paint my picture every day for the rest of my life. And the GNP would go up. But the utility of the product would be zilch, and I would be keeping those 10,000 people from doing AIDS research, or teaching, or nursing. I don't do that though. I don't use very many of those claim checks. There's nothing material I want very much. And I'm going to give virtually all of those claim checks to charity when my wife and I die.

“I order that one-fifth of this be used for the poor who serve the priests, and the remainder be distributed by us to strangers and beggars. For it is disgraceful that, when no Jew ever has to beg, and the impious Galilaeans support not only their own poor but ours as well, all men see that our people lack aid from us.”

Julian (emperor) (331–363) Roman Emperor, philosopher and writer

Letter to Arsacius, High-priest of Galatia (June? 362), as translated by Emily Wilmer Cave Wright, in The Works of the Emperor Julian, Volume III (1913)
General sources
Context: The Hellenic religion does not yet prosper as I desire, and it is the fault of those who profess it; for the worship of the gods is on a splendid and magnificent scale, surpassing every prayer and every hope. May Adrasteia pardon my words, for indeed no one, a little while ago, would have ventured even to pray for a change of such a sort or so complete within so short a time. Why, then, do we think that this is enough, why do we not observe that it is their benevolence to strangers, their care for the graves of the dead and the pretended holiness of their lives that have done most to increase atheism? I believe that we ought really and truly to practise every one of these virtues. And it is not enough for you alone to practise them, but so must all the priests in Galatia, without exception. … In every city establish frequent hostels in order that strangers may profit by our benevolence; I do not mean for our own people only, but for others also who are in need of money. I have but now made a plan by which you may be well provided for this; for I have given directions that 30,000 modii of corn shall be assigned every year for the whole of Galatia, and 60,000 pints of wine. I order that one-fifth of this be used for the poor who serve the priests, and the remainder be distributed by us to strangers and beggars. For it is disgraceful that, when no Jew ever has to beg, and the impious Galilaeans support not only their own poor but ours as well, all men see that our people lack aid from us. Teach those of the Hellenic faith to contribute to public service of this sort, and the Hellenic villages to offer their first fruits to the gods; and accustom those who love the Hellenic religion to these good works by teaching them that this was our practice of old.

Men , People , Support

Quotes about use page 35

Quotes about use
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