Quotes about view (3930 quotes, page 11)

“The tolerant man has decided opinions, but recognises the process by which he reaches them, and keeps before himself the truth that they can only be profitably spread by repeating in the case of others a similar process to that through which he passed himself. He always keeps in view the hope of spreading his own opinions, but he endeavours to do so by producing conviction. He is virtuous, not because he puts his own opinions out of sight, nor because he thinks that other opinions are as good as his own, but because his opinions are so real to him that he would not anyone else hold them with less reality”

Mandell Creighton (1843–1901) English historian and ecclesiastic

Persecution and Tolerance, Hulsean Lectures, University of Cambridge (Winter 1893–94)

Truth , Hope , Thinking , Reality

“Had Mr. Darwin written a work on the change of species, as determined by observation and experiment, without any other object but that of advancing natural science, he would have obtained a high place among philosophical naturalists. But after reading his work in which the name of the Creator is never distinctly mentioned, we can hardly believe that scientific truth was the only object the author had in view. Researches, conducted under the influence of other motives, are not likely to stand the test of a rigorous scrutiny; and some of Mr. Darwin's not unfriendly critics have produced ample evidence that the idol of speculation has been occasionally worshipped at the expense of truth.”

David Brewster (1781–1868) British astronomer and mathematician

The facts and fancies of Mr. Darwin (1862)

Truth , Motivation , Nature , Science

“The first objection to Darwinism is that it is only a guess and was never anything more. It is called a “hypothesis,” but the word “hypothesis,” though euphonioous, dignified and high-sounding, is merely a scientific synonym for the old-fashioned word “guess.” If Darwin had advanced his views as a guess they would not have survived for a year, but they have floated for half a century, buoyed up by the inflated word “hypothesis.” When it is understood that “hypothesis” means “guess,” people will inspect it more carefully before accepting it.”

William Jennings Bryan (1860–1925) United States Secretary of State

God and Evolution (1922)

People , Fashion

“My sense of the high advantage derived from this establishment in a scientific point of view, as I am fully sensible that by reason of my patronizing it, my name, however, undeserving of any celebrity is favorably noticed even in distant regions, among the scientific personages of the present day.”

Swathi Thirunal Rama Varma (1813–1846) Maharajah of Travencore

His perception of modern science is explicitly stated in ‘An enlightened and princely patron of true science".

Sense , Distant

“Works of art are analytic propositions. That is, if viewed within their context – as art – they provide no information whatsoever about any matter of fact. A work of art is a tautology in that it is a presentation of the artist’s intention, that is, he is saying that that particular work of art is art, which means, is a definition of art.”

Joseph Kosuth (1945) American conceptual artist

Art after Philosophy, 1969

Art

“I cannot but add that I have always been a supporter and defender of your policy when you were Prime Minister. I am sure that it was right. In view of the attitude of France and of the unreadiness of this country for which you were in no way to be blamed, it would have been folly to precipitate then a war with Germany. It was your strength of will and purpose and self-restraint that saved us from that mistake. When the time to meet the challenge of Hitler came, you had made it plain to the whole impartial world that you had done everything possible to keep Europe from war, and to fix the blame for that calamity on the unbridled ambition of Hitler. You enabled your country to enter the war with a clear conscience and a united will.”

Neville Chamberlain (1869–1940) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Archbishop of Canterbury Cosmo Gordon Lang to Chamberlain (6 October 1940), quoted in Keith Feiling, Neville Chamberlain (London: Macmillan, 1946), pp. 462-463.
About

War , World , Way , Support

“I do view the march of technology as kind of inevitable. But I would like to accompany it with reason. And one form of reasoning that’s useful in these debates is to find precedence.”

David Krakauer (1967) scientist

Complexity and Stupidity, Sam Harris interviews David Krakauer, podcast November 13, 2016 https://www.samharris.org/blog/item/complexity-stupidity

“I dropped all my own views of sense and nonsense. I told him that, taking all that he had told me as fact, the Presences might be either ordinary minds traversing Space in sleep; or minds such as his which had independently captured the sense of Space's quality; or, finally, the spirits of just men made perfect, behaving as psychical researchers think they do. It was a ridiculous task to set a prosaic man, and I wasn't quite serious.”

John Buchan (1875–1940) British politician

Space (1912)

Men , Thinking , Sense , Sleep

“It seems to me imperative to re-establish the true dualism—that between vital impulse and vital control—and to this end to affirm the higher will first of all as a psychological fact. The individual needs, however, to go beyond this fact if he is to decide how far he is to exercise control in any particular instance with a primary view to his own happiness: in short, he needs standards. To secure standards, at least critically, he cannot afford, like the Rousseauist, to disparage the intellect.”

Irving Babbitt (1865–1933) American academic and literary criticism

Source: "What I Believe" (1930), pp. 14-15

Exercises , Happiness

“I have always been strong for a large increase of labour representation in the House of Commons…Now, I dare say the day may come—it may come sooner than some think—when the Liberal party will be transformed or superseded by some new party; but before the working population of this country have their destinies in their own hands, as they will assuredly do within a measurable distance of time, there is enough ground to be cleared which only the Liberal party is capable of clearing. The ideal of the Liberal party is that view of things which believes that the welfare of all is bound up with injustice being done to none. Above all, according to the ideal of the Liberal party—that party from which I beseech you, not for my sake, but for your own, not to sever yourselves—the ideal of the Liberal party is this—that in the mass of the toilers on land all the fountains of national life abide and the strongest and most irresistible currents flow.”

John Morley, 1st Viscount Morley of Blackburn (1838–1923) British Liberal statesman, writer and newspaper editor

Speech in Newcastle (21 May 1894), quoted in 'Mr. Morley At Newcastle', The Times (22 May 1894), p. 11.

Life , Thinking , Strong , Time

“The history of technology will record that for the first time a machine of human construction, a five-and-a-half-ton missile, covered a distance of a hundred and twenty miles with a lateral deflection of only two and a half miles from the target. Your names, my friends and colleagues, are associated with this achievement. We did it with automatic control. From the artilleryman's point of view, the creation of the rocket as a weapon solves the problem of the weight of heavy guns. We are the first to have given a rocket built on the principles of aircraft construction a speed of thirty-three hundred miles per hour by means of rocket propulsion. Acceleration throughout the period of propulsion was no more than five times that of gravity, perfectly normal for maneuvering of aircraft. We have thus proved that it is quite possible to build piloted missiles or aircraft to fly at supersonic speed, given the right form and suitable propulsion. Our automatically controlled and stabilized rocket has reached heights never touched by any man-made machine. Since the tilt was not carried to completion our rocket today reached a height of nearly sixty miles. We have thus broken the world altitude record of twenty-five miles previously held by the shell fired from the now almost legendary Paris Gun.
The following points may be deemed of decisive significance in the history of technology: we have invaded space with our rocket and for the first time--mark this well--have used space as a bridge between two points on the earth; we have proved rocket propulsion practicable for space travel. To land, sea, and air may now be added infinite empty space as an area of future intercontinental traffic, thereby acquiring political importance. This third day of October, 1942, is the first of a new era in transportation, that of space travel....
So long as the war lasts, our most urgent task can only be the rapid perfection of the rocket as a weapon. The development of possibilities we cannot yet envisage will be a peacetime task. Then the first thing will be to find a safe means of landing after the journey through space…”

Walter Dornberger (1895–1980) German general

[Dornberger, Walter, Walter Dornberger, V2--Der Schuss ins Weltall, 1952 -- US translation V-2 Viking Press:New York, 1954, Bechtle Verlag, Esslingan, p17,236]

War , World , Travel , History

“The Universe will now be set right. Made over to fit my unique view of what should be. Let Nihilism reign supreme!”

Jim Starlin (1949) Comic creator

Thanos, in The Infinity Gauntlet (1991), Issue 2 : From Bad to Worse

Universe

“Philosophy and religion are enemies, and because they are enemies they have need of one another. There is no religion without some philosophical basis, no philosophy without roots in religion. … the attacks which are directed against religion from a presumed scientific or philosophical point of view are merely attacks from another but opposing religious point of view.”

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

Religion

“No change (Marshall replacing former SecDef. Louis Johnson, who, soon after he resigned, was diagnosed with a fatal "brain malady") could have been more welcome to me. It brought only one embarrassment. The General (Marshall) insisted, overruling every protest of mine, in meticulously observing the protocol involved in my being the senior Cabinet officer. Never would he go through a door before me, or walk anywhere but on my left; he would go around an automobile to enter it after me and sit on the left; in meetings he would insist on my speaking before him. To be treated so by a revered and beloved former chief was a harrowing experience. But the result in government was, I think, unique in the history of the Republic. For the first time and perhaps, though I am not sure, the last, the Secretaries of State and Defense, with their top advisors, met with the Chiefs of Staff in their map room and discussed common problems together. At one of these meetings General Bradley and I made a treaty, thereafter scrupulously observed. The phrases 'from a military point of view' and 'from a political point of view' were excluded from our talks. No such dichotomy existed. Each of us had our tactical and strategic problems, but they were interconnected, not separate.”

Dean Acheson book Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department

Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department (1969), State Department Management, Leadership Perspectives

History , Problem , Thinking , Change

“[F]ascinating… significant movement… [P]art of the American tradition… There's something positive… when we can simultaneously swear in a new president and at the same time have a democratic process of people expressing their views. It's their right and we shouldn’t be surprised by it, or annoyed by it.”

Dick Cheney (1941) American politician and businessman

At the Ringling College Library Association Town Hall Lecture Series in Sarasota https://www.sarasotamagazine.com/articles/2017/1/23/dick-cheney-sarasota (January 2017)
2010s, 2017

People , Art , Time

“True humility is a Christian grace and one of the fruits of the Spirit, originating in a deep consciousness of sin past and present, and leading us to discover our nothingness in the view of God, our insufficiency for any thing that is good, and prompting us, as we feel our infirmities, to strive after higher and yet higher attainments.”

James McCosh (1811–1894) British philosopher

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 329.

God , Feeling , Past

“In my account of his [Lamarck's] theory, I did not, at the time, fully appreciate the deep conviction which it displays of the slow manner in which geological changes have taken place, and the insignificance of thirty or forty centuries in the history of a species, and that, too, at a period when very narrow views were entertained of the extent of past time by most of the ablest geologists, and when great revolutions of the earth's crust, and its inhabitants, were generally attributed to sudden and violent catastrophes.”

Charles Lyell (1797–1875) British lawyer and geologist

Source: The Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man (1863), Ch.20, p. 392-393

History , Change , Time , Past

“About the beginning of our Civil Wars, in the year 1642, a Chaplain of Sr. Will. Waller's (one evening as we were sitting down to Supper at the Lady Vere's in London, with whom I then dwelt,) shewed me an intercepted Letter written in Cipher. He shewed it me as a Curiosity (and it was indeed the first thing I had ever seen written in Cipher.) And asked me between jeast and earnest, whether I could make any thing of it. And he was surprised when I said (upon the first view) perhaps I might, if it proved no more but a new Alphabet. It was about ten a clock when we rose from Supper. I then withdrew to my chamber to consider of it. And by the number of different Characters therein, (not above 22 or 23:) I judged that it could not be more than a new Alphabet, and in about 2 hours time (before I went to bed) I had deciphered it; and I sent a Copy of it (so deciphered) the next morning to him from whom I had it. And this was my first attempt at Deciphering.”

John Wallis (1616–1703) English mathematician

p, 125
Dr. Wallis's Account of some Passages of his own Life (1696)

War , Time

“I feared that such a prize, as I believe is true of the activities of some of the great scientific foundations, would tend to accentuate the swings of scientific fashion. This apprehension the selection committee has brilliantly refuted by awarding the prize to one whose views are as unfashionable as mine are.”

Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992) Austrian and British economist and Nobel Prize for Economics laureate

1960s–1970s, Nobel Banquet Speech (1974)

Fear , Fashion

“It is known that the mathematics prescribed for the high school [Gymnasien] is essentially Euclidean, while it is modern mathematics, the theory of functions and the infinitesimal calculus, which has secured for us an insight into the mechanism and laws of nature. Euclidean mathematics is indeed, a prerequisite for the theory of functions, but just as one, though he has learned the inflections of Latin nouns and verbs, will not thereby be enabled to read a Latin author much less to appreciate the beauties of a Horace, so Euclidean mathematics, that is the mathematics of the high school, is unable to unlock nature and her laws. Euclidean mathematics assumes the completeness and invariability of mathematical forms; these forms it describes with appropriate accuracy and enumerates their inherent and related properties with perfect clearness, order, and completeness, that is, Euclidean mathematics operates on forms after the manner that anatomy operates on the dead body and its members.
On the other hand, the mathematics of variable magnitudes—function theory or analysis—considers mathematical forms in their genesis. By writing the equation of the parabola, we express its law of generation, the law according to which the variable point moves. The path, produced before the eyes of the 113 student by a point moving in accordance to this law, is the parabola.
If, then, Euclidean mathematics treats space and number forms after the manner in which anatomy treats the dead body, modern mathematics deals, as it were, with the living body, with growing and changing forms, and thus furnishes an insight, not only into nature as she is and appears, but also into nature as she generates and creates,—reveals her transition steps and in so doing creates a mind for and understanding of the laws of becoming. Thus modern mathematics bears the same relation to Euclidean mathematics that physiology or biology … bears to anatomy. But it is exactly in this respect that our view of nature is so far above that of the ancients; that we no longer look on nature as a quiescent complete whole, which compels admiration by its sublimity and wealth of forms, but that we conceive of her as a vigorous growing organism, unfolding according to definite, as delicate as far-reaching, laws; that we are able to lay hold of the permanent amidst the transitory, of law amidst fleeting phenomena, and to be able to give these their simplest and truest expression through the mathematical formulas”

Christian Heinrich von Dillmann (1829–1899) German educationist

Source: Die Mathematik die Fackelträgerin einer neuen Zeit (Stuttgart, 1889), p. 37.

School , Law , Beauty , Mathematics

“I cannot…perceive any ground for hoping that any practical good would, while the funding system exists in its present extent, result from the adoption of any of those projects, which have professed to have in view what is called Parliamentary Reform…when the funding system, from whatever cause, shall cease to operate upon civil and political liberty, there will be no need of projects for parliamentary reform. The parliament will, as far as shall be necessary, then reform itself.”

William Cobbett (1763–1835) English pamphleteer, farmer and journalist

Political Register (15 March 1806), quoted in Karl W. Schweizer and John W. Osborne, Cobbett and His Times (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1990), p. 11.

Hope

“When we look into the face of every single refugee, especially the children and women, we can feel their suffering. A human being who is a bit more fortunate has the duty to help them. On the other hand, there are too many now. Europe, for example Germany, cannot become an Arab country. Germany is Germany. There are so many that in practice it becomes difficult. [F]rom a moral point of view too, I think that the refugees should only be admitted temporarily. The goal should be that they return and help rebuild their countries.”

Tenzin Gyatso (1935) spiritual leader of Tibet

As quoted in "Dalai Lama says 'too many' refugees in Europe" http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/europe/Dalai-Lama-says-too-many-refugees-in-Europe/articleshow/52522387.cms, The Times of India (31 May 2016)

Women , Children , Feeling , Thinking

“At a time of information overload, good journalists are more important then ever. They serve as the public's hired guns to collect information from various sources and challenge it for the purpose of distilling down what is important and true. They-signpost issues that are worthy of our attention. In the past when we bought newspapers we were paying for that particular newspaper with its content- a bundle of news and entertainment. In the digital age we're buying the carriage (e. g. the Internet access) and readers decide later what information they want to view over that carrier.”

Heather Brooke (1970) American journalist

Page 70.
The Revolution Will Be Digitised: Dispatches From the Information War, 1st Edition

Age , Time , Past

“Soon, many European elites insinuated that the jihadist attacks had some moral justification. These anti-American views began to circulate well before the campaign to dislodge the Taliban kicked off on October 7. The bombing which became the most frequently invoked reason to take sides against the U. S. had not yet even begun.”

Jean-François Revel (1924–2006) French writer and philosopher

2000s, Europe's Anti-American Obsession (2003)

“There is much that is lacking in the political education of American troops, for which army policy cannot be criticized in view of the similar apathy on the home front. Late in the struggle the army became aware of this weakness among our soldiers. The Information and Education Division was then organized to repair this gap in the psychological preparation for combat. Some progress in the face of considerable resistance has been made by this service, but at the time of writing the men still have only a dim comprehension of the meaning of the fascist political state and its menace to our liberal democratic government. The war is generally regarded as a struggle between national states for economic empires. The men are not fully convinced that our country was actually threatened, or, if so, only remotely, or because of the machinations of large financial interests. In such passive attitudes lie the seeds of disillusion, which could prove very dangerous in the postwar period. Certainly they stand in startling contrast with the strong political and national convictions of our Axis enemies, which can inspire their troops, when the occasion demands, with a fanatical and religious fervor. Fortunately, strong intellectual motivation has not proved to be of the first importance to good morale in combat. The danger of this lack seems to be less to the prospect of military success than to success in the peace and to stability in the postwar period.”

Roy R. Grinker, Sr. (1900–1993) American psychiatrist and neurologist

Source: Men Under Stress, 1945, p. 38-39 cited in: The Clare Spark Blog (2009) Strategic Regression in “the greatest generation” http://clarespark.com/2009/12/09/strategic-regression-in-the-greatest-generation/ December 9, 2009

Men , War , Lie , Education

“The Girvan-Vanmanjari of Dhuniraj 119 written in 1702-04 during the reign of Aurangzeb, brings out this problem clearly. The book is written in the form of a catechism between two Brahmanas discussing the correct course of action to be adopted to put a stop to the injustices of Aurangzeb. One of them advocates protest and resistance. The other is of the view that such a course would still more exacerbate the tyranny of the King, but if they cooperated with the regime, they might obtain some relief and minimise the tribulations of the Hindus under the Mughal government. Centuries have rolled by, the country has been partitioned on religious lines, and yet the problem remains as a legacy of Muslim rule in India. How to live with the Muslims who cannot but discriminate between the faithful and the infidels? Through appeasement or confrontation? Not a happy legacy indeed.”

K. S. Lal book The Legacy of Muslim Rule in India

Source: The Legacy of Muslim Rule in India (1992), Chapter 6

Books , Faith , Problem , Country

“The new vision of man and politics was never taken by its founders to be splendid. Naked man, gripped by fear or industriously laboring to provide the wherewithal for survival, is not an apt subject for poetry. They self-consciously chose low but solid ground. Civil societies dedicated to the end of self-preservation cannot be expected to provide fertile soil for the heroic and inspired. They do not require or encourage the noble. What rules and sets the standards of respectability and emulation is not virtue or wisdom. The recognition of the humdrum and prosaic character of life was intended to play a central role in the success of real politics. And the understanding of human nature which makes this whole project feasible, if believed in, clearly forms a world in which the higher motives have no place. One who holds the “economic” view of man cannot consistently believe in the dignity of man or in the special status of art and science. The success of the enterprise depends precisely on this simplification of man. And if there is a solution to the human problems, there is no tragedy. There was no expectation that, after the bodily needs are taken care of, man would have a spiritual renaissance—and this for two reasons: (1) men will always be mortal, which means that there can be no end to the desire for immortality and to the quest for means to achieve it; and (2) the premise of the whole undertaking is that man’s natural primary concern is preservation and prosperity; the regimes founded on nature take man as he is naturally and will make him ever more natural. If his motives were to change, the machinery that makes modern government work would collapse.”

Allan Bloom (1930–1992) American philosopher, classicist, and academician

“Commerce and Culture,” p. 284.
Giants and Dwarfs (1990)

Life , Wisdom , Men , World

“Remember the words George Carlin said could not be said on TV? There's now a kind of movie that cannot be made without using all of them except one. Even the online trailer may startle you. It's one of those adults-only Red Band Trailers which you have to give your age in order to view. I lied about my age. Nobody under 17 would ever do that.”

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

Review http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-sitter-2011 of The Sitter (7 December 2011)
Reviews, One-star reviews

Age

“I suspect it is this Camelot view that leads Miss Croce to be rather unfair to Gene Kelly…I should say the difference starts with their bodies. If you compare Kelly to Astaire, accepting Astaire's debonair style as perfection then, of course, Kelly looks bad. But in popular dance forms, in which movement is not rigidly codified, as it is in ballet, perfection is a romantic myth or a figure of speech, nothing more. Kelly isn't a winged dancer; he's a hoofer and more earthbound. But he has warmth and range as an actor…Astaire's grasshopper lightness was his limitation as an actor - confining him to perennial gosh-oh-gee adolescence;; he was always and only a light comedian and could function only in fairytale vehicles.”

Fred Astaire (1899–1987) American dancer, singer, actor, choreographer and television presenter

Pauline Kael, responding to Croce in her review of Croce's The Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers Book, writing in The New Yorker, November 25, 1972, as reproduced in Kael, Pauline. Reeling: Film Writings 1972-1975, Marion Boyars, London - New York, pp. 58-59. ISBN 0-7145-2582-0.

Fairytale , Light , Dance , Perfection

“You know, you can imagine in China it's like: "Ching chong, ching chong chong, Danny DeVito, ching chong chong chong, drunk, 'The View,' ching chong.”

Rosie O'Donnell (1962) American comedienne, television personality and actress

['Ching-chong' joke spreads ignorance, L.A., Chung, http://www.mercurynews.com/search/ci_4853200, San Jose Mercury News, 16 December 2006, http://www.webcitation.org/5u6kwJxTz, 2010-11-09, 2010-11-09]
O'Donnell using the pejorative term ching chong to describe Danny Devito on The View.

Imagination

“The systems approach goes on to discovering that every world-view is terribly restricted.”

C. West Churchman (1913–2004) American philosopher and systems scientist

C. West Churchman, (1970) cited in: Michael C. Jackson ( 1992) Systems Methodology for the Management Sciences. p. 137
1960s - 1970s

World

“If we make this readjustment to view Homo sapiens as an ultimate in oddball rarity, and life at bacterial grade as the common expression of a universal phenomenon, then we could finally ask the truly fundamental question raised by the prospect of Martian fossils. If life originates as a general property of the material universe under certain conditions (probably often realized), then how much can the basic structure and constitution of life vary from place to independent place?”

Stephen Jay Gould book Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms

"War of the Worldviews", p. 352
Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms (1998)

Life , Question , Universe

“If you look at the American army’s counterinsurgency literature (a lot of which is now declassified), it begins with an analysis of the German experience in Europe, written with the cooperation of Nazi officers. Everything is described from the point of view of the Nazis-which techniques for controlling resistance worked, which ones didn’t. With barely a change, that was transmuted into American counterinsurgency literature.”

Noam Chomsky (1928) american linguist, philosopher and activist

"How the Nazis Won the War" in How the World Works, p. 192
Quotes 1990s, 1990-1994, Secrets, Lies and Democracy, 1994

Literature , Change

“I do not accept the view, widely held in the Federal Cabinet, that some kind of slow Asian takeover of Australia is inevitable. I do not believe that we are powerless. I do believe that we can with good will and good sense control our destiny…. As a people, we seem to move from extreme to extreme. In the past 30 years the government of Australia has moved from the extreme of wanting a white Australia to the extreme of saying that we will have an Asian Australia and that the quicker we move towards it the better.”

Geoffrey Blainey (1930) Australian historian

"The Dilemma of Asian Immigration," The Age (March 20, 1984)

People , Sense , Past

“If the GOP’s “big tent” is destined to collapse, there’s no one better to be standing under it than Kemp. If the party does not collapse-and it elites continue to ignore the views of its grass roots-it will be too left-wing for any true freedom lover to support.”

Jeffrey Tucker (1963) American writer

Source: "Jack Kemp, American Socialist" by Jeffrey Tucker, The Rothbard-Rockwell Report, September 1996, UNZ.org, 2016-05-22 http://www.unz.org/Pub/RothbardRockwellReport-1996sep-00001,

Lovers , Support , Freedom , Grass

“Intellectual culture consists, not chiefly, as many are apt to think, in accumulating information, though this is important, but in building up a force of thought which may be turned at will on any subjects on which we are called to pass judgment. This force is manifested in the concentration of the attention, in accurate, penetrating observation, in reducing complex subjects to their elements, in diving beneath the effect to the cause, in detecting the more subtle differences and resemblances of things, in reading the future in the present, and especially in rising from particular facts to general laws or universal truths. … Oone man talks continually about the particular actions of this or another neighbor; whilst another looks beyond the acts to the inward principle from which they spring, and gathers from them larger views of human nature.”

William Ellery Channing (1780–1842) United States Unitarian clergyman

Self-Culture (1838)

Truth , Law , Spring , Nature

“From the point of view of seeking a consensus of the moral imperative of individuals, such consensus being assumed to exist, the problem of choosing an electoral or other choice mechanism, or, more broadly, of choosing a social structure, assumes an entirely different form from that discussed in the greater part of this study.”

Kenneth Arrow (1921–2017) American economist

Source: 1950s-1960s, Social Choice and Individual Values (1951), p. 85

Problem , Study , Parting

“We expect salvation from him—not because he stands aloof from us, but because ingrafting us into his body he not only makes us partakers of all his benefits, but also of himself. … Since Christ has been communicated to you with all his benefits, so that all which is his is made yours, you become a member of him, and hence one with him. His righteousness covers your sins—his salvation extinguishes your condemnation; he interposes with his worthiness, and so prevents your unworthiness from coming into the view of God. Thus it truly is. It will never do to separate Christ from us, nor us from him; but we must, with both hands, keep firm hold of that alliance by which he has riveted us to himself.”

John Calvin book Institutes of the Christian Religion

Book 3, Chapter 2, Section 24, p. 477
Institutes of the Christian Religion (1536; 1559)

God , Communication , Christ

“Professor Smith has kindly submitted his book to me before publication. After reading it thoroughly and with intense interest I am glad to comply with his request to give him my impression.
The work is a broadly conceived attempt to portray man's fear-induced animistic and mythic ideas with all their far-flung transformations and interrelations. It relates the impact of these phantasmagorias on human destiny and the causal relationships by which they have become crystallized into organized religion.
This is a biologist speaking, whose scientific training has disciplined him in a grim objectivity rarely found in the pure historian. This objectivity has not, however, hindered him from emphasizing the boundless suffering which, in its end results, this mythic thought has brought upon man.
Professor Smith envisages as a redeeming force, training in objective observation of all that is available for immediate perception and in the interpretation of facts without preconceived ideas. In his view, only if every individual strives for truth can humanity attain a happier future; the atavisms in each of us that stand in the way of a friendlier destiny can only thus be rendered ineffective.
His historical picture closes with the end of the nineteenth century, and with good reason. By that time it seemed that the influence of these mythic, authoritatively anchored forces which can be denoted as religious, had been reduced to a tolerable level in spite of all the persisting inertia and hypocrisy.
Even then, a new branch of mythic thought had already grown strong, one not religious in nature but no less perilous to mankind — exaggerated nationalism. Half a century has shown that this new adversary is so strong that it places in question man's very survival. It is too early for the present-day historian to write about this problem, but it is to be hoped that one will survive who can undertake the task at a later date.”

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

Foreword of "Man and his Gods" by Homer W. Smith
Attributed in posthumous publications, Einstein and Religion (1999)

Truth , Books , Fear , Religion

“The tragedy of Africa seemingly has no end. Viewing it from afar, the casual Western onlooker can be forgiven if the scenes begin to meld: Ethiopian famine in 1987, Somalian civil war and ensuing famine in 1992, and now Central Africa in 1997. The pictures and footage assume the role of media footnotes: snapshots of hopelessness, disaster, and death that seem as far away as the moon and as unrealistic as some science fiction film. Yet, like the African crises before it, the tragedy of Central Africa is very real and, in a global age, perhaps not as distant as some would like to think. With a foreign policy appropriately rooted in some sense of humanitarian decency, the Central African crisis will not be easily ignored by American policymakers. It screams for remedy.”

Michael Johns (1964) American businessman

"Africa Deserves a Closer Look," The World and I, February 1997, by Michael Johns.

Death , War , Age , Thinking

“As in hoary winter's night stood shivering in the snow,
Surprised I was with sudden heat which made my heart to glow;
And lifting up a fearful eye to view what fire was near,
A pretty babe all burning bright did in the air appear.”

Robert Southwell (1561–1595) English Jesuit

"The Burning Babe", line 1; p. 98.

Fear , Appearance , Winter , Heart

“I want to cover all areas that can be depicted visually. This ranges from fairytales to attempts to enter the abstract and view oneself as a social outcast or someone struggling to stay alive.”

Günter Brus (1938) Austrian artist

Source: Nervous Stillness on the Horizon (2006), P. 218 (1987)

Fairytale

“There is nothing which a prudent man must shun more carefully than living with a view to popularity and giving serious thought to the things esteemed by the multitude, instead of making sound reason his guide of life, so that, even if he must gainsay all men and fall into disrepute and incur danger for the sake of what is honourable, he will in no wise choose to swerve from what has been recognized as right.”

Basil of Caesarea (329–379) Christian Saint

Source: On Greek Literature, p. 429

Life , Men

“This afternoon I had put myself down on this sweet spot, very tired of painting [with a view of the old castle of Vorden].... I was completely immersed in thinking of You... I would rather like to.... thank you, dear and beloved Lady, for the right judgments and remarks which You gave me in this [your? ] sweet letter. I solemnly promise you that I will use them for my benefit, and will spent all my powers as an artist, to make your attentions more worthy to me.”

Johannes Warnardus Bilders (1811–1890) painter from the Northern Netherlands

translation from Dutch, Fons Heijnsbroek
version in original Dutch (citaat van Johannes Warnardus Bilders' brief, in het Nederlands:) Toen ik heden middag mij zeer vermoeid van 't schilderen op dit lieve plekje had neder gezet [met zicht op het oude kasteel van Vorden].. ..ik was namelijk geheel verdiept in de gedachte aan UE.. .Ik wil liever.. ..bedenken, hoe ik U veel beminde juffrouw, dank zou zeggen, voor de juiste oordeelvellingen en bemerkingen, welke UE mij in dit [uw[?] lieve schrijven gemaakt heb, Ik beloof u plechtig dat ik ze mij ten nutte zal maken, en al mijn krachten als kunstenaar zal in spannen, om uwe atenties mij meer waardig te maken.
J.W. Bilders, in his letter [including a sketch by pen of the landscape with the castle, seen from the garden of the hotel where he stayed] to Georgina van Dijk van 't Velde, from Vorden, 1 Sept. 1868; from an excerpt of the letter https://rkd.nl/nl/explore/excerpts/751236 in the RKD-Archive, The Hague
1860's + 1870's

Thinking , Painting

“I am always deeply suspicious of received wisdom. As far as I am concerned man-made global warming is nothing more than a hypothesis that hasn't got any basis in fact. Every day more scientists are modifying their initial views. Recently 60 German scientists wrote to Chancellor Angela Merkel saying there was no proof for carbon causing global warming.”

Godfrey Bloom (1949) UK EU parliament member

BBC News http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/politics_show/regions/yorkshire_and_lincolnshire/8298649.stm

Wisdom

“Probably, I wound up—if not as a jack-of-all-trades—at best as a thirdrate polymath never able to focus these curiosities into a commanding “view of life.” The most practical solution appeared to be to make a profession of observation, to become a reporter simply, a profession easily damned as that of a fence-sitter, a moral coward unwilling to take a stand, a chronic water-treader who lacks the strength to take the plunge. To these strictures, I can only reply that once every four years at least I take a stand: I vote. And immediately afterward return to my reporting habits and the continuing discovery that in life the range of irreconcilable points of view, characters, flaws, idiosyncrasies and virtues is astounding, and that in politics there is very often much to be said on both sides, and sometimes on three or four.”

Alistair Cooke (1908–2004) British journalist and broadcaster

"Reflections of a Non-Positive Man". In: Living philosophies : the reflections of some eminent men and women of our time (1990), edited by Clifton Fadiman.

Life , Water , Appearance

“… He is not very sharp in some ways; and in his simple view of the world, paederasts are dangerous only to powder-monkeys and choir boys, or to those epicene creatures that are to be found in Mediterranean brothels. I made circuitous attempt at enlightening him a little, but he looked very knowing and said, 'Don't tell me about rears and vices; I have been in the Navy all my life.'"
"Then surely he must be wanting a little in penetration?”

Patrick O'Brian book Master and Commander

"James, I trust there was no mens rea in that remark?"
Master and Commander (1970) ("rears and vices" is O'Brian's homage to Jane Austen's Mansfield Park)

Life , World , Way , Boy

“In my message last year I emphasized the necessity for further legislation with a view to expediting the consolidation of our rail ways into larger systems. The principle of Government control of rates and profits, now thoroughly embedded in our governmental attitude toward natural monopolies such as the railways, at once eliminates the need of competition by small units as a method of rate adjustment. Competition must be preserved as a stimulus to service, but this will exist and can be increased tinder enlarged systems. Consequently the consolidation of the railways into larger units for the purpose of securing the substantial values to the public which will come from larger operation has been the logical conclusion of Congress in its previous enactments, and is also supported by the best opinion in the country. Such consolidation will assure not only a greater element of competition as to service, but it will afford economy in operation, greater stability in railway earnings, and more economical financing. It opens large possibilities of better equalization of rates between different classes of traffic so as to relieve undue burdens upon agricultural products and raw materials generally, which are now not possible without ruin to small units owing to the lack of diversity of traffic. It would also tend to equalize earnings in such fashion as to reduce the importance of section 15A, at which criticism, often misapplied, has been directed. A smaller number of units would offer less difficulties in labor adjustments and would contribute much to the, solution of terminal difficulties.”

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

1920s, Second State of the Union Address (1924)

Way , Fashion , Support , Nature

“There is more than just grandeur in this view of life, bleak and cold though it can seem from under the security blanket of ignorance. There is deep refreshment to be had from standing up and facing straight into the strong keen wind of understanding: Yeats's 'Winds that blow through the starry ways.”

Richard Dawkins book A Devil's Chaplain

Compare: "Even if the open windows of science at first make us shiver after the cosy indoor warmth of traditional humanizing myths, in the end the fresh air brings vigour, and the great spaces have a splendour of their own." Bertrand Russell, What I Believe (1925)
A Devil's Chaplain (2003)

Life , Way , Understanding , Strong

“The good of any one individual is of no more importance, from the point of view (if I may so say) of the Universe, than the good of any other; unless, that is, there are special grounds for believing that more good is likely to be realized in the one case than in the other.”

Henry Sidgwick book The Methods of Ethics

The Methods of Ethics (1884), p. 381

Universe

“Here, then, is another way to understand the intentions of the social theoretical project that this critical analysis of the contemporary situation of social thought prepares and suggests. Philosophical disputes about the social ideal have increasingly come to turn on an unresolved ambivalence toward the naturalistic premise, an incomplete rebellion against it. The visionary imagination of our age has been both liberated and disoriented. It has been liberated by its discovery that social worlds are contingent in a more radical sense than people had supposed; liberated to disengage the ideas of community and objectivity from any fixed structure of dependence and dominion or even from any determinate shape of social life. It has also, however, been disoriented by a demoralizing oscillation between a trumped-up sanctification of existing society and would-be utopian flight that finds in the land of its fantasies the inverted image of the circumstance it had wanted to escape; disoriented by the failure to spell out what the rejection of the naturalistic view means for the vision of a regenerate society. The social theory we need must vindicate a modernist—that is to say, a nonnaturalistic—view of community and objectivity, and it must do so by connecting the imagination of the ideal with the insight into transformation.”

Roberto Mangabeira Unger (1947) Brazilian philosopher and politician

Source: Social Theoryː Its Situation and Its Task (1987), p. 47

Life , People , Age , World

“…the concentration of human beings in towns…is contrary to nature, and…this abnormal existence is bound to issue in suffering, deterioration, and gradual destruction to the mass of the population…countless thousands of our fellow-men, and still a larger number of children…are starved of air and space and sunshine. …This view of city life, which is gradually coming home to the heart and understanding and the conscience of our people, is so terrible that it cannot be put away. What is all our wealth and learning and the fine flower of our civilisation and our Constitution and our political theories – what are all these but dust and ashes, if the men and women, on whose labour the whole social fabric is maintained, are doomed to live and die in darkness and misery in the recesses of our great cities? We may undertake expeditions on behalf of oppressed tribes and races, we may conduct foreign missions, we may sympathise with the cause of unfortunate nationalities; but it is our own people, surely, who have the first claim upon us…the air must be purified…the sunshine must be allowed to stream in, the water and the food must be kept pure and unadulterated, the streets light and clean…the measure of your success in bringing these things to pass will be the measure of the arresting of the terrible powers of race degeneration which is going on in the countless sunless streets.”

Henry Campbell-Bannerman (1836–1908) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech in Belmont (25 January 1907), quoted in John Wilson, C.B.: A Life of Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman (London: Constable, 1973), p. 588
Prime Minister

Life , Women , Men , Children

“On the one hand, there is the type of sinner whom, in present-day language, we would call ‘oppressor.’ Their basic sin consists in oppressing, placing intolerable burdens on others, acting unjustly and so on. On the other hand, there are those who sin ‘from weakness’ or those ‘legally considered sinners’ according to the dominant religious view.

Jesus takes a very different approach to each group. He offers salvation to all, and makes demands of all, but in a very different way. He directly demands a radical conversion of the first group, an active cessation from oppressing. For these, the coming of the Kingdom is above all a radical need to stop being oppressors.”

Jon Sobrino (1938) Spanish theologian

Source: Jesus the Liberator (1991), pp. 96-97

Way

“The genius of culture is to create an ontological system so compelling that what is inside and outside of a person are viewed as of a piece, no seams and patches noticeable.”

Richard Shweder (1945) American anthropologist

"Cultural Psychology — What Is It?", Cultural Psychology (1990)

Personality

“Human artifacts are not stains imposed on nature. Such a view drives a wedge between humanity and the rest of the community of life. A golf ball is the manifestation of the mind of a clever, playful African primate. This primate loves to invent games to test its physical and mental skill. Generally, these games are played on carefully reconstructed replicas of the savanna from which the ape came and for which its subconscious still hankers. The clever primate belongs in this world. … To love nature and to hate humanity is illogical.”

David G. Haskell (1950) writer, Biologist

"August 8th — Earthstar," pages 157-158
The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature http://theforestunseen.com/ (2012)

Love , Life , Hate , World

“I view it as a thoroughly bad peace – impolitic and impracticable in the case of Germany, absolutely ludicrous in the case of German Austria. Indeed I have not been able to read the comments of the Austrian delegates on our draft terms without deep emotion. I have fought this Peace from the inside with all my power, and have no doubt been able in the end to secure some small openings of hope for the future.”

Jan Smuts (1870–1950) military leader, politician and statesman from South Africa

Smuts to C. P. Scott on the Treaty of Versailles, 26 June 1919, as cited in Antony Lentin, 2010, Jan Smuts – Man of courage and vision, p. xvi. ISBN 978-1-86842-390-3

Peace , Hope , Reading , Future

“As educators of linguistically and culturally diverse students we face choices with respect to how we view language and human potential. Is language the means of interpreting our increasingly complex world and mobilizing intellect, imagination, and identity to create new knowledge and act on social realities or is it simply a set of sounds and symbols and the codes that bind them? Can our society benefit from all the intelligence, imagination, and multilingual talent it can get or should schools develop these attributes only among a privileged elite while focusing on English-only basic skills for those constructed as incapable of independent learning?”

Jim Cummins (professor) (1949) professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto

Language and the Human Spirit (2003)

World , Education , School , Imagination

“A criticism with which we have become familiar in this country is that an alarmingly large number of students receiving university education, and the universities are responsible for wastage and unnecessary duplication of teaching arrangements…

… Take the whole of British India with a population of two hundred and sixty-three million. India has only sixteen universities and the number of their students will be about one lac and twenty thousand. The total expenditure on higher education in India is less than four crores rupees.

Let me now turn to other countries. The British Isles afford a good illustration for comparison from the point of view of population which is about is about forty five million; but the number of universities is as many as sixteen – what we have for the whole of India – and fifty-five thousand students receive instructions under their jurisdiction. About six crores and forty lacs of rupees are spent on higher education only in England and Wales. To universities alone within this area the state annually contributes two crores and twenty-seven lacs of rupees.”

Syama Prasad Mookerjee (1901–1953) Indian politician

Speech delivered at Calcutta University Convocation on 22nd February 1936.
Source: one crore is equal to ten million
Source: ten lacs is equal to one million

Education , Universe , Country

“If England had not resisted German militarism, in my view the German hegemony of Europe would have been established and our island would have had to face a united Continental army. It is the same old story from the days of Marlborough and Napoleon.”

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

The 1930s
Source: Letter to G. M. Trevelyan (3 January 1935), quoted in Martin Gilbert, Prophet of Truth: Winston S. Churchill, 1922–1939 (London: Minerva, 1990), p. 623

“This idea that somebody put into our heads — that companies are somehow these kind of individuated units that are separate from society and don’t have to be paying attention to the communities they’re in — that is incorrect. We need to have a more enlightened view about the role of companies. This company is not somehow separate from everything else. Are we not all connected? Are we not all one? Isn’t that the point?”

Marc Benioff (1964) American businessman

The New York Times: "Marc Benioff of Salesforce: ‘Are We Not All Connected?’" https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/15/business/marc-benioff-salesforce-corner-office.html (15 June 2018)

Communication , Idea

“But even this apparently unfounded hatred is not yet the most characteristic achievement of ressentiment. Even here, it is still directed against particular persons or (as in class hatred) particular groups. Its effect is much more profound when it goes beyond such determinate hostilities—when it does not lead to a falsification of the world view, but perverts the sense of values itself. What Nietzsche calls “falsification of the tablets of value” is built on this foundation. In this new phase, the man of ressentiment no longer turns away from the positive values, nor does he wish to destroy the men and things endowed with them. Now the values themselves are inverted: those values which are positive to any normal feeling become negative. The man of ressentiment cannot justify or even understand his own existence and sense of life in terms of positive values such as power, health, beauty, freedom, and independence. Weakness, fear, anxiety, and a slavish disposition prevent him from obtaining them. Therefore he comes to feel that “all this is vain anyway” and that salvation lies in the opposite phenomena: poverty, suffering, illness, and death.”

Max Scheler (1874–1928) German philosopher

Das Ressentiment im Aufbau der Moralen (1912)

Life , Death , Men , Hostility

“I would advise sitting from morning till night under some willow bush on the river bank where there is a wide view. This will be "doing the valley" far more effectively than riding along trails in constant motion from point to point. The entire valley is made up of "points of interest."”

John Muir (1838–1914) Scottish-born American naturalist and author

"The Summer Flood of Tourists", San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin (part 1 of the 11 part series "Summering in the Sierra") dated 14 June 1875, published 22 June 1875; reprinted in John Muir: Summering in the Sierra, edited by Robert Engberg (University of Wisconsin Press, 1984) page 71
Advice for visitors to Yosemite given by John Muir at age 37 years. Compare advice given by the 74-year-old Muir below.
1870s

Night

“As we take, in fact, a general view of the wonderful stream of our consciousness, what strikes us first is this different pace of its parts. Like a bird's life, it seems to be made of an alternation of flights and perchings.”

William James (1842–1910) American philosopher, psychologist, and pragmatist

Source: 1890s, The Principles of Psychology (1890), Ch. 9

Life , Bird , Parting

“From the point of view of semantics, errors must be accidents: if in the extension of "horse" there are no cows, then it cannot be required for the meaning of "horse" that cows be called horses. On the other hand, if "horse" did not mean that which it means, and if it were an error for horses, it would never be possible for a cow to be called "horse." Putting the two things together, it can be seen that the possibility of falsely saying "this is a horse" presupposes the existence of a semantic basis for saying it truly, but not vice versa. If we put this in terms of the crude causal theory, the fact that cows cause one to say "horse" depends on the fact that horses cause one to say "horse"; but the fact that horses cause one to say "horse" does not depend on the fact that cows cause one to say "horse"…”

Jerry Fodor (1935–2017) American philosopher

Fodor (1990). A Theory of Content and Other Essays. The MIT Press.

Error , Horse , Dependency , Falseness

“Francisco Varela is amazingly inventive, freewheeling, and creative. There's a lot of depth in what he and Humberto Maturana have said. Conversely, from the point of view of a tied-down molecular biologist, this is all airy-fairy, flaky stuff. Thus there's the mixed response. That part of me that's tough-minded and critical is questioning, but the other part of me has cottoned on to the recent stuff he's doing on self- representation in immune networks. I love it.”

Stuart Kauffman (1939) American biophysicist

Stuart Kauffman in: John Brockman ed. (1995) The Third Culture: Beyond the Scientific Revolution. p. 209 ( online http://www.edge.org/documents/ThirdCulture/t-Ch.12.html)

Love , Question , Parting

“Looked at from the point of view of Islam, it was a dazzling period indeed. Islam acquired an empire over a large country full of unrivalled riches. Islam had the immense satisfaction of 1) sending millions of accursed kãfirs to hell in a continuous jihãd, 2) demolishing and desecrating thousands of idolatrous places of worship and pilgrimage, 3) killing thousands of Brahmins and Bhikshus and forcing the rest to eat beef, 4) collecting vast amounts of booty and distributing it among the mu’mins according to rules laid down by the Prophet, 5) capturing millions of men and women and children and selling them into slavery and concubinage in the far-flung Islamic world, 6) usurping power and privilege over a vast population which was reduced to serfdom, and 7) proving the superiority of Islamic scriptures by the power of the sword.”

Sita Ram Goel book The Story of Islamic Imperialism in India

The Story of Islamic Imperialism in India (1994)

Women , Men , Children , World

“This realistic image, however, does not catch at all what really is, but what should not be - death and misery - what should not exist, from our moral and humanistic point of view. And at the same time making an aesthetic and commercial, perfectly immoral use and abuse of this misery. Images that actually testify, behind their pretended "objectivity", of a deep denial of the real, and of an equal denial of the image - assigned to present what does not even want to be represented, assigned to the rape of the real by burglary.”

Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007) French sociologist and philosopher

New millennium

Death , Time

“People have presuppositions, and they will live more consistently on the basis of these presuppositions than even they themselves may realize. By presuppositions we mean the basic way an individual looks at life, his basic world view, the grid through which he sees the world. Presuppositions rest upon that which a person considers to be the truth of what exists. People's presuppositions lay a grid for all they bring forth into the external world. Their presuppositions also provide the basis for their values and therefore the basis for their decisions.”

Francis Schaeffer (1912–1984) American theologian

Life , People , Truth , World

“The people I was listening to never sold a lot of records. John Lee Hooker was never on the charts, so I was never in it from a commercial point of view. Other people expected things from my records, but I never did.”

Van Morrison (1945) Northern Irish singer-songwriter and musician

An Oral History of Popular Music (1989)

People

“In brief, one can view organizing essentially as either an economic, behavioral, adaptive, mathematical, or decisional entity. In the aggregate most of these theories are concerned with structure, behavior, and strategy under conditions of change and complexity brought about by technology, environment, and human behavior.”

George R. Terry (1909–1979)

Source: Principles of Management, 1960, p. 314 (6th ed. 1971)

Behavior , Mathematics , Change

“Michael Cole: [reading e-mail from RAW's anonymous GM] And I quote: "Mr. Punk, I understand your demands and I will certainly take them under consideration. However, right now, I'll ask you to leave the ring."
Punk: Okay… Cole, you know I love ya, I know you're just doing your job, but he's asking me to leave the ring? He/she is asking me to leave the ring? Okay, I'm not…
[The GM chime rings again] Cole: And I quote: "I suggest you leave the ring right now."
Punk: Until you announce me as the #1 contender for the WWE Championship, I suggest you watch me make snow angels.

July 17, 2011, will be the most historic day, not only in the career of CM Punk, it's gonna be a historic day for the WWE as a whole. Not only is July 17 the second annual Money in the Bank Ladder Match pay-per-view, it's the night I defeat John Cena for the WWE Championship. Now, here's that honesty I was talking about, that honesty that's probably gotten me in trouble more times than I'd like to admit, the brutal honesty I'm known for. July 17 is the day my contract with World Wrestling Entertainment comes to an end. That means when the clock strikes midnight, the 17th becomes the 18th, Sunday bleeds into Monday, I'm leaving. And trust me when I tell you I am leaving with the WWE Championship”

Phil Brooks (1978) American professional wrestler and mixed martial artist

June 20, 2011
WWE Raw

Love , Money , World , Angels

“The agreement signed by the GRP and the MILF did NOT CHANGE our laws. Terrorists are still terrorists. Law enforcement operations are still law enforcement operations. It is still illegal to shoot a policeman especially if he is unarmed. Nothing has changed, in so far as our laws are concerned. On Mr. Iqbal's comments, I think it is part of their hard ball. They have been calling the shots from day one and our negotiators probably have been infected by Stockholm Syndrome taking the side of the MILF, instead of our side. From my point of view, both the OPAPP and the GRP and the MILF should WIN THE TRUST OF THE PEOPLE first before winning the trust of each other. If they do not have the trust of the majority of Filipinos, any agreement they sign will simply be unacceptable.”

Francis Escudero (1969) Filipino politician

Escudero, F. [Francis]. (2015, March 16). Retrieved from Official Facebook Page of Francis Escudero https://www.facebook.com/senchizescudero/posts/10153138861210610/
2015, Facebook

People , Law , Thinking , Change

“Mr. Greenwood, when moving the Amendment yesterday, told us that the war would shake many strongly held views. I fear that this war will do very much more than that. The war will bring about changes which may be fundamental and revolutionary in the economic and social life of this country. On that we are all agreed.”

Anthony Eden (1897–1977) British Conservative politician, prime minister

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1939/dec/06/debate-on-the-address to the House of Commons (6 December 1939)

Life , War , Fear , Change

“A Spring o'erhung with many a flow'r,
The grey sand dancing in its bed,
Embank'd beneath a Hawthorn bower,
Sent forth its waters near my head:
A rosy Lass approach'd my view;
I caught her blue eye's modest beam:
The stranger nodded 'How d'ye do!”

Robert Bloomfield (1766–1823) British writer

And leap'd across the infant stream.
Rosy Hannah, stanza 1, from Rural Tales, Ballads, and Songs (1802)

Spring , Water , Dance

“Knowing how things work is important, but I think that's an incomplete view of what science literacy is or, at least, should be. Science literacy is an outlook. It's more of a lens through which you observe what goes on around you.”

Neil deGrasse Tyson (1958) American astrophysicist and science communicator

Global Ideas from Pluto's Challenger (May 21, 2009)

Thinking , Science

“Smith’s own theory, as given in the first five editions, is for the most part a theory of moral judgement —that is to say, it is an answer to the second question set out in the initial description of the subject of philosophical ethics. […] There is no thoroughgoing inquiry of what constitutes the character of virtue, as required by the first of the two questions, even though the historical survey at the end of the book deals with both questions in turn and, as it happens, gives more space to the first topic, the character of virtue, than to the second, the nature of moral judgement.
The fact is that Smith did not reach a distinctive view on the first topic. He has a distinctive view of the content of virtue, that is to say, a view of what are the cardinal virtues; but he does not give us an explanation of what is meant by the concept of moral virtue, how it arises, how it differentiates moral excellence from other forms of human excellence. […] I think that, when Smith came to revise the work for the sixth edition, he realized that he had not dealt at all adequately with the first of the two questions, and for that reason he added the new part VI, entitled ‘Of the Character of Virtue’, to remedy the omission. It is not, in my opinion, an adequate remedy, and it certainly does not match Smith’s elaborate answer to the second question. […]
Since the second of the two topics, the nature of moral judgement, is the main subject of both versions of Smith’s book, I shall give it priority in what follows. There is in fact a clear development in Smith’s view of this topic, especially in his conception of the impartial spectator, the most important element of Smith’s ethical theory.”

D. D. Raphael (1916–2015) Philosopher

The Impartial Spectator: Adam Smith's Moral Philosophy (2007), Ch. 1: Two Versions

Books , Question , Nature , Thinking

“We know by actual observation only a comparatively small part of the whole universe. I will call this "our neighborhood." Even within the confines of this province our knowledge decreases very rapidly as we get away from our own particular position in space and time. It is only within the solar system that our empirical knowledge extends to the second order of small quantities (and that only for g44 and not for the other gαβ), the first order corresponding to about 10-8. How the gαβ outside our neighborhood are, we do not know, and how they are at infinity of space or time we shall never know. Infinity is not a physical but a mathematical concept, introduced to make our equations more symmetrical and elegant. From the physical point of view everything that is outside our neighborhood is pure extrapolation, and we are entirely free to make this extrapolation as we please to suit our philosophical or aesthetical predilections—or prejudices. It is true that some of these prejudices are so deeply rooted that we can hardly avoid believing them to be above any possible suspicion of doubt, but this belief is not founded on any physical basis. One of these convictions, on which extrapolation is naturally based, is that the particular part of the universe where we happen to be, is in no way exceptional or privileged; in other words, that the universe, when considered on a large enough scale, is isotropic and homogeneous.”

Willem de Sitter (1872–1934) Dutch cosmologist

"The Astronomical Aspect of the Theory of Relativity" (1933)

Way , Mathematics , Nature , Knowledge

“How easily we Indians see the several sides to every question! That is what makes us such good bureaucrats, and such poor totalitarians. They say the new international organizations set up by the wonderfully optimistic (if oxymoronic) United Nations are full of highly successful Indian officials with quick, subtle minds and mellifluous tongues, for ever able to understand every global crisis from the point of view of each and every one of the contending parties. That is why they do so well, Ganapathi, in any situation that calls for an instinctive awareness of the subjectivity of truth, the relativity of judgement and the impossibility of action.”

Shashi Tharoor book The Great Indian Novel

The Great Indian Novel (1989)

Truth , Understanding , Question , Success

“You see, if you say something positive like the whole of life – all living things – is descended from a single common ancestor which lived about 4,000 million years ago and that we are all cousins, well that is an exceedingly important and true thing to say and that is what I want to say. Somebody who is religious sees that as threatening and so I am represented as attacking religion, and I am forced into responding to their reaction. But you do not have to see my main purpose as attacking religion. Certainly I see the scientific view of the world as incompatible with religion, but that is not what is interesting about it. It is also incompatible with magic, but that also is not worth stressing. What is interesting about the scientific world view is that it is true, inspiring, remarkable and that it unites a whole lot of phenomena under a single heading. And that is what is so exciting for me.”

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

[1995-04-28, Kam Patel, Going the whole hog, Times Higher Education, http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storyCode=97718&sectioncode=26]

Life , World , Religion

“His Highness was always confident in his statements, especially about what he viewed for the first time.”

Dejan Stojanovic (1959) poet, writer, and businessman

“His Highness,” p. 90
The Sun Watches the Sun (1999), Sequence: “A Game”

Confidence , Time

“[Synchronization increases the] opportunity for feedback and error correction and synthesis of different points of view.”

David A. Nadler (1948–2015) American organizational theorist

Source: "Information Processing as an Integrating Concept in Organizational Design." 1978, p. 618

Error

“His Majesty’s Government views with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of the existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.”

Arthur James Balfour (1848–1930) British Conservative politician and statesman

Letter (2 November 1917) to Lord Rothschild; this letter became known as the Balfour Declaration, quoted in Blanche E. C. Dugdale, Arthur James Balfour, First Earl of Balfour, K.G., O.M., F.R.S., Etc. 1906–1930 (London: Hutchinson & Co. Ltd, 1936), p. 171.

People , Home , Communication , Country

“Was man indeed, as he sometimes desired to be, the growing point of the cosmical spirit, in its temporal aspect at least? Or was he one of many million growing points? Or was mankind of no more importance in the universal view than rats in a cathedral? And again, was man’s true function power, or wisdom, or love, or worship, or all of all these? Or was the idea of function, of purpose, meaningless in relation to the cosmos? These grave questions I would answer.”

Olaf Stapledon book Star Maker

Source: Star Maker (1937), Chapter II: Interstellar Travel (pp. 17-18)

Love , Wisdom , Idea , Question

“Early critics pointed out REH’s fundamental epistemological flaws. … They argued that REH, even if viewed as a bold abstraction or approximation, is grossly inadequate for representing how even minimally reasonable profit seeking participants forecast the future in real-world markets. Nevertheless, … an overwhelming majority of economists has embraced REH as the way to represent how rational individuals think about the future.”

Roman Frydman (1948) American economist

"Which Way Forward for Macroeconomics and Policy Analysis?" 2013

World , Way , Thinking , Future

“There are two dominant mindsets in the world of business or any kind of organization.One is a productive mindset, and it says it's a good idea to seek valid knowledge, it's a good idea to craft your conversations so you make explicit what you are thinking and trying to examine. You craft them in such a way that you can test, as clearly as you can, the validity of your claims. Truth is a good idea. All the managerial functions—accounting, all of them—have a fundamental notion that the productive mindset is what ought to be used to manage human beings.Then there's another mindset I call the defensive mindset. The idea is that even if you are seeking valid knowledge, you are seeking only that kind of valid knowledge that protects yourself or your organization or your department—it is defensive. From a defensive mindset point of view, truth is a good idea when it isn't threatening or upsetting. If it is, massage it, spin it. But if you massage it and spin it, you're violating the espoused theory of good management. When you spin, you have to cover up the fact that you're spinning. And in order for a cover up to work, it too has to be covered up.”

Chris Argyris (1923–2013) American business theorist/Professor Emeritus/Harvard Business School/Thought Leader at Monitor Group

Chris Argyris (2004) in: " Surfacing Your Underground Organization http://hbswk.hbs.edu/archive/4456.html" on hbswk.hbs.edu by Mallory Stark, 11/1/2004

Truth , World , Way , Idea