Quotes about use
page 7

“Pornography is used in rape - to plan it, to execute it, to choreograph it, to engender the excitement to commit the act.”

Andrea Dworkin (1946–2005) Feminist writer

Testimony before the New York Attorney General's Commission on Pornography in 1986.

“Once the computers got control, we might never get it back. We would survive at their sufferance. If we're lucky, they might decide to keep us as pets.”

Marvin Minsky (1927–2016) American cognitive scientist

Life Magazine (20 November 1970), p. 68

Suffering

“The Russians were five times superior to us poor but brave Germans, both in numbers and in the superiority of their equipment. My immediate commander was Hitler himself. Unfortunately, Hitler's advice in those critical periods was invariably lousy.”

Paul Ludwig Ewald von Kleist (1881–1954) German general during World War II

To Leon Goldensohn (25 June 1946). Quoted in "The Nuremberg Interviews", Leon Goldensohn, Robert Gellatel (2004).

Time

“For us in Russia, communism is a dead dog, while, for many people in the West, it is still a living lion.”

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) Russian writer

BBC Radio broadcast, Russian service, as quoted in The Listener (15 February 1979).

People, Dogs, Communication, Dead

“Harvard's motto is "Veritas." Many of you have already found out and others will find out in the course of their lives that truth eludes us if we do not concentrate with total attention on its pursuit. And even while it eludes us, the illusion still lingers of knowing it and leads to many misunderstandings. Also, truth is seldom pleasant; it is almost invariably bitter. There is some bitterness in my speech today, too. But I want to stress that it comes not from an adversary but from a friend.”

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) Russian writer

Harvard University address (1978)

Truth

“When we are convinced of some great truths, and feel our convictions keenly, we must not fear to express it, although others have said it before us. Every thought is new when an author expresses it in a manner peculiar to himself.”

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

Source: Reflections and Maxims (1746), p. 187.

Truth, Fear, Feeling

“It is not because the truth is too difficult to see that we make mistakes. It may even lie on the surface; but we make mistakes because the easiest and most comfortable course for us is to seek insight where it accords with our emotions — especially selfish ones.”

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) Russian writer

"Peace and Violence" (1973).

Truth, Lie, Selfishness

“Literature that is not the breath of contemporary society, that dares not transmit the pains and fears of that society, that does not warn in time against threatening moral and social dangers — such literature does not deserve the name of literature; it is only a façade. Such literature loses the confidence of its own people, and its published works are used as wastepaper instead of being read.”

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) Russian writer

Open letter to the Fourth Soviet Writers’ Congress (16 May 1967) “The Struggle Intensifies,” Solzhenitsyn: A Documentary Record, ed. Leopold Labedz (1970).

Pain, People, Fear, Confidence

“The Zulu king [Zwelithini] must stop these threats of violence. We are not scared. I am scared of no one. No amount of violence can scare me because some of us are surprised that we are still alive today. … We want every Zulu-speaking person to get a piece of land. If the king wants to give land through the Ingonyama Trust, he must convince the EFF and the government.”

Julius Malema (1981) South African political activist

On 8 March 2018, concerning the Ingonyama Trust which administers 2.8-million hectares of land on behalf of the king, who is its sole trustee, https://www.timeslive.co.za/news/south-africa/2018-03-01-kzn-premier-backs-zulu-king-on-land-debate/ as quoted by Eric Naki in Juju lays into Zulu King Zwelithini https://citizen.co.za/news/south-africa/1850043/juju-lays-into-zulu-king-zwelithini/, The Citizen (8 March 2018). See also: Malema takes aim at Zulu king over land: 'There are no holy cows' https://www.timeslive.co.za/politics/2018-03-09-malema-takes-aim-at-zulu-king/, TimesLive (9 March 2018)

Personality

“A sample limited to one profession would have yielded results of doubtful generality. To develop findings independent of the peculiar circumstances of the engineer, we needed to study a comparable group. Accountants were chosen because their jobs, like those of engineers,· are rich in technique. This richness makes it likely that the accountant, like the engineer, would have much to tell us. However, the groups are vastly different in the nature of their training, their present degree of professionalization, the kind of work they do, and, presumably, the kind of people attracted into them. Last, by covering accountants and engineers, we examined the job attitudes of two of the most important staff groups in modern industry”

Frederick Herzberg (1923–2000) American psychologist

Source: The motivation to work, 1959, p. 32

People, Nature, Study, Training

“On this narrow planet, we have only the choice between two unknown worlds. One of them tempts us — ah! what a dream, to live in that! — the other stifles us at the first breath.”

Colette (1873–1954) 1873-1954 French novelist: wrote Gigi

The Photographer’s Wife
Gigi (1945)

World, Dreams

“I was working on a title called, “Untitled Solo,” and I had made—using the chance operations—a series of movements written on scraps of paper for the legs and the arms, the head, all different. And it was done not to the music but with the music of Christian Wolff.”

Merce Cunningham (1919–2009) American dancer

Merce Cunningham, A Lifetime of Dance, 2000

Music, Chance

“If by our sacrifice — yours and mine,' said Onos T'oolan, 'the pain of one life can be ended; if, by our deaths, this one can be guided home… we will judge this a worthy cause.'
'This Crippled God — he is a stranger to us all.'
'It is enough that in the place he calls home, he is no stranger.”

Steven Erikson book The Crippled God

The Crippled God (2011)

Life, Death, God, Pain

“The more troops they send to Vietnam, the happier we will be, for we feel that we shall have them in our power, we can have their blood. So if you want to help the Vietnamese you should encourage the Americans to throw more and more soldiers into Vietnam. We want them there. They will be close to China. And they will be in our grasp. They will be so close to us, they will be our hostages. … We are planting the best kind of opium especially for the American soldiers in Vietnam.”

Zhou Enlai (1898–1976) 1st Premier of the People's Republic of China

Reported in Christian Crusade Weekly (March 3, 1974) as having been said be Zhou to Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1965; reported as a likely misattribution in Paul F. Boller, Jr., and John George, They Never Said It: A Book of Fake Quotes, Misquotes, & Misleading Attributions (1989), p. 133.
Disputed

Feeling, Help

“Any corporation selling us products on the basis of anything other than utility should be revoked and shut down. Any corporation that at this time of fast-diminishing resources designs products that have in-built doomsday devices, planned obsolescence, should be shut down. All this glamour and clamor and blagging and skanking has to end.”

Russell Brand book Revolution

Revolution (2014)

Time

“Frazier is so ugly that he should donate his face to the US Bureau of Wildlife.”

Muhammad Ali (1942–2016) African American boxer, philanthropist and activist

As quoted at "Ali's Quotes" at BBC Sport : Boxing (17 January 2007) http://news2.thdo.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/boxing/6267397.stm

“It is natural that people do not want to be involved with us too much. There is no problem down to the smallest egotistical longing which the Gestapo cannot solve. Regarded in this way we are, if a joke is permitted, looked upon as a cross between a general maid and the dustbin of the Reich.”

Reinhard Heydrich (1904–1942) German Nazi official during World War II

To his officers on German Police Day (February, 1941), as quoted in Gestapo : Instrument of Tyranny (1956) by Edward Crankshaw, p. 103

People, Way, Nature, Problem

“I could not suffer them blowing me to pieces in my own native land and they knew Fitzpatrick wronged us and why not make it public and convict him but no they would rather riddle poor unfortunate creoles.”

Ned Kelly (1855–1880) Australian bushranger

Jerilderie Letter (1879)

Suffering

“There cannot be a greater mistake than that of looking superciliously upon the practical applications of science. The life and soul of science is its practical application; and just as the great advances in mathematics have been made through the desire of discovering the solution of problems which were of a highly practical kind in mathematical science, so in physical science many of the greatest advances that have been made from the beginning of the world to the present time have been made in earnest desire to turn the knowledge of the properties of matter to some purpose useful to mankind.”

William Thomson (1824–1907) British physicist and engineer

Lecture on "Electrical Units of Measurement" (3 May 1883), published in Popular Lectures Vol. I, p. 73, as quoted in The Life of Lord Kelvin (1910) by Silvanus Phillips Thompson

Life, World, Soul, Mathematics

“This was one of the tasks we set forth at the beginning of this presidential campaign: to continue the long march of those who came before us, a march for a more just, more equal, more free, more caring and more prosperous America. I chose to run for the presidency at this moment in history because I believe deeply that we cannot solve the challenges of our time unless we solve them together — unless we perfect our union by understanding that we may have different stories, but we hold common hopes; that we may not look the same and we may not have come from the same place, but we all want to move in the same direction — towards a better future for of children and our grandchildren.”

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

2008, A More Perfect Union (March 2008)

Children, Hope, History, Understanding

“Do not demand love. Begin to love. You will be loved. It is the law and no statute can alter it. If we do not follow the law, and let the law die with the teacher, we shall become accomplices to the murderer. But if follow the law with our hearts, [Bapu] will live with us and through us.”

C. Rajagopalachari (1878–1972) Political leader

Rajagopalachari (12 February 1949), quoted in [Rajmohan Gandhi, Rajaji: A Life, http://books.google.com/books?id=JjPHeRd7_UYC&pg=PA475, 1997, Penguin Books India, 978-0-14-026967-3, 286]
Spoken by C.R when Mahatma Gandhi (Bapu) was assassinated.

Love, Law, Teachers, Heart

“The problem is the fake products today are of better quality and better price than the real names … They are exactly the same factories, exactly the same raw materials but they do not use the names.”

Jack Ma (1964) Chinese businessman

Responding to the accusation that Alibaba sells fake merchandise. "Jack Ma Says Fakes 'Better Quality and Better Price Than the Real Names'” http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2016/06/15/jack-ma-says-fakes-better-quality-and-better-price-than-the-real-names/, CHINA REAL TIME REPORT, The Wall Street Journal (June 15, 2016)

Problem

“We shall be told: what can literature possibly do against the ruthless onslaught of open violence? But let us not forget that violence does not live alone and is not capable of living alone: it is necessarily interwoven with falsehood. Between them lies the most intimate, the deepest of natural bonds. Violence finds its only refuge in falsehood, falsehood its only support in violence. Any man who has once acclaimed violence as his METHOD must inexorably choose falsehood as his PRINCIPLE.”

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) Russian writer

Variant translation: Violence can only be concealed by a lie, and the lie can only be maintained by violence. Any man who has once proclaimed violence as his method is inevitably forced to take the lie as his principle.
As quoted in Solzhenitsyn: A Documentary Record (1974) edited by Leopold Labedz
Nobel lecture (1970)
Context: We shall be told: what can literature possibly do against the ruthless onslaught of open violence? But let us not forget that violence does not live alone and is not capable of living alone: it is necessarily interwoven with falsehood. Between them lies the most intimate, the deepest of natural bonds. Violence finds its only refuge in falsehood, falsehood its only support in violence. Any man who has once acclaimed violence as his METHOD must inexorably choose falsehood as his PRINCIPLE. At its birth violence acts openly and even with pride. But no sooner does it become strong, firmly established, than it senses the rarefaction of the air around it and it cannot continue to exist without descending into a fog of lies, clothing them in sweet talk. It does not always, not necessarily, openly throttle the throat, more often it demands from its subjects only an oath of allegiance to falsehood, only complicity in falsehood.

Literature, Support, Nature, Forgetting

“Living a lie the whole time — the lie that we're here to uplift our poor black brothers instead of to rob them … it corrupts us, it corrupts us in ways you can't imagine.”

George Orwell book Burmese Days

John Flory, Ch. III
Burmese Days (1934)

Lie, Way, Imagination, Time

“Hermione always yawned at the mention of Socialism, and refused even to read Antichrist. 'Don't talk to me about the lower classes,' she used to say. 'I hate them. They smell.”

George Orwell book Keep the Aspidistra Flying

And Ravelston adored her.
Source: Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936), Ch. 5

Hate, Reading

“I care not what religion, club, area or class you come from, nor what bit of colored cloth you wave as a flag. WE are ALL under deadly attack by colored hordes which outnumber us more than seven to one, led by a filthy Jewish, Communist conspiracy!”

George Lincoln Rockwell (1918–1967) American politician, founder of the American Nazi Party

White Self-Hate: Master-Stroke Of The Enemy
1962, White Self-Hate: Master-Stroke Of The Enemy

Religion, Color, Clothes

“Being the source of goodness, God, even after our failures, calls us anew, not effacing entirely from our mind the knowledge of good, even if we have turned away from virtue through sin. This is what God, at present, also does for Adam in calling him although he has hidden himself, saying to him: 'Adam, where art thou?' Adam, in fact, had been placed there by God for the purpose of working and guarding Paradise; he had received this place from Him to be his own. Having distanced himself from there by disobedience, it is proper that he should hear from God: 'Where art thou?”

Didymus the Blind (313–398) Coptic church theologian

God, Art, Failure, Knowledge

“They [men] have corrupted this [God's supernatural] order by making profane things what they should make of holy things, because in fact, we believe scarcely any thing except which pleases us.”

Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) French mathematician, physicist, inventor, writer, and Christian philosopher

The Art of Persuasion

Men, God

“Every time you stand at a crossroads of life and death, you have two universes in front of you; one loses all relation to you because you die, the other maintains its relation to you because you survive in it. Just as you would take off your clothes, you abandon the universe in which you are still alive. In other words, various universes emerge around each of us the way tree limbs and leaves branch away from the trunk.”

Kenzaburō Ōe book A Personal Matter

A Personal Matter (1964)

Life, Death, Way, Tree

“I would not let her work until she was eighteen, and believe me, since the time she was being strolled down the street in her stroller, people were saying, “Can I use her in my commercial? Can I put her in my movie?” “No!” But I did let her take any class that she wanted to take. Singing, acting, dancing…”

Michelle Phillips (1944) Singer, actress

On raising her daughter, Chynna Philips, The Huffington Post (August 25, 2016)

People, Singing, Time, Dance

“Lastly, we must also know what Baptism signifies, and why God has ordained just such external sign and ceremony for the Sacrament by which we are first received into the Christian Church. But the act or ceremony is this, that we are sunk under the water, which passes over us, and afterwards are drawn out again. These two parts, to be sunk under the water and drawn out again, signify the power and operation of Baptism, which is nothing else than putting to death the old Adam, and after that the resurrection of the new man, both of which must take place in us all our lives, so that a truly Christian life is nothing else than a daily baptism, once begun and ever to be continued.”

Martin Luther Luther's Large Catechism

"On Infant Baptism," Large Catechism (1529)

Life, Death, God, Water

“Paddy and I had scarcely a wink of sleep, for there was a man near us who had some nervous trouble, shell-shock perhaps, which made him cry out 'Pip!' at irregular intervals. It was a loud, startling noise, something like the toot of a small motor-horn. You never knew when it was coming, and it was a sure preventer of sleep…. he must have kept ten or twenty people awake every night. He was an example of the kind of thing that prevents one from ever getting enough sleep when men are herded as they are in these lodging houses.”

George Orwell book Down and Out in Paris and London

Source: Down and out in Paris and London (1933), Ch. 29

Men, People, Sleep, Housing

“What then is the place and role of the writer in this cruel, dynamic, split world on the brink of its ten destructions? After all we have nothing to do with letting off rockets, we do not even push the lowliest of hand-carts, we are quite scorned by those who respect only material power. Is it not natural for us too to step back, to lose faith in the steadfastness of goodness, in the indivisibility of truth, and to just impart to the world our bitter, detached observations: how mankind has become hopelessly corrupt, how men have degenerated, and how difficult it is for the few beautiful and refined souls to live amongst them?
But we have not even recourse to this flight. Anyone who has once taken up the WORD can never again evade it; a writer is not the detached judge of his compatriots and contemporaries, he is an accomplice to all the evil committed in his native land or by his countrymen.”

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) Russian writer

Nobel lecture (1970)

Men, Truth, World, Faith

“Over the years I kept everything and anything from stuff and things that I came across during my life in trade, if they had emotional value to me. Always the simple goods and tools, from the farmers, the blacksmith, the carpenter, the baker and so on. I loved those things most in which I saw reflected the struggle for life very clearly.... old used up shoes, trousers, jackets, hats and children's vests, which I found in the rags, often patched up endlessly.”

Jopie Huisman (1922–2000) Dutch painter

translation, Fons Heijnsbroek, 2018
version in original Dutch / citaat van Jopie Huisman, in het Nederlands: Door de jaren heen heb ik van alles en nog wat bewaard aan dingen en voorwerpen die ik in mijn leven in de handel tegenkwam, als ze gevoelswaarde voor me hadden. Altijd eenvoudig gebruiksgoed en gereedschap van de boer, de smid, de timmerman, de bakker enzovoorts. Dingen waarin ik de strijd om het bestaan het duidelijkst weerspiegeld zag vond ik het mooist.. ..afgetrapte oude schoenen, broeken, jassen, hoeden en kindervestjes, die ik in de vodden vond, vaak tot in den treure versteld en opgelapt.
Source: Jopie de Verteller' (2010) - postumous, p. 19

Love, Life, Children, Shoe

“We will never forget. If it takes us five or ten or twenty years, we will never rest until we get our revenge.”

Konrad Adenauer (1876–1967) German statesman, Federal Chancellor of Germany, politician (CDU)

As quoted by General Sir Charles Fergusson in a memorandum (10 July 1945), recalling conversations with Adenauer in 1918-1919, at the end of World War I. As published in Adenauer : The Father of the New Germany (2000) by Charles Williams, p. 293 books.google https://books.google.de/books?id=7mhpKYpugJsC&pg=PA293

Revenge, Forgetting

“Before either of us knew it, we belonged to each other.”

Friedrich Hölderlin book Hyperion

Hyperion

“Suppose that there are two sorts of existences, one seen, and the other unseen. …The seen is the changing, and the unseen is the unchanging. …And further, is not one part of us body, and the rest of us soul? …Then the soul is more like to the unseen, and the body to the seen? …the soul is then dragged by the body into the region of the changeable, and wanders and is confused; the world spins round her, and she is like a drunkard when under their influence?”

Socrates (-470–-399 BC) classical Greek Athenian philosopher

Plato, Phaedo

World, Soul, Change, Parting

“Being in a material body means that we are eager to enjoy sense gratification and other imaginings of the false ego. Sickness can help raise us out of the bodily conception by putting us deeply into bodily suffering. Thus, sickness can be one of the greatest boons from God.”

Bhakti Tirtha Swami (1950–2005) American Hindu writer

Meditation 8 - Illness as a special gift from God
Books, The Beggar, Volume III: False Ego: The Greatest Enemy of the Spiritual Leader (Hari-Nama Press, 2002)

God, Imagination, Sense, Suffering

“For the gospel proclaims that God is with us now, actively fighting the forces which would make man captive. And it is the task of theology and the Church to know where God is at work so that we can join him in this fight against evil. In America we know where the evil is. We know that men are shot and lynched. We know that men are crammed into ghettos…. There is a constant battle between Christ and Satan, and it is going on now. If we make this message contemporaneous with our own life situation, what does Christ's defeat of Satan mean for us?… The demonic forces of racism are real for the black man. Theologically, Malcolm X was not far wrong when he called the white man "the devil." The white structure of this American society, personified in every racist, must be at least part of what the New Testament meant by the demonic forces.”

James H. Cone (1938–2018) American theologian

Source: Black Theology and Black Power (1969), pp. 39-41

Life, Men, God, Evil

“All content of science, and also their protocol statements that are used for verification, are selected on the basis of decisions and can be altered in principle.”

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

Otto Neurath (1934:102), as cited in: Cartwright (2008;199)
1930s

Decision, Science

“My fellow Americans, the city of Miami is only 200 miles or so from Havana. Countless thousands of Cubans have come to Miami -- on planes and makeshift rafts; some with little but the shirt on their back and hope in their hearts. Today, Miami is often referred to as the capital of Latin America. But it is also a profoundly American city -– a place that reminds us that ideals matter more than the color of our skin, or the circumstances of our birth; a demonstration of what the Cuban people can achieve, and the openness of the United States to our family to the South. Todos somos Americanos.”

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

2014, Statement on Cuban policy (December 2014)

People, Family, Hope, Color

“Mother Mary, like us, was born in sin of sinful parents, but the Holy Spirit covered her, sanctified and purified her so that this child was born of flesh and blood, but not with sinful flesh and blood. The Holy Spirit permitted the Virgin Mary to remain a true, natural human being of flesh and blood, just as we. However, he warded off sin from her flesh and blood so that she became the mother of a pure child, not poisoned by sin as we are. For in that moment when she conceived, she was a holy mother filled with the Holy Spirit and her fruit is a holy pure fruit, at once God and truly man, in one person”

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

The Precious and Sacred Writings of Martin Luther (1905) edited by John Nicholas Lenker; republished as Sermons of Martin Luther (1996), p. 291

God, Nature, Parent, Personality

“They stopped being machines. You see, they realize their superiority and they hate us. They hate everything human.”

Karel Čapek R.U.R.

R.U.R. (1920)

Hate

“We know that our faith sometimes has been used as a wedge to divide us, but we also know that with a big God, with a loving and forceful God, if we unite in his name, we can finish his work on Earth. In the face of impossible odds, people who love their country can change it. With a uniting faith, with a God powerful enough to empower us, we can take those bullets out.”

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

2007

Love, God, People, Faith

“Literary works cannot be taken over like factories, or literary forms of expression like industrial methods. Realist writing, of which history offers many widely varying examples, is likewise conditioned by the question of how, when and for what class it is made use of.”

Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956) German poet, playwright, theatre director

"The Popular and the Realistic" (written 1938, published 1958), as translated in Brecht on Theatre (1964) edited and translated by John Willett.

History, Question

“It is of no use to possess a lively wit if it is not of the right proportion: the perfection of a clock is not to go fast, but to be accurate.”

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

Source: Reflections and Maxims (1746), p. 177.

Perfection

“Reasoning draws a conclusion and makes us grant the conclusion, but does not make the conclusion certain, nor does it remove doubt so that the mind may rest on the intuition of truth, unless the mind discovers it by the path of experience.”

Roger Bacon book Opus Majus

Opus Majus, c. 1267
Source: Robert Belle Burke (2002) The Opus Majus of Roger Bacon Part 2. p. 583

Truth, Drawing

“… exclude the need for appearances: what counts is not appearances; the value of life does not depend on the approval of others or on success, but on what we have inside us.”

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

As quoted in "Imposition of the Ashes - Homily of pope Francis" at www.vatican.va (5 March 2014) http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/francesco/homilies/2014/documents/papa-francesco_20140305_omelia-ceneri_en.html <br class="br">2010s, 2014

Life, Appearance, Success, Dependency

“For more than 70 years, the United States convinced much of the world that.. it somehow needed the United States to save it from communist darkness. "Just buy our weapons," said Washington, "let our military and our corporations roam freely across your land, and give us veto power over who your leaders will be, and we'll protect you."”

William Blum book Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower

third edition (2006), p. 1
Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower

World

“I've become a free-for-all brand. I hope they come out with a rule that they can't use a person's name without paying him for it!”

Shahrukh Khan (1965) Indian actor, producer and television personality

From interview with Anshul Chaturvedi

Hope, Personality

“I'm telling you folks, nerds are one of the most dangerous groups in this country, because they end up running things. But they still hate everybody, because they weren't the jocks in high school. So they play little dirty games on everybody. They use their brains to hurt people. And I'm aware of them. OK? I see you, you little rats!”

Alex Jones (1974) American radio host, author, conspiracy theorist and filmmaker

The Alex Jones Show https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTDLdDEJwZg, April 20, 2013. <br class="br">2013

Hate, People, School, Game

“As I said last year, each country will pursue a path rooted in the culture of its own people. Yet experience shows us that history is on the side of liberty, that the strongest foundation for human progress lies in open economies, open societies, and open governments. To put it simply, democracy, more than any other form of government, delivers for our citizens.”

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

"Remarks to the United Nations General Assembly in New York City," September 23, 2010. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=88483&st=&st1= <br class="br">2010

People, Democracy, History, Country

“I've found a place that would amaze you. People used to live there, but now it's all overgrown and no one goes there. Absolutely no one — only me… Just a little house and a garden. And two dogs. If you could see how they licked my hands, and their puppies — oh, Primus, there's probably nothing more beautiful! You take them on your lap and cuddle them, and just sit there until sundown not thinking about anything and not worrying about anything. Then when you get up you feel as though you've done a hundred times more than a lot of work. Really, I'm not good for much of anything. Everyone says I'm not cut out for any kind of work. I don't know what I'm good for.”

Karel Čapek R.U.R.

R.U.R. (1920)

People, Beauty, Dogs, Feeling

“Even if at times I can still experience outwardly some little sadness and joy, nonetheless there is in my soul a chamber in which no joy, sadness, or enjoyment from any virtue, or delight over anything that can be named, enters. This is where the All Good, which is not any particular good, resides, and it is so much the All Good that there is no other good. Although I blaspheme by speaking about it -- and I speak about it so badly because I cannot find words to express it -- I nonetheless affirm that in this manifestation of God I discover the complete truth. In it, I understand and possess the complete truth that is in heaven and in hell, in the entire world, in every place, in all things, in every enjoyment in heaven and in every creature. And I see all this is so truly and certainly that no one could convince me otherwise. Even if the whole world were to tell me otherwise, I would laugh it to scorn. Furthermore, I saw the One who is and how he is the being of all creatures. I also saw how he made me capable of understanding those realities I have just spoken about better than when I saw them in that darkness which used to delight me so. Moreover, in that state I see myself as alone with God, totally cleansed, totally sanctified, totally true, totally upright, totally certain, totally celestial in him. And when I am in that state, I do not remember anything else…”

Angela of Foligno (1248–1309) Italian saint

Source: The Memorial and Instructions, pp. 214-216

God, Truth, World, Sadness

“Ritual use of psychedelic plants and substances has been a particularly effective technology for inducing holotropic states of consciousness”

Stanislav Grof (1931) Czech pychiatrist

The Cosmic Game - Explorations of the Frontiers of Human Consciousness (1997), ISBN 0-7914-3876-7, p. 260.

“The kind of mathematics foisted on children in schools is not meaningful, fun, or even very useful. This does not mean that an individual child cannot turn it into a valuable and enjoyable personal game. For some the game is scoring grades; for others it is outwitting the teacher and the system. For many, school math is enjoyable in its repetitiveness, precisely because it is so mindless and dissociated that it provides a shelter from having to think about what is going on in the classroom. But all this proves is the ingenuity of children. It is not a justifications for school math to say that despite its intrinsic dullness, inventive children can find excitement and meaning in it.”

Seymour Papert book Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas

Source: Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas (1980), Chapter 2, Mathophobia: The Fear of Learning

Children, School, Game, Mathematics

“What is our life? A play of passion;
our mirth: the music of division;
our mother's wombs: the tiring houses be
where we are dressed for this short comedy.
Heaven the judicious sharp spectator is
that sits and marks still who doth act amiss.
Our graves that hide us from the searching sun
are like drawn curtains when the play is done.
Thus march we playing to our latest rest,
only we die in earnest, that's no jest.”

Walter Raleigh (1554–1618) English aristocrat, writer, poet, soldier, courtier, spy, and explorer

"On the Life of Man" (1612)
Attributed

Life, Music, Search, Passion

“This man is the master of us all.”

George Frideric Handel (1685–1759) German, later British Baroque composer

Er ist der Meister von uns allen!
Haydn, at a performance of Messiah. Quoted in John Galt George the Third, His Court and Family (1824) p. 34, and in Leopold Schmidt Joseph Haydn (1898) p. 86.
Criticism

“The word anti-Semitism is another word which should be eliminated from the English language. "Anti-Semitism" serves only one purpose today. It is used as a smear word. When so-called or self-styled Jews feel that anyone opposes any of their objectives they discredit their victims by applying the word anti-Semite or anti-Semitic through all the channels they have at their command and under their control. I can speak with great authority on that subject. Because so-called or self-styled Jews were unable to disprove my public statements in 1946 with regard to the situation in Palestine, they spent millions of dollars to smear me as an anti-Semite hoping thereby to discredit me in the eyes of the public who were very much interested in what I had to say. Until 1946 I was a little saint to all so-called or self-styled Jews. When I disagreed with them publicly on the Zionist intentions in Palestine I became suddenly Anti-Semite No. 1.”

Benjamin H. Freedman (1890–1984) American businessman

Facts are Facts (1954)

Hope, Feeling

“God save us from seeing a Russian revolt, senseless and merciless. Those who plot impossible upheavals among us, are either young and do not know our people, or are hard-hearted men who do not care a straw either about their own lives or those of others.”

Aleksandr Pushkin (1799–1837) Russian poet

Found in Pushkin's. The Captain's Daughter and Other Stories. English edition by Random House LLC. 2013. p. 139
As quoted by Joseph Frank in Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time (2009). Princeton University Press, p. 203.

Men, God, People, Heart

“The illusion which exalts us is dearer to us than ten thousand truths.”

Aleksandr Pushkin (1799–1837) Russian poet

The Hero ll. 64-65, quoted in Gooseberries by Anton Chekhov

Truth

“My father, a bookkeeper who never earned more than $11,000 a year in his life, sat there, writing out a $25 check to the NAACP. When I asked him why, he said discrimination against anyone is discrimination against us all. And I never forgot that. Indeed, his philanthropy was a gift, not just to that organization, but to me.”

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

http://mikebloomberg.com/en/issues/education/mayor_michael_bloomberg_delivers_slate_60_dinner_keynote_address_at_william_j_clinton_presidential_library
Philanthropy

Life

“Whoever does not philosophize for the sake of philosophy, but rather uses philosophy as a means, is a sophist.”

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

“Selected Aphorisms from the Athenaeum (1798)”, Dialogue on Poetry and Literary Aphorisms, Ernst Behler and Roman Struc, trans. (Pennsylvania University Press:1968) #96
Athenäum (1798 - 1800)

“Glorified art Thou, O God my God! I indeed testify to Thee and all-things at the moment when I am in Thy presence in pure servitude, upon this, that verily Thou art God, no other God is there besides Thee! Thou art unchanged, O my God, within the elevation of Grandeur and Majesty, and shall be unalterable, O my desirous boon, within the pinnacle of power and perfection inasmuch as nothing shall frustrate Thee and nothing shall extinguish Thee! Thou art unchanged as Thou art the Capable above Thy creation and Thou art unalterable as Thou indeed shall be as from before inasmuch as nothing is with Thee of anything and nothing is in Thy rank of anything! Thou accomplisheth and willeth and doeth and desireth! Glorified art Thou, O God my God, with Thy praise, salutations be upon the Primal Point, the Chemise of Thy Visage and the Light of Thy direction and the Luminosity of Thy Beinghood and the Clarity of Thy Selfhood and the Ocean of Thy Power by all that which Thou hath bestowed upon Him of Thy Stations and Thy Culminations and Thy Foundations, for nothing shall frustrate Thee of anything and nothing shall extinguish Thee of anything! No other God is There besides Thee, for verily Thou art the Lord of all the worlds! And blessings, O God my God, be upon the one who was the first to believe in Thee, the Visage of Thy Selfhood and the Decree of Thy direction; and upon the one who was the last to believe in Thee, the Essence of Thy direction and the Visage of Thy Holiness; and upon those whom Ye have made martyrs/witnesses (shuhadá’) unknown except by Thy Command nor restrained except by Thy Wisdom; then upon those to whom Ye have promised that Ye shall make Him manifest on the Day of Resurrection and He whom Ye will upraise on the Day of the Return by all which Thou will bestow upon Him of Thy Power and Thy Strength, for nothing shall extinguish Thee and nothing shall frustrate Thee! Ye determine all-things, for verily Thou art powerful over whatsoever Thou willeth! And I indeed testify, O my God, between Thy hands that verily there is no other god besides Thee and that He whom Ye shall make manifest on the Day of Resurrection is the Chemise of Thy Creativity and the Visage of Thy Manifestation and the direction of Thy Victory and the substance of Thy Pardoning and the branch of Thy Singularity and the clarity of Thy Unicitarianism and the Pen [of the Letter] Nún (al-qalam al-nún) within Thy Beinghood and the setting of the Cause-Command within Thy Essentiality inasmuch as there is no difference between Him and Thee except that He is Thy servant in Thy grasp, such that whatsoever is in the Heavens and the earth and what is between them will then be filled by His Name and by His Light until it be made apparent that no other god is there besides Thee and no Beloved is there like unto Thee and no Desired One is there other than Thee and no Dread is there of Thy like and no Justice of Thy equal! No other god is there besides Thee! Glorified art Thou, O God, and by Thy praise, blessings, O my God, be upon the Guide to the Throne of the Hidden Cloud and the Path to Thy Presence in the Sina'i of Authorization and the Caller by Thy Logos-Self and the Crier of Thy Permission between Thy Hands and the Ariser of Thy Attendance by Thy Command; then the Triumph, O my God, by all that which Thou will bestow upon Him of Thy Power, then that which will be made manifestly apparent of the Word upon the earth and what is upon it by Thy grandeur, and also in this that nothing shall ever put out His Light! Verily nothing shall frustrate Thee of anything and nothing shall extinguish Thee of anything! Thy mercy encompasseth all-things and verily Thou art powerful over what Ye have willed; and to the one who prays to Thee, Hearing, Answering, for verily Thou art Observant over us, and verily Thou art High, Praised beyond that which the inner hearts can comprehend!”

Subh-i-Azal (1831–1912) Persian religious leader

Ethics of the Spirituals

Wisdom, God, World, Justice

“The disappearance of nations would impoverish us no less than if all peoples were made alike, with one character, one face. Nations are the wealth of mankind, they are its generalized personalities: the smallest of them has its own particular colors, and embodies a particular facet of God's design.”

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) Russian writer

Harvard University address (1978)

God, People, Color, Personality

“The use of the sea and air is common to all; neither can a title to the ocean belong to any people or private persons, forasmuch as neither nature nor public use and custom permit any possession thereof.”

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

To the Spanish Ambassador (1580).

People, Nature, Personality, Sea

“I would like to think there's some purity in us, yeah. Naive - y'know, purposely naive.”

Kurt Cobain (1967–1994) American musician and artist

From an interview on MTV with Zeca Camargo, 1993-01-21, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Interviews (1989-1994), Video

Thinking

“I would rather die having spoken in my manner, than speak in your manner and live. For neither in war nor yet in law ought any man use every way of escaping death. For often in battle there is no doubt that if a man will throw away his arms, and fall on his knees before his pursuers, he may escape death, if a man is willing to say or do anything. The difficulty, my friends, is not in avoiding death, but in avoiding unrighteousness; for that runs deeper than death.”

Socrates (-470–-399 BC) classical Greek Athenian philosopher

38e–39a
Plato, Apology

Death, War, Law, Way

“No ocean, no life. No blue, no green. No ocean, no us.”

Sylvia Earle (1935) American oceanographer

[Earle, Sylvia, BREAKING: Dr. Sylvia Earle Boldly Addresses the UN To Urge Legal Protection for High Seas, http://mission-blue.org/2015/01/breaking-dr-sylvia-earle-boldly-addresses-the-un-to-urge-legal-protection-for-high-seas/, www.missionblue.org, Mission Blue, 28 January 2015]

Life

“How stars move tell us that most matter in the universe is dark. When we see stars in the sky, we're only seeing five or 10 percent of the matter that there is in the universe.”

Vera Rubin (1928–2016) American astronomer

As quoted in Pontifical Science Academy http://www.ewtn.com/library/ISSUES/STELLAR.TXT

Star, Universe

“I believe all the devils in hell are against us but we will triumph eventually because we have the Devil on our side.”

Madame Nhu (1924–2011) First lady of South Vietnam

In response to Diệm and Nhu, assassination in a coup d’état led by General Dương Văn Minh (Armed Forces Council) http://fablog.ehrensteinland.com/2013/10/05/

Hell

“The ways of love are all the same, whether infantile, childish, sexual, tender, sadistic, erotic, or whispered. It's simply a question of understanding, of understanding oneself above all: in bed, in broad daylight, madly or not at all, in shadow, in sunlight, in despair or at table. Otherwise, it's no use. Any of it. And the little time we have left for living, while we're still alive, in other words capable of giving pleasure, and the little time we have left for thinking (or pretending to) in this vast, mindless cacophony that daily life has become, ineluctable, uncontrollable, and truly unacceptable to any civilized person, we must make absolutely certain that we share.”

Françoise Sagan (1935–2004) French writer

Scars on the Soul (1972)

Love, Life, Pleasure, Way

“Einstein was a giant. His head was in the clouds, but his feet were on the ground. But those of us who are not that tall have to choose!”

Richard Feynman (1918–1988) American theoretical physicist

recalled by Carver Mead in Collective Electrodynamics: Quantum Foundations of Electromagnetism (2002), p. xix

“Yet if the only form of tradition, of handing down, consisted in following the ways of the immediate generation before us in a blind or timid adherence to its successes, "tradition" should positively be discouraged. We have seen many such simple currents soon lost in the sand; and novelty is better than repetition. Tradition is a matter of much wider significance. It cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour. It involves, in the first place, the historical sense, which we may call nearly indispensable to anyone who would continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year…”

T.S. Eliot book Tradition and the Individual Talent

Tradition and the Individual Talent (1919)

Way, Sense, Success

“Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter: Fear God, and keep his commandments: for this is the whole duty of man. For God shall bring every work into judgment, with every secret thing, whether it be good, or whether it be evil.”

Solomon (-990–-931 BC) king of Israel and the son of David

[Ecclesiastes, 12:13-14, 9]

God, Secret, Fear, Evil

“Inside us there is something that has no name, that something is what we are.”

José Saramago book Blindness

Dentro de nós há uma coisa que não tem nome, essa coisa é o que somos.
Source: Blindness (1995), p. 276

“I am among Ahlul Bayt, whom God has made obligatory on all Muslims to love. He, the Blessed and Most High, has said: "I do not ask of you any reward for it except love for (my) kin; and whoever earns good, We will give him more of good" [Qur'an, 42:23]. Therefore, earning good is showing love for us, Ahlul Bayt.”

Hasan ibn Ali (624–669) Shia Imam

Shia source: al-Fadhl ibn al-Hasan al-Tabrisi, Majma‘ al-Bayān, vol.9, p. 29
Sunni sources: Ibn Hajar Al-Haythami, Al-Sawā'iq al-Muhriqah, p. 101 ; Ali ibn Abu Bakr al-Haythami, Majma‘ al-Zawa'id, vol.9, p. 146 ; al-Hakim, al-Mustadrak ‘alā al-Sahihain, vol.3, p. 172
Religious-based Quotes

Love, God

“O Chatterton! that thou wert yet alive!
Sure thou would'st spread the canvass to the gale,
And love, with us, the tinkling team to drive
O'er peaceful Freedom's undivided dale;
And we, at sober eve, would round thee throng,
Hanging, enraptur'd, on thy stately song!
And greet with smiles the young-eyed Poesy
All deftly mask'd, as hoar Antiquity.”

Thomas Chatterton (1752–1770) English poet, forger

Samuel Taylor Coleridge "Monody on the Death of Chatterton" (1794) line 126.
Criticism

Love, Peace, Smile, Freedom

“America has a deeply confused image of itself that is in perpetual tension. We are a nation that takes pride in our ethnic diversity, recognizing its importance in shaping our society and in adding richness to its existence. Yet, we simultaneously insist that we can and must function and live in a race and color-blind way that ignore these very differences that in other contexts we laud. That tension between "the melting pot and the salad bowl" – a recently popular metaphor used to described New York's diversity – is being hotly debated today in national discussions about affirmative action.”

Sonia Sotomayor (1954) U.S. Supreme Court Justice

Address to the Raising the Bar symposium (2001)

Color, Way

“ABOYNE (vb.) To beat an expert at a game of skill by playing so appallingly bad that none of his clever tactics or strategies are of any use to him.”

Douglas Adams book The Meaning of Liff

The Meaning of Liff (1983)

Game

“I don't care for 'Abstract expressionism'.... and it is certainly not 'non-objective', and not 'non-representational' either. I'm very representational some of the time, and a little all of the time. But when you're painting out of your consciousness, figures are bound to emerge. We're all of us influenced by Freud, I guess. I've been a Jungian for a long time... Painting is a state of being... Painting is self-discovery. Every good artist paints what he is.”

Jackson Pollock (1912–1956) American artist

In an interview (1956); published in Conversations with Artists, by Seldon Rodman, New York, Capricorn Books, 1961, pp. 84-85
1950's

Time, Painting

“Who taught us corruption? I believe it was you, frankly… It's an import.”

Mobutu Sésé Seko (1930–1997) President of Zaïre

In an interview with a French reporter, as featured in "Mobutu: King of Zaire."
Attributed

“The trouble with you and me, Ned, is that we want everyone in the world to personally love us, and of course that's impossible; you just don't meet everyone in the world.”

Leonard Bernstein (1918–1990) American composer, conductor, author, music lecturer, and pianist

Ned Rorem, Paris Diary (1966)

Love, World, Personality

“The body is a source of endless trouble to us by reason of the mere requirement of food; and is also liable to diseases which overtake and impede us in the search after truth: and by filling us so full of loves, and lusts, and fears, and fancies, and idols, and every sort of folly, prevents our ever having, as people say, so much as a thought.”

Socrates (-470–-399 BC) classical Greek Athenian philosopher

Plato, Phaedo

Love, People, Truth, Fear

“If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn book The Gulag Archipelago

The Gulag Archipelago (1973).

People, Evil, Heart

“GG Allin is an entertainer with a message to a sick society. He makes us look at it for what we really are. The human is just another animal who is able to speak out freely, to express himself clearly. Make no mistake about it, behind what he does is a brain.”

John Wayne Gacy (1942–1994) American serial killer and torturer

John Wayne Gacy on Todd Phillips: Hated: GG Allin and the Murder Junkies, Skinny Nervous Guy Prod, 1994. 2007 DVD re-release watched March 1, 2010.

Animals

“And sweet to us is such a deprivation,
Because our good in this good is made perfect,
That whatsoe'er God wills, we also will.”

Dante Alighieri book Paradiso

Canto XX, lines 136–138 (tr. Longfellow).
The Divine Comedy (c. 1308–1321), Paradiso

God, Perfection

“Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them, and there is almost no kind of outrage — torture, the use of hostages, forced labour, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of civilians — which does not change its moral colour when it is committed by ‘our’ side.”

George Orwell (1903–1950) English author and journalist

Notes on Nationalism (1945)

Change

“I did not reveal any US operations against legitimate military targets. I pointed out where the NSA has hacked civilian infrastructure such as universities, hospitals, and private businesses because it is dangerous.”

Edward Snowden (1983) American whistleblower and former National Security Agency contractor

Interview with Glenn Greenwald, 6 June 2013, Part 1

Business, Universe

“So, in the end, have we learned anything from this look at why the world turned out the way it is, that's of any use to us in our future? Something, I think. That the key to why things change is the key to everything. How easy is it for knowledge to spread? And that, in the past, the people who made change happen, were the people who had that knowledge, whether they were craftsmen, or kings. Today, the people who make things change, the people who have that knowledge, are the scientists and the technologists, who are the true driving force of humanity. And before you say what about the Beethovens and the Michelangelos? Let me suggest something with which you may disagree violently: that at best, the products of human emotion, art, philosophy, politics, music, literature, are interpretations of the world, that tell you more about the guy who's talking, than about the world he's talking about. Second hand views of the world, made third hand by your interpretation of them. Things like that [art book] as opposed to this [transparency of some filaments]. Know what it is? It's a bunch of amino acids, the stuff that goes to build up a worm, or a geranium, or you. This stuff [art book] is easier to take, isn't it? Understandable. Got people in it. This, [transparency] scientific knowledge is hard to take, because it removes the reassuring crutches of opinion, ideology, and leaves only what is demonstrably true about the world. And the reason why so many people may be thinking about throwing away those crutches is because thanks to science and technology they have begun to know that they don't know so much. And that, if they are to have more say in what happens to their lives, more freedom to develop their abilities to the full, they have to be helped towards that knowledge, that they know exists, and that they don't possess. And by helped towards that knowledge I don't mean give everybody a computer and say: help yourself. Where would you even start? No, I mean trying to find ways to translate the knowledge. To teach us to ask the right questions. See, we're on the edge of a revolution in communications technology that is going to make that more possible than ever before. Or, if that’s not done, to cause an explosion of knowledge that will leave those of us who don't have access to it, as powerless as if we were deaf, dumb and blind. And I don't think most people want that. So, what do we do about it? I don't know. But maybe a good start would be to recognize within yourself the ability to understand anything. Because that ability is there, as long as it is explained clearly enough. And then go and ask for explanations. And if you're thinking, right now, what do I ask for? Ask yourself, if there is anything in your life that you want changed. That's where to start.”

James Burke (science historian) (1936) British broadcaster, science historian, author, and television producer

Connections (1979), 10 - Yesterday, Tomorrow and You

Life, People, Books, World

“The use of men is like a leaf
On bough, which goeth and another cometh.”

Dante Alighieri book Paradiso

Canto XXVI, lines 137–138 (tr. Longfellow).
The Divine Comedy (c. 1308–1321), Paradiso

Men

“No freeman shall be debarred the use of arms [within his own lands].”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

within his own lands Draft Constitution for Virginia (June 1776) http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/jeffcons.asp This quote often appears with the parenthetical omitted and with the spurious extension, "The strongest reason for the people to retain their right to keep and bear arms is as a last resort to protect themselves against tyranny in government". (See "No freeman shall be debarred the use of arms" Quotation https://www.monticello.org/site/research-and-collections/no-freeman-shall-be-debarred-use-arms ( Archived https://web.archive.org/web/20200220105040/https://www.monticello.org/site/research-and-collections/no-freeman-shall-be-debarred-use-arms from the original on February 20, 2020) and Jefferson Encyclopedia "Strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms" Quotation http://www.monticello.org/site/jefferson/strongest-reason-people-to-retain-right-to-keep-and-bear-arms-quotation ( Archived https://web.archive.org/web/20200218101730/https://www.monticello.org/site/research-and-collections/strongest-reason-people-retain-right-keep-and-bear-arms-spurious from the original on February 20, 2020)) <br class="br">1770s