Quotes about view
page 15

Alexey Voyevoda photo
George Eliot photo
Gregory of Nyssa photo
Jane Roberts photo
John Shelby Spong photo
Condoleezza Rice photo
Roberto Mangabeira Unger photo

“The story begins with a somewhat disgruntled hero, who perceived of the world as populated with stupid people, everywhere committing the environmental fallacy. The fallacy was a case not merely of the “mind’s falling into error,” but rather of the mind leading all of us into incredible dangers as it first builds crisis and then attacks crisis.
Like all heroes, this one looked about for resources, for aids that would help in a dangerous battle, and he found plenty of support – in both the past and the present. It won’t hurt to summarize the story thus far. If the intellect is to engage in the heroic adventure of securing improvement in the human condition, it cannot rely on “approaches,” like politics and morality, which attempt to tackle problems head-on, within the narrow scope. Attempts to address problems in such a manner simply lead to other problems, to an amplification of difficulty away from real improvement. Thus the key to success in the hero’s attempt seems to be comprehensiveness. Never allow the temptation to be clear, or to use reliable data, or to “come up to the standards of excellence,” divert you from the relevant, even though the relevant may be elusive, weakly supported by data, and requiring loose methods.
Thus the academic world of Western twentieth century society is a fearsome enemy of the systems approach, using as it does a politics to concentrate the scholars’ attention on matters that are scholastically respectable but disreputable from a systems-planning point of view.”

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

Source: 1960s - 1970s, The Systems Approach and Its Enemies (1979), p. 145; cited in C. WEST CHURCHMAN: CHAMPION OF THE SYSTEMS APPROACH http://filer.case.edu/nxb41/churchman.html, 2004-2007 Case Western Reserve University

Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot photo
John Gray photo
Karl G. Maeser photo
John Marshall Harlan II photo
André Maurois photo
Justin D. Fox photo
Vitruvius photo

“Apollo at Delphi, through the oracular utterance of his priestess, pronounced Socrates the wisest of men. Of him it is related that he said with sagacity and great learning that the human breast should have been furnished with open windows, so that men might not keep their feelings concealed, but have them open to the view. Oh that nature, following his idea, had constructed them thus unfolded and obvious to the view.”
Delphicus Apollo Socratem omnium sapientissimum Pythiae responsis est professus. Is autem memoratur prudenter doctissimeque dixisse, oportuisse hominum pectora fenestrata et aperta esse, uti non occultos haberent sensus sed patentes ad considerandum. Utinam vero rerum natura sententiam eius secuta explicata et apparentia ea constituisset!

Preface, Sec. 1
De architectura (The Ten Books On Architecture) (~ 15BC), Book III

Dan Balz photo
José Ortega Y Gasset photo
George Canning photo

“I for my part still conceive it to be the paramount duty of a British member of parliament to consider what is good for Great Britain…I do not envy that man's feelings, who can behold the sufferings of Switzerland, and who derives from that sight no idea of what is meant by the deliverance of Europe. I do not envy the feelings of that man, who can look without emotion at Italy – plundered, insulted, trampled upon, exhausted, covered with ridicule, and horror, and devastation – who can look at all this, and be at a loss to guess what is meant by the deliverance of Europe? As little do I envy the feelings of that man, who can view the peoples of the Netherlands driven into insurrection, and struggling for their freedom against the heavy hand of a merciless tyranny, without entertaining any suspicion of what may be the sense of the word deliverance. Does such a man contemplate Holland groaning under arbitrary oppressions and exactions? Does he turn his eyes to Spain trembling at the nod of a foreign master? And does the word deliverance still sound unintelligibly in his ear? Has he heard of the rescue and salvation of Naples, by the appearance and the triumphs of the British fleet? Does he know that the monarchy of Naples maintains its existence at the sword's point? And is his understanding, and his heart, still impenetrable to the sense and meaning of the deliverance of Europe?”

George Canning (1770–1827) British statesman and politician

Speech in 1798, quoted in Wendy Hinde, George Canning (London: Purnell Books Services, 1973), p. 66.

Gerald James Whitrow photo
Murray Leinster photo

“There is a widespread impression today that the history of economics is a sequence of revolutions and counter-revolutions, successive schools rising to dominance just to be deposed in a crisis by another school. According to this view, paraphrasing Marx, all history of economics is a history of school struggles, punctuated by revolutions.”

Jürg Niehans (1919–2007) Swiss economist

Jürg Niehans, " Revolution and evolution in economic theory https://ecompapers.biz.uwa.edu.au/paper/PDF%20of%20Discussion%20Papers/1992/92-20%20Niehans,%20J.pdf." The Australian Quarterly (1993): 498-515.

Maxwell D. Taylor photo
George Lippard photo
Vladimir Putin photo

“Not all G8 members take the view that chemical weapons were in fact used by the Syrian Army. Some actually agree with us that there is no proof We had disagreements that is true but I never felt lonely and Russia never was on its own in making a statement in regards of Syria.”

Vladimir Putin (1952) President of Russia, former Prime Minister

In Enniskillen, 18 June 2013 g8-summit-politics-live-blog http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/blog/2013/jun/18/g8-summit-politics-live-blog, guardian.co.uk
2011 - 2015

Paul DiMaggio photo
Leonid Brezhnev photo

“Under the dictatorship of the proletariat, revisionists and opportunists reflect the pressure of nonproletarian, bourgeois and petty-bourgeois strata, the pressure that results from the force of habit, from the views and vestiges of the past, particularly those that are nationalistic.”

Leonid Brezhnev (1906–1982) General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union

Cited in Socialist Internationalism: Theory and Practice of International Relations of A New Type http://leninist.biz/en/1982/SI507/4.2-Nationalism.in.the.Socialist.Countries

Roberto Mangabeira Unger photo
Jerry Coyne photo
Bernie Sanders photo
Geert Wilders photo

“There is no equality between our culture and the retarded Islamic culture. Look at their views on homosexuality or women.”

Geert Wilders (1963) Dutch politician

The Guardian 'I don't hate Muslims. I hate Islam' http://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/feb/17/netherlands.islam (17 February 2008)
2000s

Richard Nixon photo

“Bill Rogers has got — to his credit it’s a decent feeling — but somewhat sort of a blind spot on the black thing because he’s been in New York. He says well, ‘They are coming along, and that after all they are going to strengthen our country in the end because they are strong physically and some of them are smart.’ So forth and so on. My own view is I think he’s right if you’re talking in terms of 500 years.
What has to happen is they have to be, frankly, inbred. And, you just, that’s the only thing that’s going to do it, Rose.”

Richard Nixon (1913–1994) 37th President of the United States of America

Conversation with secretary Rose Mary Woods on tapes recorded February-March 1973 http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/flash/national/20101211_NIXON_AUDIO/3_VIETNAM.mp3 on tapes recorded February-March 1973; as quoted in "In Tapes, Nixon Rails About Jews and Blacks" http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/11/us/politics/11nixon.html, by Adam Nagourney, New York Times (10 December 2010); with sound recording http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/flash/national/20101211_NIXON_AUDIO/4_BLACKS.mp3.
1970s

Bernie Sanders photo
Aldous Huxley photo
Boris Sidis photo
Ben Croshaw photo
Hermann Weyl photo
Murray Leinster photo
Charles, Prince of Wales photo
Charles James Napier photo
Harold Wilson photo
Robert Cecil, 1st Viscount Cecil of Chelwood photo

“Patriotism or any other version of the herd instinct seems to me an entirely inadequate basis of virtue. Christianity is from that point of view an explanation of and a support for an essential ingredient in man's nature—far the best, though necessarily imperfect.”

Robert Cecil, 1st Viscount Cecil of Chelwood (1864–1958) lawyer, politician and diplomat in the United Kingdom

Letter to Gilbert Murray (25 October 1948), quoted in Gilbert Murray : An Unfinished Autobiography (1960) edited by Jean Smith and Arnold Toynbee, p. 179

Dean Acheson photo

“Communist writers likewise maintain that the Judaic-Christian code of ethics is "class" morality. By this they mean that the Ten Commandments and the ethics of Christianity were created to protect private property and the property class. To show the lengths to which Communist writers have gone to defend this view we will mention several of their favorite interpretations of the Ten Commandments. They believe that "Honor thy Father and thy Mother" was created by the early Hebrews to emphasize to their children the fact that they were the private property of their parents. "Thou shalt not kill" was attributed to the belief of the dominant class that their bodies were private property and therefore they should be protected along with other property rights. "Thou shalt not commit adultery" and "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife" were said to have been created to implement the idea that a husband was the master of the home and the wife was strictly private property belonging to him. This last line of reasoning led to some catastrophic consequences when the Communists came into power in Russia. In their anxiety to make women "equal with men" and prevent them from becoming private property, they degraded womankind to the lowest and most primitive level. Some Communist leaders advocated complete libertinism and promiscuity to replace marriage and the family.”

The Naked Communist (1958)

Elia M. Ramollah photo
Enoch Powell photo

“The reality of the situation is obscured when population is expressed as a percentage proportion taken over the whole of the United Kingdom. The ethnic minority is geographically concentrated, so that areas in which it forms a majority already exists, and these areas are destined inevitably to grow. It is here that the compatibility of such an ethnic minority with the functioning of parliamentary democracy comes into question. Parliamentary democracy depends at all levels upon the valid acceptance of majority decision, by which the nation as a whole is content to be bound because of the continually available prospect that what one majority has decided another majority can subsequently alter. From this point of view, the political homogeneity of the electorate is crucial. What we do not, as yet, know is whether the voting behaviour of our altered population will be able to use the majority vote as a political instrument and not as a means of self-identification, self-assertion and self-enumeration. It may be that the United Kingdom will escape the political consequences of communalism; but communalism and democracy, as the experience of India demonstrates, are incompatible. That is the spectre which the Conservative party's policy of assisted repatriation in the 1960s aimed to banish; but time and events have swept over and passed the already outdated remedies of the 1960s. We are entering unknown territory where the only certainty for the future is the relative increase of the ethnic minority due to the age structure of that population which has been established.”

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

Article on the 25th anniversary of his 'Rivers of Blood speech', The Times (20 April 1993), p. 18
1990s

Theodore Roszak photo
Timothy Leary photo
Peter Greenaway photo
James Fenimore Cooper photo

“Parson Amen's speculations on this interesting subject, although this may happen to be the first occasion on which he has ever heard the practice of taking scalps justified by Scripture. Viewed in a proper spirit, they ought merely to convey a lesson of humility, by rendering apparent the wisdom, nay the necessity, of men's keeping them-selves within the limits of the sphere of knowledge they were designed to fill, and convey, when rightly considered, as much of a lesson to the Puseyite, with abstractions that are quite as unintelligible to himself as they are to others; to the high-wrought and dogmatical Calvinist, who in the midst of his fiery zeal, forgets that love is the very essence of the relation between God and man; to the Quaker, who seems to think the cut of a coat essential to salvation; to the descendant of the Puritan, who whether he be Socinian, Calvinist, Universalist, or any other "1st," appears to believe that the "rock" on which Christ declared he would found his church was the "Rock of Plymouth"; and to the unbeliever, who, in deriding all creeds, does not know where to turn to find one to substitute in their stead. Humility, in matters of this sort, is the great lesson that all should teach and learn; for it opens the way to charity, and eventually to faith, and through both of these to hope; finally, through all of these, to heaven.”

James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851) American author

Source: Oak Openings or The bee-hunter (1848), Ch. XI

“When we ask ourselves if we are walking with Christ, I believe we need to ask oursleves this question: Has Christ changed the way I view the world lately?”

Donald Miller (1971) American writer

Prayer and the Art of Volkswagen Maintenance (2000, Harvest House Publishers)

John Dryden photo

“The gates of hell are open night and day;
Smooth the descent, and easy is the way:
But to return, and view the cheerful skies,
In this the task and mighty labor lies.”

John Dryden (1631–1700) English poet and playwright of the XVIIth century

Aeneis, Book VI, lines 192–195.
The Works of Virgil (1697)

Jahangir photo
William Joyce photo

“Bombardment by a new device of centres essential to the British war effort. The action was long delayed, but who can deny that the moment selected for it was chosen most appropriately from the military point of view? Germany has more secret weapons than one.”

William Joyce (1906–1946) British fascist and propaganda broadcaster

Broadcast, German European Service in English, 17 September 1944.
Refers to the first attack by the Vergeltungswaffe-1, or "reprisal weapon".

André Breton photo
Jean Baudrillard photo
Iwane Matsui photo
Eugène Delacroix photo
Max Ernst photo
John B. Cobb photo

“The scientific point of view is that such claims of postmodernism are a travesty that comes from mixing ideology and politics with science.”

Mordechai Ben-Ari (1948) Israeli computer scientist

Source: Just a Theory: Exploring the Nature of Science (2005), Chapter 7, “Postmodernist Critiques of Science: Is Science Universal?” (p. 128)

Kenneth Arrow photo

“I am old-fashioned enough to retain David Hume’s view that one can never derive “ought” propositions from “is” propositions. The two issues, method and value, are distinct.”

Kenneth Arrow (1921–2017) American economist

Kenneth Arrow, "Methodological Individualism and Social Knowledge", American Economic Review (1994)
1970s-1980s

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky photo
Shelly Kagan photo
Herman Kahn photo
Philip Schaff photo

“Editions and Revisions. The printed Bible text of Luther had the same fate as the written text of the old Itala and Jerome's Vulgate. It passed through innumerable improvements and mis-improvements. The orthography and inflections were modernized, obsolete words removed, the versicular division introduced (first in a Heidelberg reprint, 1568), the spurious clause of the three witnesses inserted in 1 John 5:7 (first by a Frankfurt publisher, 1574), the third and fourth books of Ezra and the third book of the Maccabees added to the Apocrypha, and various other changes effected, necessary and unnecessary, good and bad. Elector August of Saxony tried to control the text in the interest of strict Lutheran orthodoxy, and ordered the preparation of a standard edition (1581). But it was disregarded outside of Saxony.
Gradually no less than eleven or twelve recensions came into use, some based on the edition of 1545, others on that of 1546. The most careful recension was that of the Canstein Bible Institute, founded by a pious nobleman, Carl Hildebrand von Canstein (1667-1719) in connection with Francke's Orphan House at Halle. It acquired the largest circulation and became the textus receptus of the German Bible.
With the immense progress of biblical learning in the present century, the desire for a timely revision of Luther's version was more and more felt. Revised versions with many improvements were prepared by Joh.- Friedrich von Meyer, a Frankfurt patrician (1772-1849), and Dr. Rudolf Stier (1800-1862), but did not obtain public authority.
At last a conservative official revision of the Luther Bible was inaugurated by the combined German church governments in 1863, with a view and fair prospect of superseding all former editions in public use.”

Philip Schaff (1819–1893) American Calvinist theologian

Luther's Bible club

Roger Ailes photo

“They are, of course, Nazis. They have a kind of Nazi attitude. They are the left wing of Nazism. These guys don't want any other point of view. They don't even feel guilty using tax dollars to spout their propaganda. They are basically Air America with government funding to keep them alive.”

Roger Ailes (1940–2017) Television executive

Howard
Kurtz
Fox News Chief Blasts NPR 'Nazis'
The Daily Beast
2010-11-17
http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-11-17/fox-news-chief-roger-ailes-blasts-national-public-radio-brass-as-nazis/
2011-02-10
on NPR firing Juan Williams for remarks he made on Fox News about fearing airplane passengers in Muslim garb

Chris Grayling photo
Tristan Tzara photo
George H. W. Bush photo

“Even though I'm a tranquil guy now at this stage of my life, I have nothing but contempt and anger for those who betray the trust by exposing the identity of our sources. They are, in my view, the most insidious of traitors.”

George H. W. Bush (1924–2018) American politician, 41st President of the United States

Speech at CIA headquarters to Agency employees (26 April 1999) https://www.cia.gov/news-information/speeches-testimony/1999/bush_speech_042699.html

John Gray photo
Frederick Brotherton Meyer photo
Larry Wall photo

“If someone stinks, view it as a reason to help them, not a reason to avoid them.”

Larry Wall (1954) American computer programmer and author, creator of Perl

[199702111730.JAA28598@wall.org, 1997]
Usenet postings, 1997

Bernie Sanders photo

“Blair likes to say that his party is best when it is bold. So is he--and when he has an unconflicted view of the right and wrong of an issue.”

Irwin Stelzer (1932) American economist and columnist

Letter from Londonistan (2005)

James A. Michener photo
Hugo De Vries photo

“To put it in the terms chosen lately by Mr. Arthur Harris in a friendly criticism of my views: "Natural selection may explain the survival of the fittest, but it cannot explain the arrival of the fittest."”

Hugo De Vries (1848–1935) Dutch botanist

Concluding sentence of his work Species and Varieties: Their Origin by Mutation (1904), The Open Court Publishing Company, Chicago, p. 826.

Henry Flynt photo
M. S. Swaminathan photo
Rajiv Malhotra photo
David Bohm photo

“Perhaps in the long view, de Gaulle was more responsible with his troublesome interventions into our domestic politics, for unifying our country than we will ever give him credit for.”

Judy LaMarsh (1924–1980) Canadian politician, writer, broadcaster and barrister.

Source: Memoirs Of A Bird In A Gilded Cage (1969), CHAPTER 8, Centennial summer, p. 226

“The basic point-of-view is that science is a social process.”

Jay Lemke (1946) American academic

Source: Talking Science: Language, Learning, and Values. 1990, p. xi

Rufus Wainwright photo

“Putting all of my time
In learning to care
And a bucket of rhymes
I threw up somewhere
Want a locket of who
Made me lose my perfunctory view
Of all that is around
And of all that I do.”

Rufus Wainwright (1973) American-Canadian singer-songwriter and composer

I Don't Know What It Is
Song lyrics, Want One (2003)

Louisa May Alcott photo
Timothy McVeigh photo