Quotes about view
page 19

“[W]e live in a popular-front moment, where no one on “our side” is worth criticizing too much, if at all, and everyone on “their side” is evil. This has as much to do with ratings and page views as it does with ideology. Moths chase light, but the incentive for politicians, producers, and pundits is to follow the heat. I’m still torn over how people such as Mark Zuckerberg should deal with slanderous carnival barkers like Alex Jones. But I’m convinced a lot of people are to blame for the problem reaching Zuckerberg’s desk in the first place.”

Jonah Goldberg (1969) American political writer and pundit

2010s, 2018, Are We to Blame for the Alex Jones Problem? (2018)

People, Problem, Light, Evil

“Counsel are frequently induced, and they are justified in taking the most favourable view of their clients' case; and it is not fair to pass over any piece of evidence they find difficult to deal with, provided they cite, fairly and correctly, those parts of the evidence they comment upon.”

Lloyd Kenyon, 1st Baron Kenyon (1732–1802) British Baron

Trial of the Earl of Thanet, and others (1799), 27 How. St. Tr. 940.

Parting

“No spiritual teaching is a direct path to enlightenment. In fact, there is no such thing as a path to enlightenment, simply because enlightenment is ever present in all places and at all times. What you can do is to remove any and all illusions, especially the ones you value most and find the most security in, that cloud your perception of Reality. Let go of clinging to your illusions and resisting what is, and Reality will suddenly come into view.”

Adyashanti (1962) Spiritual teacher

The Way of Liberation (2012)

Reality, Time

“I believe a second factor which has weighed heavily in this matter is the attitude, or supposed attitude, of the United States. I confess that I am not greatly moved by this. Whatever may be the attitude of the American Government and public to the United Kingdom as such, my view of American policy over the last decade has been that it has been steadily and relentlessly directed towards the weakening and the destruction of the links which bind the British Empire together. [Cyril Osborne: "No!"] We can watch the events as they unfold and place our own interpretation on them. My interpretation is that the United States has for this country, considered separately, a very considerable economic and strategic use but that she sees little or no strategic use or economic value in the British Empire or the British Commonwealth as it has existed and as it still exists. Against the background I ask the House to consider the evidence of advancing American imperialism in this area from which they are helping to eliminate us.”

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1953/nov/05/foreign-affairs in the House of Commons (5 November 1953) on the British evacuation of the Suez Canal. 1950s

Help, Housing, Country

“If a ship runs into a large bridge, destroying both the bridge and ship, as happened recently in Tasmania, it is very difficult to see what either the naval architect or the bridge designer could have been expected to do about it from the structural point of view. The problem is not one for the structural engineer but for the local Pilotage Association. Again, aircraft cannot be designed to be flown into mountains.”

J.E. Gordon (1913–1998) Materials scientist

Source: Structures (or, Why Things Don't Fall Down) (1978), Chapter 15, A Chapter of accidents

Mountain, Problem

“All who strive to live for something beyond mere selfish aims find their capacities for doing good very inadequate to their aspirations. They do so much less than they want to do, and so much less than they, at the outset, expected to do, that their lives, viewed retrospectively, inevitably look like failure.”

Lydia Maria Child (1802–1880) American abolitionist, author and women's rights activist

1860s Source: Letter to John Fraser http://www.bartleby.com/66/71/12271.html (1868)

Failure, Selfishness

“All things in nature become identical with the phenomena they present when submitted to the practices of our laboratories, whose problems no less than their apparatus express in turn the problems and interests of society as it is. This view may be compared with that of a criminologist maintaining that trustworthy knowledge of a human being can be obtained only by the well-tested and streamlined examining methods applied to a suspect in the hands of the metropolitan police.”

Max Horkheimer book Eclipse of Reason

describing the pragmatist view, p. 49.
Eclipse of Reason (1947)

Nature, Knowledge, Problem

“We somehow believe that our point of view is superior, higher than those of the greatest minds—either because our point of view is that of our time, and our time, being later than the time of the greatest minds, can be presumed to be superior to their times; or else because we believe that each the greatest minds was right from his point of view, but not, as he claims, simply right.”

Leo Strauss (1899–1973) Classical philosophy specialist and father of neoconservativism

“What is liberal education,” pp. 7-8
Liberalism Ancient and Modern (1968)

Time

“The essential freedom, the ultimate and final freedom that cannot be taken from a man, is to say No. This is the basic premise in Sartre's view of human freedom: freedom is in its very essence negative, though the negativity is also creative.”

William Barrett (philosopher) book Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy

Source: Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy (1958), Chapter Ten, Sartre, p. 215

Freedom

“Draw all kind of everyday object placed, in such a way that they have in them the life of the man or woman – corsets that have just been removed, for example, and which retain the form of the body. Do a series in aquatint on mourning, different blacks – black veils of deep mourning floating on the face – black gloves – mourning carriages, undertaker’s vehicles – carriages like Venetian gondolas. On smoke – smoker’s smoke, pipes, cigarettes, cigars – smoke from locomotives, from tall factory chimneys, from steam boats, etc. On evening – infinite variety of subjects in cafes, different tones of glass robes reflected in the mirrors. On bakery, bread. Series of baker's boys, seen in the cellar itself or through the basement windows from the street – backs the colour of the pink flour – beautiful curves of dough – still-life's of different breads, large, oval, long, round, etc. Studies in color of the yellows, pinks, grays, whites of bread…… Neither monuments nor houses have ever been done from below, close up as they appear when you walk down the street. [a working note in which Degas planned series of views of modern Paris, the same time when he sketched the backstreet brothels, making graphic unflinching and even his realistic 'pornographic' sketches he called his 'glimpses through the keyhole', in which he also experimented with perspectives]”

Edgar Degas (1834–1917) French artist

Quote from Degas' Notebooks; Clarendon Press, Oxford 1976, nos 30 & 34 circa 1877; as quoted in The private lives of the Impressionists, Sue Roe, Harpen Collins Publishers, New York 2006, p. 182
quotes, undated

Life, Beauty, Color, Way

“Neither economic liberalism nor Keynesianism can conceptualise vocation, virtue or labour value as economic categories, neither can give a primary economic value to intermediate institutions, whether they be the corporate governance of a firm, vocational colleges, regional banks or supporter owned football clubs, they can only conceptualise the state or the market and all forms of particular association are viewed as at best “cultural” or at worst “obstructive”. They can give no conceptual status to place, to the specificity of place and the necessity of institutions in generating virtue and value within it.”

Maurice Glasman, Baron Glasman (1961) British philosopher

Politics, Employment Polices and the Young Generation, Maurice Glasman http://www.lse.ac.uk/economics/newsEventsSeminars/files/MauriceGlasmanPaper.pdf

Support, Football

“After six years of war service, I rejoined Ilford Public Library service in 1946, and set about completing my F. L. A., begun in 1940. This service had a good tradition of assistance to readers, and when I joined the Metal Box C. in 1948, I soon realised how the skills required for a scientific and industrial research “information officer” depended on the basic techniques of librarianship, notably classification and cataloguing. The enhancement of these led to the development of higher levels, in literature searching, and, more particularly, in current awareness service and selective dissemination of information….
Meeting with S. R. Ranganathan in 1948 gave me a new view of classification as facet analysis plus traditional generic analysis and I applied this in schemes for Packaging, Occupational Safety and Health, and Education. This experience has suggested to me that facet analysis applied to any subject can reveal hitherto uncoordinated concepts - materials, processes, etc – and thus offer an indication of possible areas of future research. This could be a unique Information Science to the World Wide Web.”

Douglas John Foskett (1918–2004)

Douglas Foskett (2000-04) " From Librarianship to Information Science http://faculty.libsci.sc.edu/bob/scrapbook/foskett2.htm" at

War, Health, World, Education

“The analytical equations, unknown to the ancient geometers, which Descartes was the first to introduce into the study of curves and surfaces, are not restricted to the properties of figures, and to those properties which are the object of rational mechanics; they extend to all general phenomena. There cannot be a language more universal and more simple, more free from errors and from obscurities, that is to say more worthy to express the invariable relations of natural things.
Considered from this point of view, mathematical analysis is as extensive as nature itself; it defines all perceptible relations, measures times, spaces, forces, temperatures; this difficult science is formed slowly, but it preserves every principle which it has once acquired; it grows and strengthens itself incessantly in the midst of the many variations and errors of the human mind.
Its chief attribute is clearness; it has no marks to express confused notions. It brings together phenomena the most diverse, and discovers the hidden analogies which unite them.”

Joseph Fourier book The Analytical Theory of Heat

Preliminary Discourse, p.7 Note: often quoted as Mathematics [or mathematical analysis] compares the most diverse phenomena and discovers the secret analogies that unite them.
The Analytical Theory of Heat (1878)

Error, Mathematics, Nature, Study

“Either you write songs or you don't. And if you do write songs like I do, I think there's a natural desire to want to make records. So, when I left Pink Floyd, I guess I had two, no three choices open to me: Not to do it anymore, which is daft as I was writing songs, although I suppose I could have written for other people, but I like making records; so I could either do it as Roger Waters or I could have got together with other people and said hey, why don't we start a band? But my view of bands had been jaundiced slightly by my previous experience, so I think that was something I never considered.”

Roger Waters (1943) English songwriter, bassist, and lyricist of Pink Floyd

Gold, 1992
Music

People, Nature, Thinking, Water

“An action cannot be supported for telling a bare naked lie: but that I define to be, saying a thing that is false, knowing or not knowing it to be so, and without any design to injure, cheat, or deceive another person. Every deceit comprehends a he; but a deceit is more than a lie, on account of the view with which it is practised, its being coupled with some dealing, and the injury which it is calculated to occasion, and does occasion, to another person.”

Sir Francis Buller, 1st Baronet (1746–1800) British judge

Pasley v. Freeman (1789), 3 T. R. 56.

Lie, Support, Cheating, Personality

“Even at the religious level the creationist view is a biased one. The only creation story they mention is the one in Genesis (in which there are actually two stories — the version in the first chapter being so different from that in the second chapter that biblical scholars believe they were written hundreds of years apart). Why do they not mention the belief of the Hindus that the world began with the creation of the cosmic egg? What about the Babylonians' belief that there was not a single creationist god but two cosmic parents?”

Garrett Hardin (1915–2003) American ecologist

Naked Emperors : Essays of a Taboo-Stalker (1982)

God, World, Parent

“Are we really here? Is this really happening? Is this America? Are we a great country talking about trying to straddle the world and create opportunity in this country? It's just mind-boggling. And we have sort of become acculturated, because this campaign has been so ugly. We have become acculturated to sleaze and unhappiness that you just want to shower from every 15 minutes. The Trump comparison of the looks of the wives, he does have, over the course of his life, a consistent misogynistic view of women as arm candy, as pieces of meat. It’s a consistent attitude toward women which is the stuff of a diseased adolescent. And so we have seen a bit of that show up again. But if you go back over his past, calling into radio shows bragging about his affairs, talking about his sex life in public, he is childish in his immaturity. And his — even his misogyny is a childish misogyny. And that’s why I do not think Republicans, standard Republicans, can say, yes, I’m going to vote for this guy because he’s our nominee. He’s of a different order than your normal candidate. And this whole week is just another reminder of that… The odd thing about his whole career and his whole language, his whole world view is there is no room for love in it. You get a sense of a man who received no love, can give no love, so his relationship with women, it has no love in it. It’s trophy. And his relationship toward the world is one of competition and beating, and as if he’s going to win by competition what other people get by love. And so you really are seeing someone who just has an odd psychology unleavened by kindness and charity, but where it’s all winners and losers, beating and being beat. And that’s part of the authoritarian personality, but it comes out in his attitude towards women.”

David Brooks (1961) American journalist, commentator and editor

David Brooks, as quoted in "Shields and Brooks on Trump-Cruz wife feud, ISIS terror in Brussels" http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/shields-and-brooks-on-trump-cruz-wife-feud-isis-terror-in-brussels/ (25 March 2016), PBS NewsHour 2010s

Love, Life, Women, People

“There continue to be complex debates about what Nietzsche understood truth to be. Quite certainly, he did not think, in pragmatist spirit, that beliefs are true if they serve our interests or welfare: we have just seen some of his repeated denials of this idea. The more recently fashionable view is that he was the first of the deniers, thinking that there is no such thing as truth, or that truth is what anyone thinks it is, or that it is a boring category that we can do without. This is also wrong, and more deeply so. Nietzsche did not think that the ideal of truthfulness went into retirement when its metaphysical origins were discovered, and he did not suppose, either, that truthfulness could be detached from a concern for the truth. Truthfulness as an ideal retains its power, and so far from his seeing truth as dispensable or malleable, his main question is how it can be made bearable.”

Bernard Williams (1929–2003) English moral philosopher

Source: Truth and Truthfulness (2002), p. 16

Truth, Idea, Fashion, Question

“The extensive literature addressed to the definition or characterization of science is filled with inconsistent points of view and demonstrates that an adequate definition is not easy to attain. Part of the difficulty arises from the fact that the meaning of science is not fixed, but is dynamic. As science has evolved, so has its meaning. It takes on a new meaning and significance with successive ages.”

Russell L. Ackoff (1919–2009) Scientist

Source: 1960s, Scientific method: optimizing applied research decisions, 1962, p. 1.

Age, Literature, Science, Success

“The mania for self-observation and self-admiration in literature and the view that a work is the more true and the more convincing, the more directly the author reveals himself in it, are part of the intellectual inheritance of Rousseau. In the next hundred to hundred and fifty years everything of importance in European literature is stamped with this subjectivism. Not only Werther, René, Obermann, Adolphe, Jacopo Ortis, are among the successors of Saint-Preux, but also the heroes in later novels— from Balzac’s Lucien de Rubempré, Stendhal’s Julien Sorel, Flaubert’s Frédéric Moreau and Emma Bovary to Tolstoy’s Pierre, Proust’s Marcel and Thomas Mann’s Hans Castorp—are derived from it. They all suffer from the discrepancy between dream and reality and are the victim of the conflict between their illusions and practical, commonplace, middle-class life.”

Arnold Hauser (1892–1978) Hungarian art historian

Source: The Social History of Art, Volume III. Rococo, Classicism and Romanticism, 1999, Chapter 2. The New Reading Public

Life, Dreams, Literature, Reality

“I think that democratic communities have a natural taste for freedom: left to themselves, they will seek it, cherish it, and view any privation of it with regret. But for equality, their passion is ardent, insatiable, incessant, invincible: they call for equality in freedom; and if they cannot obtain that, they still call for equality in slavery.”

Alexis De Tocqueville book Democracy in America

Book Two, Chapter I.
Democracy in America, Volume II (1840), Book Two

Communication, Nature, Thinking, Freedom

“How we come to have the world-views we do is an interesting question. No doubt reason plays a part, but human needs for meaning and purpose are usually more important. At times personal taste may be what decides the issue. There is nothing to say that, when all the work of reason is done, only one view of the world will remain. There may be many that fit everything that can be known. In that case you might as well choose the view of the world you find most interesting or beautiful. Adopting a world-view is more like selecting a painting to furnish a room than testing a scientific theory. The test is how it fits with your life.”

John Gray (1948) British philosopher

Freedom for Über-Marionettes: What Science Won't Tell You (p. 150)
The Soul of the Marionette: A Short Enquiry into Human Freedom (2015)

Life, World, Beauty, Question

“I never view aesthetic ideas as having an existence purely of their own but as a function they have in connection with political or moral values.”

Antoni Tàpies (1923–2012) Catalan painter, sculptor and art theorist

Source: undated quotes, Tàpies, Werke auf Papier 1943 – 2003,' (2004), p. 24.

Idea

“The mind is like a well-endowed museum, only a small fraction of its holdings on view at any one time.”

James Richardson (1950) American poet

#407
Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001)

Time

“We need to teach people to refuse to install non-free plug-ins; we need to teach people to care more about their long-term interest of freedom than their immediate desire to view a particular site.”

Richard Stallman (1953) American software freedom activist, short story writer and computer programmer, founder of the GNU project

"Interview with Richard Stallman: Four Essential Freedoms" Roy Schestowitz, in IT Management (19 December 2007) http://tech-insider.org/free-software/research/2007/1219.html 2000s

People, Freedom

“Donald Trump has a different view. He’s made a career out of stiffing small businesses from Atlantic City to Las Vegas. There are companies that were left hanging because he refused to pay their bills. A lot of those companies scraped together what the could to pay their employees, and many of them put their businesses at risk and some of them ended up taking bankruptcy. It wasn’t because Trump couldn’t pay them, it was because he wouldn’t pay them.”

Hillary Clinton (1947) American politician, senator, Secretary of State, First Lady

Presidential campaign (April 12, 2015 – 2016), Speech in Warren, Michigan (August 11, 2016)

Business

“The division of the world into two mutually exclusive camps - the City of War and the City of Faith - lies at the heart of Islam's traditional view of existence. Places where Islam rules supreme and its laws are strictly obeyed are known as Dar al-Iman or the City of Faith. The rest of the world is signified under the title of Dar al-Harb or the City of War.”

Amir Taheri (1942) Iranian journalist

Holy Terror: The inside story of Islamic terrorism (1987)

War, World, Faith, Law

“Let me frankly state that I see two great difficulties with this proposal. In view of your public position, such action on our part would inevitably produce worldwide speculation that discussions were under way and would impair the privacy and secrecy of those discussions. Secondly, there would inevitably be grave concern on our part whether your government would make use of such action by us to improve its military position.”

Lyndon B. Johnson (1908–1973) American politician, 36th president of the United States (in office from 1963 to 1969)

1960s, Letter to Ho Chi Minh (1967)

Way, Parting

“Consumer Christianity, while promising to strengthen our souls with an entertaining faith, has left us malnourished with an anemic view of God, faith, church, and mission.”

Skye Jethani

Source: The Divine Commodity: Discovering A Faith Beyond Consumer Christianity (2009, Zondervan)

God, Faith, Soul

“.. when the terrible storm and high flood of water raged most fearfully, I went to Schevelinge…. sea and sky seemed to be one [undivided] element; at the height where I stood - because the sea had already washed away dunes and stood up to the village – the view was horrible; the wailing of the inhabitants awful. - when arriving home, I immediately put a sketch of all this on paper - but that sketch represented so little of what I had seen on the spot itself…. [where] no part turned up itself of which I could make a sketch…. [so it] will be necessary for me to return to Scheveningen again and to outline those places where the water has raged most violently.. (translation from original Dutch: Fons Heijnsbroek)”

Andreas Schelfhout (1787–1870) Dutch painter, etcher and lithographer

(original Dutch, citaat van Schelfhout, uit zijn brief:) ..toen den verschrikkelijke storm en hogen watervloed allerverschrikkelijkst woede, begaf ik mij naar Schevelinge [=Scheveningen].. ..zee en lucht scheene een element te zijn; op de hoogte waar ik stond, want de zee had reeds duinen weggespoeld en stond tot aan het dorp, was het gezigt verschrikkelijk; het gejammer der bewoners akelig. - bij mijne thuiskomst heb ik echter dadelijk een schets daarvan op papier gebragt - doch die schets voldoet zo weinig, aan het geen men terplaatse zelve zag.. ..[waar] geen partij zig op deed waar van eigenlijk een tekening te maken was.. ..[dus] zal het nodig zijn dat ik [mij] nog een andere maal naar Scheveningen begeeft en die punten waar het water het meest gewoeld heeft afteschetsen..
Quote of Schelfhout in his letter to , 10 Feb. 1825; the original letter is in the collection of the Koninklijke Bibliotheek, Den Haag, inv. Nr: 133 C12, nr. 4

Home, Water, Rage, Parting

“Pevsner's career is a prism through which to view the world of art history as it developed in England in the middle of the twentieth century.”

Nikolaus Pevsner (1902–1983) German-born British scholar

Susie Harries, "Nikolaus Pevsner: The Life" (2011), page ix
About

World, Art, History

“Let observation with extensive view
Survey mankind, from China to Peru.”

Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) English writer

Source: Vanity of Human Wishes (1749), Line 1; comparable to: "All human race, from China to Peru, Pleasure, howe’er disguis’d by art, pursue", Thomas Warton, Universal Love of Pleasure

“Through him I am aware of the nature and condition of your world, and offer from my viewpoint comments meant to help you. Through Ruburt, then, I am permitted to view the earth again in your terms. I exist apart from him, as he exists apart from me, yet we together a part of the same entity - and that simply carries the idea of the psyche further.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Session 711, Page 337
The “Unknown” Reality: Volume Two, (1979)

World, Idea, Nature, Help

“I view the major features of my own odyssey as a set of mostly fortunate contingencies. I was not destined by inherited mentality or family tradition to become a paleontologist. I can locate no tradition for scientific or intellectual careers anywhere on either side of my eastern European Jewish background. […] I view my serious and lifelong commitment to baseball in entirely the same manner: purely as a contingent circumstance of numerous, albeit not entirely capricious, accidents.”

Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) American evolutionary biologist

"Seventh Inning Stretch: Baseball, Father, and Me", p. 29
Triumph and Tragedy in Mudville (2003)

Family

“In view of deliberate attempts in recent decades to project Buddhism and Jainism as separate religions, distinct from Hinduism, it would be in order to deal with them in passing. the attempts have clearly been motivated by the design to separate their followers from the parent body called Hinduism just as Sikhs have been to an extent. Though not to the same extent as in the case of Sikhs, the attempts have succeeded in as much as neo-Buddhists and at least some Jains have come to regard themselves as non-Hindus.”

Girilal Jain (1924–1993) Indian journalist

On Hinduism, On relation of Hinduism with Jainism and Buddhism

Religion, Motivation, Parent

“God, when he created the human species, wished their happiness; and made for them the provision which he has made, with that view, and for that purpose.”

William Paley (1743–1805) Christian apologist, natural theologian, utilitarian

Vol. I, Book II, Ch. V.
The Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy (1785)

God, Happiness

“If the young are watched too closely, if they are kept habitually under surveillance, the spring of action is weakened, the power of initiative is destroyed, and they become mediocre, commonplace, mechanical men and women, from whom nothing excellent or distinguished may be expected. Parents and teachers … must so deal with the young as to bring them little by little under the control of reason and conscience; and in this, nothing thwarts more surely than excessive supervision, for it draws attention from the inner view and voice to the eyes of the watchers. It may cultivate a love of decency and propriety, but not the creative feeling that we live with God and that righteousness is life.”

John Lancaster Spalding (1840–1916) Catholic bishop

Source: Aphorisms and Reflections (1901), p. 257-258

Love, Life, Women, Men

“"What is Bazarov?" Arkady smiled. "Would you like me to tell you, uncle, what he really is?""Please do, nephew.""He is a nihilist!""What?" asked Nikolai Petrovich, while Pavel Petrovich lifted his knife in the air with a small piece of butter on the tip and remained motionless."He is a nihilist," repeated Arkady."A nihilist," said Nikolai Petrovich. "That comes from the Latin nihil, nothing, as far as I can judge; the word must mean a man who… who recognizes nothing?""Say — who respects nothing," interposed Pavel Petrovich and lowered his knife with the butter on it."Who regards everything from the critical point of view," said Arkady."Isn't that exactly the same thing?" asked Pavel Petrovich."No, it's not the same thing. A nihilist is a person who does not bow down to any authority, who does not accept any principle on faith, however much that principle may be revered.""Well, and is that good?" asked Pavel Petrovich. "That depends, uncle dear. For some it is good, for others very bad.""Indeed. Well, I see that's not in our line. We old-fashioned people think that without principles, taken as you say on faith, one can't take a step or even breathe. Vous avez changé tout cela; may God grant you health and a general's rank, and we shall be content to look on and admire your… what was the name?""Nihilists," said Arkady, pronouncing very distinctly."Yes, there used to be Hegelists and now there are nihilists. We shall see how you will manage to exist in the empty airless void; and now ring, please, brother Nikolai, it's time for me to drink my cocoa."”

Ivan Turgenev (1818–1883) Russian writer

Source: Father and Sons (1862), Ch. 5.

God, People, Health, Faith

“With Mie's view of matter there is contrasted another, according to which matter is a limiting singularity of the field, but charges and masses are force-fluxes in the field. This entails a new and more cautious attitude towards the whole problem of matter.”

Hermann Weyl (1885–1955) German mathematician

From the Author's Preface to Fourth Edition (1920)
Space—Time—Matter (1952)

Problem

“All men are our brothers. As far as the discovery of the truth is concerned, they are all working for the same purpose; they may be separated by the accidents of space and time, and by the exigencies of race, religion, nationality, and other groupings; from the point of view of eternity they are working together.”

George Sarton (1884–1956) American historian of science

Preface.
A History of Science Vol.2 Hellenistic Science and Culture in the Last Three Centuries B.C. (1959)

Men, Truth, Religion, Time

“The new institutionalism focuses instead on nonlocal environments, either organisational sectors or fields roughly coterminous with the boundaries of industries, professions, or national societies. Environments, in this view, are more subtle in their influence; rather than being co-opted by organisations, they penetrate the organisation, creating the lenses through which actors view the world and the very categories of structure, action and thought.”

Paul DiMaggio (1951) American sociologist

Source: Introduction to The New Institutionalism and Organizational Analysis, 1991, p. 12-13.

World

“It was a custom with Apelles, to which he most tenaciously adhered, never to let any day pass, however busy he might be, without exercising himself by tracing some outline or other,—a practice which has now passed into a proverb. It was also a practice with him, when he had completed a work, to exhibit it to the view of the passers-by in his studio, while he himself, concealed behind the picture, would listen to the criticisms…. Under these circumstances, they say that he was censured by a shoemaker for having represented the shoes with one latchet too few. The next day, the shoemaker, quite proud at seeing the former error corrected, thanks to his advice, began to criticise the leg; upon which Apelles, full of indignation, popped his head out and reminded him that a shoemaker should give no opinion beyond the shoes, —a piece of advice which has equally passed into a proverbial saying.”

Pliny the Elder book Natural History

Book XXXV, sec. 84.
Naturalis Historia

Shoe, Error, Exercises, Business

“She may be mad, he realizes abruptly. Not clinically insane, just at odds with the entire universe. Locked into a pathological view of her own role in reality.”

Charles Stross book Accelerando

Source: Accelerando (2005), Chapter 7 (“Curator”), p. 289

Reality, Universe, Madness

“This patchwork of largely fictional works makes the Protocols an incoherent text that easily reveals its fabricated origins. It is hardly credible, if not in a roman feuilleton or in a grand opera, that the “bad guys” should express their evil plans in such a frank and unashamed manner, that they should declare, as the Elders of Zion do, that they have “boundless ambition, a ravenous greed, a merciless desire for revenge and an intended hatred.” If at first the Protocols was taken seriously, it is because it was presented as a shocking revelation, and by sources all in all trustworthy. But what seems incredible is how this fake arose from its own ashes each time someone proved that it was, beyond all doubt, a fake. This is when the “novel of the Protocols” truly starts to sound like fiction. Following the article that appeared in 1921 in the Times of London revealing that the Protocols was plagiarized, as well as every other time some authoritative source confirmed the spurious nature of the Protocols, there was someone else who published it again claiming its authenticity. And the story continues unabated on the Internet today. It is as if, after Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler, one were to continue publishing textbooks claiming that the sun travels around the earth.
How can one explain resilience against all evidence, and the perverse appeal that this book continues to exercise? The answer can be found in the works of Nesta Webster, an antisemetic author who spent her life supporting this account of the Jewish plot. In her Secret Societies and Subversive Movements, she seems well informed and knows the whole story as Eisner narrates it here, but this is her conclusion:
The only opinion I have committed myself is that, whether genuine or not, the Protocols represent the programme of a world revolution, and that in view of their prophetic nature and of their extraordinary resemblance to the protocols of certain secret societies of the past, they were either the work of some such society or of someone profoundly versed in the lore of secret society who was able to reproduce their ideas and phraseology.
Her reasoning is flawless: “since the Protocols say what I said in my story, they confirm it,” or: “the Protocols confirm the story that I derived from them, and are therefore authentic.” Better still: “the Protocols could be fake, but they say exactly what the Jews think, and must therefore be considered authentic.””

Will Eisner (1917–2005) American cartoonist

In other words, it is not the Protocols that produce antisemetism, it is people’s profound need to single out an Enemy that leads them to believe in the Protocols.
I believe that-in spite of this courageous, not comic but tragic book by Will Eisner- the story is hardly over. Yet is is a story very much worth telling, for one must fight the Big Lie and the hatred it spawns.
Umberto Eco, Milan Italy December 2004 translated by Allesandra Bastagli, p. vi-vii
The Plot: The Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (10/2/2005)

Life, People, Lie, Secret

“The Germans really conceive of their country as always under war conditions in this respect. No one expects a belligerent to tell the truth and, to the German mind, they are always belligerent. The Germans take the view that war is only intensified peace.”

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

Letter to Lord Londonderry (May 1938); published in Wings of Destiny (1943) by Marquess of Londonderry, p. 211

War, Truth, Peace, Country

“Again, Mahāmati, there may be some unwitted people in the future time, who, beginning to lead the homeless life according to my teaching, are acknowledged as sons of the Śākya, and carry the Kāshāya robe about them as a badge, but who are in thought evilly affected by erroneous reasonings. They may talk about various discriminations which they make in their moral discipline, being addicted to the view of a personal soul. Being under the influence of the thirst for [meat-] taste, they will string together in various ways some sophistic arguments to defend meat-eating. They think they are giving me an unprecedented calumny when they discriminate and talk about facts that are capable of various interpretations. Imagining that this fact allows this interpretation, [they conclude that] the Blessed One permits meat as proper food, and that it is mentioned among permitted foods and that probably the Tathagata himself partook of it. But, Mahāmati, nowhere in the sutras is meat permitted as something enjoyable, nor it is referred to as proper among the foods prescribed”

Gautama Buddha (-563–-483 BC) philosopher, reformer and the founder of Buddhism

for the Buddha's followers
Mahayana, Laṅkāvatāra Sūtra, Chapter Eight. On Meat-eating

Life, People, Food, Way

“Contemporary feminists, who are generally poor or narrowly trained scholars, insist on viewing history as a weepy scenario of male oppression and female victimization. But it is more accurate to see men, driven by sexual anxiety away from their mothers, forming group alliances by male bonding to create complex structures of society, art, science and technology.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Sex, Art and American Culture : New Essays (1992), p. 23

Men, Art, History, Science

“Here, we may well distinguish between Extreme Liberationism and Open Liberationism. So, as regards stealing, for example, the Extreme view holds that … not only is it good to steal, but it's wrong not to do so. By contrast, Open Liberationism holds that it's at least good to steal and, while it's open to the (epistemic) possibility that it's wrong not to do so, it's also open to the possibility that it's not wrong. While I'm inclined to think that, in the end, even the Extreme view is correct, in this book it's enough to argue for Open Liberationism.”

Peter Unger (1942) American philosopher

Source: Living High and Letting Die: Our Illusion of Innocence (1996), p. 13

Books, Thinking

“The King is the symbol of the union, not only of an Empire, but of a society which is held together by a common view of the fundamental nature of man. It is neither the worship of a tribe nor a class. It is a faith, a value placed upon the individual, derived from the Christian religion. The Christian State proclaims human personality to be supreme; the servile State denies this. Every compromise with the infinite value of the human soul leads straight back to savagery and the jungle. Expel this truth of our religion, and what follows? The insolence of dominion, and the cruelty of despotism. Denounce religion as the opium of the people, and you swiftly proceed to denounce political liberty and civil liberty as opium. Freedom of speech goes, tolerance follows, and justice is no more.”

Stanley Baldwin (1867–1947) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech to the Empire Rally of Youth at the Royal Albert Hall (18 May 1937), quoted in Service of Our Lives (1937), p. 165.
1937

People, Truth, Faith, Religion

“Summing up, Nanoscale Communication Networks is a demanding but also very interesting book, an ambitious primer. It is definitely a good starting point for further reading. The author guides the reader through all the aspects of nanonetworks, giving in most cases a clear description of his thinking process within transitions between equations. There are also many cross references between chapters and sections which give a broader view of the topic and help to memorize it. One can also find many pictures, diagrams and tables throughout this book in order to systematize the presented knowledge.”

Stephen F Bush

Book Reviews, REVIEWER: JAKUB PALIDER, NANOSCALE COMMUNICATION NETWORKS STEPHEN F. BUSH, ARTECH HOUSE, 2010, ISBN-13: 978-1-60807-003-9, HARDCOVER, 308 PAGES, IEEE Communications Magazine, August 2011.

Books, Communication, Knowledge, Thinking

“If there are any lessons to be learned from history, it is that we should be skeptical of all points of view, including those of the skeptics. No one is infallible, and no one can claim a monopoly on truth or virtue. It would be contradictory for skepticism to seek to translate itself into a new faith. One must view with caution the promises of any new secular priest who might emerge promising a brave new world—if only his path to clarity and truth is followed. Perhaps the best we can hope for is to temper the intemperate and to tame the perverse temptation that lurks within.”

Paul Kurtz (1925–2012) American professor of philosophy

Source: Multi-Secularism: A New Agenda, (2014), p. 338

Truth, World, Faith, Hope

“I was introduced to the great philosophical systems of the past to which the Western universities have given their blessing, arranging and classifying them with the delicate care lavished on museum pieces. When once these systems were so handled, it was natural that they should be regarded as monuments of human intellection. And monuments, because they mark achievements at their particular point in history, soon become conservative in the impression which they make on posterity. I was introduced to Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Marx and other immortals, to whom I should like to refer as the university philosophers. But these titans were expounded in such a way that a student from a colony could easily find his breast agitated by Conflicting attitudes. These attitudes can have effects which spread out over a whole society, should such a student finally pursue a political life. A colonial student does not by origin belong to the intellectual history in which the university philosophers are such impressive landmarks. The colonial student can be so seduced by these attempts to give a philosophical account of the universe, that surrenders his whole personality to them. When he does this, he loses sight of the fundamental social fact that he is a colonial subject. In this way, he omits to draw from his education and from the concern displayed by the great philosophers for human problems, anything which he might relate to the very real problem of colonial domination, which, as it happens, conditions the immediate life of every colonized African. With single-minded devotion, the colonial student meanders through the intricacies of the philosophical systems. And yet these systems did aim at providing a philosophical account ofthe world in the circumstances and conditions of their time. For even philosophical systems are facts of history. By the time, however, that they come to be accepted in the universities for exposition, they have lost the vital power which they had at their first statement, they have shed their dynamism and polemic reference. This is a result of the academic treatment which they are given. The academic treatment is the result of an attitude to philosophical systems as though there was nothing to them hut statements standing in logical relation to one another. This defective approach to scholarship was suffered hy different categories of colonial student. Many of them had heen handpicked and, so to say, carried certificates ofworthiness with them. These were considered fit to become enlightened servants of the colonial administration. The process by which this category of student became fit usually started at an early age, for not infrequently they had lost contact early in life with their traditional background. By reason of their lack of contact with their own roots, they became prone to accept some theory of universalism, provided it was expressed in vague, mellifluous terms. Armed with their universalism, they carried away from their university courses an attitude entirely at variance with the concrete reality of their people and their struggle. When they came across doctrines of a combative nature, like those of Marxism, they reduced them to arid abstractions, to common-room subtleties. In this way, through the good graces oftheir colonialist patrons, these students, now competent in the art of forming not a concrete environmental view of social political problems, but an abstract, 'liberal' outlook, began to fulfil the hopes and expectations oftheir guides and guardians.”

Kwame Nkrumah (1909–1972) Pan Africanist and First Prime Minister and President of Ghana

Source: Consciencism (1964), Introduction, pp. 2-4.

Life, People, Age, World

“Jung believed that he was proceeding scientifically, but most Freudians remain convinced that he was inventing his own underground realm, rather as Tolkien invented Middle Earth. There is at least an element of truth in this view.”

Colin Wilson (1931–2013) author

Source: C. G. Jung: Lord of the Underworld (1984), p. 126

Truth

Gautama Buddha (-563–-483 BC) philosopher, reformer and the founder of Buddhism

Nagara Sutta, Samyutta Nikaya II.124, translated by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
Pali Canon, Sutta Pitaka, Samyutta Nikaya (Connected Discourses)

Death, Age, Travel, Feeling

“Since economics deals with human beings, the problems of its scientific treatment involves fundamental problems of the relations between man and his world. From a rational or scientific point of view, all practically real problems are problems in economics. The problem of life is to utilize resources "economically," to make them go as far as possible in the production of desired results. The general theory of economics is therefore simply the rationale of life. - In so far as it has any rationale! The first question in regard to scientific economics is this question of how far life is rational, how far its problems reduce to the form of using given means to achieve given ends. Now this, we shall contend, is not very far; the scientific view of life is a limited and partial view; life is at bottom an exploration in the field of values, an attempt to discover values, rather than on the basis of knowledge of them to produce and enjoy them to the greatest possible extent. We strive to "know ourselves," to find out our real wants, more than to get what we want. This fact sets a first and most sweeping limitation to the conception of economics as a science.”

Frank Knight (1885–1972) American economist

Source: "The limitations of scientific method in economics", 1924, p. 97 (2009 edition); Lead paragraph

Life, World, Question, Knowledge

“Compassion is not a dirty word. Compassion is not a sign of weakness. In my view, compassion in politics and in public policy is in fact a hallmark of great strength. It is a hallmark of a society which has about it a decency which speaks for itself.”

Kevin Rudd (1957) Australian politician, 26th Prime Minister of Australia

Rudd's first speech as Labor leader, 5 December 2006, 13 February 2008, The Australian http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20876,20876230-601,00.html, 2006

“I paint very large pictures. I realize that historically the function of painting large pictures is painting something very grandiose and pompous. The reason I paint them however, - I think it applies to other painters I know -, is precisely because I want to be very intimate and human. To paint a small picture is to place yourself outside your experience, to look upon an experience as a stereopticon view or with a reducing glass. However you paint the larger picture, you are in it. It isn't something you command.”

Mark Rothko (1903–1970) American painter

1950's
Source: Interiors, Vol. 110, no 10, May 1951; as quoted in Abstract Expressionism Creators and Critics, ed. Clifford Ross, Abrams Publishers New York 1990, p. 172

Thinking, Painting

“Some people say that without God, people would give themselves permission to do anything. [Yet] only with God, only with the view that God’s on your side, can people give themselves permission to do things that otherwise would be called satanic.”

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) British American author and journalist

Freedom From Religion Foundation, 21/10/2007 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6WByhz44EA&t=4m25s 2000s, 2007

God, People

“It seemed to me singularly ill-contrived for the British government to be going to war with Hitler when Hitler might have been about to attack the Russians, and even more ill-contrived that, when Hitler did attack the Russians, he had already defeated the French army. What I'm saying is that the war shouldn't have been started in September 1939…from the point of view of Britain, the war was really not a good thing and I would regard it as, in effect, a defeat.”

Maurice Cowling (1926–2005) historian

Interviewed in Naim Attallah, Singular Encounters (Quartet Books, 1990), p. 144.

War

“It is not necessary to conclude that the managerial groups have assumed complete domination over the concerns in which they are found, although this may be the fact in various instances, but only to reckon with the undoubted truth that the managerial factor in public and private enterprise has taken on a far more significant role than before.
This new role which has puzzled and alarmed the "owners" in industry and the policy-makers in government is not, however, primarily a power role, but a specialization of the evolving and complex character which we now confront in our civilization.
We may, of course, always raise the question-not in point of fact always raised-of what the relation of these managers is to the t! nds of the state or the ends of other groups and to the special techniques of the particular group and to its special social composition. In the complex power pattern of organization how are these managerial element-related to the organization of the consent of the governed, so vital a force in the life of every form of human association? In the struggle for advantage and mastery these larger factors may, indeed, pass unnoticed, but from the point of view of the student of politics and government, they are of supreme importance in judging the trends and possibilities of managerial evolution in modem society.”

Charles Edward Merriam (1874–1953) American political scientist

Source: Systematic Politics, 1943, p. 163-4 ; as cited in Albert Lepawsky (1949), Administration, p. 15-16

Life, Truth, Question

“Why should it be insulting? … Something happened there which led to other events. Many innocent people were killed there. Some of those people were American citizens obviously. We obviously are very much against any terrorist action and any killing. And also we are very much against any plots to sow the seeds of discord among nations. Usually you go to these sites to pay your respects. And-- also to perhaps to air your views about the root causes of such incidents. I think that when I do that, I will be paying, as I said earlier, my respect to the American nation.”

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (1956) 6th President of the Islamic Republic of Iran

When asked about his stated desire to visit the site of the World Trade Center in an interview with Scott Pelley of 60 Minutes, 20 September 2007.
[20 September 2007, http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/09/20/world/main3280561.shtml, "CBS News - Ahmadinejad: How Is WTC Visit Insulting", cbsnews.com, 2007-10-12]
2007

People, Thinking

“Narrator: What’s your relationship with the IRS these days?
Karl Hess: [laughs] Miserable. Terrible.
Narrator: And why's that?
Karl Hess: Well, you know, they ask every now and then when I'm going to behave myself and I tell them never and I…
Narrator: Are you not paying federal taxes?
Karl Hess: Yeah, nothing.
Narrator: I guess they don’t take too kindly to that?
Karl Hess: No, they think it’s terrible.
Therese Hess: On the other hand, they're not being very active about it right now.
Karl Hess: Well, no, the last time he was here…
Therese Hess: It's like it's no fun anymore or something.
Karl Hess: Something like that. The local people seem to take more of a kindly view as though they really think it's a rotten thing. I'm not doing anybody any harm. And…they seem to be more sensitive. [laughs] Or decent somehow. I don't…I don't know, the federal people are…
Narrator: What can they do?
Karl Hess: Put me in jail.”

Karl Hess (1923–1994) American journalist

Anarchism in America http://alexpeak.com/art/films/aia/ (15 January 1983)

People, Thinking, Time

“The scientist has to have a way of thinking about the environment of a system that is richer and more subtle than a mere looking at for boundaries. He does this by noting that, when we say that something lies ‘outside’ the system, we mean that system can do relatively little about its characteristics or its behavior. Environment, in effect, makes up the things and people that are ‘fixed’ or ‘given’, from the system’s point of view.”

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

Source: 1960s - 1970s, The Systems Approach (1968), p. 35

People, Way, Behavior, Thinking

“I cannot speak for all, but I have talked to many artists who feel this way - we have lost even our belief that we are the minority that knows. We believed ten years ago, twenty years ago, that we knew the secret. Now we have lost this belief. We are a minority with no power and no belief, no faith. I feel myself, as an artist and as a citizen, just totally obsolete… Okay, it can be done this way or that way or this way, or in splashes or smoothly, but why? What the hell is it about? That's why we wanted to ask people. For us - from our point of view - it's a sincere thing to understand something, to change course. Because the way we live we cannot live anymore. I have never seen artists so desperate as they are now, in this society.”

Alexander Melamid (1945) Russian artist

Vitaly Komar, ‎Aleksandr Melamid, ‎JoAnn Wypijewski (1997). Painting by Numbers: Komar and Melamid's Scientific Guide to Art p. 16

People, Secret, Faith, Way

“Industrialization relations are of the highest importance from every point of view including that of production.”

Gulzarilal Nanda (1898–1998) Prime Minister of India

In, p. 23.
Gulzarilal Nanda: A Life in the Service of the People

“I think if we study the primates, we notice that a lot of these things that we value in ourselves, such as human morality, have a connection with primate behavior. This completely changes the perspective, if you start thinking that actually we tap into our biological resources to become moral beings. That gives a completely different view of ourselves than this nasty selfish-gene type view that has been promoted for the last 25 years.”

Frans de Waal (1948) Dutch primatologist and ethologist

Frans de Waal, in a NOVA interview, " The Bonobo in All of Us" PBS (1 January 2007) http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/nature/bonobo-all-us.html; quotes from this interview were for some time misplaced on this page, which probably generated similar misattributions elsewhere, and the misplacement was not discovered until after this quotation had been selected for Quote of the Day, as a quote of Goodall. Corrections were subsequently made here, during the day the quote was posted as QOTD. The Bonobo in All of Us (2007)

Behavior, Thinking, Study, Change

“Since Judaism made Christianity possible and gave it the character of a religion essentially free from magic, it rendered an important service from the point of view of economic history. For the dominance of magic outside the sphere in which Christianity has prevailed in one of the most serious obstructions to the rationalization of economic life. Magic involves a stereotyping of technology and economic relations. When attempts were made in China to inaugurate the building of railroads and factories a conflict with geomancy ensued … Similar is the relation to capitalism of the castes in India. Every new technical process which an Indian employs signifies for him first of all that he leaves his caste and falls into another, necessarily lower … An additional fact is that every caste makes every other caste impure. In consequence, workmen who dare not accept a vessel filled with water from each other's hands, cannot be employed together in the same factory room. Obviously, capitalism could not develop in an economic group thus bound hand and foot by magical means.”

Max Weber (1864–1920) German sociologist, philosopher, and political economist

Max Weber, General Economic History, trans. by Frank Knight, 1961. p 265

Life, Religion, History, Water

“So far it has been ascertained that a root definition is a core description of purposeful activity taken from a specific point of view.”

Robert L. Flood (1959) British organizational scientist

Source: Dealing with Complexity (1988), p. 111.

“Baryonyx is on display at the Natural History Museum in London. If you ever get the chance to view this wonderful specimen, remember that you just might be looking at the skeleton of one of the dragons from English history and legend (e. g., Sir George the Dragon Slayer) or one of the dragons spoken of in the Bible.”

Ken Ham (1951) Australian young Earth creationist

Great Dinosaur Mystery Solved! (2000)

History, Nature, Chance

“As a science mathematics has been adapted to the description of natural phenomena, and the great practitioners in this field… have never concerned themselves with the logical foundations of mathematics, but have boldly taken a pragmatic view of mathematics as an intellectual machine which works successfully. Description has been verified by further observation, still more strikingly be prediction, and sometimes, more ominously, by control of natural forces. Happily, unresolved problems… still remain as challenges.”

George Frederick James Temple (1901–1992) British mathematician

100 Years of Mathematics: a Personal Viewpoint (1981)

Mathematics, Nature, Problem, Science

“Time travel may be achieved one day, or it may not. But if it is, it should not require any fundamental change in world-view, at least for those who broadly share the world view I am presenting in this book.”

David Deutsch book The Fabric of Reality

Source: The Fabric of Reality (1997), Ch. 12

Books, World, Travel, Change

“Progress is a fact. Even so, faith in progress is a superstition. Science enables humans to satisfy their needs. It does nothing to change them. They are no different today from what they have always been. There is progress in knowledge, but not in ethics. This is the verdict both of science and history, and the view of every one of the world's religions. The growth of knowledge is real and - barring a worldwide catastrophe - it is now irreversible. Improvements in government and society are no less real, but they are temporary. Not only can they be lost, they are sure to be. History is not progress or decline, but recurring gain and loss. The advance of knowledge deludes us into thinking we are different from other animals, but our history shows that we are not.”

John Gray book Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

Non-Progress: De Quincey's Toothache (p. 155)
Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (2002)

World, Faith, Religion, History

“No one can imagine the beauty of the view from anything witnessed in England. It had never been seen before by European eyes; but scenes so lovely must have been gazed upon by angels in their flight.”

David Livingstone (1813–1873) Scottish explorer and missionary

Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1039/1039-h/1039-h.htm

Love, Beauty, Angels, Imagination

“There is, of course, provision for consultation of the record by the usual scheme of indexing. If the user wishes to consult a certain book, he taps its code on the keyboard, and the title page of the book promptly appears before him, projected onto one of his viewing positions.”

Vannevar Bush book As We May Think

As We May Think (1945)

Books, Appearance

“The advance in knowledge and useful new factors based on such knowledge are all too frequently put aside as if they were not produced means of production but instead simply happened to occur over time. This view is as a rule implicit in the notion of technological change.”

Theodore Schultz (1902–1998) American economist

Source: "Transforming traditional agriculture," 1964, p. 136

Knowledge, Change, Time

“Her position before was sheltered from the light: now, I had a distinct view of her whole figure and countenance. She was slender, and apparently scarcely past girlhood: an admirable form, and the most exquisite little face that I have ever had the pleasure of beholding: small features, very fair; flaxen ringlets, or rather golden, hanging loose on her delicate neck; and eyes — had they been agreeable in expression, they would have been irresistible.”

Emily Brontë book Wuthering Heights

Mr. Lockwood on Catherine Linton (Ch. II).
Wuthering Heights (1847)

Pleasure, Light, Past

“What has here been remarked in general of the prophets as the champions of religious progress is also true in particular of him who as the most perfect blossom of the religious development of Israel constituted also the essential force of the new Christian religion—Jesus of Nazareth. Against this logical conclusion of the evolutionary view of history the representatives of the new faith present the most obstinate resistance.”

Otto Pfleiderer (1839–1908) German Protestant theologian

Source: Evolution and Theology (1900), p. 12.

Faith, Religion, History, Perfection

“I am not sure what is meant by those who say that the Party should return to something called "One Nation Conservatism". As far as I can tell by their views on European federalism, such people's creed would be better described as "No Nation Conservatism".”

Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013) British stateswoman and politician

Keith Joseph Memorial Lecture (11 January 1996) http://www.margaretthatcher.org/speeches/displaydocument.asp?docid=108353 Post-Prime Ministerial

People

“I have separated arithmetical from symbolical algebra, and I have devoted the present volume entirely to the exposition of the principles of the former science and their application to the theory of numbers and of arithmetical processes: the second volume, which is now in the press, will embrace the principles of symbolical algebra: it will be followed, if other and higher duties should allow me the leisure to complete them, by other works, embracing all the more important departments of analysis, with the view of presenting their principles in such a form, as may make them component parts of one uniform and connected system.”

George Peacock (1791–1858) Scottish mathematician

Vol. I: Arithmetical Algebra Preface, p. iii
A Treatise on Algebra (1842)

Science, Parting

“Unfortunately, the optimistic view that "classical civilization" handed down certain fundamental works that managed to include the knowledge contained in the lost writings has proved groundless. In fact, in the face of a general regression in the level of civilization, it's never the best works that will be saved through an automatic process of natural selection.”

Lucio Russo (1944) Italian historian and scientist

1.1, "The Erasure of the Scientific Revolution", p. 8
The Forgotten Revolution: How Science Was Born in 300 BC and Why It Had to Be Reborn (2004)

Nature, Knowledge

“DR JAMES DOBSON: Well, there's been an awful lot of hate expressed in this election. And most of it has been aimed at those who hold to conservative Christian views. He is certainly not the only one to take a position like that. But I think that that is -that's where he's coming from. He has certainly opposed most of the things that conservative Christians stand for.”

James Dobson (1936) Evangelical Christian psychologist, author, and radio broadcaster.

2004

Hate, Thinking

“Defence was an afterthought, prompted by necessity; and its introduction as a State function, though effected doubtless with a view to the strengthening of the State, was really and in principle the initiation of the State's destruction. Its growth in importance is but an evidence of the tendency of progress toward the abolition of the State.”

Benjamin Ricketson Tucker (1854–1939) American journalist and anarchist

The Relation of the State to the Invididual (1890)

“In my view there can be no affirmative action without segregation-nor any end to the segregation if our names must be kept on separate lists. I'd like to propose instead a simple scenario: a fair job market where employment is commensurate with ability regardless of gender, racial or ethnic background. I make a pitch, they like my story, I get the job. Why not?”

Migdia Chinea Varela (1947) American actress, screenwriter, and TV personality

"My life as a 'Two-Fer' ", Newsweek, 26 December 1988, p. 25

“The direction in which science will move is set by the philosophic world view of the scientists.”

Francis Schaeffer (1912–1984) American theologian

How Should We Then Live : The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture (1976), Chapter 1, Ancient Rome

World, Science

“It starts at the bottom, viewing an organism as a large population of simple machines, and works upwards synthetically from there — constructing large aggregates of simple, rule-governed objects which interact with one another nonlinearly in the support of life-like, global dynamics. The ‘key' concept in AL is emergent behavior.”

Christopher Langton (1949) American computer scientist

Source: Artificial Life (1989), p.2

Life, Behavior, Support

“May the ability to see many points of view keep us gentle.”

B. W. Powe (1955) Canadian writer

Coda, p. 167
Towards a Canada of Light (2006)

“If sub specie aeternitatis [from eternity's point of view] there is no reason to believe that anything matters, then that does not matter either, and we can approach our absurd lives with irony instead of heroism or despair.”

Thomas Nagel (1937) American philosopher

"The Absurd" in Mortal Questions, Cambridge University Press, 1979, p. 23.

Despair

“One thing I hate about the New Deal is that it is killing what, to me, is the American pioneering spirit. I simply do not know what to tell my own boys, leaving school and confronting this new world whose ideal is Security and whose practice is dependence upon government instead of upon one’s self…. All the old character-values seem simply insane from a practical point of view; the self-reliant, the independent, the courageous man is penalized from every direction.”

Rose Wilder Lane (1886–1968) American journalist

Journal entry (April 15, 1937), as quoted in The Ghost in the Little House, ch. 14, by William V. Holtz (1993)
Commenting on the domestic policies of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Hate, World, School, Boy

“Though the churches, in general, abstained from interfering officially, the scientific activities of the physicists have always been influenced by their private religious views. The latter, of course, were not necessarily identical with the ecclesiastical doctrines, but the philosophical attitudes of the scientists were affected, at least to some extent, by the prevailing religious thought. Kepler, Descartes, Leibniz, and Newton freely acknowledged this influence; it played a part in the principle of least action in the eighteenth century. After this period, in which Kant's philosophy proclaimed the complete independence of scientific understanding and religious belief, not much more about it is found in physical writings. However, this by no means signifies that the investigational urge of later scientists was not intimately connected with their religiosity. The tenet that the scientific experience of truth in any sense is "theoria," i. e., a view of God, might be said sincerely about the best of them. The search for knowledge without regard to its applicability for use has been "an essential trait of man through the centuries, a sign of his higher origin."”

Max von Laue (1879–1960) German physicist

[Max von Laue, History of physics, Academic Press Inc, 1950, http://www.archive.org/details/historyofphysics030356mbp, 3-5]

God, Truth, Search, Understanding

“Most studies of the internal operation of complex organizations, if they mention goals at all, have taken official statements of goals at face value. This may be justified if only a limited problem is being investigated, but even then it contributes to the view that goals are not problematical. In this view, goals have no effect upon activities other than in the grossest terms; or it can be taken for granted that the only problem is to adjust means to given and stable ends. This reflects a distinctive "model" of organizational behavior, which Gouldner has characterized as the rational model. Its proponents see the managerial elite as using rational and logical means to pursue clear and discrete ends set forth in official statements of goals, while the worker is seen as governed by non-rationalistic, traditionalistic orientations.”

Charles Perrow (1925–2019) American sociologist

Source: 1960s, "The analysis of goals in complex organizations", 1961, p. 854.

Behavior, Problem, Study

“Human life will no longer be regarded with the kind of superstitious awe which it is accorded in traditional thought, and the lives of non-humans will no longer be a matter of indifference. This means that human life will, in a sense, be devalued, while the value granted to non-human life will be increased. A revised view of such matters as suicide and euthanasia, as well as a revised view of how we should treat animals, will result.”

James Rachels (1941–2003) American philosopher

Created from Animals: The Moral Implications of Darwinism (1990), p. 5

Life, Sense, Suicide, Animals

“Before, the wire studies were subjective, portraits, caricatures, stylized representations of beasts and humans. But these recent things have been viewed from a more objective angle and although their present size is diminutive, I feel that there is no limitation to the scale to which they can be enlarged... One of the canons of the futuristic painters, as propounded by Modigliani, was that objects behind other objects should not be lost to view, but should be shown through the others by making the latter transparent. The wire sculpture accomplishes this in a most decided manner.”

Alexander Calder (1898–1976) American artist

1920s, Statement on Wire Sculpture' (1929)

Feeling, Study

“The defining qualities are about use: ease and simplicity. Caring beyond the functional imperative, we also acknowledge that products have a significance way beyond traditional views of function.”

Jonathan Ive (1967) English designer and VP of Design at Apple

In an interview at the Design Museum (2003)[citation needed]

Way

“In the radical feminist view, the new feminism is not just the revival of a serious political movement for social equality. It is the second wave of the most important revolution in history. It's aim: overthrow of the oldest most rigid class/caste system in existence, the class system based on sex - a system consolidated over thousands of years, lending the archetypal male and female roles an undeserved legitimacy and seeming permanence.”

Shulamith Firestone book The Dialectic of Sex

Source: The Dialectic of Sex (1970), Chapter Two, "On American Feminism

Sex, History

“I am so confined, writing passes, etc., that it is impossible for me to attend to the duties of the day, which, in many instances, prejudices the service. Such a confined situation leaves one no opportunity of viewing things for themselves. It is recommended, by one of the greatest Generals of the age, not only to issue orders, but to see to the execution; for the army being composed of men of indolence, if the commander is not attentive to every individual in the different departments, the machine becomes dislocated, and the progress of business retarded.”

Nathanael Greene (1742–1786) American general in the American Revolutionary War

Letter to George Washington (July 1776)

Men, Age, Business

“What typically emerges from looking at kids, gifted and ordinary, is that, from the kids’ point of view, accomplishment, that is, the private sense of mastery, the hard thing suddenly made easy, counts for far more in their inner lives than does the achievement—the competition won, the reward secured.”

Adam Gopnik (1956) American journalist

How to Raise a Prodigy, The New Yorker (2018)

Sense

“I am gaining in health slowly, and am quite cheerful in view of my approaching end, — being fully persuaded that I am worth inconceivably more to hang than any other purpose.”

John Brown (abolitionist) (1800–1859) American abolitionist

Letter to his brother Jeremiah https://archive.org/stream/lifeandlettersof00sanbrich/lifeandlettersof00sanbrich_djvu.txt (12 November 1859).

Health

“My own views began to change before the next Nazi move, the occupation of Austria in [March] 1938…. No longer was it possible for me to believe that Nazism was a temporary aberration in German politics, that the good sense of the German people would soon take care of the Fuehrer, and that the greater danger to peace was French over-reaction to Hitler's moves, with the United Kingdom supporting such reaction. This feeling was replaced by the fear of aggressive war brought about by the policy of a German regime which now must be considered as evil and savage and an immediate menace to freedom and to peace. This regime could not be allowed to triumph in Europe, for its triumph would be a threat to free men everywhere.”

Lester B. Pearson (1897–1972) 14th Prime Minister of Canada

Memoirs, Volume One

Men, War, People, Fear

“Misleading may be the claims that procedures [of animal testing] are carried out under anaesthesia. Restraining devices and paralysing drugs can today be so effective that an anaesthetic is often unnecessary from the purely practical point of view. The risk of giving a dose too large and thereby losing an expensive chimpanzee, for example, may often tempt a scientist or technician, inexperienced with sophisticated anaesthetic techniques, to give a dose too small, from which the animal quickly recovers — but not of course until after it has been strapped securely to the operating table.”

Richard D. Ryder (1940) British psychologist

Experiments on Animals (1971)

Animals

“The fact of the modern national States or empires not having originated organically does not prevent their being organs of that great entity which we call civilised humanity, and which is much too extensive to be included in any single State. And, indeed, these organs are at present necessary and of great importance for human development. On this point Socialists can scarcely differ now. And it is not even to be regretted, from the Socialist point of view, that they are not characterised purely by their common descent. The purely ethnological national principle is reactionary in its results. Whatever else one may think about the race-problem, it is certain that the thought of a national division of mankind according to race is anything rather than a human ideal. The national quality is developing on the contrary more and more into a sociological function. But understood as such it is a progressive principle, and in this sense Socialism can and must be national. This is no contradiction of the cosmopolitan consciousness, but only its necessary completion, The world-citizenship, this glorious attainment of civilisation, would, if the relationship to national tasks and rational duties were missing, become a flabby characterless parasitism. Even when we sing "Ubi bene, ibi patria," we still acknowledge a "patria," and, therefore, in accordance with the motto, "No rights without duties"; also duties towards her.”

Eduard Bernstein (1850–1932) German politician

Bernstein, Eduard. "Patriotism, Militarism and Social-Democracy." (Originally published as: "Militarism." Social Democrat. Vol.11 no.7, 15 July 1907, pp.413-419.) http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/bernstein/works/1907/07/patriotism.htm

World, Problem, Thinking, Sense

Quotes about view page 19

Quotes about view
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