Quotes about view
page 29

“We know so well what we are doing ourselves and why we do it, do we not? I fancy that there is some truth in the view which is being put forward nowadays, that it is our less conscious thoughts and our less conscious actions which mainly mould our lives and the lives of those who spring from us.”

Samuel Butler book The Way of All Flesh

Source: The Way of All Flesh (1903), Ch. 5

Truth, Spring

“We will have even more successful and even more fruitful movements. Radical, merciless, pro-violence views will be wiped out and we will make this world a place like Heaven on Earth insha’Allah. The world will be an abode of peace, it will be a festive place.”

Harun Yahya (1956) Turkish author

20 April 2013.
A9 TV addresses, 2013

World, Peace, Success

“There was such a wonderful setting of the moon this morning, the yellow moon against little pink clouds, and the mountains a pure deep blue [viewed from his Swiss farmhouse], quite glorious, I would so have liked to paint. But it was cold, even my window was frozen, although I had kept the fire in all night.”

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880–1938) German painter, sculptor, engraver and printmaker

In a letter from Frauenkirch, Jan. 1919; as quoted in Expressionism, de:Wolf-Dieter Dube; Praeger Publishers, New York, 1973, p. 48 Some time later Kirchner would made a colored wood-cut: 'Moonlit Winter Night' https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/25/Kirchner_-_Wintermondnacht.jpg 1916 - 1919

Mountain, Painting, Night

“The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn't do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life's assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i. e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire's flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It's not desiring the fall; it's terror of the flames. Yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don‘t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You'd have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.”

David Foster Wallace book Infinite Jest

Infinite Jest (1996)

Life, Death, People, Fear

“I assert that the art of sculpture, among all the arts connected with design, is at least seven times greater than any other, for the following reason: why, sir, a statue of true sculpture ought to have seven points of view, which ought all to boast equal excellence.”

Benvenuto Cellini (1500–1571) Florentine sculptor and goldsmith

Dico, che l'arte della Scultura infra tutte l'arte, che s'interviene disegno, è maggiore sette volte, perchè una statua di Scultura deve avere otto vedute, e conviene che la sieno tutte di egual bontà.
Letter to Benedetto Varchi, January 28, 1546, cited from G. P. Carpani (ed.) Vita di Benvenuto Cellini (Milano: Nicolo Bettoni, 1821) vol. 3, p. 183; translation from Thomas Nugent (trans.) The Life of Benvenuto Cellini, a Florentine Artist (London: Hunt and Clarke, 1828) vol. 2, p. 264.

Art, Time

“Once when Adam had still lived in the trailer park, he had been pushing the lawn mower around the straggly side yard when he realized that it was raining a mile away. He could smell it, the earthy scent of rain on dirt, but also the electric, restless smell of ozone. And he could see it: a hazy sheet of water blocking his view of the mountains. He could track the line of rain travelling across the vast dry field towards him. It was heavy and dark, and he knew he would get drenched if he stayed outside. It was coming from so far away that he had plenty of time to put the mower away and get under cover. Instead, though, he just stood there. he closed his eyes and let the storm soak him.
That was this kiss.”

Maggie Stiefvater (1981) American writer

pg 242-243
The Raven Cycle Series, The Raven King (2016)

Travel, Mountain, Kiss, Water

“The dispatch of a naval force and the peremptory outcome that Great Britain tried to impose are clear demonstrations that that country persists in addressing the question with arguments based on force, and that the solution is sought through the simple refusal to recognize Argentinian rights. In view of that unacceptable intention, the Argentine Government could have no other response than the one it has just made by taking action. The Argentinian position can in no way be considered a form of aggression against the present inhabitants of the islands. Their rights and ways of life will be respected with the same generosity with which we respected those peoples we liberated during our independence movement. Yet we will not yield to the intimidatory deployment of the British forces; far from using peaceful diplomatic channels, they have threatened the indiscriminate use of those forces. Our forces will act only to the extent strictly necessary. They will in no way disrupt the life of the islanders. On the contrary, they will protect those institutions and persons who agree to coexist with us, but they will not tolerate any excesses either in the islands or on the mainland. We have a clear appreciation of the stance adopted and it is in defence of this stance that the Argentine nation has risen, the whole nation, spiritually and materially.”

Leopoldo Galtieri (1926–2003) Argentine military dictator

President Galtieri’s address to the nation https://teachwar.wordpress.com/resources/war-justifications-archive/falklandsmalvinas-war-1982/#arg1, 2 April 1982

Life, People, Peace, Way

“I regret I no longer have the years of youth needed to create a beautiful series of views of this place, which would in any case be rather difficult to paint due to the monuments, which require a good draughtsmanship and long stays in the city, like Ziem used to do in the past.”

Eugène Boudin (1824–1898) French painter

Quote of Boudin from Venice, c. 1893-94; as cited in 'Venice, The Grand Canal', by Anne-Marie Bergeret-Gourbin https://www.museothyssen.org/en/collection/artists/boudin-eugene/venice-grand-canal, Museo Thyssen 1880s - 1890s

Youth, Beauty, Past, Painting

“The Soviet leaders accused Comrade Stalin of allegedly interfering in other parties, of imposing the views of the Bolshevik Party upon others. We can bear witness to the fact that at no time did comrade Stalin do such a thing towards us, towards the Albanian people and the Party of Labor of Albania, he always behaved as a great Marxist, as an outstanding internationalist, as a comrade, brother and sincere friend of the Albanian people. In 1945, when our people were threatened with starvation, comrade Stalin ordered the ships loaded with grain destined for the Soviet people, who also were in dire need of food at that time, and sent the grain at once to the Albanian people. Whereas, the present Soviet leaders permit themselves these ugly deeds.”

Enver Hoxha (1908–1985) the Communist leader of Albania from 1944 until his death in 1985, as the First Secretary of the Party of L…

Speeches, Moscow Address

People, Food, Time, Sincerity

“We must begin by distinguishing between visual mental imagery and visual perception: Visual perception occurs while a stimulus is being viewed, and includes functions such as visual recognition (i. e., registering that a stimulus is familiar) and identification (i. e., recalling the name, context, or other information associated with the object). Two types of mechanisms are used in visual perception: “bottom-up” mechanisms are driven by the input from the eyes; in contrast, “top-down” mechanisms make use of stored information (such as knowledge, belief, expectations, and goals). Visual mental imagery is a set of representations that gives rise to the experience of viewing a stimulus in the absence of appropriate sensory input. In this case, information in memory underlies the internal events that produce the experience. Unlike afterimages, mental images are relatively prolonged.”

Stephen Kosslyn (1948) American psychologist

Stephen M. Kosslyn, "Mental images and the brain." Cognitive Neuropsychology 22.3-4 (2005): p. 334

Knowledge, Memory

“I'm not trying to win a popularity contest. If you're in a public media setting and you're not expressing something of yourself, turn it over to someone who will. Just get out. Just go away and put somebody on who has a point of view, because the most dangerous thing about TV is its equalizing factor, its lowest common denominator factor. And that's what I fight against all the time.”

Keith Olbermann (1959) American sports and political commentator

" Inside Story: Knowing It All http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/latimes/64665598.html?did=64665598&FMT=ABS&FMTS=FT" by David Davis, L.A. Times (2000-11-26)

Time, Fight

“My views are more akin to the nineteenth-century liberal philosophy espoused by Milton Friedman, especially in his Capitalism and Freedom. In that work, he proposed many policies that are harmonious with free markets and are receiving serious attention in the United States and other countries. This list includes school choice, the flat-rate income tax, rules for monetary stability, privatized social security, and the elimination of affirmative-action programs.”

Robert Barro (1944) American classical macroeconomist

Getting It Right (1997); Introduction

School, Freedom, Country

“The progress of science requires more than new data; it needs novel frameworks and contexts. And where do these fundamentally new views of the world arise? They are not simply discovered by pure observation; they require new modes of thought. And where can we find them, if old modes do not even include the right metaphors? The nature of true genius must lie in the elusive capacity to construct these new modes from apparent darkness. The basic chanciness and unpredictability of science must also reside in the inherent difficulty of such a task.”

Stephen Jay Gould book The Flamingo's Smile

"False Premise, Good Science", p. 138
The Flamingo's Smile (1985)

Lie, World, Nature, Science

“Sin is like a mountain with two aspects according to whether it is viewed before or after it has been reached: yet both aspects are real.”

Samuel Butler (1835–1902) novelist

Sin
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part II - Elementary Morality

Mountain

“In my view, the composer, just as the poet, the sculptor or the painter, is in duty bound to serve Man, the people. He must beautify human life and defend it. He must be a citizen first and foremost, so that his art might consciously extol human life and lead man to a radiant future. Such is the immutable code of art as I see it.”

Sergei Prokofiev (1891–1953) Ukrainian & Russian Soviet pianist and composer

Page 136; from his "Music and Life" (1951).
Sergei Prokofiev: Autobiography, Articles, Reminiscences (1960)

Life, People, Art, Future

“Don't blame me for the fact that competent programming, as I view it as an intellectual possibility, will be too difficult for "the average programmer" — you must not fall into the trap of rejecting a surgical technique because it is beyond the capabilities of the barber in his shop around the corner.”

Edsger W. Dijkstra (1930–2002) Dutch computer scientist

Dijkstra (1975) Comments at a Symposium http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD05xx/EWD512.html (EWD 512). 1970s

“Though Lewis' views frequently are well left of center on the political spectrum, his writing is moderate. Lewis is at once passionate and logical - great to argue with in your head.”

Anthony Lewis (1927–2013) American journalist

[Richard H., Weiss, November 5, 1998, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Times columnist likes to mine a vein of thought, G1]
About

Passion

“…this indeed is one of the most mischievous effects of the proceedings of the Radicals, that by abusing popular privileges they establish precedents for abridging them. My views of the state of the country are more and more gloomy. Everything is tending, and has for some time been tending, to a complete separation between the higher and lower orders of society; a state of things which can only end in the destruction of liberty.”

Charles Grey, 2nd Earl Grey (1764–1845) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland

Letter to Lord Brougham (25 August 1819) in the aftermath of the Peterloo Massacre, quoted in E. A. Smith, Lord Grey. 1764-1845 (Alan Sutton, 1996), p. 217.
1810s

Time, Country

“Religion isn't always pretty. Especially viewed from the outside, by an unbeliever.”

Orson Scott Card (1951) American science fiction novelist

Homecoming saga, Earthfall (1995)

Religion

“Scientific truth, like puristic truth, must come about by controversy. Personally this view is abhorrent to me. It seems to mean that scientific truth must transcend the individual, that the best hope of science lies in its greatest minds being often brilliantly and determinedly wrong, but in opposition, with some third, eclectically minded, middle-of-the-road nonentity seizing the prize while the great fight for it, running off with it, and sticking it into a textbook for sophomores written from no point of view and in defense of nothing whatsoever. I hate this view, for it is not dramatic and it is not fair; and yet I believe that it is the verdict of the history of science.”

Edwin Boring (1886–1968) American psychologist

Source: History, psychology, and science. 1963, p. 68; Paper "The Psychology of Coutroversy", (1929)

Hate, Truth, Hope, History

“There's a tendency to view ourselves, our endeavors, and our accomplishments as the pinnacle. Yet, compared to whats in our solar system, whats in our galaxy, and whats in our universe, we are but a mere speck in the vastness of time, space, mass, and energy.”

Anthony Watts (1958) American television meteorologist

Some Planetary Perspective http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/06/07/some-planetary-perspective/, wattsupwiththat.com, June 7, 2008. 2008

Universe, Time

“I began [to portray president Kennedy ] with fragmentary sketches—first in charcoal, then in casein, sometimes just heads, sometimes the whole figure. For the first session (during a Medicare conference), I sat on top of a 6-foot ladder to get an unimpeded view of him. Concentrating on bone structure, most of my first sketches of him made him look twenty years younger. This was also because the positions he assumed were those of a college athlete. I made about thirty sketches at the first session and rushed back to a big studio that had been turned over to me by the Norton Gallery, made further drawing combining different aspects, and finally, after a couple days, decided on the proportions and size of the first canvas—4 by 8 feet. In succeeding sessions of sketching, I was struck by the curious faceted structure of light over his face and hair—a quality of transparent ruddiness. This play of light contributed to the extraordinary variety of expressions.”

Elaine de Kooning (1918–1989) American painter

n.p.
1950 - 1971, Painting a Portrait of the President', Elaine de Kooning (1964)

Light, Drawing

“Well I rode a while, for a mile or so
Down the road to the 18th Avenue
And the people I saw were the people I know
And they all came down to take a view”

Cat Stevens (1948) British singer-songwriter

18th Avenue (Kansas City Nightmare)
Song lyrics, Catch Bull at Four (1972)

People

“I tend toward the cynical view where religion is concerned.”

Glen Cook book Soldiers Live

Source: Soldiers Live (2000), Chapter 52, “The Nether Taglian Territories: Lady Made Grumpy Noises” (p. 541)

Religion

“The first place he went into was the Royal Exchange, …. where men of all ages and all nations were assembled, with no other view than to barter for interest. … David … resolved to stay no longer in a place where riches were esteemed goodness, and deceit, low cunning, and giving up all things to the love of gain were thought wisdom.”

Sarah Fielding (1710–1768) British writer

The Adventures of David Simple, bk. 1, ch. 4 (1744), pp. 24-26

Love, Wisdom, Men, Age

“This sketch of how consciousness fits into the wider universe supports a form of non-reductive, Reflexive Monism. Human minds, bodies and brains are embedded in a far greater universe. Individual conscious representations are perspectival. That is, the precise manner in which entities, events and processes are translated into experiences depends on the location in space and time of a given observer, and the exact mix of perceptual, cognitive, affective, social, cultural and historical influences which enter into the 'construction' of a given experience. In this sense, each conscious construction is private, subjective, and unique. Taken together, the contents of consciousness provide a view of the wider universe, giving it the appearance of a 3D phenomenal world. … However, such conscious representations are not the thing-itself. In this vision, there is one universe (the thing-itself), with relatively differentiated parts in the form of conscious beings like ourselves, each with a unique, conscious view of the larger universe of which it is a part. In so far as we are parts of the universe that, in turn, experience the larger universe, we participate in a reflexive process whereby the universe experiences itself.”

Max Velmans book Understanding Consciousness

Max Velmans (2009) Understanding Consciousness, Edition 2. Routledge/Psychology Press, p. 298

World, Support, Sense, Universe

“Evolving life must experience a vast range of possibilities, based on environmental histories so unpredictable that no realized route - the pathway to consciousness in the form of Homo sapiens or Little Green Men, for example - can be construed as a highway to heaven, but must be viewed as a tortuous track rutted with uncountable obstacles and festooned with innumerable alternative branches. Any reasonably precise repetition of our earthly route on another planet therefore becomes wildly improbable even in a trillion cases.”

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

"War of the Worldviews", p. 351
Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms (1998)

Life, Men, History

“Be firm and do not fear war. For that peace which some are so urgently pressing upon us is not peace but war. And the war for which I am so insistent is peace, not war for I do not thirst for the blood of anyone, nor will I drink it even in case of tumult. This is the end I have in view - the enervation of the oligarchy. Unless this takes place neither the truth of the Gospel nor its ministers will be safe among us. I have in mind nothing cruel, but what I do is friendly and paternal. I desire to save some who are perishing through ignorance. I am laboring to preserve liberty. Fear nothing; for we shall so manage all things with the goodness and the alliance of God that you shall not be ashamed nor displeased because of us.”

Huldrych Zwingli (1484–1531) leader of the Protestant Reformation in Switzerland, and founder of the Swiss Reformed Churches

Letter, 1529, ibid, p.301

God, War, Truth, Fear

“The transformation of the automobile market was essentially complete in 1929. If Mr. Ford, in that pivotal year in the modern economy, still held stubbornly to his old concept in his new Model A, he was counterbalanced by Mr. Chrysler, who had come up from nowhere with tremendous vitality and with a market policy similar to General Motors'. The fact that Mr. Ford built nearly two million of the five million U. S.-produced cars and trucks sold that year was only incidental from the long-term point of view. it was a splurge, not the sign of a trend.”

Alfred P. Sloan (1875–1966) American businessman

Source: My Years with General Motors, 1963, p. 169

Cars

“[Television, radio, and magazines] are so designed as to make thinking seem unnecessary (though this is only an appearance). The packaging of intellectual positions and views is one of the most active enterprises of some of the best minds of our day. The viewer of television, the listener to radio, the reader of magazines, is presented with a whole complex of elements—all the way from ingenious rhetoric to carefully selected data and statistics—to make it easy for him to “make up his own mind” with the minimum of difficulty and effort. But the packaging is often done so effectively that the viewer, listener, or reader does not make up his own mind at all. Instead, he inserts a packaged opinion into his mind, somewhat like inserting a cassette into a cassette player. He then pushes a button and “plays back” the opinion whenever it seems appropriate to do so. He has performed acceptably without having had to think.”

Mortimer J. Adler book How to Read a Book

Source: How to Read a Book (1940, 1972), p. 4

Way, Thinking, Effort, Appearance

“And, further, shall we be sure of finding the left bank free from German troops? Germany is supposedly going to undertake to have neither troops nor fortresses on the left bank and within a zone extending 50 km. east of the Rhine. But the Treaty does not provide for any permanent supervision of troops and armaments, on the left bank any more than elsewhere in Germany. In the absence of this permanent supervision, the clause stipulating that the League of Nations may order enquiries to be undertaken is in danger of being purely illusory. We can thus have no guarantee that after the expiry of the fifteen years and the evacuation of the left bank, the Germans will not filter troops by degrees into this district. Even supposing they have not previously done so, how can we prevent them doing it at the moment when we intend to re-occupy on account of their default? It will be simple for them to leap to the Rhine in a night and to seize this natural military frontier well ahead of us. The option to renew the occupation should not therefore from any point of view be substituted for occupation. It will then be simple for them to leap to the Rhine in a night and to seize this natural military frontier well ahead of us.”

Raymond Poincaré (1860–1934) 10th President of the French Republic

Memorandum to Clemenceau (28 April 1919), quoted in David Lloyd George, The Truth about the Peace Treaties. Volume I (London: Victor Gollancz, 1938), p. 430.

Nature, Night

“One should view the present situation – the status quo – as being maintained by certain conditions or forces. A culture – for instance, the food habits of a certain group at a given time – is not a static affair but a live process like a river which moves but still keeps to a recognizable form…Food habits do not occur in empty space. They are part and parcel of the daily rhythm of being awake and asleep; of being alone and in a group; of earning a living and playing; of being a member of a town, a family, a social class, a religious group... in a district with good groceries and restaurants or in an area of poor and irregular food supply. Somehow all these factors affect food habits at any given time. They determine the food habits of a group every day anew just as the amount of water supply and the nature of the river bed determine the ﬂow of the river, its constancy or change.”

Kurt Lewin (1890–1947) German-American psychologist

Kurt Lewin (1943) "Psychological ecology". In: D. Cartwright (Ed.) Field Theory in Social Science. London: Social Science Paperbacks. As cited in: Bernard Burnes (2004) " Kurt Lewin and the Planned Approach to Change: A Re-appraisal https://blackboard.le.ac.uk/bbcswebdav/institution/College%20of%20Social%20Science/School%20of%20Management/DL%20Materials/MBA/2.%20Organizational%20Behaviour/Section%208/Burnes.pdf" in: Journal of Management Studies. Vol 41. Nr 6. p. 977-1002. 1940s

Family, Food, Nature, Water

“As to sociology and anthropology, it is manifest that the importance of information and communication as mechanisms of organization proceeds beyond the individual into the community. On the other hand, it is completely impossible to understand social communities such as those of ants without a thorough investigation of their means of communication, and we were fortunate enough to have the aid of Dr. Schneirla in this matter. For the similar problems of human organization, we sought help from the anthropologists Drs. Bateson and Margaret Mead; while Dr. Morgenstern of the Institute for Advanced Study was our adviser in the significant field of social organization belong to economic theory. His very important joint book on games with Dr. von Neumann, by the way, represents a most interesting study of social organization from the point of view of methods closely related to, although distinct from, the subject matter of cybernetics. Dr. Lewin and others represented the newer work on the theory of opinion sampling and the practice of opinion making, and Dr. F. C. S. Northrup was interested in assaying the philosophical significance of our work.”

Norbert Wiener book Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine

Introduction. p. 18-19
Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (1948)

Books, Way, Game, Communication

“Forever; ’t is a single word!
Our rude forefathers deemed it two:
Can you imagine so absurd
A view?”

Charles Stuart Calverley (1831–1884) British poet

Forever; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

Imagination

“The mere suggestion that it might be possible to look at a thing from more than one point of view was infuriating to these people.”

Neal Stephenson book Seveneves

"Five Thousand Years Later"; referring to the Diggers
Seveneves (2015), Part Three

People

“The abundance of our definitive words about God shows that we don't view him as a great mystery anymore, but as a sterile calculation without ambiguity or obscurity.”

Skye Jethani

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

God

“A system in one perspective is a subsystem in another. But the systems view always treats systems as integrated wholes of their subsidiary components and never as the mechanistic aggregate of parts in isolable causal relations.”

Ervin László (1932) Hungarian musician and philosopher

Source: Introduction to Systems Philosophy (1972), p. 14.

Parting

“I have no wish to argue, Father. Yet it must be said that the monks exist here in peace and security only because of the swords of the defenders. I do not belittle your views — I wish all men shared them. But they do not. … if all men and women lived as you and I, there would be no children, and no humanity. What then would be the Will of the Source?”

David Gemmell book Quest for Lost Heroes

Source: Drenai series, Quest for Lost Heroes, Ch. 2

Women, Men, Children, Peace

“None of the men and women who voted for this bill has any right to speak in public about the rule of law anymore, or to take a high moral view of the Third Reich, or to wax poetic about the American Idea.”

Garrison Keillor (1942) American radio host and writer

Referring to the Military Commissions Act of 2006, in "Congress's Shameful Retreat From American Values" in The Chicago Tribune (4 October 2006) http://www.truthout.org/article/garrison-keillor-congresss-shameful-retreat-from-american-values

Women, Men, Law, Idea

“The sentence "Auschwitz cannot be explained" is faulty simply from a formal point of view, for anything that is has an explanation, even if by necessity a merely self-serving faulty, so so explanation.”

Imre Kertész book Kaddish for an Unborn Child

Kaddish for a Child Not Born (1990)

“As a moral issue, abortion will be debated as long as humankind is able to debate. I respect all points of view as being valid to the holder. What concerns me is abortion as a legal and political issue. I am against all reproductive laws for the same reason I am against the draft. I believe that legal ownership of one’s body is the most basic civil and human right. Without it, we are all slaves to whatever government is in power at any given time.”

Helen Reddy (1941) Australian actress

On abortion, pg. 184.
The Woman I Am: A Memoir (2006)

Law, Time

“Alexander Hamilton Stephens' Constitutional View of the War Between the States, which was and remains probably the best defense of the Confederate cause. It is all about states' rights, and the defense of the minority against the tyranny of the numerical majority, although the "silent minority", the four million slaves, are never counted. It is substantially the book that Calhoun would have written had he been alive to do so. Stephens, who was Vice President of the Confederacy, had also been widely known, north and south, as one of the intellectual luminaries of his time.”

Harry V. Jaffa (1918–2015) American historian and collegiate professor

1990s, Defending the Cause of Human Freedom (1994)

War, Books, Time

“It is not uninteresting to observe in society the opinions of its different classes respecting honours conferred on science. Military and naval men, especially the most eminent, feel that genius is limited by no profession, and themselves sympathizing with it, would gladly hail as brothers in the same distinction, the philosopher and the poet. With lawyers the case is reversed; genius dwells not in their courts : industry and acuteness, monopolised by one absorbing professional subject, exclude larger views; and ribbons not being amongst the honoraria of their own profession, they reprobate their application to science. To this there are, however, some noble exceptions. Amongst the brightest ornaments, of their own profession, men are to be found of larger experience and more extended views than it often produces, who are themselves qualified to have become discoverers in other sciences. It is much to be regretted when such powers are applied to the mere administration, instead of to the reformation, of the laws of their country.”

Charles Babbage (1791–1871) mathematician, philosopher, inventor and mechanical engineer who originated the concept of a programmable c…

Source: The Exposition of 1851: Views Of The Industry, The Science, and the Government Of England, 1851, p. 224

Men, Law, Feeling, Science

“As the brain-changes are continuous, so do all these consciousnesses melt into each other like dissolving views. Properly they are but one protracted consciousness, one unbroken stream.”

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

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

Change

“Ostalgie [≈ “East German Nostalgia”] is not my kind of thing. To some, the GDR appears in a backward-looking bleary-eyed view as a palladium of social security. In truth, the GDR collapsed not least because, being economically inefficient, it could not finance its social promises.”

Günter Schabowski (1929–2015) German politician

Ostalgie ist nicht mein Ding. Manchem erscheint die DDR in rückblickender Verklärung als ein Hort sozialer Sicherheit. Tatsächlich ist die DDR nicht zuletzt daran zugrunde gegangen, dass sie infolge wirtschaftlicher Ineffizienz ihre sozialen Verheißungen nicht finanzieren konnte.
from: Mitteldeutsche Zeitung, 6 November 2004.

Truth, Nostalgia, Appearance

“In the construction of world views one can distinguish seven important tasks that correspond with the various components of a world view and that must provide an answer to a number of fundamental questions. First we must design a model of the world. What is the world like in which we live? How is the world structured and how does it function? What are the most suitable metaphors for speaking of the whole? Are mechanistic or organic models to be given preference? An explanation of reality must then follow. Why are the world and mankind as they are? Is a completely different world possible? What general explanatory principles apply?”

Diederik Aerts (1953) Belgian theoretical physicist

Source: Perspectives on the World: an interdisciplinary reflection. (1995), p. v : About "The seven tasks of World-view construction"

World, Question, Reality

“I think continually of some way of painting without the dot. I hope to achieve this but I have not been able to solve the problem of dividing the pure tone without harshness... How can one combine the purity and simplicity of the dot with the fullness, suppleness, liberty, spontaneity and freshness of sensation postulated by our impressionist art? This is the question which preoccupies me, for the dot is meager, lacking in body, diaphanous, more monotonous than simple, even in the Seurat's, particularly in the Seurat's [paintings]... I'm constantly pondering this question, I shall go to the Louvre to look at certain painters who are interesting from this point of view. Isn't it senseless that there are no Turners [here]..”

Camille Pissarro (1830–1903) French painter

Quote of Pissarro, Paris, 6 September 1888, in a letter to his son Lucien; from Camille Pissarro - Letters to His Son Lucien ed. John Rewald, with assistance of Lucien Pissarro; from the unpublished French letters; transl. Lionel Abel; Pantheon Books Inc. New York, second edition, 1943, pp. 131-132
1880's

Hope, Art, Way, Question

“When the federal government spends more each year than it collects in tax revenues, it has three choices: It can raise taxes, print money, or borrow money. While these actions may benefit politicians, all three options are bad for average Americans. Deficits mean future tax increases, pure and simple. Deficit spending should be viewed as a tax on future generations, and politicians who create deficits should be exposed as tax hikers.”

Ron Paul (1935) American politician and physician

Deficits Make You Poorer http://www.lewrockwell.com/paul/paul238.html (March 15, 2005). 2000s, 2001-2005

Money, Future

“The gap between a dumb and a clever person may appear large from an anthropocentric perspective, yet in a less parochial view the two have nearly indistinguishable minds.”

Nick Bostrom book Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies

Source: Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (2014), Ch. 4

Appearance, Personality

“When my ability to reason shows me that the suffering of another being is very similar to my own suffering and matters just as much to that other being as my own suffering matters to me, then my reason is showing me something that is undeniably true…. The perspective on ourselves that we get when we take the point of view of the universe also yields as much objectivity as we need if we are to find a cause that is worthwhile in a way that is independent of our own desires. The most obvious such cause is the reduction of pain and suffering, wherever it is to be found.”

Peter Singer (1946) Australian philosopher

p. 238 http://books.google.com/books?id=BoDMBgAAQBAJ&pg=PT238 Writings on an Ethical Life (2000)

Pain, Way, Suffering, Universe

“Regimes of racial segregation were not disestablished because of the work of leaders and presidents and legislators but rather because of the fact that ordinary people adopted a critical stance in the way in which they perceived their relationship to reality. Social realities that may have appeared inalterable, impenetrable, came to be viewed as malleable and transformable; and people learned how to imagine what it might mean to live in a world that was not so exclusively governed by the principle of white supremacy. This collective consciousness emerged within the context of social struggles.”

Angela Davis (1944) American political activist, scholar, and author

Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Closures and Continuities (2013)

People, World, Way, Imagination

“Americans have been selling this view around the world: that progress comes from perfect protection of intellectual property. Notwithstanding the fact that the most innovative and progressive space we've seen — the Internet — has been the place where intellectual property has been least respected. You know, facts don't get in the way of this ideology.”

Lawrence Lessig (1961) American academic, political activist.

"Code + Law: An Interview with Lawrence Lessig" http://www.openp2p.com/pub/a/p2p/2001/01/30/lessig.html at O'Reilly P2P (29 January 2001)

World, Way, Perfection

“Opticks was out of harmony with the ideas of 19th-century physics. …an exposition of the "wrong" (i. e., corpuscular) theory of light,—even though it also contained many of the basic principles of the "correct" (i. e., wave) theory. Not only had Newton erred in his choice… but also he apparently had found no insuperable difficulty in simultaneously embracing features of two opposing theories. …by adopting a combination of the two theories at once, he had violated one of the major canons of 19th-century physics… Today our point of view is influenced by the theory of photons and matter waves, or the… complementarity of Niels Bohr; and we may read with a new interest Newtons ideas on the interaction of light and matter or his explanation of the corpuscular and undulatory aspects of light.”

I. Bernard Cohen (1914–2003) American historian of science

I. Bernard Cohen, Preface to Opticks by Sir Isaac Newton (1952)

Idea, Light, Reading

“The universal and lasting establishment of peace constitutes not merely a part, but the whole final purpose and end of the science of right as viewed within the limits of reason.”

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) German philosopher

Eternal Peace (1795)

Peace, Universe, Science, Parting

“The scientistic sociologist wishes people to feel that he is just as empirical and thoroughgoing as the natural scientist, and that his conclusions are based just as relentlessly on observed data. The desire to present this kind of façade accounts, one may suspect, for the many examples and the extensive use of statistical tables found in the works of some of them. It has been said of certain novelists that they create settings having such a wealth of realistic detail that the reader assumes that the plot which is to follow will be equally realistic, when this may be far from the case. What happens is that the novelist disarms the reader with the realism of his setting in order that he may “get away with murder” in his plot. The persuasiveness of the scene is thus counted on to spill over into the action of the story. In like manner, when a treatise on social science is filled with this kind of data, the realism of the latter can influence our acceptance of the thesis, which may, on scrutiny, rest on very dubious constructs, such as definitions of units. Along with this there is sometimes a great display of scientific preciseness in formulations. But my reading suggests that some of these writers are often very precise about matters which are not very important and rather imprecise about matters which are. Most likely this is an offsetting process. If there are subjects one cannot afford to be precise about because they are too little understood or because one’s views of them are too contrary to traditional beliefs about society, one may be able to maintain an appearance of scientific correctness by taking great pains in the expressing of matters of little consequence. These will afford scope for a display of scholarly meticulousness and of one’s command of the scientific terminology.”

Richard M. Weaver (1910–1963) American scholar

“Concealed Rhetoric in Scientistic Sociology,” pp. 148-149.
Language is Sermonic (1970)

Pain, People, Feeling, Nature

“In classical Newtonian physics there was a clear understanding of 'what reality is'. Indeed in this classical view, reality at a certain time is the collection of all what is actual at this time, and this is contained in 'the present'. Often it is stated that three dimensional space and one dimensional time have been substituted by four dimensional space-time in relativity theory, and as a consequence the classical concept of reality, as that what is 'present', cannot be retained. Is reality then the four dimensional manifold of relativity theory? And if so, what is then the meaning of 'change in time?”

Diederik Aerts (1953) Belgian theoretical physicist

Aerts, D. (1996). " Relativity theory: what is reality? http://www.vub.ac.be/CLEA/aerts/publications/1996RelReal.pdf". Foundations of Physics, 26, pp. 1627-1644

Understanding, Reality, Change, Time

“Acting in conformity with reason, in the singular, and acting for good reasons, in the plural, are two different things insofar as reason is objective, whereas reasons are subjective. From an external point of view, we can evaluate a policy as being in conformity with reason or not. From an internal point of view, one can evaluate an action as being rational or not. From this difference it follows that only rationality can be used for explanatory ends. It is only insofar as the agent has made the demands of reason his own that the latter may give rise to, and possibly explain, specific behaviors. The assessment of the actor and that of the observer need not coincide.”

Jon Elster (1940) Norwegian academic

Reason and Rationality (2009)

Behavior

“Too close a view may interfere with one's grasp of an overall problem or concept”

Anthony Stafford Beer (1926–2002) British theorist, consultant, and professor

Source: Management Science (1968), Chapter 1, Processes and Policies, p. 21.

Problem

“We live in a culture in which intelligence is denied relevance altogether, in a search for radical innocence, or is defended as an instrument of authority and repression. In my view, the only intelligence worth defending is critical, dialectical, skeptical, desimplifying.”

Susan Sontag (1933–2004) American writer and filmmaker, professor, and activist

"Women, the Arts, & the Politics of Culture: An Interview with Susan Sontag" in Salmagundi, No. 31-32 (Fall/Winter 1975), p. 29; later published in Conversations with Susan Sontag (1995) edited by Leland A. Poague, p. 77

Search, Intelligence

“Will we ever again be able to view a public object with civic dignity, unencumbered by commercial messages? Must city buses be fully painted as movable ads, lampposts smothered, taxis festooned, even seats in concert halls sold one by one to donors and embellished in perpetuity with their names on silver plaques?”

Stephen Jay Gould book The Lying Stones of Marrakech

"The Lying Stones of Marrakech", p. 25
The Lying Stones of Marrakech (2001)

Painting

“Ruburt tuned in to the world view of a man known dead. He was not directly in communication with William James. He was aware, however, of the universe through William James' world view. As you might tune into a program on a television set, Ruburt tuned into the view of reality now held in the mind of William James. Because that view necessarily involved emotions, Ruburt felt some sense of emotional contact -- but only with the validity of the emotions. Each person has such a world view, whether living or dead in your terms, and that "living picture" exists despite time or space. It can be perceived by others.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Source: Psychic Politics: An Aspect Psychology Book (1976), p. 82-83

World, Communication, Reality, Sense

“The alternatives with which Freud leaves us are grim only if we view them from the perspective of some past possibility. … The grimness is relieved by the gaiety of being free from the historic Western compulsion of seeking large and general meanings for small and highly particular lives.”

Philip Rieff (1922–2006) American sociologist

The Triumph of the Therapeutic (1966)

Past

“In the new environment and markets it is not enough to only promote the export of Finland. We need the political view where the countries are developing and political abilities to contribute the direction of development, e. g. in the human rights and security issues.”

Pekka Haavisto (1958) Finnish politician

Source: Pekka Haavisto: Moninapaista arvokeskustelua http://www.ulkopolitiikka.fi/article/910/pekka_haavisto_moninapaista_arvokeskustelua/ Ulkopolitiikka 4/2011” ”Uusissa toimintaympäristöissä ja uusilla markkinoilla ei riitä, että edistetään Suomen vientiä. Pitää olla myös poliittinen näkemys siitä, mihin maat ja alueet ovat kehittymässä, sekä poliittisia valmiuksia vaikuttaa kehityksen suuntaan, esimerkiksi ihmisoikeus- ja turvallisuuskysymyksiin.”

Country

“Despite people's claims to the contrary, I think that a proper application of skepticism when viewing religious claims does necessarily lead to atheism.”

Matt Dillahunty (1969) American activist

Episode 692: "Buzzwords of Ignorance" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9t25A6A_2uc, Channel Austin (January 16, 2011) The Atheist Experience

People, Thinking

“A liberal education is that which aims to develop faculty without ulterior views of profession or other means of gaining a livelihood. It considers man an end in himself and not an instrument whereby something is to be wrought. Its ideal is human perfection.”

John Lancaster Spalding (1840–1916) Catholic bishop

Source: Aphorisms and Reflections (1901), p. 234

Education, Perfection

“Watch for slanted passages in text books. Socialist authors have invaded the textbook field. So have some with even more radical views.”

W. Cleon Skousen book The Naked Communist

The Naked Communist (1958)

Books

“The mystic and the physicist arrive at the same conclusion; one starting from the inner realm, the other from the outer world. The harmony between their views confirms the ancient Indian wisdom that Brahman, the ultimate reality without, is identical to Atman, the reality within.”

Fritjof Capra book The Tao of Physics

Epilogue, p. 305.
The Tao of Physics (1975)

Wisdom, World, Reality

“As for those who condemned these operations looked at the event [9/11] in isolation and failed to connect them to past events and did not look at the causes that lead to this result. So their point of view is narrow.”

Osama bin Laden (1957–2011) founder of al-Qaeda

Al - Jazeera Broadcast Tape - On 9/11 and the American reaction http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dls5JTD-uG0 (The date of this tape is not provided, though it seems to be 2002 or 2003, but could be as early as October 2001.) 2000s

Past

“Admittedly, the tendency to bracket substantive moral questions makes it difficult to argue for toleration in the language of the good. Defining privacy rights by defending the practices privacy protects seems either reckless or quaint; reckless because it rests so much on moral argument, quaint because it recalls the traditional view that ties the case for privacy to the merits of the conduct privacy protects. But as the abortion and sodomy cases illustrate, the attempt to bracket moral questions faces difficulties of its own. They suggest the truth in the "naive" view, that the justice or injustice of laws against abortion and homosexual sodomy may have something to do with the morality or immorality of these practices after all.”

Michael J. Sandel (1953) American political philosopher

Michael J. Sandel, "Moral Argument and Liberal Toleration: Abortion and Homosexuality" (1989)

Truth, Justice, Law, Question

“The French, the British and the Canadian stuff that's in the films is through my American eyes, and I'm comparing it to America, and I'm not saying they don't have problems. But those aren't for me to fix. Trust me, from an American point of view, the Europeans look pretty good. You need to preserve what you have and fight to get back that which you lost.”

Michael Moore (1954) American filmmaker, author, social critic, and liberal activist

Interview with Jay Harris http://www.thebragmag.com/features/michael-moore-talks-to-the-bra.php, in The Brag (August 2007) 2007

Problem, Fight

“Men being born with a title to perfect freedom and uncontrolled enjoyment of all the rights and privileges of the law of nature… no one can be put out of his estate and subjected to the political view of another, without his consent.”

William Penn (1644–1718) English real estate entrepreneur, philosopher, early Quaker and founder of the Province of Pennsylvania

First Frame of Government (25 April 1682).
Frame of Government (1682)

Men, Law, Nature, Freedom

“Social physics never can pretend to discover laws which will verify themselves in every particular, in the case of isolated individuals. The science will have rendered a service sufficiently vast, in giving more precise views upon a host of points, of which vague glimpses only were before possessed.”

Adolphe Quetelet (1796–1874) Belgian astronomer, mathematician, statistician and sociologist

Preface of M. Quetelet
A Treatise on Man and the Development of His Faculties (1842)

Law, Science

“If I, so close to the peak, could glean no joy from that rarefied air, the air I was told, as soon as I’d acquired language, would absolve me, if in fact all I gleaned was the view from that peak, the vista true, that the whole climb had been a spellbound clamber up an edifice of foolishness, then what possible salvation can there be for those at the foothills or dying on the slopes or those for whom the climb is not even an option? What is their solution? Well, it’s the same solution that’s available to me, the only solution that will make any of us free. To detach the harness and fall within. Now that’s what I call an extended metaphor. In Fairfield, Iowa, then, there could be the solution. But none of us want a boring solution. The Revolution cannot be boring.”

Russell Brand book Revolution

Revolution (2014)

Joy

“The Present Age, according to my view of it, stands in that Epoch which in my former lecture I named the THIRD, and which I characterized as the Epoch of Liberation—directly from the external ruling Authority, indirectly from the power of Reason as Instinct, and generally from Reason in any form; the Age of absolute indifference towards all truth, and of entire and unrestrained licentiousness:–the state of completed sinfulness.”

Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814) German philosopher

Source: The Characteristics of the Present Age (1806), p. 16

Truth, Age, Indifference

“There is the view that poetry should improve your life. I think people confuse it with the Salvation Army.”

John Ashbery (1927–2017) poet from the United States

International Herald Tribune (Paris, October 2, 1989) The Columbia World of Quotations, 1996. http://www.bartleby.com/66/78/4378.html

Life, People, Thinking

“There is the view that during the Cold War, Pakistan was the most allied ally and then, within the space of just a few months, we became America's most sanctioned friend.”

Maleeha Lodhi (1953) Pakistani diplomat

— Lodhi talking to The New York Times on September 30, 2001

War

“What we need is a machine that will let us see the other guy’s point of view.”

Arthur C. Clarke book The Light of Other Days

Source: The Light of Other Days (2000), Chapter 5

Guy

“From the point of view of a tapeworm, man was created by God to serve the appetite of the tapeworm.”

Edward Abbey (1927–1989) American author and essayist

A Voice Crying in the Wilderness (Vox Clamantis in Deserto) (1990)

God

“The most frequently encountered view of commitment in organizations is one having to do with an individual's psychological bond to the organization.”

Gerald R. Salancik (1943–1996) American organizational theorist

Barry M. Staw & ‎Gerald R. Salancik (1977). New directions in organizational behavior. p. 2

“We debase the richness of both nature and our own minds if we view the great pageant of our intellectual history as a compendium of new information leading from primal superstition to final exactitude. We know that the sun is hub of our little corner of the universe, and that ties of genealogy connect all living things on our planet, because these theories assemble and explain so much otherwise disparate and unrelated information—not because Galileo trained his telescope on the moons of Jupiter or because Darwin took a ride on a Galápagos tortoise.”

Stephen Jay Gould book Eight Little Piggies

"A Foot Soldier for Evolution", p. 441
Eight Little Piggies (1993)

History, Nature, Universe, Sun

“Religious fundamentalists see themselves as having remedies for the maladies of the modern world. In reality they are symptoms of the disease they pretend to cure. They hope to recover the unreflective faith of traditional cultures, but this is a peculiarly modern fantasy. We cannot believe as we please; our beliefs are traces left by our unchosen lives. A view of the world is not something that can be conjured up as and when we please.”

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

The Human: Against fundamentalism ― religious and scientific (p. 18)
Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (2002)

World, Disease, Faith, Hope

“When a member of an organization is placed in a position with duties ill defined in their relation to other duties what happens? Naturally he attempts to make his own interpretation of those duties and, where he can, to impose this view on those about him. In this process he encounters others in similar cases, with friction and lack of coordination as the inevitable result.”

James D. Mooney (1884–1957) American businessman

Source: The Principles of Organization, 1947, p. 29-30

Nature

“Many organizations and their managers drive toward the future while looking through the rear-view mirror. They manage in relation to events that have already occurred, rather than anticipate and confront the challenges of the future.”

Gareth Morgan (1943) Organizational theorist

Morgan (1988) Riding the waves of change: developing managerial competencies for a turbulent world. p. 4

Future

“But it is we that choose to divide animals up into discontinuous species. On the evolutionary view of life there must have been intermediates, even though, conveniently for our naming rituals, they are usually extinct.”

Richard Dawkins book A Devil's Chaplain

"Gaps in the Mind"
A Devil's Chaplain (2003)

Life, Animals

“[Larkin] himself is well aware that there are happier ways of viewing life. It's just that he is incapable of sharing them, except for fleeting moments - and the fleeting moments do not accumulate, whereas the times in between them do.”

Clive James (1939–2019) Australian author, critic, broadcaster, poet, translator and memoirist

Ibid.
Essays and reviews, At the Pillars of Hercules (1979)

Life, Way, Time

“My eye came to rest on the delicate convolutions of her ear-those intricate, perfect ears. The thought passed through my mind: "No, those ears were not created by any chance coming together of atoms in nature (the Communist view). They could have been created only by immense design."”

Whittaker Chambers Witness

Source: Witness (1952), p. 16

Nature, Chance, Perfection

“Inflation and Employment in capitalist countries, in my own view, the change is the other way around: the constraints on the pressure of demand tend to be excessive, with the result that unemployment is much greater than can be justified by the needs of resource-allocation, and the rate of economic growth is appreciably less than it could be.
The main reason for this is that the distribution of power and, ultimately, the distribution of incomes, changes in favor of labor the faster the economy grows and the nearer it is to full employment, and over a longer period it changes in favor of capital the greater the volume of unemployment. This is the real reason why the continuance of Keynesian policies after the war led to a recrudescence of long-discredited ideas that go by the name of “monetarism.” The main attraction of monetarism was not its intellectual simplicity— inflation is a matter of the money supply, period— but that it elevated the fear of inflation to the unique position which could not be justified by the experience of numerous countries who habitually suffer from it.”

Nicholas Kaldor (1908–1986) British/Hungarian economist

Nicholas Kaldor, Economics without Equilibrium (1985), p.37-38

Money, War, Fear, Way

“In view of the increasingly critical situation I propose to come over at once to see you with a view to trying to find a peaceful solution. I propose to come across by air and am ready to start tomorrow.
Please indicate earliest time at which you can see me and suggest place of meeting. I should be grateful for a very early reply.”

William L. Shirer book The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich

At eleven o'clock that same night Neville Chamberlain got off an urgent message to Hitler
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1960)

Peace, Time

“The extreme nature of dominant-end views is often concealed by the vagueness and ambiguity of the end proposed.”

John Rawls book A Theory of Justice

Source: A Theory of Justice (1971; 1975; 1999), Chapter IX, Section 83, p. 554

Nature

“For we may remark generally of our mathematical researches, that these auxiliary quantities, these long and difficult calculations into which we are often drawn, are almost always proofs that we have not in the beginning considered the objects themselves so thoroughly and directly as their nature requires, since all is abridged and simplified, as soon as we place ourselves in a right point of view.”

Louis Poinsot (1777–1859) French mathematician and physicist

[Louis Poinsot, translated by Charles Thomas Whitley, Outlines of a new theory of rotatory motion, R. Newby (Cambridge), 1834, 4]

Mathematics, Nature

“The Court thus proclaims itself sole arbiter of our Nation's moral standards—and in the course of discharging that awesome responsibility purports to take guidance from the views of foreign courts and legislatures. Because I do not believe that the meaning of our Eighth Amendment, any more than the meaning of other provisions of our Constitution, should be determined by the subjective views of five Members of this Court and like-minded foreigners, I dissent. Words have no meaning if the views of less than 50 percent of death penalty States can constitute a national consensus. Our previous cases have required overwhelming opposition to a challenged practice, generally over a long period of time.”

Antonin Scalia (1936–2016) former Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

On executing minors: Roper v. Simmons (2005) (dissenting).
2000s

Death, Penalty, Time

“The root of all religions, from the Baha'i point of view, is based on the theory that man will gradually come to understand the unity of the world and the oneness of mankind. It teaches that all the prophets are one – that science and religion are the two great powers which must be balanced if man is to become mature. I feel my work has been influenced by these beliefs. I've tried to decentralize and interpenetrate so that all parts of a painting are of related value.”

Mark Tobey (1890–1976) American abstract expressionist painter

as quoted in Abstract Expressionism, Barbara Hess, Taschen, Köln, 2006, p. 60
posthumous Quotes

World, Religion, Feeling, Understanding

“The development of American political theories has received surprisingly little attention from students of American history. Even the political ideas of the Revolutionary fathers and the tenets of such important schools as those represented by Jefferson and Adams have not been carefully analyzed or put in their proper perspective. The political theory of the controversies over slavery and the nature of the Union has generally been presented from the partisan point of view, while recent tendencies in political thought have received no adequate notice.”

Charles Edward Merriam (1874–1953) American political scientist

Source: A History of American Political Theories, 1903, p. vii; Preface, lead paragraph

School, History, Idea, Nature

“Human beings are incontestably capital from an abstract and mathematical point of view.”

Theodore Schultz (1902–1998) American economist

Source: "Investment in human capital," 1961, p. 3

Mathematics

“Liberalism in its political instantiation, for all of its appeal, is so powerful a theory that it probably works better in opposition than in government. Modern liberalism has become what liberal philosophers not long ago would have derided as a “comprehensive view” -- a theory that believes itself able to give an account of how every institution of the society should operate, and even, alas, how people should think. Add to that a dash of triumphalism, and you wind up with a government impatient with the tendency of human beings to resist having too much forced on them at once.”

Stephen L. Carter (1954) American legal academic and writer

Trump and the Fall of Liberalism (November 11, 2016)

People, Thinking

“We lived in places that we never knew.
We could not name the birds perched on our sill,
Or see the trees we cut down for our view.
What we possessed we always chose to kill."We claimed the earth but did not hear her claim,
And when we died, they laid us on her breast,
But she refuses us — until we earn
Forgiveness from the lives we dispossessed.”

Dana Gioia (1950) American writer

"A California Requiem"
Poetry, Interrogations at Noon (2001)

Forgiveness, Bird, Tree

“Let us take short views. If we look over the precipices, we shall grow dizzy. If we look too far ahead, we shall grow discouraged. Let us rather put our weak hands into Christ's strong, loving grasp, and all the time listen to His cheering words, "Fear not; only trust."”

Theodore L. Cuyler (1822–1909) American minister

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 592.

Love, Fear, Strong, Time

“In the "Alexandrian" explanation described above, the multiple from which evolution emerges is both secondary and sinful from its origin: it represents in fact (an idea that smacks of Manicheanism and the Hindu metaphysical systems) broken and pulverized unity. Starting from a very much more modern and completely different point of view, let us assert, as our original postulate, that, the multiple (that is, non-being, if taken in the pure state) being the only rational form of a creatable (creabile) nothingness, the creative act is comprehensible only as a gradual process of arrangement and unification, which amounts to accepting that to create is to unite. And, indeed, there is nothing to prevent our holding that union creates. To the objection that union presupposes already existing elements, I shall answer that physics has just shown us (in the case of mass) that experientially (and for all the protests of "common sense") the moving object exists only as the product of its motion.”

Pierre Teilhard De Chardin (1881–1955) French philosopher and Jesuit priest

pp. 193–195 https://archive.org/stream/ChristianityAndEvolution/Christianity_and_Evolution#page/n191/mode/2up Christianity and Evolution (1969)

Idea, Sense

“The problem is one of opposition between subjective and objective points of view. There is a tendency to seek an objective account of everything before admitting its reality. But often what appears to a more subjective point of view cannot be accounted for in this way. So either the objective conception of the world is incomplete, or the subjective involves illusions that should be rejected.”

Thomas Nagel (1937) American philosopher

"Subjective and Objective," in Mortal Questions, Cambridge University Press, 1979, p. 196.

World, Way, Problem, Reality

“I had to develop a sense of humor I'm sure it's a defense mechanism. It was, 'Before they make fun of me, I'll make a joke.' Being funny is just a point of view about life in general. Sometimes it's born out of difficult childhoods, where you have to develop a sense of humor. Ultimately, it's a gift.”

Nathan Lane (1956) American actor

Marshall Fine (January 24, 2000) "Nathan the 'Great'", The Journal News, p. 1E.

Life, Sense, Childhood

Quotes about view page 29

Quotes about view
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