Quotes about usual
page 6

“Rat and behavioral psychology … mirror the actual inhumanity of reality. Rat psychology is human psychology where a total society has trained human beings to be creatures of stimulus and response, i. e. rats. “Insofar as the hardening of society has reduced men more and more to objects,” wrote Adorno, “methods which convey this are no sacrilege. … The method serves freedom in that it wordlessly testifies to the prevailing unfreedom.” Or, as Adorno and Horkheimer wrote in another context: “The usual objection that empirical social research is too mechanical, too crude, and too unspiritual [ungeistig] shifts the responsibility from that which science is investigating to science itself.” … The idealistic misconception of … behavioral methods … shifts the evil from the social conditions that coerce men and women into standardized roles onto the social science that is merely registering these conditions.”

Russell Jacoby (1945) American historian

Source: Social Amnesia: A Critique of Conformist Psychology from Adler to Laing (1975), p. 69

Women, Men, Behavior, Reality

“That’s the trouble with people like them, I suppose; whenever you think you’re detecting the first signs of them starting to behave responsibly, it’s just them being even more devious and underhand than usual.”

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, Excession (1996), Chapter 8 “Killing Time” section V (p. 261).

People, Thinking

“When conspiracies have governmental powers, they can usually cover up their guilt at the time and they often destroy evidence so thoroughly that later generations are left with a puzzle they can solve only partially or tentatively. We now know only that the assassination of Abraham Lincoln was arranged by a conspiracy for the dual purpose of eliminating a political figure who was no longer useful and of exciting fresh animosity against the Southerners who had been conquered, and whose country had been destroyed, in the unconscionable war of aggression of which he had been the ostensible leader; but, aside from a few hirelings, the only person whom we can positively identify as a member of the conspiracy is Stanton, who was the Secretary of War in Lincoln’s cabinet, arranged many of the practical details, and was able, after the event, to silence key witnesses, although we can only guess what it was they knew that made it necessary to have them judicially murdered. And Stanton seems to have been only a local manager for principals whose identity we can only surmise.”

Revilo P. Oliver (1908–1994) American philologist

"Revised Historiography", Liberty Bell magazine (April 1980)
1970s, 1980s

War, Silence, Time, Personality

“I owe my view of the world to the Bible. To my mind, the Bible's approach is the only valid one. Most philosophies usually go out of date within 20 years.”

Wilhelm Busch (pastor) (1897–1966) German pastor and writer

The world we live in p. 131
Jesus Our Destiny

World

“I'm so rarely the arbiter of what all women want. I'm usually quite the outlier on that chart.”

Rachel Maddow (1973) American journalist

Inauguration Night, MSNBC (January 20, 2009)

Women

Josef Albers (1888–1976) German-American artist and educator

4 quotes from: 'The Color in my Painting'
Homage to the square' (1964)

Color, Painting, Dependency

“I had wished to visit a slaughter-house, in order to see with my own eyes the reality of the question raised when vegetarianism is discussed. But at first I felt ashamed to do so, as one is always ashamed of going to look at suffering which one knows is about to take place, but which one cannot avert; and so I kept putting off my visit. But a little while ago I met on the road a butcher … He is not yet an experienced butcher, and his duty is to stab with a knife. I asked him whether he did not feel sorry for the animals that he killed. He gave me the usual answer: 'Why should I feel sorry? It is necessary.”

Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) Russian writer

But when I told him that eating flesh is not necessary, but is only a luxury, he agreed; and then he admitted that he was sorry for the animals.
Source: The First Step (1892), Ch. IX

Feeling, Question, Reality, Suffering

“By 2050 Egypt’s population will increase from 90 million to 138 million. The population of Nigeria will increase from 186 million to 390 million. Uganda’s population will rise from 38 million to 93 million, and Ethiopia’s from 102 to 228 million. It is János Martonyi who usually warns us – and how right he is – that projecting current trends into the future requires caution, because in history there are always events which can change their course. But as we cannot prepare for unforeseeable events in the future, common sense tells us that we must project these figures into the future, and we must prepare for them. They clearly show that the real pressure on our continent will come from Africa. Today we are talking about Syria, today we are talking about Libya; but in fact we must prepare for the population pressure coming from the region beyond Libya – and its magnitude will be far greater than anything we have experienced so far. This warns us that we must be steely in our determination. Border protection – particularly when we need to build a fence and detain people – is something which is difficult to justify in aesthetic terms, but believe me, you cannot protect the borders – and thus ourselves – with flowers and cuddly toys. We must face this fact.”

Viktor Orbán (1963) Hungarian politician, chairman of Fidesz

Tusnádfürdő speech http://www.kormany.hu/en/the-prime-minister/the-prime-minister-s-speeches/viktor-orban-s-presentation-at-the-27h-balvanyos-summer-open-university-and-student-camp, 26 July 2016

People, History, Flowers, Sense

“Try to see what attitudes rule your day, then ask what kind of a day you usually have.”

Vernon Howard (1918–1992) American writer

The Power of Esoterics

“I thought a lot about the beauty of Leonardo's Mona Lisa, we have two expressions that are composed on the same icon: usually to express an expression our whole body moves in that direction, to create another expression we need a different time. These two times, the sadness and the smile, which point out our duality are characterized at the same time. It creates a displacement. It's as if we could not grasp both things together. Hence the perception of that extraordinary beauty.”

Umberto Pettinicchio (1943) Italian painter

Umberto Pettinicchio late interview https://www.shantimandir.eu/la-spiritualita-oltre-liconarelazione-umberto-pettinicchio/, La spiritualita’ oltre l’icona, shantimandir.eu, 2001.

Sadness, Smile, Beauty, Time

“My budget blueprint will restrain spending, yet meet growing needs with a reasonable 4 percent growth rate, which is a little more than inflation. After paying the bills, my plan reduces the national debt, and fast. So fast, in fact, that economists worry that we're going to run out of debt to retire. That would be a good worry to have. Finally, along with funding our priorities and paying down debt, my plan returns about one out of every four dollars of the surplus to the American taxpayers, who created the surplus in the first place. A surplus in tax revenue, after all, means that taxpayers have been overcharged. And usually when you've been overcharged, you expect to get something back. Tax relief means real help for both American families and the American economy. Everybody who pays income taxes will receive a tax cut. Nobody will be targeted in, and nobody will be targeted out. The typical family will get about $1,600 in tax relief, and that's real money. And that's money that will help American families manage their own accounts, manage your own balance sheets.”

George W. Bush (1946) 43rd President of the United States

2000s, 2001, Radio Address to the Nation (February 2001)

Money, Family, Help

“I am not a Muslim in the usual sense, though I hope I am a “Muslim” as “one surrendered to God”; but I believe that embedded in the Qur’an and other expressions of the Islamic vision are vast stores of divine truth from which I and other occidentals have still much to learn.”

William Montgomery Watt (1909–2006) Scottish historian

Islam and Christianity Today: A Contribution to Dialogue https://books.google.com/books?id=4YlTAQAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&hl=fr&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false, Routledge Library Editions, 1983, p. IX.

God, Truth, Hope, Sense

“Creatures really have divergent and conflicting desires. Their distinct motives are not (usually) wishes for survival or for means-to-survival, but for various particular things to be done and obtained while surviving. And these can always conflict. Motivation is fundamentally plural.”

Mary Midgley (1919–2018) British philosopher and ethicist

Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature (1979). 168.
Context: Creatures really have divergent and conflicting desires. Their distinct motives are not (usually) wishes for survival or for means-to-survival, but for various particular things to be done and obtained while surviving. And these can always conflict. Motivation is fundamentally plural. It must be so because, in evolution, all sorts of contingincies and needs arise, calling for all sorts of different responses. An obsessive creature, constantly dominated by one kind of motive, would not survive.

Motivation

“Trouble is a great deal of fun, and crimes committed without malice are usually forgiven among peers.”

Jack Terricloth (1970)

What Would Jack Do?

“In the long run wives are to be paid in a peculiar coin – consideration of their feelings. And it usually turns out this is an enormous, unthinkable inflation few men will remit, or if they will, only with a sense of being overcharged.”

Elizabeth Hardwick (1916–2007) Novelist, short story writer, literary critic

Seduction and Betrayal

Men, Feeling, Sense

“The enthronement in office of a Socialist Government will be a serious national misfortune such as has usually befallen great States only on the morrow of defeat in war. It will delay the return of prosperity; it will check enterprise and impair credit; it will open a period of increasing political confusion and disturbance.”

Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Letter to a correspondent (17 January 1924) shortly before Labour formed its first government, reprinted in The Times (18 January 1924), p. 14
Early career years (1898–1929)

War

“In 1915 Sophie Taeuber and I carried out our first works in the simplest forms, using painting, embroidery and pasted paper [without using oil colors to avoid any reference with usual painting]. These were probably the first manifestations of their kind, pictures that were their own reality, without meaning or cerebral intention. We rejected everything in the nature of a copy or a description, in order to give free flow to what was elemental and spontaneous.”

Hans Arp (1886–1966) Alsatian, sculptor, painter, poet and abstract artist

on creating art without using oil colors to avoid any reference with usual painting, in The Art of Jean Arp, Herbert Read, Abrams, New York 1968, p. p. 34, 38
1960s

Color, Nature, Reality, Past

“The way the anima initially manifests in an individual man usually bears the stamp of his mother's character. If he experienced her in a negative way, then his anima often takes the form of depressive moods, irritability, perpetual malcontent, and excessive sensitivity. If the man is able to overcome these, precisely these things can strengthen his manliness. Such a negative mother anima will endlessly whisper within a man: "I'm a nothing," "It doesn't make sense anyhow," "It's different for other people," "Nothing * gives me any pleasure," and so on. Continual fear of disease, impotence, or accidents are her work, and she constellates a general sense of gloom. Troubled moods like these can intensify to the point of temptations to suicide; thus the anima can become a demoness of death. She appears in this role in Cocteau's film Orpheus.”

Marie-Louise von Franz (1915–1998) Swiss psychologist and scholar

Archetypal Dimensions of the Psyche (1994), The Anima as the Woman within the Man

Death, People, Pleasure, Fear

“I always like to write three versions of a book. The first is always agony and chaos; no one could understand it. With the second you get the shape, it's more or less all right. I write both of those in longhand. The third draft I type out with two fingers: it's for refining of meaning, additions and subtractions. I think my novels usually begin with characters; you have them floating about in your head and it may be years before they get together in a situation. Characters interest me more than situations.”

Patrick White (1912–1990) English-born Australian writer

In The Making (1970)

Books, Understanding, Thinking

“In one sense 'there are' both universals and material objects, in another sense there is no such thing as either: statements about each can usually be analysed, but not always, nor always without remainder.”

J. L. Austin (1911–1960) English philosopher

Source: Philosophical Papers (1979), p. 43.

Sense, Universe

“…the jeaned and rucksacked young I see on Continental trains or thumbing rides on motorways are not in search of the exotic. They are seeking confirmation that their own kind exists everywhere and denies the racial and cultural variety that used to be one of the joys of the world. If they want the exotic at all it is in the form of what they know well in their own lands through regular, though usually illegal, importation….”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Non-Fiction, Homage to QWERT YUIOP: Selected Journalism 1978-1985 (1986)

World, Search, Joy, Training

“The tendency was to sell families as units, if for no other reason [than] to keep the slaves contented. The gangs in transit were usually a cheerful lot, though the presence of a number of the more vicious type sometimes made it necessary for them all to go in chains. At the other extreme, when the Central of Georgia railroad company in 1858 equipped a Negro sleeping car to assist in the slave trade it set a standard not always maintained in a later generation. When on the block, the slave was as likely to hinder as to help in his sale. Some, out of a vain conceit in bringing a high price, would boast of their physical prowess, in which case an unwary purchaser would likely be cheated. Others would malinger, because of a grudge against owners or traders or in order to bring a low price and be put at less tiring labor. Dealers, also, adopted the tricks of horse traders to make their merchants more attractive -- the greasiest Negro was generally considered the healthiest.”

W. Cleon Skousen (1913–2006) ex FBI agent, conservative United States author and faith-based political theorist

The Making of America (1986)

Family, Cars, Sleep, Help

“I think there's a side of me that's trying to compete with Lucas and Spielberg — I don't usually admit this publicly — because I tend to think that they only go so far, and their view of the world is rather simplistic. What I want to do is take whatever cinema is considered normal or successful at a particular time and play around with it — to use it as a way of luring audiences in.”

Terry Gilliam (1940) American-born British screenwriter, film director, animator, actor and member of the Monty Python comedy troupe

IMDB profile http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000416/bio#quotes

World, Way, Thinking, Time

“If our binoculars search for our partner’s best intent, it will usually be found.”

Warren Farrell (1943) author, spokesperson, expert witness, political candidate

Source: Women Can't Hear What Men Don't Say (2000), p. 32.

“For physical fitness is not only one of the most important keys to a healthy body; it is the basis of dynamic and creative intellectual activity. The relationship between the soundness of the body and the activities of the mind is subtle and complex. Much is not yet understood. But we do know what the Greeks knew: that intelligence and skill can only function at the peak of their capacity when the body is healthy and strong; that hardy spirits and tough minds usually inhabit sound bodies.”

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

1960, Sport at the New Frontier: The Soft American

Intelligence, Strong

“I update negatively on people who mislead (including expressing great confidence while being wrong, and especially including avoidable mischaracterizations of others' views); people who do tangible damage (usually by misleading); and people who create little of value despite large amounts of opportunity and time investment.”

Holden Karnofsky (1981) American nonprofit executive

In "Some Thoughts on Public Discourse" http://effective-altruism.com/ea/17o/some_thoughts_on_public_discourse/, February 2017

People, Confidence, Time

“Forty years ago, when Dylan Thomas read, he spent half the program reciting other poets' work. Hardly a self-effacing man, he was nevertheless humble before his art. Today most readings are celebrations less of poetry than of the author's ego. No wonder the audience for such events usually consists entirely of poets, would-be poets, and friends of the author.”

Dana Gioia (1950) American writer

Essays, Can Poetry Matter? (1991)

Art, Reading

“Contemporary art -- the field we are usually working in because there's money -- is mostly concerned with systems or systematic concepts. In the context of their work, artists adapt models of individual art-specific or economic or political systems like in a laboratory, to reveal the true nature of these systems by deconstructing them. So would it be fair to say that by their chameleon-like adaptation they are attempting to generate a similar system? Well… the corporate change in the art market has aged somewhat in the meantime and looks almost as old as the 'New Economy'. Now even the last snotty brat has realized that all the hogwash about the creative industries, sponsoring, fund-raising, the whole load of bullshit about the beautiful new art enterprises, was not much more than the awful veneer on the stupid, crass fanfare of neo-liberal liberation teleology. What is the truth behind the shifting spheres of activity between computer graphics, web design and the rest of all those frequency-orientated nerd pursuits? A lonely business with other lonely people at their terminals. And in the meantime the other part of the corporate identity has incidentally wasted whole countries like Argentina or Iceland. That's the real truth of the matter.”

Johannes Grenzfurthner (1975) Austrian artist, writer, curator, and theatre and film director

Interview on Furtherfield http://www.furtherfield.org/interviews/interview-johannes-grenzfurthner-monochrom-part-1

Money, People, Truth, Age

“[another part / version of Whistler's lecture:]
Nature contains the elements, in colour and form, of all pictures, as the keyboard contains the notes of all music. But the artist is born to pick, and choose, and group with science, these elements, that the result may be beautiful—as the musician gathers his notes, and forms his chords, until he bring forth from chaos glorious harmony. To say to the painter, that Nature is to be taken as she is, is to say to the player, that he may sit on the piano. That Nature is always right, is an assertion, artistically, as untrue, as it is one whose truth is universally taken for granted. Nature is very rarely right, to such an extent even, that it might almost be said that Nature is usually wrong: that is to say, the condition of things that shall bring about the perfection of harmony worthy a picture is rare, and not common at all.”

James McNeill Whistler (1834–1903) American-born, British-based artist

1870 - 1903, his lecture 'Ten O'Clock' (1885)
Source: James McNeill Whistler (1834–1903), Weinberg, H. Barbara, 'Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History'. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/whis/hd_whis.htm (April 2010)

Truth, Beauty, Music, Nature

“I'm of the opinion that anyone--even strangers--can sense the urgency of a request, and most people will usually do the right thing. … But when that didn't work, I offered to pay them.”

Nicholas Sparks (1965) American writer and novelist

Jeremy Marsh, Chapter 14, p. 218
2000s, True Believer (2005)

People, Sense

“I didn't become rich, but I was usually comfortable. That is a social disease, the symptom of which is the ability to ignore it while your society develops weeping pustules and has its brains eaten out by radioactive maggots.”

John Varley (1947) American science fiction author

"The Persistence of Vision"

Disease

“It is often said that in prosperity we have many friends, but that we are usually neglected when things go badly. I disagree. Not only do malicious people flock about us in order to witness our ruin, but other unfortunates as well, who have been kept away by our happiness, and now feel close to us on account of our troubles. When Shelley was poor and unknown, he had more friends than the triumphant Lord Byron. It takes great nobility of soul to be able, without any taint of self-interest, to be friends with fortunate people.”

André Maurois (1885–1967) French writer

Un Art de Vivre (The Art of Living) (1939), The Art of Friendship

Happiness, People, Feeling, Soul

“I curse in everyday life, but usually when I stub my toe. The topics I'm discussing, it's not necessary to curse. I found [cursing] is a sign that a joke is not finished or well-written.”

Jim Gaffigan (1966) comedian, actor, author

Michael McIntyre (February 9, 2007) "He's bringing home the bacon, from clubs to Super Bowl ads", The Plain Dealer, p. 30.

Life

“A multi-colored crowd streaked about,
and suddenly all was totally changed.
It wasn't the usual city racket.
It came from a strange land.”

Anna Akhmatova (1889–1966) Russian modernist poet

"The First Long Range Artillery Fire On Leningrad," translation by Daniela Gioseffi (1993) http://users.tellurian.net/wisewomensweb/OnPrgudc.html

Color, Change

“When governments and other vested interests attack me personally I usually regard it as a vindication, otherwise they would use facts. That's why I believe in the wonderful Claud Cockburn dictum, 'Never believe anything until it is officially denied.”

John Pilger (1939) Australian journalist

It has certainly been my experience. John Pilger, This much i know http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2005/nov/13/pressandpublishing.observermagazine, The Observer, 13 November 2005

Personality

“There is another and very important ground for standardization and that is the desirability of having parts interchangeable. Standards of exchange have long been in general use, and these have, most usually, been fixed with a view to convenient use rather than on a scientific basis. The units of weight and measure are examples of this form of standard. They may not even be the most logical, or most convenient, but once established they can, in general, be changed only by slow degrees, if at all.”

Dexter S. Kimball (1865–1952) American engineer

Source: Principles of industrial organization, 1913, p. 42

Change, Parting

“According to a stagist conception of progressive history (which is usually blind to its implicit teleology), the work of figures like Foucault, Derrida and other cutting-edge French theorists is often intuitively affiliated with a form of profound and sophisticated critique that presumably far surpasses anything found in the socialist, Marxist or anarchist traditions. It is certainly true and merits emphasis that the Anglophone reception of French theory, as John McCumber has aptly pointed out, had important political implications as a pole of resistance to the false political neutrality, the safe technicalities of logic and language, or the direct ideological conformism operative in the McCarthy-supported traditions of Anglo-American philosophy. However, the theoretical practices of figures who turned their back on what Cornelius Castoriadis called the tradition of radical critique—meaning anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist resistance—surely contributed to the ideological drift away from transformative politics. According to the spy agency itself, post-Marxist French theory directly contributed to the CIA’s cultural program of coaxing the left toward the right, while discrediting anti-imperialism and anti-capitalism, thereby creating an intellectual environment in which their imperial projects could be pursued unhindered by serious critical scrutiny from the intelligentsia.”

Gabriel Rockhill (1972) philosopher

"The CIA reads French Theory: On the Intellectual Labor of Dismantling the Cultural Left" (2017)

History, Support, Falseness

“When the economy is in a depression, scarcity ceases to rule. Productive resources sit idle, so that it is possible to have more of some things without having less of others; free lunches are all around. As a result, all the usual rules of economics are stood on their head; we enter a looking-glass world in which virtue is vice and prudence is folly. Thrift hurts our future prospects; sound money makes us poorer. Moreover, that's the kind of world we have been living in for the past several years, which means that it is a kind of world that students should understand. […] Depression economics is marked by paradoxes, in which seemingly virtuous actions have perverse, harmful effects. Two paradoxes in particular stand out: the paradox of thrift, in which the attempt to save more actually leads to the nation as a whole saving less, and the less-well-known paradox of flexibility, in which the willingness of workers to protect their jobs by accepting lower wages actually reduces total employment. […] In times of depression, the rules are different. Conventionally sound policy – balanced budgets, a firm commitment to price stability – helps to keep the economy depressed. Once again, this is not normal. Most of the time we are not in a depression. But sometimes we are – and 2013, when this chapter was written, was one of those times.”

Paul Krugman (1953) American economist

“Depressions are Different”, in Robert M. Solow, ed. Economics for the Curious: Inside the Minds of 12 Nobel Laureates. 2014.

Money, World, Understanding, Time

“Humour very often consists of shrewd perceptions about people. It's usually fun at someone's expense. Nowadays if you're funny at anybody's expense they run to the UN and say, "I must have an ombudsman to protect me." You hardly dare have a shrewd perception about anybody.”

Robertson Davies book World of Wonders

"World of Wonders".
Conversations with Robertson Davies (1989)

People

“If this just degenerates after a historic election, back into the usual bologna of politics in Washington and pettiness in Washington, then the American people I believe will move towards a third party in a massive way.”

Newt Gingrich (1943) Professor, Speaker of the United States House of Representatives

In appearance on CBS News http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ImvI-G5gA9g (11 November 1994) 1990s

People, Way

“When I think about the kinds of movies that make me cry, that make tears come to my eyes, I usually don't think about sad films. Sad films, I sort of just look at it. It's movies that are about selflessness, that are about sacrifice, about humans that believe in the good of the human race that sometimes move me.”

Roger Ebert (1942–2013) American film critic, author, journalist, and TV presenter

Roger Ebert's DVD commentary for Casablanca

Sadness, Thinking, Tear, Cry

“The awareness of their individual blemishes and shortcomings inclines the frustrated to detect ill will and meanness in their fellow men. Self-contempt, however vague, sharpens our eyes for the imperfections of others. We usually strive to reveal in others the blemishes we hide in ourselves.”

Eric Hoffer book The True Believer

Section 100
The True Believer (1951), Part Three: United Action and Self-Sacrifice

Men

“My idea of painting was that those yellow squares, being put on the wall as delineating a virtual square or rectangle, were involving the wall itself within the piece and, in this sense, compared to what is usually a work of art, a painting, this piece was somehow reversing the usual terms of the esthetic proposition. Usually, you see the painting and you ignore the wall. Here you had the wall coming through the painting — and the painting itself, the painted pieces, become a standpoint to make the wall appear.”

Robert Barry (1936) American artist

Robert Barry (1980) in: Alexander Alberro (2003). Conceptual Art and the Politics of Publicity. Alberro noted: "Barry has since discussed the way in which this painting accented the structural support..."

Art, Idea, Sense, Appearance

“The artificial intelligence approach may not be altogether the right one to make to the problem of designing automatic assembly devices. Animals and machines are constructed from entirely different materials and on quite different principles. When engineers have tried to draw inspiration from a study of the way animals work they have usually been misled; the history of early attempts to construct flying machines with flapping wings illustrates this very clearly.”

Maurice Wilkes (1913–2010) British computer scientist

Sect. 4: Design and Assembly
"Computers Then and Now" (1968)

Way, History, Intelligence, Problem

“Westerns. A period gone by, the pioneer, the loner operating by himself, without benefit of society. It usually has something to do with some sort of vengeance; he takes care of the vengeance himself, doesn't call the police. Like Robin Hood. It's the last masculine frontier. Romantic myth. I guess, though it's hard to think about anything romantic today. In a Western you can think, Jesus, there was a time when man was alone, on horseback, out there where man hasn't spoiled the land yet.”

Clint Eastwood (1930) actor and director from the United States

Source: Clint: The Life and Legend (1999), p. 217.

Thinking, Time

“The point of Buddhist meditation is not to stop thinking, for … cultivation of insight clearly requires intelligent use of thought and discrimination. What needs to be stopped is conceptualisation that is compulsive, mechanical and unintelligent, that is, activity that is always fatiguing, usually pointless, and at times seriously harmful.”

B. Alan Wallace (1950) American author, translator, teacher, researcher, interpreter, and Buddhist practitioner

Tibetan Buddhism from the Ground up, Wisdom (1993).

Intelligence, Thinking, Time

“Business as usual is over. And I think what I mean by that is that you know, the President-elect looks at this and says what’s best for the country? How do we put America and Americans first and stop trying to figure out how we cater to you know, pundits and the establishment class, big donors. He is putting Americans first and foremost. And when he talks about Americans first, he means I don’t care what a bunch of elites tell me or people at a dinner party. He wants to know what American workers care about, what American families care about, what’s going to help American businesses grow.”

Sean Spicer (1971) American political strategist and former White House Press Secretary and Communications Director for President…

Incoming Trump Press Secretary Sean Spicer on the Media: ‘Business as Usual Is Over’ http://www.breitbart.com/video/2016/12/29/incoming-trump-press-secretary-sean-spicer-on-the-media-business-as-usual-is-over/ (December 29, 2016)

People, Family, Business, Thinking

“By them saying I should fall in line is an insult. I'm not asking for an invitation. I think they should get behind me, not fall in line like sheep. They're so paranoid, it makes me think they have weak candidates and they're afraid. The more they attack, the more they show their hand, and I mean that across party lines. It's not politics as usual. We're running a different campaign, and they're scared to death.”

Scott Ashjian (1963) American businessman

[Jourdan, Kristi, Tea Party activists say candidate uninvited, Las Vegas Review-Journal, 1B, March 18, 2010]

Death, Thinking

“In conceptual art the idea or the concept is the most important aspect of the work. When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art. This kind of art is not theoretical or illustrative of theories; it is intuitive; it is involved with all types of mental processes and it is purposeless. It is usually free from the dependence on the skill of the artist as a craftsman.”

Sol LeWitt (1928–2007) American artist

Source: Quotes of Sol Lewitt, "Paragraphs on Conceptual Art," 1967, p. 80. Cited in: Diane Waldman. Carl Andre https://archive.org/stream/carlandre00wald#page/7/mode/1up. Published 1970 by Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. p. 7

Art, Idea, Decision, Dependency

“I don't think there was anything in my brain right then except the usual background static -- the kind you get on your radio when it's turned up all the way and tuned to no station at all. My brain had checked to the power, so to speak; the little guy wearing the Napoleon hat inside was showing aces and betting them.”

Stephen King book Rage

Rage (1977)

Way, Guy, Thinking

“Bad luck is usually transmitted by close proximity to habitual sufferers.”

Irvine Welsh book The Acid House

The narrator talking about Ange after they are released from prison.
"Stoke Newington Blues".
The Acid House (1994)

Bad luck, Suffering

“Bankers grovelled before the governments they usually revile, like wispy poets whining for grant money. They got billions in bailouts, yet somehow the financial sector still inspires more trust and respect than the government that saved it from itself.”

Laura Penny (1975) Canadian journalist

Source: More Money than Brains (2010), Chapter Five, Bully vs. Nerd, p. 168

Money

“Success usually comes to those who are too busy to be looking for it.”

Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) 1817-1862 American poet, essayist, naturalist, and abolitionist

No known citation to Thoreau's works. First found, uncredited, in the 1940s in the variant "Success usually comes to those who are too busy to look for it", p. 711, Locomotive Engineers Journal, Volume 76, 1942. Google Books http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=N6GZAAAAIAAJ&q=%22Success+usually+comes+to+those+who+are+too+busy%22&dq=%22Success+usually+comes+to+those+who+are+too+busy%22&lr=&as_drrb_is=b&as_minm_is=0&as_miny_is=1900&as_maxm_is=0&as_maxy_is=1980&as_brr=0 Misattributed

Business, Success, Motivational, Success

“Aspiring dictators sometimes win elections, and elected leaders sometimes govern badly and threaten their neighbors. … History demonstrates that democracy usually follows good governance, not the reverse.”

Rudy Giuliani (1944–2001) American businessperson and politician, former mayor of New York City

As quoted in " "Giuliani: Too much stress on two-state plan" at Jewish Telegraph Agency (15 August 2007) http://www.jta.org/cgi-bin/iowa/breaking/103642.html

Democracy, History

“Don't you retards think before you click "Send" that maybe someone on the other end is actually going to read your stupid, malformed emails some day? It's almost like there's a record full of incomprehensible bullshit playing in your mind 24/7, and you put the needle down randomly and whatever it picks up, you just type it up in an email and shoot it off to me, usually mid-sentence.”

Maddox (1978) American internet writer

I am a genius, you are not. http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=your_stupid_ideas The Best Page in the Universe

Stupidity, Thinking, Reading

“I’m your apprentice!” Simon protested. “When are you going to teach me something?”
“Idiot boy! What do you think I’m doing? I’m trying to teach you to read and to write. That’s the most important thing. What do you want to learn?”
“Magic!” Simon said immediately. Morgenes stared at him.
“And what about reading…?” the doctor asked ominously.
Simon was cross. As usual, people seemed determined to balk him at every turn. “I don’t know,” he said. What’s so important about reading and letters, anyway? Books are just stories about things. Why should I want to read books?”
Morgenes grinned, an old stoat finding a hole in the henyard fence. “Ah, boy, how can I be mad at you…what a wonderful, charming, perfectly stupid thing to say!” The doctor chuckled appreciatively, deep in his throat.
“What do you mean?” Simon’s eyebrows moved together as he frowned. “Why is it wonderful and stupid?”
“Wonderful because I have such a wonderful answer,” Morgenes laughed. Stupid because…because young people are made stupid, I suppose—as tortoises are made with shells, and wasps with stings—it is their protection against life’s unkindnesses.”
“Begging your pardon?” Simon was totally flummoxed now.
“Books,” Morgenes said grandly, leaning back on his precarious stool, “—books are magic. That is the simple answer. And books are traps as well.”
“Magic? Traps?”
“Books are a form of magic—” the doctor lifted the volume he had just laid on the stack, “—because they span time and distance more surely than any spell or charm. What did so-and-so think about such-and-such two hundred years agone? Can you fly back through the ages and ask him? No—or at least, probably not.
But, ah! If he wrote down his thoughts, if somewhere there exists a scroll, or a book of his logical discourses…he speaks to you! Across centuries! And if you wish to visit far Nascadu or lost Khandia, you have also but to open a book….”
“Yes, yes, I suppose I understand all that.” Simon did not try to hide his disappointment. This was not what he had meant by the word “magic.” “What about traps, then? Why ‘traps’?”

Tad Williams (1957) novelist

Morgenes leaned forward, waggling the leather-bound volume under Simon’s nose. “A piece of writing is a trap,” he said cheerily, “and the best kind. A book, you see, is the only kind of trap that keeps its captive—which is knowledge—alive forever. The more books you have,” the doctor waved an all-encompassing hand about the room, “the more traps, then the better chance of capturing some particular, elusive, shining beast—one that might otherwise die unseen.”
Source: Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn, The Dragonbone Chair (1988), Chapter 7, “The Conqueror Star” (pp. 92-93).

Life, People, Books, Age

“It is the usual though inequitable method of the world, to pronounce an action to be either right or wrong, as it is attended with good or ill success.”
Est omnino iniquum, sed usu receptum, quod honesta consilia vel turpia, prout male aut prospere cedunt, ita vel probantur vel reprehenduntur.

Pliny the Younger (61–113) Roman writer

Letter 9, 7.
Letters, Book V

World, Success

“The preliminary outward movement of thought—holism—is everybit as necessary as the inward, atomizing one and in any investigation it usually needs to come first.”

Mary Midgley (1919–2018) British philosopher and ethicist

Are You an Illusion (2014). 30.

“Another good touch. What do we charge for a regular martini?”
“Ninty-five cents—ninety-eight cents with tax.
What's it do to the tips?”
Builds them. There aren’t as many dimes and nickels around, so they usually leave two-bits. The two cents' change is a sting to conscience.””

Ross Thomas (1926–1995) 1926-1995 American writer

Cast a Yellow Shadow (1967)

Change

“Very shortly the temple was once again a wonder of the world, and the Ephesian Church settled down to a long reign marked only by the usual bitter quarrels, heresies, and internal dissent through which all major faiths struggle.
Any religion begins in a moment of transforming truth. That moment quickly shatters into falsehood and shame and stagecraft, bitter comedy, sometimes murder. Thieves catch hold of any chance for power. The early years of a faith are best not too closely examined by its faithful.”

Kage Baker book The Life of the World to Come

Source: The Life of the World to Come (2004), Chapter 12, “Alec Solves a Mystery” (p. 201)

Truth, World, Faith, Religion

“Shamed, dishonored, wading in blood and dripping with filth, thus capitalist society stands. Not as we usually see it, playing the roles of peace and righteousness, of order, of philosophy, of ethics - as a roaring beast, as an orgy of anarchy, as a pestilential breath, devastating culture and humanity - so it appears in all its hideous nakedness.”

Rosa Luxemburg (1871–1919) Polish Marxist theorist, socialist philosopher, and revolutionary

Source: The Junius Pamphlet (1915), Ch. 1, Rosa Luxemburg Speaks (1970), trns: Mary-Alice Waters

Peace, Appearance

“One of the common means by which one nation exploits another and one that is relevant to Africa’s external relations is exploitation through trade. When the terms of trade are set by one country in a manner entirely advantageous to itself, then the trade is usually detrimental to the trading partner. To be specific, one can take the export of agricultural produce from Africa and the import of manufactured goods into Africa from Europe, North America, and Japan. The big nations establish the price of the agricultural products and subject these prices to frequent reductions. At the same time the price of manufactured goods is also set by them, along with the freight rates necessary for trade in the ships of those nations. The minerals of Africa also fall into the same category as agricultural produce as far as pricing is concerned. The whole import-export relationship between Africa and its trading partners is one of unequal exchange and of exploitation.”

Walter Rodney book How Europe Underdeveloped Africa

Source: How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972), p. 38.

Time, Country

“I usually let them [his drawings] lies around for a long time. I have to get to really like it. And then when I do the painting I have to get to like that too. Sometimes I stay with the sketch, sometimes I follow the original idea exactly if the idea is solved. But most of the time there have to be adjustments during the painting. Through the painting of it I find the color and I work the form and play with it and it adjusts itself.”

Ellsworth Kelly (1923–2015) American painter, sculptor, and printmaker

In an interview by Henry Geldzahler, 'Art International 1.', February 1964, p. 48
1950 - 1968

Color, Idea, Time, Drawing

“Her point of view about student work was that of a social worker teaching finger-painting to children or the insane.
I was impressed with how common such an attitude was at Benton: the faculty—insofar as they were real Benton faculty, and not just nomadic barbarians—reasoned with the students, “appreciated their point of view”, used Socratic methods on them, made allowances for them, kept looking into the oven to see if they were done; but there was one allowance they never under any circumstances made—that the students might be right about something, and they wrong. Education, to them, was a psychiatric process: the sign under which they conquered had embroidered at the bottom, in small letters, Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased?—and half of them gave it its Babu paraphrase of Can you wait upon a lunatic? One expected them to refer to former students as psychonanalysts do: “Oh, she’s an old analysand of mine.” They felt that the mind was a delicate plant which, carefully nurtured, judiciously left alone, must inevitably adopt for itself even the slightest of their own beliefs.
One Benton student, a girl noted for her beadth of reading and absence of coöperation, described things in a queer, exaggerated, plausible way. According to her, a professor at an ordinary school tells you “what’s so”, you admit that it is on examination, and what you really believe or come to believe has “that obscurity which is the privilege of young things”. But at Benton, where education was as democratic as in “that book about America by that French writer—de, de—you know the one I mean”; she meant de Tocqueville; there at Benton they wanted you really to believe everything they did, especially if they hadn’t told you what it was. You gave them the facts, the opinions of authorities, what you hoped was their own opinion; but they replied, “That’s not the point. What do you yourself really believe?” If it wasn’t what your professors believed, you and they could go on searching for your real belief forever—unless you stumbled at last upon that primal scene which is, by definition, at the root of anything….
When she said primal scene there was so much youth and knowledge in her face, so much of our first joy in created things, that I could not think of Benton for thinking of life. I suppose she was right: it is as hard to satisfy our elders’ demands of Independence as of Dependence. Harder: how much more complicated and indefinite a rationalization the first usually is!—and in both cases, it is their demands that must be satisfied, not our own. The faculty of Benton had for their students great expectations, and the students shook, sometimes gave, beneath the weight of them. If the intellectual demands were not so great as they might have been, the emotional demands made up for it. Many a girl, about to deliver to one of her teachers a final report on a year’s not-quite-completed project, had wanted to cry out like a child, “Whip me, whip me, Mother, just don’t be Reasonable!””

Randall Jarrell book Pictures from an Institution

Source: Pictures from an Institution (1954) [novel], Chapter 3, pp. 81–83

Life, Children, Books, Youth

“I fly to Luxembourg on Berlusconi's usual twin engine, who accompanies us, glad to exhibit himself and exhibit his status in an international ceremony. The gold medal (but is it really gold?) is given to me by Gaston Thorn, head of the Luxembourg government. Berlusconi fills his notebook with addresses: of all the V. I. P.'s that he has met. He's a true climber that takes advantage of everything and throws nothing away.”

Indro Montanelli (1909–2001) Italian journalist

Luxembourg, 23 may, from accounts with myself. [citation needed]
2000s - 2010s

Flying

“The mere management of arms, though essentially requisite, was not sufficient of itself to form an accomplished knight in the times of chivalry; it was necessary for him to be endowed with beauty, as well as with strength and agility of body; he ought to be skilled in music, to dance gracefully, to run with swiftness, to excel in wrestling, to ride well, and to perform every other exercise befitting his situation. To these were to be added urbanity of manners, strict adherence to the truth, and invincible courage. Hunting and hawking skilfully were also acquirements that he was obliged to possess, and which were usually taught him as soon as he was able to endure the fatigue that they required.”

Joseph Strutt (1749–1802) British engraver, artist, antiquary and writer

pg. xxiv
The Sports and Pastimes of the People of England (1801), Chivalry

Truth, Beauty, Music, Exercises

“[T]he psychic and physical characteristics of human beings, and the differences between individuals, are the consequence of an interaction between the genes that are present in the fertilized egg and the sequence of environmental circumstances that the developing organism experiences during its entire life history. With a few exceptions, like cystic fibrosis where possession of the defective genotype leads ineluctably to the disease, or language acquisition where the language spoken depends only on experience and not at all on genotype, human characteristics are all subject to this interaction of forces. There are, moreover, random events in cell growth and differentiation that are neither genetic nor environmental in the usual sense, and which play an extremely important part in development, especially in behavioral traits.”

Richard C. Lewontin (1929) American evolutionary biologist

Genes and Sexuality: An Exchange (1995)

Life, Disease, Behavior, History

“If we're going to consider failure to comply with UN directives a good reason for wrecking a country with cruise missiles, hey, I can think of a country in the Middle East which is in violation of a lot more UN directives than Iraq is. Israel has consistently thumbed its nose at UN directives, and no one in Washington has ever told Israel, "Comply or get hit." Let's understand one fundamental fact. This crusade against Iraq isn't about the United Nations or international security or stopping the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. It's about making the Middle East safe for Israel to continue bullying its neighbors and stealing from them. Every other explanation is lies and hypocrisy. And we really can expect a bigger dose of lies and hypocrisy than usual as the warmongers work to get this war against Iraq started. The media bosses will trot more generals and politicians in front of the TV cameras and have them bluster patriotically about how we're not going to let Saddam Hussein get away with it any longer, by god, and they'll show groups of military personnel cheering when they're told that they're being shipped out to the Persian Gulf to kick Saddam Hussein's behind and keep him from getting away with whatever it is he's getting away with, which mainly seems to be running his country the way he wants to instead of the way the United Nations tells him. They will work overtime at convincing the couch potatoes and the mindless yahoos who like to wave flags and shout patriotic slogans that destroying Iraq really is an act of American patriotism. And as long as the number of Americans killed in a Jewish war against Iraq remains small, the flag-waving yahoos and the bought politicians ought to be able to drown out any dissent from Americans like me who believe that we don't have any reasonable justification for waging such a war. And keeping casualties small ought to be easy, so long as it remains strictly a high-tech war, with us launching missiles against defenseless targets from many miles away. Of course, sometimes wars get out of hand, and unexpected things happen. If the Jews manage to get Iran involved in the war also -- and that's what they really want to do, what they really need to do -- then I think we stand a pretty good chance of seeing some major terrorist activity in the United States. I know that if I were Osama bin Laden, I'd have been spending my time getting ready for just such a development ever since Bill Clinton blew up that pharmaceutical factory in Sudan. I'd be putting my teams into place in the United States, assembling materials, choosing targets, and waiting for the Jews to provide justification for me to begin killing Americans on a significant scale. Of course, whether Osama bin Laden is as resourceful and as capable as he's said to be remains to be seen. Personally, I have very little faith in the ability of these flea-bitten Muslims to get things done. But we'll see.”

William Luther Pierce (1933–2002) American white nationalist

Why War? (November 21, 1998) http://web.archive.org/web/20070324011124/http://www.natvan.com/pub/1998/112198.txt, American Dissident Voices Broadcast of November 21, 1998 http://archive.org/details/DrWilliamPierceAudioArchive308RadioBroadcasts. 1990s, 1990

God, War, Faith, Way

“For the truth is that our doctrines are usually only the justification a posteriori of our conduct, or else they are our way of trying to explain that conduct to ourselves.”

Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936) 19th-20th century Spanish writer and philosopher

The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), VI : In the Depths of the Abyss

Truth, Way

“The physicist needs a facility in looking at problems from several points of view. The exact analysis of real physical problems is usually quite complicated, and any particular physical situation may be too complicated to analyze directly by solving the differential equation. But one can still get a very good idea of the behavior of a system if one has some feel for the character of the solution in different circumstances. Ideas such as the field lines, capacitance, resistance, and inductance are, for such purposes, very useful. … On the other hand, none of the heuristic models, such as field lines, is really adequate and accurate for all situations. There is only one precise way of presenting the laws, and that is by means of differential equations. They have the advantage of being fundamental and, so far as we know, precise. If you have learned the differential equations you can always go back to them. There is nothing to unlearn.”

Richard Feynman (1918–1988) American theoretical physicist

volume II; lecture 2, "Differential Calculus of Vector Fields"; section 2-1, "Understanding physics"; p. 2-1
The Feynman Lectures on Physics (1964)

Law, Way, Behavior, Feeling

“…and it's a story that might bore you but you don't have to listen, she told me, because she always knew it was going to be like that, and it was, she thinks, her first year, or actually weekend, really a Friday, in September, at Camden, and this was three or four years ago, and she got so drunk that she ended up in bed, lost her virginity (late, she was eighteen) in Lorna Slavin's room, because she was a Freshman and had a roommate and Lorna was, she remembers, a Senior or Junior and usually somestimes at her boyfriend's place off-campus, to who she thought was a Sophomore Ceramics major but who was actually either some guy from N. Y. U., a film student, and up in New Hampshire just for The Dressed to Get Screwed party, or a townie.”

Bret Easton Ellis The Rules of Attraction

The Rules of Attraction (1987)

Guy, Thinking

“I usually work in a direction until I know how to do it, then I stop. At the time that I am bored or understand — I use those words interchangeably — another appetite has formed.”

Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008) American artist

Quoted in: Wendy Richmond (2009), Art Without Compromise, p. 136
21st Century

Understanding, Time

“I wrote, after an early rejection, "X turned down Wrinkle, turned it down with one hand while saying that he loved it, but didn't quite dare to do it, as it really isn't classifiable. I know it isn't really classifiable, and am wondering if i'll have to go through the usual hell with this that I seem to go through with everything I write. But this book I'm sure of. If I've ever written a book that says how I feel about God and the universe, this is it. This is my psalm of praise…”

Madeleine L'Engle (1918–2007) American writer

Section 4.10
The Crosswicks Journal, A Circle of Quiet (1972)

Love, God, Books, Feeling

“Well, method is, it seems to me, a natural growth out of a need, and from a need the modern artist has found new ways of expressing the world about him. I happen to find ways that are different from the usual techniques, which seems a little strange at the moment, but I don't think there's anything very different about it. I paint on the floor and this isn't unusual – the Orientals did that.”

Jackson Pollock (1912–1956) American artist

Source: 1950's, Interview by William Wright, Summer 1950, pp. 142-143

World, Way, Nature, Thinking

“"There is no outside-text." It is usually mistranslated as "There is nothing outside the text" by his opponents to make it appear that Derrida is claiming nothing exists beyond language (see Searle–Derrida debate). In French, that mistranslated phrase would actually read "Il n'y a rien en dehors du texte."”

Jacques Derrida book Specters of Marx

il n'y a pas de hors-texte
"This question is therefore not only of Rousseau's writing but also of our reading. ...the writer writes in a language and in a logic whose proper system, laws, and life his discourse by definition cannot dominate absolutely. ...reading... cannot legitimately transgress the text toward something other than it... . There is nothing outside of the text [there is no outside-text; il n'y a pas de hors-texte]."
Specters of Marx (1993), 1960s

Appearance, Reading

“I wasn’t that passionate about it [the radical counterculture]. I agreed with it, but at the political demonstrations I would get very nervous when people started chanting in unison. I didn’t like that. I usually disliked those smash-the-state kind of guys, even though I agreed politically with them. I took LSD, I said “groovy” and “far-out,” but I was kind of a detached observer.”

Robert Crumb (1943) American cartoonist

"R. Crumb, The Art of Comics No. 1" http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6017/the-art-of-comics-no-1-r-crumb, The Paris Review, Summer 2010, No. 193.

People, Guy, Passion

“If, doubting God's words, you believe this Grant to be false, it will indeed be false. Yet, if you truly believe that you have received this Grant from the Parent and do just as God says, you will be blessed, regardless of whether there is usually good or bad in your mind. The bad will appear elsewhere. In the case of childbirth, you will be blessed with a rapid and easy delivery if you just discard doubt from your mind and follow the teachings of God. But if you harbor doubt and fear, even though there be no wrongdoing in your mind, then the wheel of fear will be set in motion and your fears will be borne out.”

Nakayama Miki (1798–1887) Founder of Tenrikyo

From Yoshikazu Nakayama's biography of Miki, My Oyasama, vol. 2, p. 40–1.
My Oyasama

God, Fear, Parent, Appearance

“The concepts of purposive behavior and teleology have long been associated with a mysterious, self-perfecting or goal-seeking capacity or final cause, usually of superhuman or super-natural origin. To move forward to the study of events, scientific thinking had to reject these beliefs in purpose and these concepts of teleological operations for a strictly mechanistic and deterministic view of nature. This mechanistic conception became firmly established with the demonstration that the universe was based on the operation of anonymous particles moving at random, in a disorderly fashion, giving rise, by their multiplicity, to order and regularity of a statistical nature, as in classical physics and gas laws. The unchallenged success of these concepts and methods in physics and astronomy, and later in chemistry, gave biology and physiology their major orientation. This approach to problems of organisms was reinforced by the analytical preoccupation of the Western European culture and languages. The basic assumptions of our traditions and the persistent implications of the language we use almost compel us to approach everything we study as composed of separate, discrete parts or factors which we must try to isolate and identify as potential causes. Hence, we derive our preoccupation with the study of the relation of two variables. We are witnessing today a search for new approaches, for new and more comprehensive concepts and for methods capable of dealing with the large wholes of organisms and personalities.”

Lawrence K. Frank (1890–1968) American cyberneticist

L.K. Frank (1948) "Foreword". In L. K. Frank, G. E. Hutchinson, W. K. Livingston, W. S. McCulloch, & N. Wiener, Teleological mechanisms. Ann. N. Y. Acad. Sc., 1948, 50, 189-96; As cited in: Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1968) "General System Theory: Foundations, Development, Applications". p. 16-17

Law, Behavior, Search, Fashion

“.. when making a painting after a study, it costs me a lot of effort to follow this study very well. One is very much inclined to make something different, so-called better, and that's why people usually get confused. A good outdoor-study has a breath of nature in it which must not be neglected or destroyed. You have to get everything out of that study and not just a third or half. If you can really improve one or the other: a la bonheur, but otherwise it is advisable to follow the study obediently as a guide.”

Willem Roelofs (1822–1897) Dutch painter and entomologist (1822-1897)

translation from original Dutch: Fons Heijnsbroek (original Dutch: citaat van Willem Roelofs, in het Nederlands:) ..groote moeite kost het [me om] bij het maken van een schilderij naar een studie, deze werkelijk goed te volgen. Men is maar al te zeer geneigd, er iets anders, zoogenaamd iets beters, van te maken, en daardoor geraakt men meestal juist van de wijs. Een goede buiten-studie heeft een adem der natuur in zich, dien men niet mag verwaarloozen of vernietigen. Men moet uit zo'n studie alles halen, wat er in zit en niet een derde of de helft. Kan men waarlijk het een of ander verbeteren, a la bonheur, maar anders is het raadzaam, de studie gehoorzaam te volgen als gids. Quote of Roelofs; recorded and cited by his student nl:Frans Smissaert in 1891, as quoted in Zó Hollands - Het Hollandse landschap in de Nederlandse kunst sinds 1850, Antoon Erftemeijer https://www.franshalsmuseum.nl/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/zohollands_eindversie_def_1.pdf; Frans Hals museum | De Hallen, Haarlem 2011, p. 16 undated quotes

People, Nature, Effort, Study

“Political conservatives have focused on tax reduction as an economic growth strategy for three reasons. First it is self-serving; it saves rich people lots of money. Second, it comports with their ideological allegiance to laissez-faire economics. And third, tax incentives are less intrusive to business-as-usual than any other form of government planning.”

Robert Kuttner (1943) American journalist

Source: The Economic Illusion (1984), Chapter 5, Taxes, p. 227

Money, People, Business

“"[…] is being "whipped like a government mule!" (usually said when someone is taking a beating)”

Jim Ross (1952) American professional wrestling commentator, professional wrestling referee, and restaurateur

Commentary Quotes

“The term "meaning" is not here included among the basic terms of semiotic. This term, useful enough at the level of everyday analysis, does not have the precision necessary for scientific analysis. Accounts of meaning usually throw a handful of putty at the target of sign phenomena, while a technical semiotic must provide us with words which are sharpened arrows. "Meaning" signifies any and all phases of sign-processes (the status of being a sign, the interpretant, the fact of denoting, the significatum), and frequently suggests mental and valuational processes as well; hence it is desirable for semiotic to dispense with the term and to introduce special terms for the various factors which meaning fails to discriminate.”

Charles W. Morris (1903–1979) American philosopher

Source: Signs, Language and Behavior, 1946, p. 19

“In Wing Chun we hit the larger part of the face, usually at an angle, so the butt of the chin is avoided. In Wing Chun, the main target area is from the mouth upward…”

Wong Shun Leung (1935–1997) martial artist

Wong Shun Leung Comments on Where to Hit on the Human Head Practical Fighting Concepts Source: Interview with Wong Shun Leung, by: Erle Montaigue http://www.vingtsunupdate.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=44&Itemid=77

Parting

“… the state of a really big system does not at all have to have the symmetry of the laws which govern it; in fact, it usually has less symmetry.”

Philip Warren Anderson (1923) American physicist

Source: More Is Different (1972), p. 395

Law

“Though I'm no expert on all things Pantera, I did hear their version of 'Cat Scratch Fever' and it was exceedingly white. No soul, no balls, no feel. Caucasian all the way. Elements of dope, booze and heroin disconnect quite apparent as usual. There is no excuse for such horrifically negative, irresponsible, criminal, America-wrecking behavior as such chimp-like substance abuse. Period. They appeared as Ozzy-like zombies on TV. Ya think. American drunks and dopers are allahpuke terrorists' favorite allies. Damn them. Damn them all.”

Ted Nugent (1948) American rock musician

Postings on Pantera (2006)

Way, Behavior, Feeling, Soul

“For people like us it is necessary to be a bit stronger, more self-critical, more observant than the usual run. Whether we happen to come already enhanced with these qualities, as some have claimed, or whether our situation invests them in us, we have traditionally - and we do have a long and proud tradition - been a little finer, a little firmer, more sensitive and flexible than others… There will be times when only your own spine can support you, moments when only your own wit can inspire you, days when nothing but exacting self-control can raise you from bed, nights when nothing but your word can impel you into society. But of all these disciplines, there is nothing you must hold to more sternly than to be kind and sympathetic. The easiest armor to put on is always cruelty. That armor will, indeed, see you through everything. Vicious condescension toward those without your strength can make you feel momentarily superior. But that easy armor must be forgone. Don't ever curdle that creamy brow with lines of easy disdain, or curl those lips with a popular sneer. Of all the models available, the one of gentleman in our late war is most succinct: Face what you have to face with humor, dignity, and style; protect yourself with knightly grace; have contempt for your own weakness and never encourage it in others; but never, Ralph, never for an instant permit yourself to feel anything other than pity and deepest sympathy for unfortunate comrades who have, after all, fallen in the same battle.”

Robert Patrick (playwright) (1937) Playwright, poet, lyricist, short story writer, novelist

One of Those People
Untold Decades: Seven Comedies of Gay Romance (1988)

War, People, Feeling, Support

“People who are just getting "seriously interested" in film always ask a critic, "Why don’t you talk about technique and 'the visuals' more?" The answer is that American movie technique is generally more like technology and it usually isn’t very interesting.”

Pauline Kael book Going Steady

Going Steady (1969), Trash, Art and the Movies (February 1969)

People

“A metaphysical thesis of a particular school is usually rejected by a rival school which puts forward a (directly or indirectly) contradictory thesis. Jainism says that the lesson to be drawn from such age-old philosophic disputes is the following: Each school asserts its thesis and claims it to be the absolute truth, and thus it does not really wish to understand the point that is being made by the opposite side. The rival schools, by their arguments and counter arguments, only encourage dogmatism and intoleration in philosophy, This, according to the Jainas, is the evil of ekanta one-sided philosophies. But the philosophic propositions of rival schools could be integrated together under the Anekanta system.”

Bimal Krishna Matilal (1935–1991) Indian philosopher

Central Philosophy of Jainism (1981), p. 2

Truth, Age, School, Understanding

“Specialization, as has been noted, is the confining of human activity to a limited field. In industrial work this means the limitation of an enterprise to a portion of the field and to the production of a limited line of products. But even when the line of products is limited, there are usually many types that are possible in that line and an infinite number of sizes of any one type. Thus suppose a manufacturer specializes in the manufacture of men's shoes. Here there is no limit to the types that may be produced and no limit to the number of sizes of any type since no two feet are exactly alike. Again a manufacturer may specialize on the production of motors between the sizes, say, of one-half horse-power and twenty horse-power. Here again many types are possible and an infinite number of sizes for each type. But it has been shown that one of the essentials of cheap production is quantity, and for a given total output the greatest number of each element entering into the product is secured when the numbers of types and sizes are a minimum.”

Dexter S. Kimball (1865–1952) American engineer

Source: Principles of industrial organization, 1913, p. 41-42

Men, Shoe, Horse

“He was usually easygoing, one of those guys with little respect for authority because of a conviction that people in charge tend to do stupid things.”

Jack McDevitt (1935) American novelist, Short story writer

Source: Academy Series - Priscilla "Hutch" Hutchins, Cauldron (2007), Chapter 36 (p. 322)

People, Stupidity, Guy

“There is usually enough of everything on the table except cream.”

E. W. Howe (1853–1937) Novelist, magazine and newspaper editor

Country Town Sayings (1911), p31.

“Reviewers are usually people who would have been poets, historians, biographers, etc., if they could; they have tried their talents at one or the other, and have failed; therefore they turn critics.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) English poet, literary critic and philosopher

"Lectures on Shakespeare and Milton" (1811–1812)

People

“In this way, we influence the muscles of physiognomy [facial expression] and it is possible for us to arouse any passion or sentiment whatsoever; the contraction of the interconnected muscles, constituting “the anatomy of expression”, evokes in the brain of the hypnotised person certain impressions just as these, in the waking state, determine the whole facial expression. It is thus merely a reversal of the usual order [of causation] between the emotions and their physical expressions.”

James Braid (1795–1860) Scottish surgeon, hypnotist, and hypnotherapist

Original Philosophy of Hypnotism The International College of Hypnosis & Hypnotherapy

Way, Passion, Personality

“The drawings [his watercolors] usually succeed in one day or at most two days or they develop difficult and usually don't finish well, then…. [I hope] the end will be as good as the beginning. (translation from original Dutch: Fons Heijnsbroek)”

Willem Roelofs (1822–1897) Dutch painter and entomologist (1822-1897)

(original Dutch: citaat van Willem Roelofs, in het Nederlands:) De teekeningen [Roelofs bedoelt zijn aquarellen] lukken mij doorgaans in een dag of hoogstens twee dagen of zij gaan moeijelijk en worden dan meestal niet goed.. ..[ik hoop dat] het eind zoo goed zal zijn als het begin.
In a letter to P. verLoren van Themaat, 30 March, 1867; in Haagsch Gemeentearchief / Municipal Archive of The Hague
1860's

Hope, Drawing

“Political science, by which I mean nothing more abstruse or academic than consideration of a foreign country as a country in its own right, seems to have been almost completely supplanted by a preoccupation with international relations. What is thought irrelevant to that side of things (often wrongly) is considered beneath notice. This can be seen by the reflexiveness with which journalists now contact I. R. professors or nuclear specialists for comment on North Korea’s motivations, party conferences, personality cult, etc — and the perfect confidence with which that comment is supplied.This is not to say that discussion of the current crisis does justice to international relations as a discipline. Usually it is conducted in a very simplistic, moralizing, America-centric fashion, with no apparent sense of history. Much of the stuff on Twitter or in op-ed pieces is all the more embarrassing for having been written from a presumed position of great intellectual superiority to Donald Trump. For all his unsuitedness to be president, the fellow is no more ignorant of North Korea’s political nature than most of his critics are.”

Brian Reynolds Myers (1963) American professor of international studies

2010s, And Then What? (June 2018)

Justice, Confidence, History, Motivation