Quotes about wall
page 10

“My friends have come to me unsought. The great God gave them to me. By oldest right, by the divine affinity of virtue with itself, I find them, or rather not I, but the Deity in me and in them derides and cancels the thick walls of individual character, relation, age, sex, circumstance, at which he usually connives, and now makes many one.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

1840s, Essays: First Series (1841), Friendship

God, Age, Sex

“It is no difficult trick to bring a great deal of energy, study, and native ability into Wall Street and to end up with losses instead of profits. These virtues, if channeled in the wrong directions, become indistinguishable from handicaps.”

Benjamin Graham (1894–1976) American investor

Source: The Intelligent Investor: The Classic Text on Value Investing (1949), Chapter I, What the Intelligent Investor Can Accomplish, p. 11

Study, Loss

“The human will, that force unseen,
The offspring of a deathless soul,
Can hew the way to any goal,
Though walls of granite intervene.”

James Allen (1864–1912) British philosophical writer

As A Man Thinketh (1902), Effect of Thought on Circumstances

Way, Soul

“The Wall Street banker thinks it shameful to raise a department clerk’s salary from $1500 to $1800 a year, but every man who draws a salary himself says: “That’s all right. I wish it was me.” And he feels very much like votin’ the Tammany ticket on election day, just out of sympathy.”

George Washington Plunkitt (1842–1924) New York State Senator

Plunkitt of Tammany Hall, Chapter 1, Honest Graft and Dishonest Graft

Feeling, Thinking, Drawing

“We should be well aware of the full importance of this day, because today, within the welcoming walls of Boulogne-sur-Mer, there meet not Frenchmen with Englishmen, not Russians with Poles, but people with people.”

Ludoviko Lazaro Zamenhof (1859–1917) Polish ophthalmologist and inventor of Esperanto

Address to the First World Congress of Esperanto, Bologne-sur-Mer, France. 5 August 1905.

People

“I have just concluded my series of paintings, I look at them constantly. I who made them often find them horrible. I understand them only at rare moments, when I have forgotten all about them, on days when I feel kindly disposed and indulgent to their poor maker. Sometimes I am horribly afraid to turn round canvases which I have piled against the wall; I am constantly afraid of finding monsters where I believed there were precious gems!… Thus it does not astonish me that the critics in London relegate me to the lowest rank. Alas! I fear that they are only too justified! - However, at times I come across works of mine which are soundly done and really in my style, and at such moments I find great solace. But no more of that. Painting, art in general, enchants me. It is my life. What else matters?”

Camille Pissarro (1830–1903) French painter

Quote in a letter, 20 Nov. 1883; as quoted in Painting Outside the lines, Patterns of Creativity in Modern Art, ed. David W. Galenson, Harvard University Press, 30 Jun 2009, p. 84
1880's

Life, Fear, Art, Feeling

“But no - what’s this? The branch on which he is sitting is weak. That is not all: wood-mice are gnawing away at it: before long they will eat through it and it will snap and fall. The branch sags down over a well. Aha! Escape! Perhaps our hero can swim? But the well is dry and there are snakes writhing and hissing on its bed. As the branch bends lower, he perceives a solitary blade of grass on wall of well. On top of the blade of grass gleams a drop of honey. What is our hero to do? What action does our puranic man quintessential Indian, take in the situation? He bends with the branch and licks up the honey…. What did you expect? Some neat solution to the problem? The tiger changes its mind and goes away? Amitabh Bachchan leaps to the rescue? Don’t be silly. One strength of Indian mind is that it knows some problems cannot be resolved and it learns to make best of them. That is the Indian answer to the insuperable difficulty. One does not fight against that by which one is certain to be overwhelmed; but one finds the best way, for oneself, to live with it. This is our national aesthetic. Without it, india as we know it could not survive.”

Shashi Tharoor book The Great Indian Novel

The Great Indian Novel (1989)

Way, Problem, Grass, Learning

“It is apparent that prisoners of war are among the most vulnerable of people. Not only are they completely under the control of their captors, but in a time of conflict, the hatred and brutality of the battlefield are very likely to be mirrored within military prison walls.”

Jimmy Carter (1924) American politician, 39th president of the United States (in office from 1977 to 1981)

Pages 125-126
Post-Presidency, Our Endangered Values (2005)

War, People, Time

“September fattens on vines. Roses
flake from the wall. The smoke
of harmless fires drifts to my eyes.”

Geoffrey Hill (1932–2016) English poet and professor

September Song http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/september-song/. Poetry

“When Sulla died in the year [78 B. C. ], the oligarchy which he had restored ruled with absolute sway over the Roman state; but, as it had been established by force, it still needed force to maintain its ground against its numerous secret and open foes. it was opposed not by any single party with objects clearly expressed and under leaders distinctly acknowledged, but by a mass of multifarious elements, ranging themselves doubtless under the general name of the popular party, but in reality opposing the Sullan organization of the commonwealth on very various grounds and with very different designs…There were… the numerous and important classes whom the sullan restoration had left unsatisfied, or whom the political or private interest it had directly injured. Among those who for such reasons belonged to the opposition ranked the dense and prosperous population of the region between the Po and the Alps, which naturally regarded the bestowal of Latin rights in [89 B. C. ] as merely an installment of the full Roman franchise, and so afforded a ready soil for agitation. To this category belonged also the freedman, influential in numbers and wealth, and specially dangerous through their aggregation in the capital, who could not brook their having been reduced by the restoration to their earlier, practically useless, suffrage. In the same position stood, moreover, the great capitalists, who maintained a cautious silence, but still as before preserved their tenacity of resentment and their equal tenacity of power. The populace of the capital, which recognized true freedom in free bread-corn, was likewise discontented. Still deeper exasperation prevailed among the burgess bodies affected by the Sullan confiscations - whether they, like those of Pompeii, lived on their property curtailed by the Sullan colonists, within the same ring-wall with the latter, and at perpetual variance with them; or, like the Arrentines and Volaterrans, retained actual possession of their territory, but had the Damocles' sword of confiscation suspended over them by the Roman people..”

Theodor Mommsen (1817–1903) German classical scholar, historian, jurist, journalist, politician, archaeologist and writer

Vol. 4, Part: 1. Translated by W.P. Dickson.
The History of Rome - Volume 4: Part 1

People, Secret, Nature, Reality

“You all wrong. You try to hit home run every time but you no can do. No man can do. I wish you try to hit ball like you did when you joined team last July. Then you just try to meet ball because you want to make good showing after coming from minors. You swing easy and ball goes into centerfield seats. Next day, you swing easy again and ball goes over left field wall. Now you swing too hard. Try to hit home run every swing. You wrong. You have no timing, you miss ball. Please, for me, just try to meet ball when we open season. You have so much power, you just meet ball and whoosh—it goes over fence. Stu, with my brains, if I have your power, I make $200,000 in baseball.”

Roberto Clemente (1934–1972) Puerto Rican baseball player

Advice given to teammate Dick Stuart on April 7, 1959, as quoted in "The Scoreboard: Meet Ball, Homers Will Come, Clemente Assures Stuart" https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=IEIqAAAAIBAJ&sjid=aU4EAAAAIBAJ&pg=7149,2639076 by Les Biederman, in The Pittsburgh Press (Wednesday, April 8, 1959), p. 43 Baseball-related, <big><big>1950s</big></big>, <big>1959</big>

Home, Time, Season

“Iron Pillar: “…In our opinion this pillar was made in the ninth century before (the birth of) Lord Jesus… When Rai Pithora built a fort and an idol-house near this pillar, it stood in the courtyard of the idol-house. And when Qutbu’d-Din Aibak constructed a mosque after demolishing the idol-house, this pillar stood in the courtyard of the mosque…
”Idol-house of Rai Pithora: “There was an idol-house near the fort of Rai Pithora. It was very famous… It was built along with the fort in 1200 Bikarmi [Vikrama SaMvat] corresponding to AD 1143 and AH 538. The building of this temple was very unusual, and the work done on it by stone-cutters is such that nothing better can be conceived. The beautiful carvings on every stone in it defy description… The eastern and northern portions of this idol-house have survived intact. The fact that the Iron Pillar, which belongs to the Vaishnava faith, was kept inside it, as also the fact that sculptures of Kirshan avatar and Mahadev and Ganesh and Hanuman were carved on its walls, leads us to believe that this temple belonged to the Vaishnava faith. Although all sculptures were mutilated in the times of Muslims, even so a close scrutiny can identify as to which sculpture was what. In our opinion there was a red-stone building in this idol-house, and it was demolished. For, this sort of old stones with sculptures carved on them are still found.
”Quwwat al-Islam Masjid: “When Qutbu’d-Din, the commander-in-chief of Muizzu’d-Din Sam alias Shihabu’d-Din Ghuri, conquered Delhi in AH 587 corresponding to AD 1191 corresponding to 1248 Bikarmi, this idol-house (of Rai Pithora) was converted into a mosque. The idol was taken out of the temple. Some of the images sculptured on walls or doors or pillars were effaced completely, some were defaced. But the structure of the idol-house kept standing as before. Materials from twenty-seven temples, which were worth five crores and forty lakhs of Dilwals, were used in the mosque, and an inscription giving the date of conquest and his own name was installed on the eastern gate…“When Malwah and Ujjain were conquered by Sultan Shamsu’d-Din in AH 631 corresponding to AD 1233, then the idol-house of Mahakal was demolished and its idols as well as the statue of Raja Bikramajit were brought to Delhi, they were strewn in front of the door of the mosque…”“In books of history, this mosque has been described as Masjid-i-Adinah and Jama‘ Masjid Delhi, but Masjid Quwwat al-Islam is mentioned nowhere. It is not known as to when this name was adopted. Obviously, it seems that when this idol-house was captured, and the mosque constructed, it was named Quwwat al-Islam…””

Syed Ahmed Khan (1820–1898) Indian educator and politician

About antiquities of Delhi. Translated from the Urdu of Asaru’s-Sanadid, edited by Khaleeq Anjum, New Delhi, 1990. Vol. I, p. 305-16
Asaru’s-Sanadid

Books, Faith, Beauty, History

“Let's stop for a second and remember where we were eight years ago. We had the worst financial crisis, the Great Recession, the worst since the 1930s. That was in large part because of tax policies that slashed taxes on the wealthy, failed to invest in the middle class, took their eyes off of Wall Street, and created a perfect storm. In fact, Donald was one of the people who rooted for the housing crisis. He said, back in 2006, "Gee, I hope it does collapse, because then I can go in and buy some and make some money." Well, it did collapse…. We have come back from that abyss. And it has not been easy. So we're now on the precipice of having a potentially much better economy, but the last thing we need to do is to go back to the policies that failed us in the first place.”

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

Presidential campaign (April 12, 2015 – 2016), First presidential debate (September 26, 2016)

Money, People, Hope, Parting

“In one gallery they actually had a notice which said "No Sketching." How obnoxious! I said, "How do you think these things got on the walls if there was no sketching?"”

David Hockney (1937) British artist

"Portrait of the Artist as a Naughty Boy," interview with John Mortimer, In Character (1983), p. 97
1980s

Thinking

“"High (drive/fly ball) into (left/center/etc.) field, and deep. Back goes (fielder's name), a-way back, it's gone!" (Or "… to the [warning] track, to the [fence/wall], gone!")”

Vin Scully (1927) American sports broadcaster

Variations of his most common home run call

Way, Flying

“"Wouldn't you like to come in and have a cup of tea and dry off?"
"Lady, don't you realize that we don't even have time to pull up our shorts?"
"Pull up your shorts?"
"YES, PULL UP OUR SHORTS!" I screamed at her and walked off into the wall of water.”

Charles Bukowski book Post Office

Post Office (1971)

Water, Time, Tea

“Baby, you've got a heart so big,
It could crush this town.
But I can't hold out forever.
Even walls fall down.”

Tom Petty (1950–2017) American musician

Walls (Circus)
Lyrics, Songs and Music from "She's the One" (1996)

Heart, Baby

“Charge once more, then, and be dumb!
Let the victors, when they come,
When the forts of folly fall,
Find thy body by the wall.”

Matthew Arnold The Last Word

St. 4
The Last Word (1867)

“Depraved these styles are called, the one with its ever broken and twisted mouldings, the other with its rich crowded carving, and depraved we may count them, if we are of the school that thinks the purpose of architectural ornament is always to state some fact of construction. The Mexican architects and their workmen were certainly not of this school. They broke their mouldings, turned and curved them and multiplied their ornament for the pure joy it gave them to see the sparkle of the sunlight on their white walls.”

Clarence Stein (1882–1975) American architect

A Triumph of Spanish Colonial Style (1916)

School, Thinking, Joy

“There are an infinite number of ways to lie and only one truth. Propaganda today is not a wall, not a dike holding back information from reaching the people. It is a flood, overwhelming our critical thinking. The concept is not to promote a particular narrative or agenda but to create doubt and to make people believe that the truth is unknowable. There are no Russian forces in Ukraine. Russia didn’t meddle in the U. S. election. The popular Vladimir Putin was reelected on March 18, 2018.”

Garry Kasparov (1963) former chess world champion

2010s, The Truth About Putin (2018)

People, Truth, Lie, Way

“For men have dulled their eyes with sin,
And dimmed the light of heaven with doubt,
And built their temple-walls to shut thee in,
And framed their iron creeds to shut thee out.”

Henry Van Dyke (1852–1933) American diplomat

God of the Open Air, st. III (1904).

Men, Light

“A restless flame
Someone calls your name
Through the empty hall
Casting shadows on the wall
In the sound of emptiness
Isolation
Nowhere left to run
Now the time has come…”

Mike Oldfield (1953) English musician, multi-instrumentalist

Song lyrics, Heaven's Open (1991)

Time

“We can not gaze into space and understand that space has no end. There is no brick wall at the end of space, because if there was, what would be behind the brick wall? It just goes on and on……never ending. The thought of infinity hurts my brain – I can not understand it. The Bible teaches us that God is eternal, without beginning and without end. We being finite, can not understand a world without time. Time is just a dimension that God has created and subjected man to Eternity and infinity are too much for our tiny brains to comprehend.”

Ray Comfort (1949) New Zealand-born Christian minister and evangelist

Cults, Sects and Questions (c. 1979)

God, World, Understanding, Time

“I foresee great refinements in the field of short-pulse microwave signaling, whereby several simultaneous programs may occupy the same channel, in sequence, with incredibly swift electronic communication; vastly important developments in microwave technique, whereby present clumsy connecting leads between wall or floor sockets and electric devices like toasters and vacuum sweepers may become unnecessary; gigantic magnetrons and klystrons, or their successors, will generate megawatts in microwaves; living rooms and their occupants will be heated by high-frequency waves from walls or ceilings; short waves will be generally used in the kitchen for roasting and baking, almost instantaneously”

Lee De Forest (1873–1961) American inventor

"Dawn of the Electronic Age" http://blog.modernmechanix.com/2006/03/20/dawn-of-the-electronic-age/, Popular Mechanics, January 1952

Communication

“I have the disadvantage of not being sociable. Wall Street men are fond of company and sport. A man makes one hundred thousand dollars there and immediately buys a yacht, begins to race fast horses, and becomes a sport generally. My tastes lie in a different direction. When business hours are over I go home and spend the remainder of the day with my wife, my children, and books of my library. Every man has natural inclinations of his own. Mine are domestic. They are not calculated to make me particularly popular in Wall Street, and I cannot help that.”

Jay Gould (1836–1892) American businessman

Also quoted in The Life and Legend of Jay Gould (1986) by Maury Klein
Jay Gould : A Character Sketch (1893)

Men, Children, Lie, Books

“Reputation runs in a vicious circle, and Merit limps behind it, mortified and abashed at its own insignificance. It has been said that the test of fame or popularity is to consider the number of times your name is repeated by others … So, if you see the same name staring you in the face in great letters at the corner of every street, you involuntarily think the owner of it must be a great man to occupy so large a space in the eye of the town. The appeal is made, in the first instance, to the senses, but it sinks below the surface into the mind. There are various ways of playing one's-self off before the public, and keeping one's name alive. The newspapers, the lamp-posts, the walls of empty houses, the shutters of windows, the blank covers of magazines and reviews, are open to every one.”

William Hazlitt (1778–1830) English writer

"On Patronage and Puffing" Table Talk: Essays On Men And Manners http://www.blupete.com/Literature/Essays/TableHazIV.htm (1821-1822)

Way, Thinking, Sense, Time

“Politics does not bother corporate power. Whoever wins, they win. Both parties represent Wall Street over Main Street. Wall Street is embedded in the federal government.”

Ralph Nader (1934) American consumer rights activist and corporate critic

As interviewed by Chris Hedges in "Welcome to 1984," May 14, 2016 http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/welcome_to_1984_20160514

“Bobby noticed two colorful charts posted on the wall near the refrigerator. The first displayed each kid's grades and major test results since the start of the school year in September. The other was a list of household chores for which each child was responsible. … Some attributed Asian-Americans' success to a conspiracy, but Bobby saw the simple explanation for their achievements everywhere in the Phan house: They tried harder. They embraced the ideals upon which the country had been based — including hard work, honesty, goal-oriented self-denial, and the freedom to be whatever one wanted to be. Ironically, their great success was partly due to the fact that so many born Americans had become cynical about those same ideals.”

Dean Koontz book The Bad Place

Source: The Bad Place (1990), Chapter 32

School, Color, Freedom, Success

“As with all dwellings,” she said, “of mortals and immortals both, it is the living that makes a house—not the doors, not the walls.”

Tad Williams (1957) novelist

Source: Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn, Stone of Farewell (1990), Chapter 25, “Petals in a Wind Storm” (pp. 626-627).

Housing

“It is all a matter of comparing one’s own life with something worse and consoling oneself with the relativity of human fortunes. When I was eight or nine I had an experience which came clearly to mind when I read your advice. I used to know a family in a little village near mine: father, mother and sons: they were small landowners and had an inn. Very energetic people, especially the woman. I knew (I had heard) that besides the sons we knew, this woman had another son nobody had seen, who was spoken of in whispers, as if he were a great disgrace for the mother, an idiot, a monster or worse. I remember that my mother referred to this woman often as a martyr, who made great sacrifices for this son, and put up with great sorrows. One Sunday morning about ten, I was sent to this woman’s: I had to deliver some crocheting and get the money. I found her shutting the door, dressed up to go out to mass, she had a hamper under her arm. On seeing me she hesitated then decided. She told me to accompany her to a certain place, and that she would take delivery and give me the money on our return. She took me out of the village, into an orchard filled with rubbish and plaster; in one corner there was a sort of pig sty, about four feet high, and windowless, with only a strong door. She opened the door and I could hear an animal-like howling. Inside was her son, a robust boy of 18, who couldn’t stand up and hence scraped along on his seat to the door, as far as he was permitted to move by a chain linked to his waist and attached to the ring in the wall. He was covered with filth, and his eyes shone red, like those of a nocturnal animal. His mother dumped the contents of her basket – a mixed mess of household leftovers – into a stone trough. She filled another trough with water, and we left. I said nothing to my mother about what I had seen, so great an impression it had made on me, and so convinced was I that nobody would believe me. Nor when I later heard of the misery which had befallen that poor mother, did I interrupt to talk of the misery of the poor human wreck who had such a mother.”

Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937) Italian writer, politician, theorist, sociologist and linguist

Gramsci, 1965, p. 737 cited in Davidson, 1977, p. 35.

Life, Money, People, Family

“When I was very young, somebody — maybe it was a squirrel, they talk so much, or a magpie, or maybe a fishie — told me that Pan owned all this forest. Well, not owned owned. Not like he would sell the forest to someone else, or put a wall all around it … It's not hard to own something. Or everything. You just have to know that it's yours, and then be willing to let it go.”

Neil Gaiman book Stardust

Stardust (1999)

“But now he sleeps endlessly.
Now the moss and the grass
open with sure fingers
the flower of his skull.
And now his blood comes out singing;
singing along marshes and meadows,
slides on frozen horns,
faltering souls in the mist
stumbling over a thousand hoofs
like a long, dark, sad tongue,
to form a pool of agony
close to the starry Guadalquivir.
Oh, white wall of Spain!
Oh, black bull of sorrow!
Oh, hard blood of Ignacio!
Oh, nightingale of his veins!”

Federico García Lorca Llanto por Ignacio Sánchez Mejías

Pero ya duerme sin fin.
Ya los musgos y la hierba
abren con dedos seguros
la flor de su calavera.
Y su sangre ya viene cantando:
cantando por marismas y praderas,
resbalando por cuernos ateridos,
vacilando sin alma por la niebla,
tropezando con miles de pezuñas
como una larga, oscura, triste lengua,
para formar un charco de agonía
junto al Guadalquivir de las estrellas.
¡Oh blanco muro de España!
¡Oh negro toro de pena!
¡Oh sangre dura de Ignacio!
¡Oh ruiseñor de sus venas!
Llanto por Ignacio Sanchez Mejias (1935)

Sadness, Soul, Flowers, Sleep

“Turn on your side and bear the day to me
Beloved, sceptre-struck, immured
In the glass wall of sleep. Slowly
Uncloud the borealis of your eye
And show your iceberg secrets, your midnight prizes
To the green-eyed world and to me.”

George Barker (1913–1991) British poet

Turn on your side and bear the day to me

Secret, World, Sleep

“You must show that a man is wrong before you start explaining why he is wrong. The modern method is to assume without discussion that he is wrong and then distract his attention from this (the only real issue) by busily explaining how he became so silly. In the course of the last fifteen years I have found this vice so common that I have had to invent a name for it. I call it “Bulverism”. Some day I am going to write the biography of its imaginary inventor, Ezekiel Bulver, whose destiny was determined at the age of five when he heard his mother say to his father—who had been maintaining that two sides of a triangle were together greater than a third—”Oh you say that because you are a man.” “At that moment”, E. Bulver assures us, “there flashed across my opening mind the great truth that refutation is no necessary part of argument. Assume that your opponent is wrong, and the world will be at your feet. Attempt to prove that he is wrong or (worse still) try to find out whether he is wrong or right, and the national dynamism of our age will thrust you to the wall.””

Clive Staples Lewis (1898–1963) Christian apologist, novelist, and Medievalist

That is how Bulver became one of the makers of the Twentieth Century.
"Bulverism" (1941)

Truth, Age, World, Parting

“What concern of mine are your affairs? Or Coren’s? What kind of peace would there be in me or in my house if I took interest in the wars and feuds that you weave in the courts below? I do not understand such things. I understand only what lies within my walls.”

Patricia A. McKillip book The Forgotten Beasts of Eld

Source: The Forgotten Beasts of Eld (1974), Chapter 3, p. 85.

War, Peace, Understanding, Housing

“Over the darkened city, the city of towers,
The city of a thousand gates,
Over the gleaming terraced roofs, the huddled towers,
Over a somnolent whisper of loves and hates,
The slow wind flows, drearily streams and falls,
With a mournful sound down rain-dark walls.”

Conrad Aiken (1889–1973) American novelist and poet

The House of Dust (1916 - 1917)

Love, Hate

“I never did a western while at Universal. I did a variety of roles, including ‘The Climax’ with Boris Karloff. There is a huge painting of me in the film. When it was over, Ernest Pagano, one of the producers, put it up in his office. It took up most of the wall! I wasn’t happy because people thought we were having an affair—which I never have and never would do.”

June Vincent (1920–2008) actress

An Interview with June Vincent (1996)

People, Universe, Painting, Happiness

“Bernie wants us to live under the heavenly socialist–communist system like China. We never hear the left criticize that Mao Tse-Tung killed over 80 million people—the Chinese government admits—biggest mass murder in history. That's why there's so many liberal trendy places in Austin, in Denver, in New York, in LA, and San Francisco named after Mao. And people go and love play on their iPhones and the free market and their Chinese slave goods, and they drink beer and expensive wine and giggle about how fun it is to wear red stars. You couldn't put more bad luck on you, you couldn't trash your mojo better. Wearing swastika armbands, you stupid snot-nosed crud! That live off the backs of everybody that fought Nazism and Communism. You need to have your jaws broken! Don't you worry, reality is gonna crash in on you, trash! Who lowered our defenses and brought the Republic down; oh, we're already gone! And you celebrate it like you've joined the globalists mounting America's head on the wall, your great victory! A mass rape of women across Europe. The national draft coming in for women! The families falling apart! Women degraded into nothing but sexual objects! ALL in the name of Gloria Steinem and the Central Intelligence Agency program! And a Bernie Sanders with his fake Einstein hair, and his 'I'm a man of the people!' We go out and talk to Bernie Sanders' supporters, they can hardly talk—they're like him—'Free! Free! I want free stuff!' As if the New World Order is gonna give you anything free! Oh, it's free like a piece of cheese. And a little mouse comes out and it smells it and goes to bite it and, WA BAM! Breaks your neck. But your stupider than the little mouse. You can see all the countries and all the people caught in the mouse traps, caught in the big bear traps. You know what you do? You go into a trendy shop. On some capitalist strip. And you go in and you snuggle in with that credit card that daddy put money in for the trust fund. And you put on that little fur-rimmed coat and you're all sexy with your hammer and sickle on, and your Che Guevara and, you know, shirt from Rage Against the Machine, and the whole capitalist record company system selling it to you, and you go out on the street and you walk into McDonald's and you have yourself a double latte, oh yeah. Pathetic! Scum! Oh, how you'll burn in the camps, later. Wishing you had done something; I mean, you are the ultimate chumps, the ultimate buffoons, the ultimate schmucks!… But the public had so much freedom! They were so wealthy, even our poorest, they had no idea that what they were replacing it with was abject slavery.”

Alex Jones (1974) American radio host, author, conspiracy theorist and filmmaker

"Sanders Supporters are Pathetic Scum" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ooNxJnf_UAI, February 2016

Love, Women, Money, Bad luck

“Prew bit his lips. He got his envelope roll out of the wall locker and the combat pack off the bed foot. He laid them on the floor and opened the light pack. Everyone in the squadroom sat up and watched him silently and speculatively, as they might watch a sick horse upon whose time to die they had gotten up a pool.”

James Jones book From Here to Eternity

From Here to Eternity (1951)

Light, Time, Horse

“Recently I dreamed of you [of the artist Herman van der Weele and his wife] and that you two were very rich and lived in a beautiful place and that I sat in your room with you and Herman, with beautiful fabrics and wallpapers that I couldn't stop looking to them and you wore black glasses, just like me now [to protect his eyes], but they [black glasses] were so amazingly beautiful and they suited you so well, as is only possible in a dream, and your dress was beautifully deep red blue black with exotic figures woven into it and the walls were yellow and pink. Anyway it was all a miracle of beauty and I wished that.... my eyes were healthy again and that we each could spent hundred thousand guilders a week, then we had built a beautiful yacht and we all sailed to the country of the Mikado [Japan], to have a look there.”

George Hendrik Breitner (1857–1923) Dutch painter and photographer

translation from the original Dutch, Fons Heijnsbroek
version in original Dutch / citaat uit de brief van Breitner, in het Nederlands: Laatst heb ik van jelui [de kunstenaar Herman van der Weele en zijn vrouw] gedroomd en dat jelui heel rijk waren en prachtig woonden en dat ik met U en Herman in een vertrek daarvan zat, met zulke prachtige stoffen en behangen, dat ik mij niet kan verzadigen er naar te kijken en gij hadt een zwarte bril op net als ik nu, maar die was zo verbazend mooi en stond U zoo goed, als dat alleen maar in een droom mogelijk is en uw costuum was prachtig diep rood blauw zwart met exotische figuren daarin geweven en de wanden waren geel en rose, enfin het was een wonder van pracht en ik wou dat.. ..mijn oogen weer heel waren en dat we ieder honderdduizend gld in de week te verteren hadden, dan lieten we een mooi jacht bouwen en zeilden allemaal naar het land van den Mikado, om daar eens te kijken.
Quote of Breitner, in a letter to Herman van der Weele, c. 1892-96; as cited in Meisjes in kimono. Schilderijen, tekeningen en foto's van George Hendrik Breitner (1857-1923) en zijn Japanse tijdgenoten, J.H.G. Bergsma & H. Shimoyama; Hotei Publishing, Leiden 2001, pp. 15-16
1890 - 1900

Beauty, Dreams, Country

“Hitler's large-scale demands for the Mediterranean meant that…the plans for…an 'Eastern Wall' were overtaken by the increasingly rapid advance of the Red Army.”

Walter Warlimont (1894–1976) German general

After the end of WWII, quoted in "Inside Hitler's Headquarters, 1939-45" - Page 388 - by Walter Warlimont - 1964

“Like feather bed betwixt a wall
And heavy brunt of cannon ball.”

Samuel Butler (poet) (1612–1680) poet and satirist

Canto II, line 872
Source: Hudibras, Part I (1663–1664)

“I had never heard a Mass like that one.. the church vault was split open, the walls were rasped and peeling, the altars were wrecked or had been thrown out; worst of all, that great dark hole at the end, where the high altar had been, the paving hidden beneath the powder and rubble, no pews to sit on, everyone standing or kneeling before a wooden table with a crucifix placed on it, a sunbeam shining sharply down through a gap in the vault and a cloud of flies dancing in the harsh light that illuminated the whole Church and made it seem as though we were hearing Mass in the middle of the street. [-] I had never heard a Mass like that one [-] The bread and the Wine appeared as though they were fresh: the Host appeared to be beating and, in the sunlight, when the Wine was poured into the chalice, it appeared to be blood that was flowing [-] and then the thought, the sentiment occurred to me that Mass should always be heard in this way, in fear and trembling”

Joan Maragall (1860–1911) Spanish writer

Fear, Way, Light, Appearance

“In the summer camp mentality of American universities, the ferocity of genuine intellectual debate would just seem like spoiling everyone’s fun. Ambitious humanities professors go about the business behind a brick wall of “theory,” which they imagine is the dernier cri, but which has long been out of fashion, even in Paris. Drab, uncultivated philistines, without broad knowledge of the arts, have seized the top jobs in the Ivy League, simply because they have the right opinions and know the right people. In the past twenty years, conferences became the infernal engine driving the academic profession. The conference crowd, an international party circuit of literary luminaries ever on the move, was put together by the new humanities centers. These programs had the initially laudable aim of fostering interdisciplinary exchanges outside the repressive framework of the conservative, static and over-tenured university departments. But the epidemic of French theory was abroad in the world. The humanities centers quickly became careerist stockyards, where greedy speculation and insider trading were as much the rules of the game as on Wall Street.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Vamps and Tramps (1994), p. 101

People, World, Art, Imagination

“My mother had rubbings from the temple at Angkor Watt on the walls-that was the first thing that interested me. But it really began when I was in my teens, when my mother gave me a copy of A Passage to India. I really came into it from literature-only later did I turn to religious literature. I read Rumer Godden's Mooltiki, and other stories and poems of India (1957) and I read Kipling's Jungle Books. Then I read the Upanishads, and it was just so fascinating to me. I was raised by atheist and communist parents, so we had no religion whatsoever.”

Wendy Doniger (1940) American Indologist

About her first introduction to India.
Q&A with Wendy Doniger, the Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor and author of The Hindus

Books, Religion, Literature, Parent

“And as our friendship grew, and I learned more about Barack, he introduced me to the work he'd done when he first moved to Chicago after college. Instead of heading to Wall Street, Barack had gone to work in neighborhoods devastated when steel plants shut down and jobs dried up. And he'd been invited back to speak to people from those neighborhoods about how to rebuild their community.”

Michelle Obama (1964) lawyer, writer, wife of Barack Obama and former First Lady of the United States

2000s, Democratic National Convention speech (2008)

Friendship, People, Communication, Learning

“He called out for the others, but they were nowhere near. He tried to run, without knowing which way to go, but his legs were sluggish and the earth stood on end; in the next instant he found himself lying horizontal, his cheek in the dirt, without having felt himself fall. Then the earth tilted away from him again. He tried to walk steadily, but the earth continued to surge. Finally he sat down beneath a house-gable, leaned his back against the wall, and waited until the earth settled back in its place. He drooped his head and mumbled about his forefathers... In the end all he could do was start to sing the sad passion-hymns and death-prayers his mother had taught him in his youth.”

Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) Icelandic author

Íslandsklukkan (Iceland's Bell) (1946), Part II: The Fair Maiden

Death, Youth, Sadness, Way

“Gleizes was only trying to reduce the curvature of natural volumes to adapt them more naturally and rigorously to the surface of the painting, a surface which he believed to be continuous with the wall and, for all practical purposes, with no curvature at all.”

Jean Metzinger (1883–1956) French painter

Cubism was born

Nature, Painting

“In the fall, acorns, filberts, and hickory nuts are gathered by wildlife as winter stores. Field and pack rats bring in smaller seed such as wild rice from the marshes. If storages are provided, these foragers will fill hollow pipes or logs, or smaller pipes, old vehicle engine manifolds, and nest boxes or wall cavities. Seed so collected is sound, clean, and neatly stored. Providing some 15% is left, and given over to winter food for these workers, 85% can be collected for human use. A few people regularly collect their hickory nuts or wild rice in this way, by providing dens for squirrels or pack rats. It is a question of cooperation and provision for others, instead of attempting to kill off the experts and do the job yourself.”

Bill Mollison (1928–2016) Australian permaculturist

Source: Permaculture: A Designers' Manual (1988), chapter 12.15

People, Food, Way, Question

“What's green, hangs on a wall and whistles?”

Leo Rosten (1908–1997) American writer

Riddle presented in The Joys of Yiddish (1968) The answer: "A Herring" — because you can paint it green, nail it to the wall — and the whistling part is added just to make the riddle hard." Rosten did not claim to be the author of this riddle, but he popularized it.

“He (Wells) closed his eyes and he turned his head and he raised one hand to fend away what could not be fended away. Chigurh shot him in the face. Everything that Wells had ever known or thought or loved drained slowly down the wall behind him. His mother's face, his First Communion, women he had known. The faces of men as they died on their knees before him. The body of a child dead in a roadside ravine in another country.”

Cormac McCarthy book No Country for Old Men

No Country for Old Men (2005)

Love, Women, Men, Dead

“Every wall that I run in to is what I have yet to understand about myself and this life, and there is no other wall, none.”

Guy Finley (1949) American self-help writer, philosopher, and spiritual teacher, and former professional songwriter and musician

Secrets of Being Unstoppable

Life, Understanding

“My collages are only ideas for things much larger – things to cover walls. In fact all the things that I have done I would like to see much larger. I am not interested in painting as it has been accepted for so long – to hang on walls of houses as pictures. To hell with pictures – they should be the wall – even better – on the outside wall – of large buildings. Or stood up outside as billboards or a kind of modern 'icon'. We must make our art like the Egyptians, the Chinese & the African and the Island primitives – with their relation to life. It should meet the eye direct.”

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

Quote in a letter to John Cage, 4 September 1950; as quoted in "Ellsworth Kelly, a Retrospective", ed. Diane Waldman, Guggenheim museum, New York 1997, p. 11
1950 - 1968

Life, Art, Idea, Hell

“I have always had plenty of friends, and now at age sixty, I face four walls as a common prisoner.”

Albert Kesselring (1885–1960) German Luftwaffe Generalfeldmarschall during World War II

To Leon Goldensohn, February 4, 1946, from "The Nuremberg Interviews" by Leon Goldensohn, Robert Gellately - History - 2004.

Age

“…he tries to view his life as a brick of sorts, set in place with a slap in 1933 and hardening ever since, just one life in rows and walls and blocks of lives.”

John Updike book Rabbit at Rest

Rabbit at Rest (1990)

Life

“Both of them have seen many young Western men arrive here on business missions and completely lose control of their sphincters and become impediments to any kind of organized activity. Daily hired Wall because, like Daily, he is a stable family man who has his act together…and they seem to be making excellent progress toward their goal, which is to run two really expensive wires across the Malay Peninsula. They tend to be absolutely straight shooters…. Their openness would probably be career suicide in the atmosphere of Byzantine court-eunuch intrigue that is public life in the United States today. On the other hand, if I had an unlimited amount of money and woke up tomorrow morning with a burning desire to see a 2,000-hole golf course erected on the surface of Mars, I would probably call men like Daily and Wall, do a handshake deal with them, send them a blank check, and not worry about it.”

Neal Stephenson (1959) American science fiction writer

"Mother Earth Mother Board," cover story in Wired, 4.12 (1996)

Life, Men, Money, Family

“All I ever wanted to do is to paint sunlight on the side of a wall.”

Edward Hopper (1882–1967) prominent American realist painter and printmaker

Comment on his 'Early Sunday Morning' (1930) https://www.wikiart.org/en/Search/Early%20Sunday%20Morning 1941 - 1967

Painting

“The death of Black Jade coincided with the wedding hour of Pao-yu and Precious Virtue. Shortly after Snow Duck was taken to the wedding chambers, Black Jade had regained consciousness. During this lucid moment, which was not unlike the afterglow of the setting sun, she took Purple Cuckoo's hand and said to her with an effort, "My hour is here. You have served me for many years, and I had hoped that we should be together the rest of our lives… but I am afraid…"
The effort exhausted her and she fell back, panting. She still held Purple Cuckoo's hand and continued after a while, "Mei-mei, I have only one wish. I have no attachment here. After my death, tell them to send my body back to the south––"
She stopped again, and her eyes closed slowly. Purple Cuckoo felt her mistress' hand tighten over hers. Knowing this was a sign of the approaching end, she sent for Li Huan, who had gone back to her own apartment for a brief rest. When the latter returned with Quest Spring, Black Jade's hands were already cold and her eyes dull. They suppressed their sobs and hastened to dress her. Suddenly Black Jade cried, "Pao-yu, Pao-yu, how––" Those were her last words.
Above their own lamentations, Li Huan, Purple Cuckoo, and Quest Spring thought they heard the soft notes of an ethereal music in the sky. They went out to see what it was, but all they could hear was the rustling of the wind through the bamboos and all they could see was the shadow of the moon creeping down the western wall.”

Wang Chi-chen (1899–2001)

Source: Dream of the Red Chamber (1958), p. 307

Death, Hope, Music, Spring

“The city is very different from the country, girl. It is a kind of shared consciousness that begins its work on you as soon as you enter it, if not well before, a consciousness that begins to separate you from the country possibly even before you decide to journey toward it. It encircles you with forces much greater than the walls and gates which imitate tinier villages or towns. People who come to it come seeking the future, not realizing all that will finally affect them in it is their own, only more or less aware, involvement with the past. The way we do things here—really, that’s all there is to be learned in our precincts. But in the paving of every wide, clear avenue, in the turnings of every dark, overhung alley, in the ornaments on every cornice, in the salt-stained stones of each neighborhood cistern, there are traces of the way things once were done—which is the key to why they are done as they are today.”

Samuel R. Delany book Neveryóna

Source: Neveryóna (1983), Chapter 5, “Of Matrons, Mornings, Motives, and Machinations” (p. 104)

People, Way, Girl, Learning

“If heat were the affecting force, direct indications of its presence could be found which would not make use of geometry as an indirect method. …direct evidence for the presence of heat is based on the fact that it affects different materials in different ways. …The forces… which we have introduced… have two properties: (a) They affect all materials in the same way. (b) There are no insulating [or isolating] walls. …the definition of the insulating wall may be added here: it is a covering made of any kind of material which does not act upon the enclosed object with forces having property a. Let us call the forces which have the properties a and b universal forces; all other forces are called differential forces. Then it can be said that differential forces, but not universal forces, are directly demonstrable.”

Hans Reichenbach (1891–1953) American philosopher

The Philosophy of Space and Time (1928, tr. 1957)

Way, Universe

“Chateau Gaillard had utilized the last of the newly built, huge great towers, and Rochester had depended on its early twelfth-century tower. During the course of the thirteenth century defense shifted to a towered wall, the enceinte or enclosure castle. Two plans emerged: the castle could rely on a series of courtyards, which had to be taken one after another, or on a concentric defense in which a second wall entirely surrounded the inner wall.”

Marilyn Stokstad (1929–2016) art historian

Source: Medieval castles (2005), Ch. 2 : The Castle as Fortress : The Castle and Siege Warfare

Dependency

“Today's draw is another little brick in the wall.”

Phil Brown (footballer) (1959) English association football player and manager

15-Sep-2007, BBC Radio Humberside
An interesting metaphor, erm...

Drawing

“From the day the President announced my nomination as the Attorney General of the United States three months ago, I have thought often about how to best prepare to meet the awesome responsibilities of this office. Outside these walls, the cries of those powerless souls who are injured, disenfranchised or otherwise aggrieved may indeed be faint. But those same pleas for help echo powerfully within the Department of Justice. Every day, like a steady drumbeat we are asked to provide an answer to a problem, to secure a remedy, to be a champion — and every day this Department responds as it has done so time and time again throughout the history of our beloved America.”

Alberto Gonzales (1955) 80th United States Attorney General

Remarks at his installation as Attorney General http://www.usdoj.gov/ag/speeches/2005/02142005_aggonzales.htm (February 14, 2005).

Justice, Soul, History, Problem

“Wall Street is where prophets tell us what will happen and profits tell us what did happen.”

Robert Orben (1928) American magician and writer

Greg Heberlein (September 28, 1986) "'Doctor' Lefevre Seeks Cure For Hospitalized Bull Market", The Seattle Times, p. C2.
Attributed

“England can never repay you
You gave your life to be buried alongside
The place you loved
The sermons attended when you were young
Still echo round these churchyard walls”

Colin Moulding (1955) English bassist, songwriter and vocalist

"In Loving Memory Of A Name"
Mummer (1983)

Love, Life

“You think that a wall as solid as the earth separates civilization from barbarism. I tell you the division is a thread, a sheet of glass. A touch here, a push there, and you bring back the reign of Saturn.”

John Buchan book The Power-House

Source: The Power-House (1916), Ch. 3 "Tells of a Midsummer Night"

Thinking

“It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”

Robert F. Kennedy (1925–1968) American politician and brother of John F. Kennedy

Inscribed on the Robert F. Kennedy gravesite at Arlington National Cemetery
Day of Affirmation Address (1966)

Hope, History, Courage, Time

“When your back is against the wall, there's only one way to go and that's forward.”

Amitabh Bachchan (1942) Indian actor

On Rajiv Gandhi, reported in Steven R. Weisman, "India a Year Later: Gandhi Leaving His Mark", The New York Times (October 30, 1985), A-1.

Way

“A mine was dug, and in two or three days the walls fell down, and the fort of Multan was taken. Six thousand warriors were put to death, and all their relations and dependents were taken as slaves. Protection was given to the merchants, artisans and the agriculturists. Muhammad Kasim said the booty ought to be sent to the treasury of the Khalifa; but as the soldiers have taken so much pains, have suffered so many hardships, have hazarded their lives, and have been so long a time employed in digging the mine and carrying on the war, and as the fort is now taken, it is proper that the booty should be divided, and their dues given to the soldiers. Then all the great and principal inhabitants of the city assembled together, and silver to the weight of sixty thousand dirams was distributed and every horseman got a share of four hundred dirams weight. After this, Muhammad Kasim said that some plan should be devised for realizing the money to be sent to the Khalifa. He was pondering over this, when suddenly a Brahman came and said, 'Heathenism is now at an end, the temples are thrown down, the world has received the light of Islam, and mosques are built instead of idol temples. I have heard from the elders of Multan that in ancient times there was a chief in this city whose name was Jibawin, and who was a descendent of the Rai of Kashmir. He was a Brahman and a monk, he strictly followed his religion, and always occupied his time in worshipping idols. When his treasures exceeded all limits and computation, he made a reservoir on the eastern side of Multan, which was hundred yards square. In the middle of it he built a temple fifty yards square, and he made a chamber in which he concealed forty copper jars each of which was filled with African gold dust. A treasure of three hundred and thirty mans of gold was buried there. Over it there is an idol made of red gold, and trees are planted round the reservoir.'… It is related by historians, on the authority of… Ali bin Muhammad who had heard it from Abu Muhammad Hindui that Muhammad Kasim arose and with his counsellors, guards and attendants, went to the temple. He saw there an idol made of gold, and its two eye were bright red rubies… Muhammad Kasim ordered the idol to be taken up. Two hundred and thirty mans of gold were obtained, and forty jars filled with gold dust… This gold and the image were brought to treasury together with the gems and pearls and treasures which were obtained from the plunder of Multan.”

Muhammad bin Qasim (695–715) Umayyad general

Multan (Punjab) . The Chach Nama, in: Elliot and Dowson, Vol. I : Elliot and Dowson, History of India as told by its own Historians, 8 Volumes, Allahabad Reprint, 1964. pp. 205-06.
Quotes from The Chach Nama

Death, Money, Pain, War

“Since completing this memoir in 1995 I've returned to Palestine every year. In fact, apart from traveling abroad to lecture, Palestine is the only place I've been since I first journeyed there 15 years ago. I sometimes fantasize vacationing in Greece or Italy but never do. If I have time and cost isn't prohibitive, I always return to Palestine. I do so mostly from a sense of duty - do I have a right to be elsewhere? - relieved by the authentic affection I've developed for friends. I cannot say I enjoy going back. From the moment I arrive, even before arriving, I count the minutes left before I depart. The eminent Hebrew University sociologist Baruch Kimmerling has described Gaza as "the largest concentration camp ever to exist." The West Bank ranks only a mite less awful. Once the Israeli wall currently under construction is finished, the West Bank will replace Gaza with top honors. Bordered on both sides by four meter deep trenches, fortified with guard towers at regular intervals, and topped with barbed wire, this massive barricade will stretch across fully 347 kilometers - twice the size of the Berlin Wall.”

Norman G. Finkelstein (1953) American political scientist and author

Postscript to German edition of The Rise and Fall of Palestine
Other sourced statements

Travel, Sense, Universe, Time

“As far as my exhibition concerned [opening was 8 May 1954, in Ghent].... there is however a recent and important painting hanging there 'Man met Boompje' [Man with tree, later titled 'The Gardener] - permettez-moi - with beautiful refracting matters and color: lemon-yellow spots and lacquerish black on white, (face) transparent pure light-blue with a very thin layer glacis over it (in the small wall) and strong-blue painted vertical line. Yellow brown and mauve brush-sweeps with small red dashes over it (for the small tree), and further a lot of beautiful white.”

Roger Raveel (1921–2013) painter

version in original Flemish (citaat van Roger Raveel, in het Vlaams): Wat nu mijn tentoonstelling betreft (opening was 8 mei 1954, in Gent].. .er is echter een recent en belangrijk werk bij n.l. 'Man met boompje' [later 'De Tuinman' getiteld] - permettez-moi- met mooie brekende materies en kleur: citroengele vlekken en lakachtig zwarte op wit, (gezicht) transparante zuivere lichte blauwe met een heel dunne glacis erover (in muurtje) en sterk blauwe geschilderde vertikale lijn. Geelbruine en mauve vegen met daarop kleine rode streepjes (voor boompje) verder veel mooi wit.
Quote of Raveel, in a letter to his friend Hugo Claus, from Machelen aan de Leie, May 1954; as cited in Hugo Claus, Roger Raveel; Brieven 1947 – 1962, ed. Katrien Jacobs, Ludion; Gent Belgium, 2007 - ISBN 978-90-5544-665-0, p. 164 (translation: Fons Heijnsbroek)
1945 - 1960

Beauty, Color, Tree, Light

“Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.”

Robert Frost (1874–1963) American poet

1910s, Mending Wall (1914)

Love, Sun

“I set to work. I pointed a mural for the main wall: Introduction to the New National Theatre. The other interior walls, the ceiling and the friezes depicted the forerunners of the contemporary actor – a popular musician, a wedding jester, a good woman dancing, a copyist of the Torah, the first poet dreamer, and finally a modern couple flying over the stage. The friezes were decorated with dishes and food, beigels and fruits spread out on well-laid tables. I looked forward to meeting the actors who passed me: 'Let us agree. Let's join forces and throw out all this old rubbish. Let's work a miracle!”

Marc Chagall (1887–1985) French artist and painter

c. 1921
Quote from 'Chagall in the Yiddish Theater', Avram Kampf, as quoted in Marc Chagall - the Russian years 1906 – 1922, editor Christoph Vitali, exhibition catalogue, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, 1991, p. 101
1920's

Food, Wedding, Dance, Flying

“A culture is no better than its woods,” Auden writes. Fortunately for him, a book of poetry can be better than its poems. Two-thirds of The Shield of Achilles is non-Euclidean needlepoint, a man sitting on a chaise longue juggling four cups, four saucers, four sugar lumps, and the round-square: this is what great and good poets do when they don’t even bother to write great and good poems, now that they’ve learned that—it’s Auden’s leitmotif, these days—art is essentially frivolous. But a little of the time Auden is essentially serious, and the rest of the time he’s so witty, intelligent, and individual, so angelically skillful, that one reads with despairing enthusiasm, and enjoys Auden’s most complacently self-indulgent idiosyncrasy almost as one enjoys Sherlock Holmes’s writing Victoria Rex on the wall in bullet holes.”

Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) poet, critic, novelist, essayist

Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

Books, Art, Angels, Intelligence

“The Israelis are mistaken if they think we do not have an alternative to negotiations. By Allah I swear they are wrong. The Palestinian people are prepared to sacrifice until either the last boy and the last girl raise the Palestinian flag over the walls, the churches and the mosques of Jerusalem.”

Yasser Arafat (1929–2004) former Palestinian President, and Nobel Peace Prize recipient

In a speech given on 6 August 1995, at a party to celebrate the birth of his daughter, reported in Haaretz (6 September 1995) and in The Jerusalem Post (7 September 1995).
1990s

People, Girl, Boy, Thinking

“So what I would like to recommend is – if we are going to have continued dialogue – we will work out the wall. They are going to say, “who is going to pay for the wall, Mr. President?” to both of us, and we should both say, “we will work it out.” It will work out in the formula somehow. As opposed to you saying, “we will not pay” and me saying, “we will not pay.””

Donald J. Trump (1946) 45th President of the United States of America

Full transcripts of Trump’s calls with Mexico and Australia By Greg Miller, Julie Vitkovskaya and Reuben Fischer-Baum; Aug. 3, 2017 https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2017/politics/australia-mexico-transcripts/?utm_term=.95d2f93766d6 (Friday, January 27, 2017) 2010s, 2016, January

“No one was allowed to leave the theatre during his recitals, however pressing the reason. We read of women in the audience giving birth, and of men being so bored with listening and applauding that they furtively dropped down from the wall at the rear, since the gates were kept barred, or shammed dead and were carried away for burial.”
Cantante eo ne necessaria quidem causa excedere theatro licitum est. Itaque et enixae quaedam in spectaculis dicuntur et multi taedio audendi laudandique clausis oppidorum portis aut furtim desiluisse de muro aut morte simulata funere elati.

Sueton book The Twelve Caesars

Of Nero's public performances in musical competitions.
Source: The Twelve Caesars, Nero, Ch. 23

Women, Men, Birth, Reading

“We could have gone all the way to the Great Wall of China
If you'd only had a little more faith in me.
In lieu of diamonds, gold and platinum, reminders will still shine bright.
All the king's men and all the king's horses
Can't put you together the way you used to be.
We could have been standing on the Great Wall of China.”

Billy Joel (1949) American singer-songwriter and pianist

The Great Wall of China.
Song lyrics, River of Dreams (1993)

Men, Faith, Way, Horse

“The fall of the patriciate by no means divested the Roman commonwealth of its aristocratic character. We have already indicated that the plebeian party carried within it that character from the first as well as, and in some sense still more decidedly than, the patriciate; for, while in the old body of burgesses an absolute equality of rights prevailed, the new constitution set out from a distinction between the senatorial houses who were privileged in point of burgess rights and of burgess usufructs, and the mass of the other citizens. Immediately, therefore, on the abolition of the patriciate and the formal establishment of civic equality, a new aristocracy and a corresponding opposition were formed; and we have already shown how the former engrafted itself as it were on the fallen patriciate, and how, accordingly, the first movements of the new party of progress were mixed up with the last movements of the old opposition between the orders. The formation of these new parties began in the fifth century, but they assumed their definite shape only in the century which followed. The development of this internal change is, as it were, drowned amidst the noise of the great wars and victories, and not merely so, but the process of formation is in this case more withdrawn from view than any other in Roman history. Like a crust of ice gathering imperceptibly over the surface of a stream and imperceptibly confining it more and more, this new Roman aristocracy silently arose; and not less imperceptibly, like the current concealing itself beneath and slowly extending, there arose in opposition to it the new party of progress. It is very difficult to sum up in a general historical view the several, individually insignificant, traces of these two antagonistic movements, which do not for the present yield their historical product in any distinct actual catastrophe. But the freedom hitherto enjoyed in the commonwealth was undermined, and the foundation for future revolutions was laid, during this epoch; and the delineation of these as well as of the development of Rome in general would remain imperfect, if we should fail to give some idea of the strength of that encrusting ice, of the growth of the current beneath, and of the fearful moaning and cracking that foretold the mighty breaking up which was at hand. The Roman nobility attached itself, in form, to earlier institutions belonging to the times of the patriciate. Persons who once had filled the highest ordinary magistracies of the state not only, as a matter of course, practically enjoyed all along a higher honour, but also had at an early period certain honorary privileges associated with their position. The most ancient of these was doubtless the permission given to the descendants of such magistrates to place the wax images of these illustrious ancestors after their death in the family hall, along the wall where the pedigree was painted, and to have these images carried, on occasion of the death of members of the family, in the funeral procession.. the honouring of images was regarded in the Italo-Hellenic view as unrepublican, and on that account the Roman state-police did not at all tolerate the exhibition of effigies of the living, and strictly superintended that of effigies of the dead. With this privilege were associated various external insignia, reserved by law or custom for such magistrates and their descendants:--the golden finger-ring of the men, the silver-mounted trappings of the youths, the purple border on the toga and the golden amulet-case of the boys--trifling matters, but still important in a community where civic equality even in external appearance was so strictly adhered to, and where, even during the second Punic war, a burgess was arrested and kept for years in prison because he had appeared in public, in a manner not sanctioned by law, with a garland of roses upon his head.(6) These distinctions may perhaps have already existed partially in the time of the patrician government, and, so long as families of higher and humbler rank were distinguished within the patriciate, may have served as external insignia for the former; but they certainly only acquired political importance in consequence of the change of constitution in 387, by which the plebeian families that attained the consulate were placed on a footing of equal privilege with the patrician families, all of whom were now probably entitled to carry images of their ancestors. Moreover, it was now settled that the offices of state to which these hereditary privileges were attached should include neither the lower nor the extraordinary magistracies nor the tribunate of the plebs, but merely the consulship, the praetorship which stood on the same level with it,(7) and the curule aedileship, which bore a part in the administration of public justice and consequently in the exercise of the sovereign powers of the state.(8) Although this plebeian nobility, in the strict sense of the term, could only be formed after the curule offices were opened to plebeians, yet it exhibited in a short time, if not at the very first, a certain compactness of organization--doubtless because such a nobility had long been prefigured in the old senatorial plebeian families. The result of the Licinian laws in reality therefore amounted nearly to what we should now call the creation of a batch of peers. Now that the plebeian families ennobled by their curule ancestors were united into one body with the patrician families and acquired a distinctive position and distinguished power in the commonwealth, the Romans had again arrived at the point whence they had started; there was once more not merely a governing aristocracy and a hereditary nobility--both of which in fact had never disappeared--but there was a governing hereditary nobility, and the feud between the gentes in possession of the government and the commons rising in revolt against the gentes could not but begin afresh. And matters very soon reached that stage. The nobility was not content with its honorary privileges which were matters of comparative indifference, but strove after separate and sole political power, and sought to convert the most important institutions of the state--the senate and the equestrian order--from organs of the commonwealth into organs of the plebeio-patrician aristocracy.”

Theodor Mommsen (1817–1903) German classical scholar, historian, jurist, journalist, politician, archaeologist and writer

The History of Rome - Volume 2

Death, Men, War, Youth

“The model used by Wall Street to price trillions of dollar's worth of derivatives thought of the financial world as an orderly, continuous process. But the world was not continuous; it changed discontinuously, and often by accident.”

Michael Lewis book The Big Short

Source: The Big Short (2010), Chapter Five, Accidental Capitalists, p. 116

World, Change

“Within a temple's towering walls I stand
A temple vast; the heaven is its dome:
No corniced crag was hewn by human hand,
Nor by it wrought this tracery of foam;”

Clara Jessup Moore (1824–1899) American writer and philanthropist

Niagara Below the Cataract

“I do have the toughest, most comprehensive plan to go after Wall Street. And not just the big banks, all the other financial interests that pose a threat to our economy. And I have said no bank is too big to fail and no executive is too powerful to jail, and I will use the powers that have now been passed by the Congress, by President Obama, who, incidentally, took a lot of money from Wall Street, which didn’t stop him from signing into law the toughest regulations on the financial industry since the Great Depression. There are a lot of different powerful interests in Washington. I’ve taken them on. I took on the drug companies. I took on the insurance companies. Before there was something called Obamacare, there was something called Hillarycare, and I worked really hard to get comprehensive health care reform.”

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

Presidential campaign (April 12, 2015 – 2016), Democratic Presidential Debate in Miami (March 9, 2016)

Money, Law

“He stood with his back angled to the wall. To an indifferent observer he was simply in idle conversation, but it wasn't like that at all. This was an instinctive gesture of survival, being in constant readiness for an attack. His head didn't turn and his eyes didn't seem to move, but I knew he saw us. I could feel the hackles on the back of my neck stiffening and I knew he felt the same way.
Dog was meeting dog. Nobody knew it but the dogs and they weren't telling.
He was bigger than I thought. The suggestion of power I had seen in his photographs was for real. When he moved it was with the ponderous grace of some jungle animal, dangerously deceptive, because he could move a lot faster if he had to.
When we were ten feet away he pretended to see us for the first time and a wave of charm washed the cautious expression from his face and he stepped out to greet Dulcie with outstretched hand.
But it wasn't her he was seeing. It was me he was watching. I was one of his own kind. I couldn't be faked out and wasn't leashed by the proprieties of society. I could lash out and kill as fast as he could and of all the people in the room, I was the potential threat. I knew what he felt because I felt the same way myself.”

Mickey Spillane book The Body Lovers

The Body Lovers (1967)

People, Dogs, Way, Feeling

“Reconstruction aspired to restore the foundations of freedom to a wayward South and it expected to triumph as effortlessly as 19th-century liberal notions of progress had promised. Instead, the same Romantic feudalism that had created the old Southern order reasserted its hegemony, and postwar Southern aristocrats appealed to a set of cultural and racial biases which safely defused the importance of property, and sharply restricted access to it. This might have been averted had the victorious Union been willing to pour the resources into Reconstruction it had devoted to winning the war. But Reconstruction became a symbol of how quickly political fatigue afflicts liberal democracies. Moreover, understanding Reconstruction as a bourgeois revolution which was strangled in its cradle by vengeful cotton nabobs offers some larger parallels to the optimistic era that prevailed between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise of Islamic state terrorism.”

Allen C. Guelzo (1953) American historian

2010s, Defending Reconstruction (2017)

War, Democracy, Understanding, Freedom

“I would build a great wall, and nobody builds walls better than me, believe me, and I'll build them very inexpensively, I will build a great, great wall on our southern border. And I will have Mexico pay for that wall.”

Donald J. Trump (1946) 45th President of the United States of America

2010s, 2015, Presidential Bid Announcement (June 16, 2015)

“The outlaw is the conscious warrior who makes use of the aggression to break down the walls, barriers, and boundaries that artificially separate and alienate.”

Sam Keen (1931) author, professor, and philosopher

Source: The Passionate Life (1983), p. 132

“They boosted themselves with such nauseating self-praise as to make the stones jump out of the walls and flee.”

Giovanni Boccaccio book Corbaccio

Se medesimi esaltando con parole da fare per istomacaggine le pietre saltar del muro e fuggirsi.
Il Corbaccio (c. 1355), "The Labyrinth of Love" (tr. Normand Cartier)

“Man is a strange animal. He generally cannot read the handwriting on the wall until his back is up against it.”

Adlai Stevenson (1900–1965) mid-20th-century Governor of Illinois and Ambassador to the UN

The 1957 Ford Almanac has the quote "It's too late to read the handwriting on the wall when your back's up against it", attributed to "Anon." The quote appeared in several variations afterwards, for instance in an essay by Meredith Thring in Nature Magazine in 1965. It began to be attributed without context to Stevenson in the 1970s. According to "Adlai Stevenson: His Life and Legacy" by Porter McKeever (p. 566), Stevenson made this remark "with increasing frequency in the final months of his life"; but Stevenson died in 1965 and this book does not give a precise reference. Absent better attestation, Stevenson either used the quote from elsewhere or the association with Stevenson is a mistake.
Misattributed

Reading, Animals

“I believe anyone who supports feminism is anti-woman even if they are not conscious of it. Feminism and "female empowerment" has led to a generation of the least happy women in history. They are lost and are being told that they are the EXACT same as men and should be able to compete at the same level in all fields of life. How sad to always fail at something you are supposed to be equal in. How sad to be led astray to never get married then hit a wall where you wish for nothing more than a family but cannot have it… simply because you bought into this false notion of feminism that promised happiness and fulfillment. The reality is women are biologically different and different things will make them happy.”

Lauren Southern (1995) Canadian libertarian commentator

AMA on Reddit https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/4zlf89/lauren_southern_ama/d6wtbfx/ (August 25, 2016)

Life, Women, Men, Sadness

“Slowly the human beings have arise n-guided by a glimmering light — and have climbed spiritually from the earth and the clod, from the shrub and tree up the broad walls of the arched sky, to stars, and moon, and sun, and then beyond the sun, for the divinity seeldng and striving imagination stretches away to the invisible, all powerful, all-controlling, all-loving. One who permeates the universe, lives in it, and breathes His life through it, the eternal life to be taken into the human soul. The myth is the obscure image, in the child's soul, of God Himself.”

Francis Wayland Parker (1837–1902) Union Army officer

Source: Talks on Pedagogics, (1894), p. 10

Love, Life, God, Soul

“But you cannot say anymore that the United States is going to pay for the wall. I am just going to say that we are working it out. Believe it or not, this is the least important thing that we are talking about, but politically this might be the most important talk about.”

Donald J. Trump (1946) 45th President of the United States of America

Full transcripts of Trump's calls with Mexico and Australia By Greg Miller, Julie Vitkovskaya and Reuben Fischer-Baum; Aug. 3, 2017 https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2017/politics/australia-mexico-transcripts/?utm_term=.95d2f93766d6 (Friday, January 27, 2017) 2010s, 2016, January

“It takes time, see. You finish painting the painting and then you turn it to the wall. I mean, you say, does it have it or doesn't it have it? If it doesn't have it, you throw it away, but if you think it has it, you turn it to the wall. And then when you have made some more work, then you turn them all over. And you, again, try to see exactly what it does mean and just exactly how effectively you have rendered this meaning.”

Agnes Martin (1912–2004) American artist

1974
1970's, interview, K. Horsfield & L. Blumenthal

Thinking, Time, Painting