Quotes about well
page 88

“Shaw: Madam, would you sleep with me for a million pounds?
Actress: My goodness, Well, I'd certainly think about it
Shaw: Would you sleep with me for a pound?
Actress: Certainly not! What kind of woman do you think I am?!
Shaw: Madam, we've already established that. Now we are haggling over the price.”

George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) Irish playwright

Similar remarks are also attributed to Winston Churchill, Groucho Marx and to Mark Twain
Disputed

Thinking, Sleep

“So who are the bulk of our clients in these sorts of cases? Is it the working class? No! It's classless hoodlums. Classless hoodlums, either from the dregs of the society, or from the remains of the exploiters' class. They have no place to go. So they take to -- pederasty. Together with them, next to them, under this excuse, in stinky secretive bordellos another kind of activity takes place as well -- counter-revolutionary work.”

Nikolai Krylenko (1885–1938) Russian revolutionary, politician and chess organiser

Krylenko on the law re-criminalizing homosexuality in 1936. Quoted in David Tuller, Cracks in the Iron Closet: Travels in Gay and Lesbian Russia, University of Chicago Press, 1996

Secret

“"Well, maybe I'm a latent homosexual." He considered that for a moment. "Or maybe I'm a latent heterosexual. Anyway, I'm pretty latent. I don't know why. Of course, I've taken a number of stabs at it, but then I start thinking about the futility of it all and I give up. Maybe it's because you're expected to do something and after a certain point all I want to do is lie there and stare at the ceiling."”

Margaret Atwood book The Edible Woman

The Edible Woman (1969)

Lie, Thinking

“[Q: do you believe that a nation should suffer a detrimental cost in order to compensate for wrongs committed by the governors of that nations, or by segments of that nation in the past? ] Suppose you're living under a dictatorship, and the dictators carry out some horrendous acts. So you're living in Stalinist Russia, let's say, and Stalin carries out horrible crimes. Are the people of Russia responsible for those crimes? Well, to only a very limited extent, because living under a brutal, harsh, terrorist regime, there isn't very much they can do about it. There's something they can do, and to the extent that you can do something, you're responsible for what happens. Suppose you're living in a free, democratic society, with lots of privilege, enormous, incomparable freedoms, and the government carries out violent, brutal acts. Are you responsible for it? Yeah, a lot more responsible, because there's a lot that you can do about it. If you share responsibility in criminal acts, you are liable for the consequences.”

Noam Chomsky (1928) american linguist, philosopher and activist

Interview by Brian Lamb on C-SPAN, June 1, 2003 https://www.c-span.org/video/?176809-1/depth-noam-chomsky Quotes 2000s, 2003

People, Freedom, Suffering, Past

“The history of the Democratic Party can be concisely captured by referring to its steadfast allegiance to the four Ss. Slavery, Secession, Segregation, and Socialism. During the Obama presidency we have seen how hard old habits die, even for a black man whose race was the long-time victim of Democratic Party's bone-deep authoritarianism. Under this Democratic president we have seen a war waged on several fronts against America's young. Indeed, the Democrats' historic taste for and belief in slavery have resurfaced with a vengeance and indiscriminately under the Obama administration, whether white, black, yellow, red, male, or female America's young are dying and being forced to work for Obama and his lieutenants as they seek to maintain their party's hold on political power. How so? Well, America has never had a president and administration so eager to kill unborn Americans. Even with post-1973 science having proved irrefutably that the unborn are human beings, and even though American law always has defined them as U. S. citizens, Obama and his colleagues have strengthened at every point they could the absurd notion that unborn humans are the chattel property of the woman who bears them, and so can be disposed of, that is, murdered, at her whim. And, in what must be considered a masterpiece of Orwellian language, Obama and his team, and most Democrats since 1973, describe this federal government-issued license to kill as a woman's 'right', a means by which she manifests her equality with men. They then damn any one who questions the logic, sanity, or justice of this argument as an 'extremist'. Only in an America in which a political entity as devoted to the four 'Ss' as the Democratic Party could opposition to the cold-blooded murder of fellow citizens unable defend themselves be identified by the country’s best-educated as 'extremism'. If this is indeed a right, it is a right gives each woman the right to be a slave-owner and a Nazi. Such a 'right' really is no different than the rights sanctioned by the Dred Scott decision and the Nuremberg laws, each of which legally defined certain categories of people out of the human race in order to enslave or kill them. Since 1973, the application of this 'right' has produced precisely the same results as Dred Scott and the Nuremberg laws, though in numbers so immense, 55 million and climbing, that they make those acts seem rather tame and minimally destructive of humans.”

Michael Scheuer (1952) American counterterrorism analyst

As quoted in "Obama and his party offer America's young … death, misery, and slavery" http://non-intervention.com/1143/obama-and-his-party-offer-america%E2%80%99s-young-%E2%80%A6-death-misery-and-slavery/ (21 November 2013), by M. Scheuer, Michael Scheuer's Non-Intervention. 2010s

Men, War, People, Education

“Hysteria will not help us to solve the problem that confronts us. We overstate the danger when we say that twelve millions seek, because of post-war conditions abroad, to come immediately to America. Ending June 30, 1914, the year's immigration figures were 1,218,480. Then came the war and a vast slump, from which we are just recovering. Calculations placed immigration statistics for the current year as 1,079,428—figures still below the prewar status. But even though we need have no grave fears, now is the time for a careful reexamination and revision of our immigration policies. We should have no more aliens to cope with, in the immediate months to come, than our institutions are able to handle. To assume burdens we can not easily meet would lie unfair both to us and to the alien. In protecting ourselves we are protecting him as well. We can not lower our standards, or allow them to be lowered, so as to include him. We must prepare him for our standards. And that means wise education. In the home, in the school, in industry, in citizenship, we have not heretofore applied thoroughly the human test, and that is our next step in the Americanization of the alien. Much work has yet to be done in the immediate months to come. Some protective measure, therefore, seems necessary.”

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

1920s, Whose Country Is This? (1921)

War, Lie, Education, Fear

“I covered the walls of both basement rooms with Milino, a cheap substitute for canvas, stretched string backwards and forwards across the rooms and attached widths of packing-paper to them, so that they reached down to the floor and as far as the walls that I wanted to paint. I wanted to create a labyrinth which would somehow help to prevent a compositional idea from establishing itself all too quickly. I had the idea of working on all the walls pretty well at the same time, as if they were one large painting completely surrounding me. By constantly wandering in the labyrinth I sought to realise a form of “de-composition.””

Günter Brus (1938) Austrian artist

Source: Nervous Stillness on the Horizon (2006), P. 114 (1985)

Idea, Time, Help, Painting

“What helped the Christian missions a good deal from the outside was the rise of Nehruvian Secularism as India’s state policy as well as a raging fashion among India’s intellectual elite. The knowledgeable among the missionaries were surprised and somewhat amused. They knew that Secularism had risen in the West as the deadliest enemy of Christian dogmas and that it had deprived the churches of their stranglehold on state power. In India, however, Secularism was providing a smokescreen behind which Christianity could steal a march.”

Sita Ram Goel (1921–2003) Indian activist

History of Hindu-Christian Encounters (1996)

Fashion, Knowledge, Rage, Help

“The fifth and most important principle of our foreign policy is support of national independence—the right of each people to govern themselves—and to shape their own institutions. For a peaceful world order will be possible only when each country walks the way that it has chosen to walk for itself. We follow this principle by encouraging the end of colonial rule. We follow this principle, abroad as well as at home, by continued hostility to the rule of the many by the few—or the oppression of one race by another. We follow this principle by building bridges to Eastern Europe. And I will ask the Congress for authority to remove the special tariff restrictions which are a barrier to increasing trade between the East and the West. The insistent urge toward national independence is the strongest force of today's world in which we live. In Africa and Asia and Latin America it is shattering the designs of those who would subdue others to their ideas or their will. It is eroding the unity of what was once a Stalinist empire. In recent months a number of nations have east out those who would subject them to the ambitions of mainland China. History is on the side of freedom and is on the side of societies shaped from the genius of each people. History does not favor a single system or belief—unless force is used to make it so. That is why it has been necessary for us to defend this basic principle of our policy, to defend it in Berlin, in Korea, in Cuba—and tonight in Vietnam.”

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

1960s, State of the Union Address (1966)

Hostility, People, World, Peace

“The unspoken ideology of capitalism didn’t admit, back then, of any corporate duty beyond making a return on investment for the shareholders while obeying the law.
Then the terrible teens hit, with a global recession followed by a stuttering shock wave of corporate scandals as rock-ribbed enterprises were exposed as hollow husks run by conscience-free predators who were even less community-minded and altruistic than gangsters. The ravenous supermarket chains had gutted the entire logistic and retail sector, replacing high-street banks and post offices as well as food stores and gas stations, recklessly destroying community infrastructure; manufacturers had outsourced production to the cheapest overseas bidders, hollowing out the middle-class incomes on which consumer capitalism depended: The prison-industrial complex, higher education, and private medical sectors were intent on milking a public purse that no longer had a solid tax base with which to pay. Maximizing short-term profit worked brilliantly for sociopathic executives looking to climb the promotion ladder—but as a long-term strategy for stability, a spiraling Gini coefficient left a lot to be desired.”

Charles Stross book Rule 34

Source: Rule 34 (2011), Chapter 7, “Liz: Black Swans” (pp. 82-83)

Education, Law, Food, Communication

“If a human being is isolated from other humans for a month or more, and is confined to a small area geographically and a small range of activities, his interest in his surroundings and its minutiae increase radically…. Further, if a confined, isolated human is allowed brief contacts with other humans even without a shared language, he begins to find their presence comforting, and a pleasant relief from the "evenness" of his surroundings. If these humans controls his only sources of food as well as his sources of intraspecies stimulation, he mat adapt to their demands in subtle and not so subtle ways. He may, given time, learn their language, take on their beliefs, etc. When we catch a dolphin and put him alone in a small tank, we are imposing similar "solitary confinement" structures on him. Maybe we can thus capture his loyalty and his initiative.”

John Lilly (1915–2001) American physician

Man and Dolphin (1961), p.190-191; as quoted in The Sounding of the Whale: Science and Cetaceans in the Twentieth Century (2012), by D. Graham Burnett, p.578-579

Food, Way, Learning, Time

“The piety that sees a sign of divine favor in escape from a sudden danger which destroys other lives, is a spurious and egotistic travesty of the faith that knows that ‘God spared not His own Son, but freely gave Him up for us all.’ The true Christian will ask for no immunity from the common lot, for no freedom from the hardships of experience, for no miraculous deliverance from impending calamity, but he will ask for the power to overcome the world in a spirit that is courageous as well as meek, militant against all forms of evil while profoundly thankful for what seems good in his life.”

Leslie Weatherhead (1893–1976) English theologian

Source: The Christian Agnostic (1965), p.207, (Dr. E. Griffith Jones: Providence, Divine and Human. 1925. Hodder and Stoughton. p107

Life, God, World, Faith

“Dicko: Hayley, hair looks great by the way. Curls are good for you. I've got to say, look, I don't think you're a natural at this. You have to work really hard at everything you do and it's pleasing to see the way you're moving in the right direction. I think that was a really tough song to chose. Some of those timings in there, it was a bit like a maths exam at times for me trying to keep up. But I think it's a really good style for you. That type of song. That type of artist, George as well. The only problem I have with you, I've had it for the past few weeks, is I can see you concentrating and I can hear you thinking about what you're trying to do as you're doing it and I don't know. Sometimes I just think if you could switch all of that off and just let yourself go a bit I think you'd be a lot better for it. But that was very good.”

Hayley Jensen (1983) Australian singer

Australian Idol, Final Performances, Final 8

Way, Nature, Problem, Thinking

“One must beware of a formula good for everything, that will serve to interpret the other arts as well as reality, and that instead of creating will only produce a style, or rather a stylization.”

Georges Braque (1882–1963) French painter and sculptor

Source: 1908 - 1920, quotes from Artists on Art...(1972), p. 422 - Braque's quote, Paris 1917

Art, Reality

“Oh. Marx's love for Shakespeare! It is well known. Chris Hani shared the same passion. I have just learned this and I like the idea. Even though Marx more often quotes Timon of Athens, the Manifesto seems to evoke or convoke, right from the start, the first coming of the silent ghost, the apparition of the spirit that does not answer, on those ramparts of Elsinore which is then the old Europe.”

Jacques Derrida book Specters of Marx

Injunctions of Marx
Specters of Marx (1993)

Love, Quotes, Idea, Learning

“He had his hands full with Adi Akinbiyi when he came on, he had his hands full with Andy Gray from the start and in other ways he had his hands full with Kyle Lafferty and Robbie Blake as well. He's had four or five strikers coming at him and he's stood up to them manfully.”

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

07-Nov-2007, Hull City OWS
No comment.

Way

“It ain't justice, Richard, but politics, and like all politics it ain't pretty, but well done it can work wonders.”

Bernard Cornwell (1944) British writer

Major Michael Hogan, p. 172
Sharpe (Novel Series), Sharpe's Battle (1995)

Justice

“The process of being brought up, however well it is done, cannot fail to offend.”

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

The Funeral of a Great Myth (1967)

“There's a lyric in the middle of the song that says, "I want to decide between survival and bliss." Basically I'm talking about the difference between really being alive and really embracing the reason why I'm here on this earth versus my just being asleep and sleep walking and accepting the status quo and accepting somewhat of a suffering mentality to being here. It really is my responsibility to distinguish the difference between the two and choose which one I want. It's so easy for me to want to not take responsibility for my life and relinquish it and look outside of myself for the answers that I know very well are within me. It's so scary to be silent and it's so scary to go within, until I do it. And once I'm doing it, I just wonder why I wasn't doing this all the time. So that decision to be fully alive is one that is preceded by some pretty intense decisions and some choices and responsibility-taking that at times can be very intimidating, again, before I do it.”

Alanis Morissette (1974) Canadian-American singer-songwriter

On her song "Precious Illusions", in "Alanis Morissette talks about songs from 'Under Rug Swept'", in MSO (23 Jun 2002) http://web.archive.org/web/20020623040236/http://msopr.com/mso/morissette-cutbycut.html

Life, Decision, Sleep, Suffering

“I am easy to work with and get along well with almost everybody.”

Preity Zinta (1975) film actress

Personal Quotes

“The proof of the pudding is in the eating. There was a widespread myth of the 1970s, a myth along Tom Kuhn’s (1962) Structure of Scientific Revolutions lines. The Keynesianism, which worked so well in Camelot and brought forth a long epoch of price-level stability with good Q growth and nearly full employment, gave way to a new and quite different macro view after 1966. A new paradigm, monistic monetarism, so the tale narrates, gave a better fit. And therefore King Keynes lost self esteem and public esteem. The King is dead. Long live King Milton!
Contemplate the true facts. Examine 10 prominent best forecasting models 1950 to 1980: Wharton, Townsend–Greenspan, Michigan Model, St. Louis Reserve Bank, Citibank Economic Department under Walter Wriston’s choice of Lief Olson, et cetera. … M did matter as for almost everyone. But never did M alone matter systemically, as post-1950 Friedman monetarism professed.”

Paul A. Samuelson (1915–2009) American economist

New millennium, An Interview with Paul A. Samuelson, 2003

Way, Dead

“The war [World War 1. ] gave me a certainty of belief. I grew aware of the bankruptcy of theories, of the theories of intellectuals as well as artists. L'art pour l'art and other grave problems no longer gave me a headache; they seemed to me so much bosh hand interested me as little as platonic love.”

Maurice de Vlaminck (1876–1958) French painter

Source: Quotes dated, Dangerous Corner', 1929, p. 17-18

Love, War, World, Problem

“From that place the Sultan proceeded to a certain city, which was accounted holy by the people of the country. In that city the men of Ghaznin saw so many strange and wonderful things, that to tell them or to write a description of them is not easy' In short, the Sultan Mahmud having possessed himself of the booty, burned their idol temples and proceeded towards Kanauj….. The Ghaznivids found in these forts and their dependencies 10,000 idol temples, and they ascertained the vicious belief of the Hindus to be, that since the erection of these buildings no less than three or four hundred thousand years had elapsed. Sultan Mahmud during this expedition achieved many other conquests after he left Kanauj, and sent to hell many of the infidels with blows of the well tempered sword. Such a number of slaves were assembled in that great camp, that the price of a single one did not exceed ten dirhams.”

Mahmud of Ghazni (971–1030) Sultan of Ghazni

Mathura (Uttar Pradesh), Kanauj (Uttar Pradesh). Habibu’s-Siyar in Elliot and Dowson, Vol. IV : Elliot and Dowson, History of India as told by its own Historians, 8 Volumes, Allahabad Reprint, 1964. p. 178-80
Quotes from The History of India as told by its own Historians

Men, People, Hell, Dependency

“The tribesmen understand this very well, although they would not describe it in the same terms I have. It is simply a working part of their lives. Do you think they would continue to consult me if they found that the advice that I gave them did not work? They are uncivilized, but they are not insane.”

James Blish (1921–1975) American author

Source: Short fiction, Midsummer Century (1972), Chapter 3 (p. 21)

Understanding, Thinking, Parting

“It was early 1932, when Einstein and I both were at the California Institute of Technology in Pasedena, and we just decided to look for a simple relativistic model that agreed reasonably well with the known observational data, namely, the Hubble recession rate and the mean density of matter in the universe. So we took the space curvature to be zero and also the cosmological constant and the pressure term to be zero, and then it follows straightforwardly that the density is proportional to the square of the Hubble constant. It gives a value for the density that is high, but not impossibly high. That's about all there was to it. It was not an important paper, although Einstein apparently thought that it was. He was pleased to have a simple model with no cosmological constant. That's it.”

Willem de Sitter (1872–1934) Dutch cosmologist

As quoted by Helge Kragh, Masters of the Universe: Conversations with Cosmologists of the Past (2014)

Universe

“It is as well to be born in the first chapter as elsewhere, and though I have only secondary evidence as to the fact, believe it happened as related to me afterwards by my mother, who said the doctor found me in an old hollow log and, as our house happened to be nearest to the log in question, he wrapped me up in his cloak, carried me to the house and left me with mother.”

Terence V. Powderly (1849–1924) American mayor

[Powderly, Terence, 'The Path I Trod: The Autobiography of Terence V. Powderly, 1940, Columbia University Press, 9781163178164, https://archive.org/stream/pathitrodautobio00powdrich, 8]

Question, Housing

“Visionaries are the first people in their industry segment to see the potential of the High Tech Marketing Enlightenment new technology. Fundamentally, they see themselves as smarter than their opposite numbers in competitive companies—and, quite often, they are. Indeed, it is their ability to see things first that they want to leverage into a competitive advantage. That advantage can only come about if no one else has discovered it. They do not expect, therefore, to be buying a well—tested product with an extensive list of industry references. Indeed, if such a reference base exists, it may actually turn them off, indicating that for this technology, at any rate, they are already too late.”

Geoffrey Moore book Crossing the Chasm

Source: Crossing the Chasm, 1991, p. 41-42

People

“Who's an Aryan? And what are these lower peoples anyway? Well, Hitler taught that the blond-haired, blue-eyed Norwegians were close to pure Aryan. Did you follow all of that? The blond-haired, blue-eyed Norwegian. And he thought the Germans were mostly Aryan? The Mediterranean's are slightly Aryan. Slavics are half Aryan, half ape. Orientals are slightly ape. The black Africans are mostly ape and the Jews are close to pure ape. Hitler killed the Jews because of his evolution thinking. We fought a really big war, probably a 100 million people died in World War II altogether because of that stupid theory. It's not just dumb, folks, it's dangerous.”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Creation seminars (2003-2005), The dangers of evolution

War, People, Stupidity, World

“For a while I was most well known for that [the Janis Joplin album cover], and for “Keep on Truckin’.” That was a drawing that came out of LSD trips, and the words came from a Blind Boy Fuller song from 1935. I drew it in my sketchbook and then for Zap. It sort of caught the popular imagination. It became a horrible popular thing.”

Robert Crumb (1943) American cartoonist

"R. Crumb, The Art of Comics No. 1" http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6017/the-art-of-comics-no-1-r-crumb, The Paris Review, Summer 2010, No. 193.

Imagination, Boy, Drawing

“If Critical Systems Thinking is to contribute to enlightened societal practice, e. g., with respect to the pressing environmental and social issues of our time, it should be accessible not only to well-trained decision makers and academics but also to a majority of citizens.”

Robert L. Flood (1959) British organizational scientist

Robert L. Flood, Norma R. A. Romm (1996) Critical Systems Thinking: Current Research and Practice. p. 165.

Thinking, Decision, Time, Training

“Well, this is a surprise. If you aren't here to give me trouble, then why are you here?”

Kazuo Ishiguro book Never Let Me Go

Source: Never Let Me Go (2005), Chapter 21, p. 248

“I think at first they were a bit surprised that it had happened, then they realised it was really nice and it was good fun and we got on really well, they were good friends of ours as well so we had a good giggle with them as well.”

Prince William, Duke of Cambridge (1982) a member of the British royal family

On the reaction of their flatmates when he and Kate became romantically involved with each other.
First post-engagement interview (2010)

Thinking

“Dr. Smith and all of his sensible disciples have believed that people would not strive to do anything well unless there were a reasonable measure of agreement between the success of their efforts and the rewards they would receive.”

George Stigler (1911–1991) American economist

"The Effect of Government on Economic Efficiency." 1988

People, Effort, Success

“The history of mathematics may be instructive as well as agreeable; it may not only remind us of what we have, but may also teach us to increase our store. Says De Morgan, "The early history of the mind of men with regards to mathematics leads us to point out our own errors; and in this respect it is well to pay attention to the history of mathematics." It warns us against hasty conclusions; it points out the importance of a good notation upon the progress of the science; it discourages excessive specialization on the part of the investigator, by showing how apparently distinct branches have been found to possess unexpected connecting links; it saves the student from wasting time and energy upon problems which were, perhaps, solved long since; it discourages him from attacking an unsolved problem by the same method which has led other mathematicians to failure; it teaches that fortifications can be taken by other ways than by direct attack, that when repulsed from a direct assault it is well to reconnoitre and occupy the surrounding ground and to discover the secret paths by which the apparently unconquerable position can be taken.”

Florian Cajori book A History of Mathematics

Source: A History of Mathematics (1893), pp. 1-2; Cited in: Robert Edouard Moritz. Memorabilia mathematica; or, The philomath's quotation-book https://archive.org/stream/memorabiliamathe00moriiala#page/198/mode/2up, (1914) p. 90; Study and research in mathematics

Men, Secret, Way, Error

“Distortive or even totally false reporting on communally sensitive issues is a well-entrenched feature of Indian journalism. There is no self-corrective mechanism in place to remedy this endemic culture of disinformation. No reporter or columnist or editor ever gets fired or formally reprimanded or even just criticized by his peers for smearing Hindus. This way, a partisan economy with the truth has become a habit hard to relinquish. And foreign correspondents used to trusting their Indian secularist sources have likewise developed a habit of swallowing and relaying highly distorted news stories. Usually, the creation of a false impression of the Indian communal situation is achieved without outright lies, relying rather on the silent treatment for inconvenient facts and a screaming overemphasis on convenient ones. (…) So, moral of the story: feel free to write lies about the Hindus. Even if you are found out, most of the public will never hear of it, and you will not be made to bear any consequences.(…) These days, noisy secularists lie in waiting for communal riots and elatedly jump at them when and where they erupt. They exploit the anti-Hindu propaganda value of riots to the hilt, making up fictional stories as they go along to compensate for any defects in the true account. John Dayal is welcomed to Congressional committees in Washington DC as a crown witness to canards such as how Hindus are raping Catholic nuns in Jhabua, an allegation long refuted in a report by the Congress state government of Madhya Pradesh and more recently in the court verdict on the matter. Arundhati Roy goes lyrical about the torture of a Muslim politician's two daughters by Hindus during the Gujarat riots of 2002, even when the man had only one daughter, who came forward to clarify that she happened to be in the US at the time of the “facts.””

Koenraad Elst (1959) orientalist, writer

Harsh Mander has already been condemned by the Press Council of India for spreading false rumours about alleged Hindu atrocities in his famous column Hindustan Hamara. Teesta Setalwad has reportedly pressured eyewitnesses to give the desired incriminating testimony against Hindus in the Gujarat riots.
K. Elst: Religious Cleansing of Hindus, 2004, Agni conference in The Hague, in The Problem with Secularism (2007)
2000s, The Problem with Secularism (2007)

Truth, Lie, Way, Feeling

“A human life, I think, should be well rooted in some spot of native land, where it may get the love of tender kinship for the face of earth, for the labours men go forth to, for the sounds and accents that haunt it, for whatever will give that early home a familiar unmistakeable difference amidst the future widening of knowledge: a spot where the definiteness of early memories may be inwrought with affection, and kindly acquaintance with all neighbours, even to the dogs and donkeys, may spread not by sentimental effort and reflection, but as a sweet habbit of the blood. At five years old, mortals are not prepared to be citizens of the world, to be stimulated by abstract nouns, to soar above preference into impartiality; and that prejudice in favour of milk with which we blindly begin, is a type of the way body and soul must get nourished at least for a time. The best introduction to astronomy is to think of the nightly heavens as a little lot of stars belonging to one's own homestead.”

George Eliot book Daniel Deronda

Daniel Deronda (1876)

Love, Life, Men, World

“Were't the last drop in the well,
As I gasp'd upon the brink,
Ere my fainting spirit fell
'T is to thee that I would drink.”

George Gordon Byron (1788–1824) English poet and a leading figure in the Romantic movement

To Thomas Moore, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

Drink

“I stayed in bed all day yesterday, for instance, while she [Elizabeth Taylor] spent the entire day until well after midnight sitting in the main room, gossiping, etc. And, of course, inevitably sipping away at the drinks… What is more frightening is that she has become bored with everything in life.”

Richard Burton (1925–1984) Welsh actor

In "Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor: The Love Letters. How drinking cocooned them from pressure of fame. Without it, they couldn't even make love."

Life, Drink

“Well, Fitz, I looked all through that bible, it was in very fine print and stumbling on that great book Ecclesiastics, read it aloud to all who would listen. Soon I was alone and began cursing the bloody bible because there were no titles in it — although I found the source of practically every good title you ever heard of. But the boys, principally Kipling, had been there before me and swiped all the good ones so I called the book Men Without Women hoping it would have a large sale among the fairies and old Vassar Girls.”

Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) American author and journalist

Letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald (15 September 1927); published in Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917–1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker

Women, Men, Books, Hope

“Ernst Bloch … recognized the dual character of the religious phenomenon, its oppressive aspect as well as its potential for revolt. The first requires the use of what he called 'the cold stream of Marxism': the relentless materialist analysis of ideologies, idols and idolatries. The second, however, requires 'the warm stream of Marxism', seeking to rescue religion's utopian cultural surplus, its critical and anticipatory force.”

Michael Löwy (1938) French sociologist

Source: The War of Gods: Religion and Politics in Latin America (1996), p. 16 http://books.google.com/books?id=gyOHaZFpvL8C&pg=PA16

Religion

“We are now approaching a social revolution, in which the old economic foundations of monogamy will disappear just as surely as those of its complement, prostitution. Monogamy arose through the concentration of considerable wealth in one hand — a man's hand — and from the endeavor to bequeath this wealth to the children of this man to the exclusion of all others. This necessitated monogamy on the woman's, but not on the man's part. Hence this monogamy of women in no way hindered open or secret polygamy of men. Now, the impending social revolution will reduce this whole care of inheritance to a minimum by changing at least the overwhelming part of permanent and inheritable wealth—the means of production—into social property. Since monogamy was caused by economic conditions, will it disappear when these causes are abolished?
One might reply, not without reason: not only will it not disappear, but it will rather be perfectly realized. For with the transformation of the means of production into collective property, wagelabor will also disappear, and with it the proletariat and the necessity for a certain, statistically ascertainable number of women to surrender for money. Prostitution disappears and monogamy, instead of going out of existence, at last becomes a reality—for men also.
At all events, the situation will be very much changed for men. But also that of women, and of all women, will be considerably altered. With the transformation of the means of production into collective property the monogamous family ceases to be the economic unit of society. The private household changes to a social industry. The care and education of children become? a public matter. Society cares equally well for all children, legal or illegal. This removes the care about the "consequences" which now forms the essential social factor—moral and economic—hindering a girl to surrender unconditionally to the beloved man. Will not this be sufficient cause for a gradual rise of a more unconventional intercourse of the sexes and a more lenient public opinion regarding virgin honor and female shame? And finally, did we not see that in the modern world monogamy and prostitution, though antitheses, are inseparable and poles of the same social condition? Can prostitution disappear without engulfing at the same time monogamy?”

Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) German social scientist, author, political theorist, and philosopher

The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1804) as translated by Ernest Untermann (1902); Full English text of The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1884/origin-family/index.htm - Full original-language German text of The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State http://www.mlwerke.de/me/me21/me21_025.htm

Women, Men, Money, Children

“Fiction is but moulding together the materials collected by every day, in real as well as imagined life; the highest order of excellence carries the impulse along with it. Nature and fortune have this earth for their place of contention, and the victory is too often with the latter.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

Literary Remains

Life, Imagination, Nature, Victory

“How does artificial intelligence refer to social relationships – for example, the functioning of one or another political system? Well, the evolution of the world is not a closed and completed process. For sure, we are awaiting a change in social relations due to moving of the labor market, especially as a result of transferring the burden of performing various activities on the devices. The invention of machines during the English Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries resulted in mass strikes and revolts, because many workers were afraid that they would be replaced by the machines. The societies has somehow coped with it. Will they defend themselves in the situation of the next step towards the automation of everything? It's an open matter.”

Zygmunt Vetulani (1950) Polish mathematician

Polish Press Agency (July 17, 2018): Polish Scientist warns against cyborgization perils https://polandinenglish.info/38094623/polish-scientist-warns-against-cyborgization-perils.

World, Intelligence, Change

“Laura Knoy: Now how does this noninterventionist philosophy play out when it's a humanitarian crisis like genocide in Darfur, Sudan?
Ron Paul: …it should be done voluntarily. I have no right – no moral right or constitutional right – to come with a gun and tax the people and say: "I will take money because I want to do good" … there's warring factions going on there, it's a civil war… You could've argued that in Somalia as well … And the American people are generous – there's no reason why we can't help feed the world, and we do. But there's no justification to use violence against our people to extract money to do good overseas.”

Ron Paul (1935) American politician and physician

Interview by Laura Knoy on NHPR, June 5, 2007 http://info.nhpr.org/node/13016 2000s, 2006-2009

Money, War, People, World

“I often get letters, quite frequently, from people who say how they like the programmes a lot, but I never give credit to the almighty power that created nature. To which I reply and say, "Well, it's funny that the people, when they say that this is evidence of the Almighty, always quote beautiful things. They always quote orchids and hummingbirds and butterflies and roses." But I always have to think too of a little boy sitting on the banks of a river in west Africa who has a worm boring through his eyeball, turning him blind before he's five years old. And I reply and say, "Well, presumably the God you speak about created the worm as well," and now, I find that baffling to credit a merciful God with that action. And therefore it seems to me safer to show things that I know to be truth, truthful and factual, and allow people to make up their own minds about the moralities of this thing, or indeed the theology of this thing.”

David Attenborough (1926) British broadcaster and naturalist

From the BBC documentary Life on Air (2002)

God, People, Truth, Beauty

“The framers of the Constitution well understood that each locality, having separate and distinct interests, required separate and distinct laws, domestic institutions, and police regulations adapted to its own wants and its own condition; and they acted on the presumption, also, that these laws and institutions would be as diversified and as dissimilar as the States would be numerous, and that no two would be precisely alike, because the interests of no two would be precisely the same.”

Stephen A. Douglas (1813–1861) American politician

Speech in Chicago, Illinois (9 July 1858)
1850s

Law

“The Holocaust would never have happened if black people lived in Germany in the 1930s and 40s … well, it wouldn't have happened to Jews.”

Sarah Silverman (1970) American comedian and actress

Jesus Is Magic (2005)

People

“The history of a species, or any natural phenomenon that requires unbroken continuity in a world of trouble, works like a batting streak. All are games of a gambler playing with a limited stake against a house with infinite resources. The gambler must eventually go bust. His aim can only be to stick around as long as possible, to have some fun while he's at it, and, if he happens to be a moral agent as well, to worry about staying the course with honor.”

Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) American evolutionary biologist

"The Streak of Streaks", pp. 186–187; originally published in The New York Review of Books (1988-08-18)
Triumph and Tragedy in Mudville (2003)

World, History, Game, Nature

“A cucumber should be well sliced, and dressed with pepper and vinegar, and then thrown out, as good for nothing.”

Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) English writer

October 5, 1773
Recounted as a common saying of physicians at the time.
The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (1785)

“I was also not willing to accept the orders of the leaders regarding my personal life or the personal lives of the other members. I had refused to allow the government to tell me how to live, so why should I allow the leadership of Progressive Labor to reorient my life?… Open criticism of the leadership dictums did not sit well with them, and they immediately began to accuse me of ‘trying to create a splinter group.’… The leaders became so paranoid over the issue of their ‘public image’ that they told members to shave their mustaches, wear coats and ties, forget the cowboy boots, be careful whom they are seen with, stay away from people who take dope, date only certain girls, attend classes regularly, and watch their language in public. Strange concerns, indeed, for Communists who at times attempted to pose as libertarians!”

Phillip Abbott Luce (1935–1998)

Source: The New Left: The Resurgence of Radicalism Among American Students (1966), p. 44

Life, People, Girl, Time

“She is not fair to outward view
As many maidens be;
Her loveliness I never knew
Until she smiled on me:
Oh! then I saw her eye was bright,
A well of love, a spring of light.”

Hartley Coleridge (1796–1849) British poet, biographer, essayist, and teacher

"Song. She is not fair"
Poems (1851)

Love, Smile, Spring, Light

“I'm honoured by the confidence the council has shown in me as well as my team and Jack Layton. I clearly have big shoes to fill, but I'm also fortunate to be standing on such a solid foundation. Jack Layton has spent eight years building this New Democrat movement for a better Canada, eight years building a team that is ready to tackle any circumstance with hope and optimism. That's exactly what you can expect from us in the coming weeks”

Nycole Turmel (1942) Canadian politician

Turmel accepts NDP leadership during Layton absence http://www.ctv.ca/CTVNews/Canada/20110728/ndp-interim-leader-110728/ July 28, 2011.

Hope, Shoe, Confidence, Optimism

“For 12 years I have had the honor of teaching geometry and mechanics applied to the arts, in favor of the industrial class… on the most important questions to the well-being, education, and morality of the workers, to the progress of national industry, to the development of all means of prosperity that work can produce for the splendor and happiness of our country.”

Charles Dupin (1784–1873) French mathematician

Charles Dupin (1831), Discours sur le Sort des Ouvriers [Discourse on the Condition of the Workers] Paris: Bachelier Librairie. p. 1. ; Translation Wren & Bedeian (2005, 73)

Happiness, Education, Art, Question

“Suspicions amongst thoughts, are like bats amongst birds, they ever fly by twilight. Certainly they are to be repressed, or at least well guarded: for they cloud the mind; they leese friends; and they check with business, whereby business cannot go on currently and constantly. They dispose kings to tyranny, husbands to jealousy, wise men to irresolution and melancholy. They are defects, not in the heart, but in the brain; for they take place in the stoutest natures.”

Francis Bacon book Essays

Of Suspicion
Essays (1625)

Men, Jealousy, Business, Nature

“One of the chief reasons for the widespread fear of the Huns rested on their ability to travel very long distances in relatively short periods. This ability may well have been based on their use of horseshoes.”

Carroll Quigley (1910–1977) American historian

Source: The Evolution of Civilizations (1961) (Second Edition 1979), Chapter 10, Western Civilization, p. 349

Fear, Travel

“Democracy prevents the politician's fulfillment of his obligations to the nation. Even the most well-meaning politician becomes, in a democracy, the slave of his supporters, because either he satisfies their personal interests or they destroy his organization. The politician lives under the tyranny and permanent threat of the electoral bosses. He is placed in a position in which he must choose between the termination of his lifetime work and the satisfaction of the demands of party members. And the politician, given such a choice, opts for the latter. He does so not out of his own pocket, but out of that of the country. He creates jobs, sets up missions, commissions, sinecures--all rostered in the nation's budget--which put increasingly heavy pressures on a tired people.”

Corneliu Zelea Codreanu (1899–1938) Romanian politician

For My Legionaries: The Iron Guard (1936), Politics

People, Democracy, Support, Personality

“It was as if by becoming a musician and Music Master he had chosen music as one of the ways toward man's highest goal, inner freedom, purity, perfection, and as though ever since making that choice he has done nothing but let himself be more and more permeated, transformed, purified by music — his entire self from his nimble, clever pianist's hands and his vast, well-stocked musician's memory to all the parts and organs of body and soul, to his pulses and breathing, to his sleep and dreaming — so that he was now only a symbol, or rather a manifestation, a personification of music.”

Hermann Hesse book The Glass Bead Game

The Glass Bead Game (1943)

Dreams, Music, Way, Soul

“God have mercy on his miserable soul! and make him see and feel his guilt — I ask no other vengeance! If he could but fully know and truly feel my wrongs I should be well avenged, and I could freely pardon all.”

Anne Brontë book The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

Source: The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), Ch. XXXIV : Concealment; Helen Graham

God, Feeling, Soul

“He's getting wrapped up before the game and iced down after it. And you see that and you might have an injury, but you are like, 'Well, if Ovie can go out there and skate as hard as he does, I can go out there.”

Alexander Ovechkin (1985) Russian ice hockey player

That rubs off on guys a lot, too.
Sami Lepisto, interview in Harlan Goode (October 5, 2008) "The Capitals' star attraction: Ovechkin charms fans with energy, humbleness", The Washington Times, News World Communications. p. M08.
About

Guy, Game

“There were…smiles of encouragement for Lydgate, and some smiles of sweet pity as well, as for the only leper present.”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Fiction, Devil of a State (1961)

Smile

“I realized that our time in the White House would form the foundation for who they would become and how well we managed this experience could truly make or break them. That is what Barack and I think about every day as we try to guide and protect our girls through the challenges of this unusual life in the spotlight, how we urge them to ignore those who question their father’s citizenship or faith. How we insist that the hateful language they hear from public figures on TV does not represent the true spirit of this country. How we explain that when someone is cruel or acts like a bully, you don’t stoop to their level. No, our motto is, when they go low, we go high.”

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

2010s, 2016 Democratic National Convention (2016)

Life, Hate, Faith, Girl

“I listen to the wind
To the wind of my soul
Where I’ll end up well I think,
Only God really knows”

Cat Stevens (1948) British singer-songwriter

The Wind
Song lyrics, Teaser and the Firecat (1971)

God, Soul, Thinking

“The captain, thinking over this event afterward, realized that by his own lifelong standards he had a crew composed entirely of lunatics, with himself well to the front in degree of aberration; but he was fairly sure that this particular form of insanity was going to be useful.”

Hal Clement book Mission of Gravity

Source: Mission of Gravity (1954), Chapter 9

Thinking

“The fates could not possibly be so malevolent, now that he had only a few hundred meters to go.
He was whistling in the dark, of course. How many aircraft had crashed at the very edge of the runway, after safely crossing an ocean? How many times had machines or muscles failed when there were only millimeters to go? Every possible piece of luck, bad as well as good, happened to somebody, somewhere. He had no right to expect any special treatment.”

Arthur C. Clarke book The Fountains of Paradise

Source: The Fountains of Paradise (1979), Chapter 53 “Fade-Out” (pp. 272-273)

Fate, Time

“Prose must be written in language that is well understood by its readers. The world would hardly miss those literary works that are mastered by only half-a-dozen pundits.”

Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay (1838–1894) Bengali writer

Peary Chand Mitra's Place in Bengali Literature (as quoted in Bengal Online http://bengalonline.sitemarvel.com/bankimchandra.asp)

World

“When office and wealth become the gods of a people, and the most unworthy and unfit most aspire to the former, and fraud becomes the highway to the latter, the land will reek with falsehood and sweat lies and chicane. When the offices are open to all, merit and stern integrity and the dignity of unsullied honor will attain them only rarely and by accident. To be able to serve the country well, will cease to be a reason why the great and wise and learned should be selected to render service. Other qualifications, less honorable, will be more available.”

Albert Pike book Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry

Source: Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry (1871), Ch. III : The Master, p. 66

God, People, Fraud, Learning

“Sometimes I feel that a more rational explanation for all that has happened during my lifetime is that I am still only thirteen years old, reading Jules Verne or H. G. Wells, and have fallen asleep.”

Stanislaw Ulam (1909–1984) Polish-American mathematician

Preface To the 1983 Edition, p. xxvii
Adventures of a Mathematician - Third Edition (1991)

Feeling, Reading

“There is little danger that any student, however idle or stupid, will fail to get some result; but there is great danger that he will be led astray, obsessed and overwhelmed by his results, even though it be by those which it is necessary that he should attain. Too often, moreover, he mistaketh the first resting-place for the goal, and taketh off his armour as if he were a victor ere the fight is well begun.
It is desirable that the student should never attach to any result the importance which it at first seems to possess.”

Aleister Crowley (1875–1947) poet, mountaineer, occultist

Book VI : Liber O (1909)

Stupidity, Fight

“It is the great glory as well as the great threat of science that everything which is in principle possible can be done if the intention to do it is sufficiently resolute.”

Peter Medawar (1915–1987) scientist

The Threat and the Glory, 1977
1970s

Science

“In a debate on “gay” marriage, the opponent said “Next thing you’ll be marrying horses!” Jeff responded, “Well, at least I’d be in a stable relationship!””

Jeffrey Montgomery (1953–2016) American LGBT rights activist and public relations executive

Marriage, Horse

“One of the most natural of reactions during the war was intolerance. But the inevitable disregard for the opinions and feelings of minorities is none the less a disturbing product of war psychology. The slow and difficult advances which tolerance and liberalism have made through long periods of development are dissipated almost in a night when the necessary war-time habits of thought hold the minds of the people. The necessity for a common purpose and a united intellectual front becomes paramount to everything else. But when the need for such a solidarity is past there should be a quick and generous readiness to revert to the old and normal habits of thought. There should be an intellectual demobilization as well as a military demobilization. Progress depends very largely on the encouragement of variety. Whatever tends to standardize the community, to establish fixed and rigid modes of thought, tends to fossilize society. If we all believed the same thing and thought the same thoughts and applied the same valuations to all the occurrences about us, we should reach a state of equilibrium closely akin to an intellectual and spiritual paralysis. It is the ferment of ideas, the clash of disagreeing judgments, the privilege of the individual to develop his own thoughts and shape his own character, that makes progress possible. It is not possible to learn much from those who uniformly agree with us. But many useful things are learned from those who disagree with us; and even when we can gain nothing our differences are likely to do us no harm. In this period of after-war rigidity, suspicion, and intolerance our own country has not been exempt from unfortunate experiences. Thanks to our comparative isolation, we have known less of the international frictions and rivalries than some other countries less fortunately situated. But among some of the varying racial, religious, and social groups of our people there have been manifestations of an intolerance of opinion, a narrowness to outlook, a fixity of judgment, against which we may well be warned. It is not easy to conceive of anything that would be more unfortunate in a community based upon the ideals of which Americans boast than any considerable development of intolerance as regards religion. To a great extent this country owes its beginnings to the determination of our hardy ancestors to maintain complete freedom in religion. Instead of a state church we have decreed that every citizen shall be free to follow the dictates of his own conscience as to his religious beliefs and affiliations. Under that guaranty we have erected a system which certainly is justified by its fruits. Under no other could we have dared to invite the peoples of all countries and creeds to come here and unite with us in creating the State of which we are all citizens.”

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

1920s, Toleration and Liberalism (1925)

War, People, Religion, Feeling

“Well there are walls, that make a prison, many names that can bring hate. Yeah tear 'em down and ride 'em over.”

Jackson C. Frank (1943–1999) American musician

Don't Look Back

Hate, Tear

“Looking back today over the years, we may well be proud of the work which our fellow citizens have done in India. There have, of course, been mistakes, there have been failures, but we can assert that our rule in India will stand comparison with that of any other nation which has been charged with the ruling of a people so different from themselves.”

Clement Attlee (1883–1967) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech https://hansard.parliament.uk/commons/1947-07-10/debates/584499a6-8830-4426-be23-7215df06d57e/IndianIndependenceBill#2442 in the House of Commons (10 July 1947). 1940s

People, Failure

“You can have an Apple in the phone business, or a RIM, and they can do very well, but when 1.3 billion phones a year are all smart, the software that's gonna be most popular in those phones is gonna be software that's sold by somebody who doesn't make their own phones.”

Steve Ballmer (1956) American businessman who was the chief executive officer of Microsoft

TechCrunch Interview With Steve Ballmer http://youtube.com/watch?v=1OpRQMRa270 in YouTube (24 September 2009) 2000s

Business

“Prudent readers will do well to hold Three Weeks at arm's length, unless they want to be cut by flying adjectives.”

Elinor Glyn (1864–1943) British novelist and scriptwriter

S. J. Perelman "Cloudland Revisited: Tuberoses and Tigers", in The Most of S. J. Perelman (London: Mandarin, [1979] 1992) p. 282.
Criticism

Flying

“"Those who fought know a secret about themselves, and it is not very nice." … They have experienced secretly and privately their natural human impulse toward sadism and brutality. As I say in this new book of mine, not merely did I learn to kill with a noose of piano wire put around somebody's neck from behind, but I learned to enjoy the prospect of killing that way. It's those things that you learn about yourself that you never forget. You learn that you have much wider dimensions than you had imagined before you had to fight a war. That's salutary. It's well to know exactly who you are so you can conduct the rest of your life properly.”

Paul Fussell (1924–2012) Recipient of the Purple Heart medal

Humanities interview (1996)

Life, War, Secret, Books

“We may not appreciate the fact; but a fact nevertheless it remains: we are living in a Golden Age, the most gilded Golden Age of human history — not only of past history, but of future history. For, as Sir Charles Darwin and many others before him have pointed out, we are living like drunken sailors, like the irresponsible heirs of a millionaire uncle. At an ever accelerating rate we are now squandering the capital of metallic ores and fossil fuels accumulated in the earth’s crust during hundreds of millions of years. How long can this spending spree go on? Estimates vary. But all are agreed that within a few centuries or at most a few millennia, Man will have run through his capital and will be compelled to live, for the remaining nine thousand nine hundred and seventy or eighty centuries of his career as Homo sapiens, strictly on income. Sir Charles is of the opinion that Man will successfully make the transition from rich ores to poor ores and even sea water, from coal, oil, uranium and thorium to solar energy and alcohol derived from plants. About as much energy as is now available can be derived from the new sources — but with a far greater expense in man hours, a much larger capital investment in machinery. And the same holds true of the raw materials on which industrial civilization depends. By doing a great deal more work than they are doing now, men will contrive to extract the diluted dregs of the planet’s metallic wealth or will fabricate non-metallic substitutes for the elements they have completely used up. In such an event, some human beings will still live fairly well, but not in the style to which we, the squanderers of planetary capital, are accustomed.”

Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) English writer

"Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow" in Adonis and the Alphabet (1956); later in Collected Essays (1959), p. 293

Men, Alcohol, Age, History

“My happiness is my business. I can see finality for myself, an end, an absolute end; but none for my business. There one has room to breathe, to grow, to expand, and the possibilities are boundless. One can go to places like the Congo, and organize, organize, organize, well, very big things indeed. But I don’t work at business only for the sake of money. I am not a lover of money as money and never have been. I work at business because business is life. It enables me to do things.”

William Lever, 1st Viscount Leverhulme (1851–1925) English industrialist, philanthropist, and politician

William Lever, quoted in C. Wilson, The History of Unilever, London: Cassell, 1954, vol. 1, p. 187; Requoted in Witzel (2004: 166)

Life, Money, Happiness, Lovers

“What on earth has given opera its prestige in western civilisation — a prestige that has outlasted so many different fashions and ways of thought? Why are people prepared to sit silently for three hours listening to a performance of which they do not understand a word and of which they very seldom know the plot? Why do quite small towns all over Germany and Italy still devote a large portion of their budgets to this irrational entertainment? Partly, of course, because it is a display of skill, like a football match. But chiefly, I think, because it is irrational. "What is too silly to be said may be sung" — well, yes; but what is too subtle to be said, or too deeply felt, or too revealing or too mysterious — these things can also be sung and can only be sung.”

Kenneth Clark (1903–1983) Art historian, broadcaster and museum director

Source: Civilisation (1969), Ch. 9: The Pursuit of Happiness; "What is too silly to be said may be sung" is a commonly used translation or paraphrase of lines from Act I, Scene ii of the play The Barber of Seville by Pierre de Beaumarchais, which was the basis of famous operas.

People, Way, Fashion, Understanding

“Pocket: Do you know that there's no fool piece on the chessboard, Kent?
Kent: Methinks the fool is the player, the mind above the moves.
Pocket: Well, that's a scratchy spot of cat wank. But bloody well said.”

Christopher Moore book Fool

Ch 15 - In a Lover's Eye - pg 184
Fool (2009)

Fools, Cats

“Openness to the new is the virtue that describes the moral consequence of the doctrine of the relation of spirit to structure. The religion of the future inherits this doctrine from the struggle with the world, and radicalizes it. This virtue acts out the human truth of our relation to the settled contexts of our life and thought. That they are ephemeral and defective, that they cannot accommodate all the experience and insight we have reason to value, that there is always more in us, individually as well as collectively, than is, or ever can be, in them are facts giving us persistent reason to rebel against such structures.”

Roberto Mangabeira Unger The Religion of the Future

Source: The Religion of the Future (2014), p. 385

Life, Truth, World, Religion

“People may wonder why I am content to prescribe such a general and apparently vague formula as "Every day, in every way, I am getting better and better" for all and every ailment. The reason is, strange as it may seem, that our subconscious mind does not need the details. The general suggestion that everything "in every way" is going well is quite sufficient to set up the procedure of persuasion which will carry its effects to the different organs and improve every function. I have had remarkable demonstration of this in the course of my long teaching and experiments. Time and again I have seen patients cured, not only of the particular disease for which they sought relief, but also of minor disabilities which they had almost forgotten.”

Emile Coué (1857–1926) French psychologist and pharmacist

Source: Autosuggestion : My method (2014), Chapter III: Auto-suggestion in practice.

People, Disease, Way, Time

“Well, God knows he don't need any brains to buck barley bags. But don't you try to put nothing over, Milton. I got my eye on you.”

John Steinbeck Of Mice and Men

George; "buck" here means to work at lifting and throwing the sacks of barley
Of Mice and Men (1937)

God

“Art is anything you can do well. Anything you can do with Quality.”

Robert M. Pirsig (1928–2017) American writer and philosopher

NPR Interview http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4612364 with Pirsig (1974)

Art

“Excessive toil occurred only where the masters or overseers were feeble witted as well as brutal. A persistent rumor among abolitionists was that sugar planters followed a policy of working slaves to death in seven years as a matter of economy. The persons spreading such reports were as ignorant of Negro nature as they were of conditions in the sugar mills. Furthermore, they overrated the ability of the masters to know how to kill a slave in the given time instead of leaving him a broken-down burden to the plantation. When they set out to prove the accusation they returned with no evidence, but convinced that the practice existed in some obscure region which they had not succeeded in ferreting out. Harriet Martineau, after watching slaves go through the motions of work without tiring themselves, considered the planters as models of patience and observed that new slave owners from Europe or the North were prone to be the most severe. Numerous observers, of various shades of opinion on slavery, agreed that brutality was no more common in the black belt than among free labor elsewhere, and that the slave owners were the worst victims of the system.”

W. Cleon Skousen (1913–2006) ex FBI agent, conservative United States author and faith-based political theorist

The Making of America (1986)

Death, Nature, Time, Personality

“Well you do enough talk
My little hawk, why do you cry? Tell me what did you learn
From the Tillamook burn
Or the Fourth of July?
We're all gonna die”

Sufjan Stevens (1975) American singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist

"Fourth of July"
Lyrics, Carrie and Lowell (2015)

Learning, Cry

“I dare say that most of you gentlemen know that a good many pig-iron handlers can never learn to shovel right; the ordinary pig-iron handler is not the type of man well suited to shoveling. He is to stupid; there is too much mental strain, too much knack required of a shoveled for the pig-iron handler to take kindly to shoveling.”

Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856–1915) American mechanical engineer and tennis player

Source: Testimony of Frederick W. Taylor... 1912, p. 111.

Stupidity, Learning

“One joins the movement in a valueless world,
Choosing it, till both hurler and the hurled,
One moves as well, always toward, toward.”

Thom Gunn (1929–2004) English poet

On the Move (l. 30-32)
Collected Poems by Thom Gunn (1994)

World

“I quote somewhere a correspondence with Ken Arrow, after he wrote Arrow and Hahn. I wrote to him and I said that the trouble is that neoclassical economists confuse risk with uncertainty. Uncertainty means non-probabilistic. And he said, 'Quite true, you're quite correct that Keynes is much more fruitful, but the trouble with the General Theory is, those things that were fruitful couldn't be developed into a nice precise analytical statement, and those things that could were retrogressions from Keynes but could be developed into a nice precise analytical statement.' That's why mainstream economics went that route. And my answer is, I would hope that even Nobel Prize winners didn't believe that regression is growth, which it clearly isn't. But that's right. The fear that everybody has, you see, is nihilism: you won't be able to say what's going to happen. Well, evolutionists don't worry about being unable to predict. You ask the evolutionists, who tell you what happened in the past, just what next species is going to appear, and the answer is, anything could. Right? Does that bother people? Explanation is the first thing in science. If you can't explain, you don't have anything. But you needn't necessarily predict. Now, if you know the future's uncertain, what does that mean? It means basically, the way Hicks put it in his later years, that humans have free will. The human system isn't deterministic or stochastic, which is deterministic with a random error. Humans can do thins to change the world.”

Paul Davidson (1930) Post Keynesian economist

quoted in Conversations with Post Keynesians (1995) by J. E. King

People, World, Fear, Hope

“Death, he remembered somebody saying once, was a kind of victory. To have lived a long good life, a life of prodigious pleasure and minimal misery, and then to die; that was to have won. To attempt to hang on forever risked ending up in some as-yet-unglimpsed horror future. What if you lived forever and all that had gone before, however terrible things had sometimes appeared to be in the past, however badly people had behaved to each other throughout history, was nothing compared to what was yet to come? Suppose in the great book of days that told the story of everything, all the gone, done past was merely a bright, happy introduction compared to the main body of the work, an unending tale of unbearable pain scraped in blood on a parchment of living skin?
Better to die than risk that.
Live well and then die, so that the you that is you now can never be again, and only tricks can re-create something that might think it is you, but is not.”

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, Excession (1996), Chapter 8 “Killing Time” section V (pp. 259-260).

Life, Death, Pain, Happiness

“Nimble finger and nimble wits will take you a good deal further than a sword and muscles. Sharp eyes help as well, but fortunately, I have these things.”

Robert Jordan (1948–2007) American writer

Faile Bashere
(15 October 1991)

Help

“We have a culture where principles mean nothing and personalities mean everything. And I can see why it caught on—I’ve done very well out of it. My personality allows me to get away with all sorts of rubbish: riding the wrong way up a one-way street on a stolen bicycle (I didn’t steal it though; I bought it off a dodgy bloke), winking at the police as I pass, years of trouble-free promiscuity, tables at restaurants. But without principles, I was freewheeling away from God.”

Russell Brand book Revolution

Revolution (2014)

God, Way, Personality

“Mind from its object differs most in this:
Evil from good; misery from happiness;
The baser from the nobler; the impure
And frail, from what is clear and must endure.
If you divide suffering and dross, you may
Diminish till it is consumed away;
If you divide pleasure and love and thought,
Each part exceeds the whole; and we know not
How much, while any yet remains unshared,
Of pleasure may be gained, of sorrow spared:
This truth is that deep well, whence sages draw
The unenvied light of hope; the eternal law
By which those live, to whom this world of life
Is as a garden ravaged, and whose strife
Tills for the promise of a later birth
The wilderness of this Elysian earth.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley Epipsychidion

Source: Epipsychidion (1821), l. 174

Love, Life, Happiness, Pleasure

“Does it not seem to you, Justice Joyce, that this series of statistics might well occur without the intervention of any Divine Will whatsoever?”

Algis Budrys (1931–2008) American writer

The Executioner, p. 136
The Unexpected Dimension (1960)

Justice

“For a period of roughly 35 years, Keynesian theory provided a central paradigm for macroeconomists, and considerable progress was made on several empirical fronts. It was widely recognized that some of the ingredients of Keynesian economics (e. g. money illusion and/or nominal wage rigidity) rested on slender to non-existent microtheoretic foundations; and there were always dissenters. But, thought of as a collection of empirical regularities that fit together into a coherent whole, the theory worked tolerably well. In the 1970s, however, the Keynesian paradigm was rejected by a great many academic economists, especially in the United States, in favour of what we now call new classical economics. By about 1980, it was hard to find an American academic macroeconomist under the age of 40 who professed to be a Keynesian. That was an astonishing intellectual turnabout in less than a decade, an intellectual revolution for sure.”

Alan Blinder (1945) economist

"The fall and rise of Keynesian economics", (1988)

Money, Age

“The main business of religions is to purify, control, and restrain that excessive and exclusive taste for well-being which men acquire in times of equality.”

Alexis De Tocqueville book Democracy in America

Book One, Chapter V.
Democracy in America, Volume II (1840), Book One

Men, Religion, Business, Time

“Today, having come far in our own historical journey, we must decide. Will we turn back, or finish well? Before history is written down in books, it is written in courage. Like Americans before us, we will show that courage and we will finish well. We will lead freedom's advance. We will compete and excel in the global economy. We will renew the defining moral commitments of this land, and so we move forward, optimistic about our country, faithful to its cause, and confident of victories to come.”

George W. Bush (1946) 43rd President of the United States

2000s, 2006, State of the Union (January 2006)

Books, Faith, Confidence, History

Patrick Allen (1927–2006) Film, television and voice actor

E4, She's All That' Trail

School

“Honestly, ever since I found this way of eating I have endless amounts of energy. I can go all day, and after it all I never find myself getting tired. No matter what kind of shows I have done, or workouts I do on top of it, I still have to force myself to sleep at night. … Right from the first time that I started to really eat vegan I could feel how much it was affecting me. John Salley … always told me how the players who ate that way outperformed the others. I started to see that results for myself as well.”

Travis Barker (1975) American drummer and music producer

"Blink 182's Travis Barker: Why I'm Vegan" https://web.archive.org/web/20170321220957/https://www.mensjournal.com/entertainment/articles/blink-182s-travis-barker-why-im-vegan-w473107, interview with Men's Journal (March 2017).

Way, Feeling, Sleep, Time

“Whatever women do they must do twice as well as men to be thought of half as good. Luckily, this is not difficult.”

Charlotte Whitton (1896–1975) Canadian politician

Quoted in Canada Month, June 1963

Women, Men, For women, Cute

Quotes about well page 88

Quotes about well
page 88