Quotes about wording (9378 quotes, page 60)

“The translator of Homer should above all be penetrated by a sense of four qualities of his author: — that he is eminently rapid; that he is eminently plain and direct both in the evolution of his thought and in the expression of it, that is, both in his syntax and in his words; that he is eminently plain and direct in the substance of his thought, that is, in his matter and ideas; and, finally, that he is eminently noble.”

Matthew Arnold On Translating Homer

On Translating Homer (1861)

Idea , Sense

“I have a desire to be part of the defence of our sovereignty against the aggression we face every day from our 'friendly neighbour' and those here on the Rock who do not understand the simple words "No Surrender". No surrender of our right to open government, no surrendering of our duties to care for our people, no surrender to the concept that Gibraltarians should find dignified jobs, no surrender of our hopes and dreams for Gibraltar and certainly no surrender of our sovereignty on land or sea.”

Fabian Picardo (1972) Gibraltarian politician and barrister

Address after being elected leader of the GSLP in April 2011
2011

People , Dreams , Hope , Understanding

“It's the way that you kiss, the way that you give back,
The way you love me like this -- look at the beauty of that.
These are the tangled words of our love, that we both do untie --
Same old ways, same old spice, same old paradise.”

Amber (1970) Dutch born German singer, songwriter, label owner and executive producer

"Same Old Paradise", My Kind of World (2004).

Love , Beauty , Way , Kiss

“You know, I used to not understand fashion, a lot of it, but I completely understood being a playwright or a screenwriter and suddenly having an actor say your words and making them come to life. That I can understand. Finally, I'm starting to understand this.”

Reese Witherspoon (1976) American film actress and producer

Interview for Vogue magazine, November 2008.

Life , Fashion , Understanding

“Be strict and intelligently critical about yourself and your own weakness and follies. But, cushion your words and attitudes with Love. Love is the greatest persuasive power we know in life.”

Chinmayananda Saraswati (1916–1993) Indian spiritual teacher

Quotations from Gurudev’s teachings, Chinmya Mission Chicago

Love , Life , Intelligence

“We teach them to speak and also to listen. Because when people only talk and don't listen, they end up thinking that what they say is the only thing that is worth anything. … Speaking and listening to words is how we know who we are, where we come from, and where our steps are going. Also it's how we know about others, their steps, and their world. Speaking and listening to words is like listening to life.”

Subcomandante Marcos (1957) Mexican activist

"I shit on all the revolutionary vanguards of this planet" http://www.csuchico.edu/zapatist/HTML/Archive/Communiques/etaJAN.html January, 2003

Life , People , World , Thinking

“It is only by having desire thwarted, and thereby learning to control it—in other words, by becoming civilized—that men become fully human.”

Theodore Dalrymple (1949) English doctor and writer

Sex and the Shakespeare Reader http://www.city-journal.org/html/13_4_oh_to_be.html (Autumn 2003).
City Journal (1998 - 2008)

Men , Learning

“The key to the understanding and to the full comprehension of all that the Prophets have said is found in the knowledge of the figures, their general ideas, and the meaning of each word they contain.”

Maimónides book The Guide for the Perplexed

Guide for the Perplexed (c. 1190), Introduction

Idea , Understanding , Knowledge

“Said on his deathbed, 1827, as cited from the book Last Words.”

Ludwig Van Beethoven (1770–1827) German Romantic composer

Books

“The domination of becoming produces another sort of fragmentation, which may be called “presentism.” Allen Tate has made the point that many modern people to whom the word “provincial” is anathema are themselves provincials in the to an extreme degree. Indeed, modernism is in essence a provincialism, since it declines to look beyond the horizon of the moment, just as a countryman may view with suspicion whatever lies beyond his country.”

Richard M. Weaver (1910–1963) American scholar

Source: Ideas have Consequences (1948), p. 67.

People , Country

“Nothing is so difficult to change as the traditional habits of a free people in regard to such things. Such changes may be easily made in despotic countries like Russia, or in countries where notwithstanding theoretical freedom the government and the police are all powerful as in France… Can you expect that the people of the United Kingdom will cast aside all the names of space and weight and capacity which they learnt from their infancy and all of a sudden adopt an unmeaning jargon of barbarous words representing ideas and things new to their minds. It seems to me to be a dream of pedantic theorists… I see no use however in attempting to Frenchify the English nation, and you may be quite sure that the English nation will not consent to be Frenchified. There are many conceited men who think that they have given an unanswerable argument in favour of any measure they may propose by merely saying that it has been adopted by the French. I own that I am not of that school, and I think the French have much to gain by imitating us than we have to gain by imitating them. The fact is there are a certain set of very vain men like Ewart and Cobden who not finding in things as they are here, the prominence of position to which they aspire, think that they gain a step by oversetting any of our arrangements great or small and by holding up some foreign country as an object of imitation.”

Henry Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston (1784–1865) British politician

Letter to Thomas Milner Gibson (5 May 1864), quoted in Jasper Ridley, Lord Palmerston (London: Constable, 1970), p. 507.
1860s

Men , People , School , Dreams

“For an instant a half-formed prayer struggled into Havor’s mouth. But he could not utter it. Not for himself. For him those words were already drowned by the noise the thong-whip had made, or the sounds of children crying out of hunger or the cold or sheer misery in that grey house of orphans in the far North, eight years ago.”

Tanith Lee (1947–2015) British writer

Source: Short fiction, Companions on the Road (1975), Chapter 7, “The Snow-Waste” (p. 69)

Hunger , Children , Housing , Cry

“We are neither a racial nor a national entity in the conventional meaning of this term; we have become a nation only on the strength of an ideology, a common belief in a particular way of life: and that ideology, that way of life is expressed in one single word: Islam.”

Muhammad Asad (1900–1992) Austro-Hungarian writer and academic

Source: This Law of Ours and Other Essays (1987), Chapter: Calling All Muslims, Radio Broadcast # 4, p 105

Life , Way

“What words say does not last. The words last. Because words are always the same, and what they say is never the same.”

Antonio Porchia (1885–1968) Italian Argentinian poet

Lo que dicen las palabras no dura. Duran las palabres. Porque las palabras son siempre las mismas y lo que dicen no es nunca lo mismo.
Voces (1943)

“He looked up startled, and saw in her face that which gave him a view into a strange new world. He had thought that women blushed when they talked of love, but her eyes were as grave and candid as a boy's. Here was one who had gone through waters so deep that she had lost the foibles of sex. Love to her was only a word of ill omen, a threat on the lips of brutes, an extra battalion of peril in an army of perplexities.”

John Buchan book Huntingtower

Source: Huntingtower (1922), Ch. 10

Love , Women , World , Sex

“In strategic thinking, one first seeks a clear understanding of the particular character of each element of a situation and then makes the fullest possible use of human brainpower to restructure the elements in the most advantageous way. Phenomena and events in the real word do not always fit a linear model. Hence the most reliable means of dissecting a situation into its constituent parts and reassembling then in the desired pattern is not a step-by-step methodology such as systems analysis. Rather, it is that ultimate nonlinear thinking tool, the human brain. True strategic thinking thus contrasts sharply with the conventional mechanical systems approach based on linear thinking. But it also contrasts with the approach that stakes everything on intuition, reaching conclusions without any real breakdown or analysis… No matter how difficult or unprecedented the problem, a breakthrough to the best possible solution can come only from a combination of rational analysis, based on the real nature of things, and imaginative reintegration of all the different items into a new pattern, using nonlinear brainpower. This is always the most effective approach to devising strategies for dealing successfully with challenges and opportunities, in the market arena as on the battlefield.”

Kenichi Ohmae (1943) Japanese academic

Source: The Mind Of The Strategist, 1982, p. 304

Way , Imagination , Understanding , Nature

“Federalism is a guideline, not a pornographic word, you can speak it out loud…We have been focusing too much on a country that has said no, no, no!”

Jacques Delors (1925) French economist and politician

Speech in Maastricht (8 December 1991), quoted in Charles Grant, Delors - Inside the House that Jacques Built (London: Nicholas Brearley, 1994), p. 200.

Country

“After collecting, using, and recommending scores of other Bible versions for about 25 years, I spent hundreds of hours studying the Bible version topic and have been dragged to the conclusion that God preserved His Word for the English-speaking people in the King James Bible (KJB). I have been unable to find any errors in it and trust it, word for word.”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Source: What On Earth Is About To Happen… For Heaven’s Sake? (2013), p. 5

God , People , Error , Study

“Long words, fat talk — they may tell us something about ourselves. Has the passion for fat in the language increased as self-confidence has waned?”

Russell Baker (1925–2019) writer and satirst from the United States

"American Fat" (p.46)
So This Is Depravity (1980)

Confidence , Passion , Self-confidence

“On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of the conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies' straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake some day and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return.”

Annie Dillard (1945) American writer

"An Expedition to the Pole", Teaching a Stone to Talk (1982)

Life , God , Children , Idea

“The words they spoke were voices that she heard.
She looked at them and saw them as they were
And what she felt fought off the barest phrase.”

Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) American poet

Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), It Must Give Pleasure

“I don't think pressure, that word, is on his mind. He loves to play hockey and enjoys the way he's playing. He's kind of made me re-establish my thinking.”

Alexander Ovechkin (1985) Russian ice hockey player

Sergei Fedorov, interview in Jill Painter (November 20, 2008) Los Angeles Daily News.
About

Love , Way , Thinking , Hockey

“[Brandeis] did not believe with the evangelist that... truth could be found by abiding in the Word or in becoming the disciple of any leader. Neither did he think it came from intuition or from speculation in metaphysics. He thought it could and would come only from the relentless, disinterested and critical study of facts.”

Louis Brandeis (1856–1941) American Supreme Court Justice

Henry J. Friendly, Mr. Justice Brandeis: The Quest for Reason, 108 U. Pa. L. Rev. 985, 999 (1960).

Truth , Thinking , Study

“I find it insufferable too the way people spread word about the latest novelties and make a fuss over them. I am charmed by the man who remains unaware of such fashions until they have become quite an old story to everyone else.”

Yoshida Kenkō (1283–1350) japanese writer

78
Essays in Idleness (1967 Columbia University Press, Trns: Donald Keene)

People , Way , Fashion

“Yet you must not cling to the words of the old sages either; they, too, may not be right. Even if you believe them, you should be alert so that, in the event that something superior comes along, you may follow that.”

Dogen (1200–1253) Japanese Zen buddhist teacher

IV, 1
Shobogenzo Zuimonki (1238)

“American Gods is about 200,000 words long, and I'm sure there are words that are simply in there 'cause I like them. I know I couldn't justify each and every one of them.”

Neil Gaiman (1960) English fantasy writer

In response to a question about whether he writes differently for different audiences, in an Inteview at HarperCollins.com

God

“The threads of wyrd are a dimension of ourselves that we cannot grasp with words. We spin webs of words, yet wyrd slips through like the wind.”

Brian Bates (1944) British academic

The Way of the Wyrd : Tales of an Anglo-Saxon Sorcerer (1983)
Context: The threads of wyrd are a dimension of ourselves that we cannot grasp with words. We spin webs of words, yet wyrd slips through like the wind. The secrets of wyrd do not lie in our word-hoards, but are locked in the soul. We can only discern the shadows of reality with our words, whereas our souls are capable of encountering the realities of wyrd directly. This is why wyrd is accessible to the sorcerer: the sorcerer sees with his soul, not with eyes blinkered by the shape of words.
Do not live your life searching around for answers in your word-hoard. You will find only words to rationalize your experience. Allow yourself to open to wyrd and it will cleanse, renew, change, and develop your casket of reason. Your word-hoard should serve your experience, not the reverse.

“Machine-held strings of binary digits can simulate a great many kinds of things, of which numbers are just one kind. For example, they can simulate automobiles on a freeway, chess pieces, electrons in a box, musical notes, Russian words, patterns on a paper, human cells, colors, electrical circuits, and so on. To think of a computer as made up essentially of numbers is simply a carryover from the successful use of mathematical analysis in studying models. Most of this series of lectures has been devoted to applications of computers, and this is not the time to give details about their usefulness. I merely wish to point out certain types of things being done with computers today that could not have been done in 1945. Some of these are technological, some are intellectual.”

George Forsythe (1917–1972) Stanford University computer scientist

As cited in: Zenon Pylyshyn (1970) Perspectives on the computer revolution. p. 379
"Educational implications of the computer revolution," 1963

Music , Color , Mathematics , Thinking

“Fair play is an English word. It is not a French word, and it has been copied all over the world. Unfortunately, it does not function any more here.”

Arsène Wenger (1949) French footballer and manager

19 April 1997
Quotations from the Public Comments of Arsene Wenger: Manager, Arsenal Football Club (2005)

World

“The act of the soul, in surrendering itself into the hands of Christ, forms a connecting bond between Him as the Vine and the soul as the branches, which communicates life, strength, nourishment, and beauty. In a word, with a just view of the character, and a supreme attachment to the person of Christ, the believer yields himself into His hands as a full and complete Saviour. Him he receives; upon Him he rests, and rests for time and eternity.”

Gardiner Spring (1785–1873) American clergyman

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 226.

Life , Beauty , Soul , Communication

“When I was a student in the 1950s, I read Husserl, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty. When you feel an overwhelming influence, you try to open a window. Paradoxically enough, Heidegger is not very difficult for a Frenchman to understand. When every word is an enigma, you are in a not-too-bad position to understand Heidegger. Being and Time is difficult, but the more recent works are clearer. Nietzsche was a revelation to me. I felt that there was someone quite different from what I had been taught. I read him with a great passion and broke with my life, left my job in the asylum, left France: I had the feeling I had been trapped. Through Nietzsche, I had become a stranger to all that.”

Michel Foucault (1926–1984) French philosopher

Truth, Power, Self : An Interview with Michel Foucault (25 October 1982)

Life , Feeling , Understanding , Passion

“Remember when the music
Came from wooden boxes strung with silver wire
And as we sang the words, it would set our minds on fire,
For we believed in things, and so we'd sing.”

Harry Chapin (1942–1981) American musician

Remember When the Music
Song lyrics, Sequel (1981)

Music , Singing , Box

“When he has nothing to say, he lets words speak.”

Elias Canetti (1905–1994) Bulgarian-born Swiss and British jewish modernist novelist, playwright, memoirist, and non-fiction writer

J. Agee, trans. (1989), p. 147
Das Geheimherz der Uhr [The Secret Heart of the Clock] (1987)

“So I humbly accept the honor, keeping in mind the words of a British playwright, John Mortimer it was, "No brilliance is needed in the law. Nothing but common sense and relatively clean fingernails." Well at best I've got one of the two of those.”

Bono (1960) Irish rock musician, singer of U2

PENN Address (2004)

Law , Sense

“French music is really very sensory, and appeals to sense of smell, taste, touch. It can be languorous, and almost erotic. Russian music is very subjective, sometimes whiny, breast-beating 'Look how I suffer, look how I suffer!'. German music is, to use your word, metaphysical. It really asks those existential questions of 'How do I relate to the Universe?', 'Is there a heaven?', 'How am I like a brook, or a leaf on a tree?'. I know this was the music that most challenged Schnabel. He said Mozart was the most inaccessible of the great masters, because with the fewest number of notes, he accesses the deepest levels of human awareness and experience.”

Leon Fleisher (1928) American conductor and pianist

Interview with pianist Leon Fleisher http://www.examiner.com/article/interview-with-pianist-leon-fleisher by Elijah Ho (October 1, 2014)

Music , Question , Sense , Tree

“There is no keeping down of veritie, but it wil spring and come out of dust and ashes, as appeared right well in this man. For though they digged vp his body, burnt his bones, & drowned his ashes, yet þe word of God and truth of his doctrine with the fruit & successe therof they could not burne.”

John Foxe (1516–1587) British historian

Bk. 5, p. 464
Acts and Monuments (1563)

God , Truth , Spring , Appearance

“When we attempt to understand the inmost nature of the outer world, we stand before it as before absolute darkness. There probably exists in nature, outside of ourselves, neither colour, odour, force, resistance, space, nor anything that we know as sensation. Light is produced by the excitement of the optic nerve, and it shines only in our brain; as to the excitement itself, there is nothing to prove that it is luminous; outside of us is profound darkness, or even worse, since darkness is the correlation of light. In the same way, all the sonorous excitements which assail us, the creakings of machines, the sounds of nature, the words and cries of our fellows are produced by excitements of our acoustic nerve; it is in our brain that noise is produced, outside there reigns a dead silence. The same may be said of all our other senses.

...In short, our nervous system, which enables us to communicate with objects, prevents us, on the other hand, from knowing their nature. It is an organ of relation with the outer world; it is also, for us, a cause of isolation. We never go outside ourselves. We are walled in. And all we can say of matter and of the outer world is, that it is revealed to us solely by the sensations it affords us, that it is the unknown cause of our sensations, the inaccessible excitant of our organs of the senses, and that the ideas we are able to form as to the nature and the properties of that excitant, are necessarily derived from our sensations, and are subjective to the same degree as those sensations themselves.”

Alfred Binet (1857–1911) French psychologist and inventor of the first usable intelligence test

Source: The Mind and the Brain, 1907, p. 25

World , Way , Communication , Idea

“To-day, whatever may annoy,
The word for me is Joy, just simple Joy.”

John Kendrick Bangs (1862–1922) American author, editor and satirist

The Word.

Joy

“And I rode along side
Till you lost me there
In the open road
And I rode along side
Till the honey spread
Itself so thin
For me to break your bread
For me to take your word
I had to steal it.”

Tori Amos (1963) American singer

"A Sorta Fairytale".
Songs

“The glossary of politics is so full of euphemistic words and phrases — as in the nature of things it must be — that one would suppose politicians must sometimes strain their wits to coin them.”

Albert Jay Nock (1870–1945) American journalist

Free Speech and Plain Language (1936)

Nature

“Has any man, or any society of men, a truth to speak, a piece of spiritual work to do; they can nowise proceed at once and with the mere natural organs, but must first call a public meeting, appoint committees, issue prospectuses, eat a public dinner; in a word, construct or borrow machinery, wherewith to speak it and do it. Without machinery, they were hopeless, helpless.”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

1820s, Signs of the Times (1829)

Men , Truth , Nature

“President Reagan brought us to the ultimate: America As Total Television. During his governance the printed word simply ceased to matter. White House dynamos had once telephoned newspapers to complain about unfair reporting. Not anymore. Now they telephoned network bosses. Even then it wasn't poor reporting they complained about, but poor pictures.
A network reporter who thought her report on shortcomings in Reaganland would anger the President's cadres was amazed when the man in charge of propaganda thanked her for doing them a good turn. But, she said, that was a tough piece of reporting.
Oh, the words may have been, said the gentleman, but on television words didn't matter. What mattered were pictures. And the pictures had been wonderful.”

Russell Baker (1925–2019) writer and satirst from the United States

"'Star Wars' Mania" (p.346)
There's a Country in My Cellar (1990)

Housing , Anger

“Sacrifice your life rather than your word.”

Thomas Jackson (1824–1863) Confederate general

Misattributed, Jackson's personal book of maxims

Life

“Now, there are electromagnetic changes [during projections] that can be perceived with instruments. Certain electrical fields will make themselves known under these conditions. The fields have always existed, but they will become apparent to physical instruments only when they are being crossed -- in other words, at the very act of projection. Other hints: A cool body temperature but with room temperature between 73.8 and 75.9. High humidity is poor. The color of a room is important. Cool colors are best. Too warm colors are detrimental, being too closely allied with earthly conditions.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Source: Seth, Dreams & Projections of Consciousness, (1986), p. 347, quoting from Session 274

Color , Change

“Give a kind word (with a kindly thought behind the word) — you will be kind and receive kind words.”

W. Clement Stone (1902–2002) American New Thought author

Be Generous!

“Mr. President, I wish to tell you something personal - not about me, but about my generation. What you have just heard about the Jewish people's inherent rights to the Land of Israel may seem academic to you, theoretical, even moot. But not to my generation. To my generation of Jews these eternal bonds are indisputable and incontrovertible truths, as old as recorded time. They touch upon the very core of our national being. Ours is an almost biblical generation of suffering and courage. Ours is the generation of Destruction and Redemption. Ours is the generation that rose up from the bottomless pit of Hell. We were a helpless people, Mr. President. We were bled white, not once, not twice, but century after century, over and over again. We lost a third of our people in one generation - mine. One-and-a-half million of them were children - ours. No one came to our rescue. We were tertiated, Mr. President. … Tertiated, not decimated. The origin of the word 'decimation' is one in 10. When a Roman legion was found guilty of insubordination one in 10 was put to the sword. In our case it was one in three - tertiated! … Sir, I take an oath before you in the name of the Jewish people - this will never ever happen again.”

Menachem Begin (1913–1992) Israeli politician and Prime Minister

Amb. Yehuda Avner's account of a meeting with U.S. President Jimmy Carter (July 1977)

Children , People , Truth , Courage

“For the faithful, the patient, the hermetically pure, all the important things in this world — not life and death, perhaps, which are merely words, but the important things — work out rather beautifully.”

Jerome David Salinger book Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction

Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction (1963), Seymour: An Introduction (1959)

Life , Death , World , Faith

“The language of ideas creates a different universe: a universe which has multiplied the monkey's vocabulary of forty words to the million words in the English dictionary.”

Jacob Bronowski (1908–1974) Polish-born British mathematician

"The Imaginative Mind in Art" (1978)

Idea , Universe

“Now, the most eloquent irreligious individual voice in Nigeria is our first Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka. Soyinka is an eminent literary scholar. He has consistently argued for tolerance and respect for the humanity of all in the face of religious intolerance and extremism. Soyinka has not minced words in condemning the unconscionable religious gladiators in the region that have often turned the country into a theatre of absurdity and holy wars. He has been consistent in his condemnation of the jihadists and crusaders who often orchestrate religious bloodletting in their quest to implement Sharia law or to further some self-styled divine mandate. While I cannot say for sure how impactful his rational appeals are on policies and programs, Soyinka’s statements are sources of hope and light at times of darkness and despair. I can say for certain that on occasions when religious extremists push the nation to the brink. When religion blinds and people are unable to see or think clearly, when fear and fanaticism loom very large, Soyinka is a voice of rational sanity, thoughtful courage, and moderation.”

Leo Igwe (1970) Nigerian human rights activist

An Interview with Dr. Leo Igwe — Founder, Nigerian Humanist Movement (2017)

War , People , Fear , Religion

““I’m a man of my word,” Jeevan said. At that point in his directionless life he wasn’t sure if this was true or not, but it was nice to think that it might be.”

Emily St. John Mandel book Station Eleven

Source: Station Eleven (2014), Chapter 27 (p. 171)

Life , Thinking

“Poems are the dreams of the universe crystallized in words.”

David Zindell book The Broken God

Source: The Broken God (1992), p. 296

Dreams , Universe

“It is my burning desire to help Christians get back to a simple faith in God’s Word. Satan’s method has always been to instill [sic] doubt in God’s Word. The first sentence that came from Satan that is recorded for us in the Bible is: “Yea, hath God said?” He started by questioning God’s Word in the garden of Eden. It worked there so he has used it ever since. In the twentieth century the major attack Satan has launched has been against the first eleven chapters of Genesis. He knows that the entire Bible stands or falls on the validity of these chapters. I believe that the Bible is the infallible, inerrant, inspired, perfect Word of God. I believe that the Bible needs to be read and believed as it stands. Christians are often guilty of neglecting or twisting the Bible to fit their lifestyle or their preconceived ideas.”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Dissertation for doctor of philosophy in christian education (May 25, 1991)

God , Faith , Idea , Question

“Roger: It’s complicated. It kind of has different phases. It will be like Chris [Demakes, guitarist/singer] or I will have a song idea and Vinnie Fiorello [drummer/lyricist] will write lyrics that go with that song idea or Vinnie will just have words that he wrote down and we’ll take that and sort of mold it into a song. I mean it kind of happens in different ways and not everyone is always involved, and sometimes everyone is involved it just depends. There’s no like formula for writing songs at least not in our band. It’s pretty much however it comes apart and falls apart and everything if it feels right it feels right the song is the ultimate guide. Am I being too hippie for you?”

Roger Manganelli (1973) American musician

Way , Feeling , Idea , Dependency

“For the Norse people, the Man now named Odin, and Chief Norse God, we fancy, was such a man. A Teacher, and Captain of soul and of body; a Hero, of worth immeasurable; admiration for whom, transcending the known bounds, became adoration. Has he not the power of articulate Thinking; and many other powers, as yet miraculous? So, with boundless gratitude, would the rude Norse heart feel. Has he not solved for them the sphinx-enigma of this Universe; given assurance to them of their own destiny there? By him they know now what they have to do here, what to look for hereafter. Existence has become articulate, melodious by him; he first has made Life alive!—We may call this Odin, the origin of Norse Mythology: Odin, or whatever name the First Norse Thinker bore while he was a man among men. His view of the Universe once promulgated, a like view starts into being in all minds; grows, keeps ever growing, while it continues credible there. In all minds it lay written, but invisibly, as in sympathetic ink; at his word it starts into visibility in all. Nay, in every epoch of the world, the great event, parent of all others, is it not the arrival of a Thinker in the world—!”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

1840s, Heroes and Hero-Worship (1840), The Hero as Divinity

Life , Men , God , People

“Have you guys noticed that Madonna is British now? OK, let's talk about her lineage for a minute. Raised in Michigan, moved to New York, is British. She started turning British like at the Golden Globes and she was doing the interviews and she says "telly" instead of "television" and she uses the word "actually" way too much and then she's also sorta bringing her voice down to a register around here (brings her voice down) and she's being interviewed for the Golden Globes and she's got whole, you know, crazy hair that everybody hated and everybody has and they were saying, "Well, Madonna, we're so glad to have you at the Golden Globes." (speaks in Madonna British accent) "Well, actually, it is more fun to come here than watch it on the telly". You know. Look, I'm from the midwest- its a TV.”

Kathy Griffin (1960) American actress and comedian

Hot Cup Of Talk (1998)

Hate , Way , Guy

“I would like to see the word 'nationalization' banned from the socialist vocabulary.”

Philip Snowden, 1st Viscount Snowden (1864–1937) British politician

The Daily Herald (15 October 1928)

“Popery is such a thing as cannot, but for want of a word to express it, be called a religion; nor is it to be mentioned with that civility which is otherwise decent to be used in speaking about the differences of human opinion about divine matters…There has now for divers years a design been carried on, to change the lawful government of England into an absolute tyranny, and to convert the established Protestant religion into downright Popery…If under his present Majesty we have as yet seen no more visible effects of the same spirit than the firing of London…it is not to be attributed to the good nature or better principles of that sect, but to the wisdom of his Holiness, who observes that we are not of late so dangerous Protestants as to deserve any special mark of his indignation, but that we may be made better use of to the wrecking of those that are of our religion, and that if he do not disturb us, there are those amongst ourselves that are leading us into a fair way of reconciliation with him.”

Andrew Marvell (1621–1678) English metaphysical poet and politician

An Account of the Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government in England [1677] (reprinted in State Tracts: Volume I (1692), pp. 69 ff.).

Wisdom , Religion , Law , Way

“I think, like a lot of people on this issue, I have really changed my thinking here to, ‘I don’t ever want to stand in front of anybody’s happiness.’ That’s not my job, okay? If that word – ‘marriage’ – is really, really that important to you, I can go with it.”

Bruce Jenner (1949) American reality television personality and retired Olympic decathlete champion

On The Ellen Degeneres Show http://www.ew.com/article/2015/09/08/ellen-degeneres-caitlyn-jenner-gay-marriage.

Marriage , People , Thinking , Change

“[R]ace theory is at variance with all Korean traditions; not for nothing did the national language lack a word for race until modern times.”

Brian Reynolds Myers (1963) American professor of international studies

2010s, North Korea's State Loyalty Advantage (December 2011)

Time

“What is the use of speech? Silence were fitter:
Lest we should still be wishing things unsaid.
Though all the words we ever spake were bitter,
Shall I reproach you, dead?”

George William Russell (1867–1935) Irish writer, editor, critic, poet, and artistic painter

You Would Have Understood Me

Silence , Dead

“The third point that is relied on to justify slaveholding is, that it is Constitutional. That is guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States. I have heard it declared over and over again that the Constitution guarantees slavery. I deny it. In no article, in no section, in no line, in no word, in no syllable, can there be any recognition of the word 'slave' or 'slavery'. Why, sir. When I came up to take the oath to support the Constitution, a whispered buzz, half in earnest and half jocular, passed around. How can Lovejoy swear to support the Constitution? How can he take the oath? I could take the oath to support the Constitution, because I believe in the Constitution, because I hold to it, because my heart is loyal to it. Every part and parcel and portion of it, I believe in. But, I do not believe in the construction put upon it by those who claim its recognition and sanction of the practice of slaveholding.”

Owen Lovejoy (1811–1864) American politician

As quoted in His Brother's Blood: Speeches and Writings, 1838–64 https://books.google.com/books?id=qMEv8DNXVbIC&pg=PA198 (2004), edited by William Frederick Moore and Jane Ann Moore, pp. 198–199
1860s, Speech to the U.S. House of Representatives (April 1860)

Support , Heart , Parting

“Dissidents should be paid 13 months' salary for a year, otherwise our mindless unanimity will bring us to an even more hopeless state of stagnation. It is especially important to encourage unorthodox thinking when the situation is critical: At such moments every new word and fresh thought is more precious than gold. Indeed, people must not be deprived of the right to think their own thoughts.”

Boris Yeltsin (1931–2007) 1st President of Russia and Chairman of the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR

Source: 1990s, Against the Grain (1990), p. 172

People , Thinking

“Billiard-Fannon’s expression hardened. “Say the words,” he ordered. “Say them, or displease me. You do not wish to see the displeasure of the Holy One!”
“I do not wish to see the Holy One at all,” said Jhutti.”

Adam Roberts book Twenty Trillion Leagues Under the Sea

Source: Twenty Trillion Leagues Under the Sea (2014), Chapter 30, “The Tetragrammaton” (p. 277)

“The clear and simple words of common usage are always better than those of erudition. The jargon of the philosophers not seldom conceals an absence of thought.”

André Maurois (1885–1967) French writer

The Art of Writing

“I verily believe that the kingdom of God advances more on spoken words than it does on essays written and read; on words, that is, in which the present feeling and thought of the teaching mind break into natural and forceful expression.”

Richard Salter Storrs (1821–1900) American Congregational clergyman

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 484.

God , Feeling , Nature , Reading

“Every word I never spoke dies like a spark smothered in smoke pulled from the glow of a shitty cigarette.”

Tod A (1965) American musician

"Feels Like the End of the World", The Golden Hour (May 6, 2008).
Lyrics, Firewater

“I'm very glad that there was, in fact, a consequence. I think that this kind of coarse language doesn't belong anywhere in reasonable dialogue between reasonable people. … It gets ruined by this disgusting -- and I'll use the word 'disgusting' -- comment which doesn't belong in any polite company and certainly doesn't belong on any radio station that I would listen to.”

Condoleezza Rice (1954) American Republican politician; U.S. Secretary of State; political scientist

Interview http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=politicsNews&storyid=2007-04-13T215538Z_01_N13229123_RTRUKOC_0_US-USA-RACE-IMUS-RICE.xml&src=rss&rpc=22 by Michael Medved, April 13, 2007.

People , Thinking

“A finished or even a competent reasoner is not the work of nature alone… education develops faculties which would otherwise never have manifested their existence. It is, therefore, as necessary to learn to reason before we can expect to be able to reason, as it is to learn to swim or fence, in order to attain either of those arts. Now, something must be reasoned upon, it matters not much what it is, provided that it can be reasoned upon with certainty. The properties of mind or matter, or the study of languages, mathematics, or natural history may be chosen for this purpose. Now, of all these, it is desirable to choose the one… in which we can find out by other means, such as measurement and ocular demonstration of all sorts, whether the results are true or not.
.. Now the mathematics are peculiarly well adapted for this purpose, on the following grounds:—
1. Every term is distinctly explained, and has but one meaning, and it is rarely that two words are employed to mean the same thing.
2. The first principles are self-evident, and, though derived from observation, do not require more of it than has been made by children in general.
3. The demonstration is strictly logical, taking nothing for granted except the self-evident first principles, resting nothing upon probability, and entirely independent of authority and opinion.
4. When the conclusion is attained by reasoning, its truth or falsehood can be ascertained, in geometry by actual measurement, in algebra by common arithmetical calculation. This gives confidence, and is absolutely necessary, if… reason is not to be the instructor, but the pupil.
5. There are no words whose meanings are so much alike that the ideas which they stand for may be confounded.
…These are the principal grounds on which… the utility of mathematical studies may be shewn to rest, as a discipline for the reasoning powers. But the habits of mind which these studies have a tendency to form are valuable in the highest degree. The most important of all is the power of concentrating the ideas which a successful study of them increases where it did exist, and creates where it did not. A difficult position or a new method of passing from one proposition to another, arrests all the attention, and forces the united faculties to use their utmost exertions. The habit of mind thus formed soon extends itself to other pursuits, and is beneficially felt in all the business of life.”

Augustus De Morgan (1806–1871) British mathematician, philosopher and university teacher (1806-1871)

Source: On the Study and Difficulties of Mathematics (1831), Ch. I.

Life , Children , Truth , Education

“Logos and logic, crystal hypothesis,
Incipit and a form to speak the word
And every latent double in the word,

Beau linguist.”

Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) American poet

Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), It Must Be Abstract

“I have no skill in any craft, even in words.”

Vālmīki Ramayana

In p. 6.
Valmiki to Narada
Ramayana

“Words that they said to me at other times, I hear now.”

Antonio Porchia (1885–1968) Italian Argentinian poet

Palabras que me dijeron en otros tiempos, las oigo hoy.
Voces (1943)

Time

“But now, coming to your shameless assertion that ministers of the altar should be allowed to marry, I consider it superfluous to unsheathe the sword of my own words against you, since we see the armed forces of the whole Church and the massed array of all the holy Fathers ready to resist you. And where so great a host of heavenly troops opposes you, one can only wonder that your novel and rash attempt at doctrine does not submit when confronted by such authority.”

Peter Damian (1007–1072) reformist monk

Letter 141:7, To the Chaplains of Duke Godfrey of Tuscany. A.D. 1066.
The Fathers of the Church, Medieval Continuation, 2004, Letters 121- 150, Owen J. Blum, Irven Michael Resnick, trs., Catholic University Press; ISBN 081321372X, ISBN 9780813213729, vol. 6, p. 115 http://books.google.com/books?id=cD_swYLRJOUC&pg=PA115&dq=%22but+now+coming+to+your+shameless+assertion+that+ministers+of+the+altar+should+be+allowed+to+marry%22&hl=en&ei=xIPDTI7dEoP-8Ab59snaBg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CCUQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=%22but%20now%20coming%20to%20your%20shameless%20assertion%20that%20ministers%20of%20the%20altar%20should%20be%20allowed%20to%20marry%22&f=false

“"Stay calm, sir," I cried. "Don't excite yourself, it could mean death." He took me at my word and instantly fell inert. I didn't know whether he was obeying me or had died.”

Tom Baker (1934) English actor

While working as a hospital orderly.

Death

“The Holy Ghost carries on the whole Christian system in His truth. Not a baptism, not a marriage, not a Sacrament can be administered but by the Holy Ghost … There is no authority civil or religious: There can be no legitimate government but what is administered by the Holy Ghost. There can be no salvation without it. All without it is rebellion and perdition, or in more orthodox words damnation.”

John Adams (1735–1826) 2nd President of the United States

Adams as misquoted by David Barton on Glenn Beck (Fox News) on , shown in the film The Hidden Faith of the Founding Fathers (2010), at 2:21:32. Without the ellipses and substituted words, this section of Adams's letter of (21 December 1809) http://books.google.com/books?id=84oTAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA248 reads:
But my Friend there is something very serious in this Business. The Holy Ghost carries on the whole Christian system in this earth. Not a Baptism, not a Marriage not a Sacrament can be administered but by the Holy Ghost, who is transmitted from age to age by laying the hands of the Bishops on the heads of Candidates for the Ministry. In the same manner as the holy Ghost is transmitted from Monarch to Monarch by the holy oil in the vial at Rheims which was brought down from Heaven by a Dove and by that other Phyal which I have seen in the Tower of London. There is no Authority civil or religious: there can be no legitimate Government but what is administered by this Holy Ghost. There can be no salvation without it. All, without it is Rebellion and Perdition, or in more orthodox words Damnation. Although this is all Artifice and Cunning in the secret original in the heart, yet they all believe it so sincerely that they would lay down their Lives under the Ax or the fiery Fagot for it. Alas the poor weak ignorant Dupe human Nature. There is so much King Craft, Priest Craft, Gentlemens Craft, Peoples Craft, Doctors Craft, Lawyers Craft, Merchants Craft, Tradesmens Craft, Labourers Craft and Devils Craft in the world, that it seems a desperate and impracticable Project to undeceive it.
Do you wonder that Voltaire and Paine have made Proselytes? Yet there was as much subtlety, Craft and Hypocrisy in Voltaire and Paine and more too than in Ignatius Loyola.
This Letter is so much in the tone of my Friend the Abby Raynal and the Grumblers of the last age, that I pray you to burn it. I cannot copy it.
Your Prophecy my dear Friend has not become History as yet. I have no Resentment or Animosity against the Gentleman and abhor the Idea of blackening his Character or transmitting him in odious Colours to Posterity.
But I write with difficulty and am afraid of diffusing myself in too many Correspondences. If I should receive a Letter from him however I should not fail to acknowledge and answer it.
Misattributed

Marriage , Truth

“What was life like in the colonies? Probably the best word to describe it would be "colonial."”

Dave Barry (1947) American writer

Nonfiction, Dave Barry Hits Below the Beltway (2001)

Life

“My favourite word is ‘no’, because I have heard it from many people on many occasions. It spurned me to strive even harder in life in attaining my goals. I always gave priority to my passion”

Prito Reza (1984) Photographer

Life , People , Passion

“When I hear the words 'social order', I start looking around for somebody to pick a fight with.”

Lindsey Davis book The Accusers

The Accusers

Fight

“The value of a book about dealing with children is inversely proportional to the number of times it contains the word behavior.”

Alfie Kohn (1957) American author and lecturer

Published in Education Leadership, September 2005 http://www.alfiekohn.org/teaching/uncondtchg.htm

Children , Books , Behavior , Time

“There can be no doubt that the modem environment is changing faster than any environment ever previously changed; therefore, the social center of gravity constantly tends to shift more rapidly; and therefore modem civilization has unprecedented need of the administrative or generalizing mind. I take it to be an axiom, that perfection in administration must be commensurate to the bulk and momentum of the mass to be administered, otherwise the centrifugal will overcome the centripetal force, and the mass will disintegrate. In other words, civilization will dissolve. A moment arrives when the minds of any given dominant type fail to meet the demands made upon them, and are superseded by a younger type, which in tum is set aside by another still younger, until the limit of the administrative genius of that particular race has been reached. Then disintegration sets in, the social momentum is gradually relaxed, and society sinks back to a level at which it can cohere.”

Brooks Adams (1848–1927) American political writer

Source: The Theory of Social Revolutions,, p. 204-5, as cited in: Albert Lepawsky (1949), Administration, p. 9-10

Change , Perfection

“The words "Kiss Kiss Bang Bang," which I saw on an Italian movie poster, are perhaps the briefest statement imaginable of the basic appeal of movies. This appeal is what attracts us, and ultimately what makes us despair when we begin to understand how seldom movies are more than this.”

Pauline Kael book Kiss Kiss Bang Bang

"A Note on the Title".
Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (1968)

Imagination , Understanding , Kiss , Despair

“For this creating to take place (as it does from time to time) words have to be accepted as heirs of their forebears, as we are of ours. And in each case, what exists is often only a bankrupt inheritance; or the hinterlands of the unspoken.”

Geoffrey Hill (1932–2016) English poet and professor

A matter of timing: The Guardian, Saturday 21 September 2002 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2002/sep/21/featuresreviews.guardianreview28/print

Time

“The surrealist thinks he has outstripped the whole of literary history when he has written (here a word that there is no need to write) where others have written "jasmines, swans and fauns." But what he has really done has been simply to bring to light another form of rhetoric which hitherto lay hidden in the latrines.”

José Ortega Y Gasset book The Revolt of the Masses

Source: The Revolt of the Masses (1929), Chapter XI: The Self-Satisfied Age

History , Thinking , Light

“If you want ease and success in this world, the death of a martyr, to be saved on the Day of Loss, a shade on the Day of the burning Qiyamat, and guidance on the Day of going astray, then take lessons from the Qur’an. Surely it is the word of the Merciful, a protection from the Satan, and one of the most weightiest of things for the scale of (good) deeds”

Muhammad (570–632) Arabian religious leader and the founder of Islam

on the Day of Judgement
Jami’ul Akhbar, Page 78
Shi'ite Hadith

Death , World , Loss , Success

“One thing that cannot be denied to the realists: a constant and intense desire to write well, to write artistically. When I think of what they have done in the matter of the use of words, of the myriad verbal effects they have discovered, of the thousand forms of composition they have created, how they have remodelled and refashioned the language in their untiring striving for intensity of expression for the very osmazome of art, I am lost in ultimate wonder and admiration.”

George Moore (novelist) (1852–1933) Irish novelist, short-story writer, poet, art critic, memoirist and dramatist

Source: Confessions of a Young Man http://www.gutenberg.org/files/12278/12278-h/12278-h.htm (1886), Ch. 13.

Art , Thinking

“I think one of the hallmarks of a spiritual maturity (or even a human maturity) is the ability to shift perspective. (…) We often use these words that give this… impression, which I think is a false impression ultimately, that there's some ultimate perspective that is the right and correct perspective, as if unity consciousness or something is the correct perspective. But, you know, if I'm a 3-year-old kid and someone's threatening my life, and my mother's next to me, I want her to be in a fierce perspective, right? I don't want her to kinda just go "it's all one, so it really doesn't matter if you're harmed.”

Adyashanti (1962) Spiritual teacher

It does matter. And so... yeah, I think the ability to shift perspective is really vital to our functionality.”
Wake Up San Francisco event (2015)
Source: Alanis Morissette - Wake Up San Francisco with Adyashanti & Tami Simon - YouTube (starts at 5:45) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jr_ClddVgJs

Life , Thinking , Falseness

“But Joenes then made a speech which was a beauty, and I cannot recall it word for word, but the idea was that laws are made by man and thus must partake of the evil nature of man, and that true morality lies in following the true dictates of the illuminated soul.
“A Commie, huh?””

Robert Sheckley book Journey Beyond Tomorrow

said the lead cop.
Source: Journey Beyond Tomorrow (1962), Chapter 2 “Lum’s Meeting With Lety Barrera Joenes” (p. 18)

Law , Beauty , Soul , Idea

“The same definition issue arises with the word “election.” In a free society, the day of the vote is the culmination of a long democratic process that depends on equal access to an unfettered media, fair conditions, debates, etc., none of which have existed in Russia for nearly 20 years. Postulating that Putin would win anyway even if the March 18 election were honest is a meaningless exercise. If he and his policies were truly popular, in the real sense of the word, he wouldn’t need to spend so much time and effort dominating the media, eliminating rivals, and rigging elections large and small. Persecuting bloggers and arresting a single protester standing in the town square with an anti-Putin sign does not strike me as the behavior of a ruler who believes in his own popularity.”

Garry Kasparov (1963) former chess world champion

2010s, The Truth About Putin (2018)

Behavior , Exercises , Sense , Effort

“Old poetics played a large part in my alchemy of the word.”

Arthur Rimbaud (1854–1891) French Decadent and Symbolist poet

La vieillerie poétique avait une bonne part dans mon alchimie du verbe.
Une Saison en Enfer http://www.mag4.net/Rimbaud/poesies/Season.html (A Season in Hell) (1873)

Parting

“Always to me any aroused group was a good group, and therefore I accepted an invitation to talk to the women's branch of the Ku Klux Klan at Silver Lake, New Jersey, one of the weirdest experiences I had in lecturing. […] Never before had I looked into a sea of faces like these. I was sure that if I uttered one word, such as abortion, outside the usual vocabulary of these women they would go off into hysteria. And so my address that night had to be in the most elementary terms, as though I were trying to make children understand. In the end, through simple illustrations I believed I had accomplished my purpose. A dozen invitations to speak to similar groups were proffered. The conversation went on and on, and when we were finally through it was too late to return to New York.”

Margaret Sanger (1879–1966) American birth control activist, educator and nurse

Source: Margaret Sanger: An Autobiography (1938), Chapter 29, "While the Doctors Consult", p. 366.

Women , Children , Understanding , Sea

“At last, after many lives of striving, many lives of working, growing purer and nobler and wiser, life after life, the Soul makes a distinct and clear speaking forth of a will that now has grown strong; and when that will announces itself as a clear and definite purpose, no longer the whisper that aspires, but the word that commands, then that resolute will strikes at the gateway which leads to the Outer Court of the Temple, and strikes with a knocking which none may deny— for it has in it the strength of the Soul that is determined to achieve, and that has learned enough to understand the vastness of the task that it undertakes.”

Annie Besant (1847–1933) British socialist, theosophist, women's rights activist, writer and orator

p. 17

Life , Soul , Understanding , Strong

“Hayek sees that the zero-sum vision is fired by an implacable negative energy. It is not the concrete vision of some real alternative that animates the socialist critic of the capitalist order. It is hostility toward the actual, and in particular toward those who enjoy advantages within it. Hence the belief in equality remains vague and undefined, except negatively. For it is essentially a weapon against the existing order – a way of undermining its claims to legitimacy, by discovering a victim for every form of success. The striving for equality is, in other words, based in ressentiment in Nietzsche’s sense, the state of mind that Max Scheler identified as the principal motive behind the socialist orthodoxy of his day. It is one of the major problems of modern politics, which no classical liberal could possibly solve, how to govern a society in which resentment has acquired the kind of privileged social, intellectual, and political position that we witness today.”

Roger Scruton (1944–2020) English philosopher

"Hayek and conservatism", in Edward Feser (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Hayek (2006)

Hostility , Way , Motivation , Problem

“The continuance of India within the British Empire is essential to the Empire's existence and is consequently a paramount interest both of the United Kingdom and of the Dominions…for strategic purposes there is no half-way house between an India fully within the Empire and an India totally outside it…Should it once be admitted or proved that Indians cannot govern themselves except by leaving the Empire – in other words, that the necessary goal of political development for the most important section of His Majesty's non-European subjects is independence and not Dominion status – then the logically inevitable outcome will be the eventual and probably the rapid loss to the Empire of all its other non-European parts. It would extinguish the hope of a lasting union between "white" and "coloured" which the conception of a common subjectship to the King-Emperor affords and to which the development of the Empire hitherto has given the prospect of leading…In discussion of the wealth of India it is usual to forget the principal item, which is four hundred millions of human beings, for the most part belonging to races neither unintelligent nor slothful…[British policy should be to] create the preconditions of democracy and self-government by as soon as possible making India socially and economically a modern state.”

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

Memorandum on Indian Policy (16 May 1946), from Simon Heffer, Like the Roman. The Life of Enoch Powell (Phoenix, 1999), pp. 104-105.
1940s

Hope , Way , Democracy , Loss

“The Department of Foreign Affairs and the Department of Justice should immediately and without delay get in touch with their counterparts and demand the attendance of the four witnesses. Such demand is covered by the Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA) which calls not only for Respect for Law but the obligation to make available the US personnel for investigative or judicial proceedings. As worded in Article V, "US military authorities shall, upon formal notification by the Philippine authorities and without delay, make such personnel available to those authorities in time for any investigative or judicial proceedings." The VFA clearly states that the Philippines has criminal jurisdiction over US soldiers involved in a crime in the country, and it is a matter of invoking it with speed and conviction. The VFA, undoubtedly, is one sided and as such we must always insist and be vigilant with what is accorded us as a matter of sovereign right in that treaty. This is incident calls for the Philippine authorities’ and the Filipinos’ righteous indignation to fight for custody of the suspect and demand for the physical availability of the four American witnesses. We cannot just sit idly by and watch while our laws are being subverted. If we cannot defend, protect nor assist our fellow Filipino right here in our own soil, what chilling message do we get out there to our people and especially to those who are outside Philippine soils? We cannot begrudge the US for acting to protect the interests of its nationals and its interests. Our own officials should also, with the same fervor, do the same. This is why I continue my call for the review of the VFA for clearer, stronger and stricter stipulations which are mutually beneficial to both parties in every step of the way.”

Francis Escudero (1969) Filipino politician

Escudero, F. [Francis]. (2014, December 16). Retrieved from Official Facebook Page of Francis Escudero https://www.facebook.com/senchizescudero/posts/10152798060815610/
2014, Facebook

People , Justice , Law , Way

“One word is too often profaned
For me to profane it;
One feeling too falsely disdained
For thee to disdain it.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) English Romantic poet

One Word is Too Often Profaned http://www.readprint.com/work-1370/Percy-Bysshe-Shelley (1821), st. 1

Feeling , Falseness

“Consolidation didn’t make him a New Yorker, and nothin’ on earth can. A man born in Germany can settle down and become a good New Yorker. So can an Irishman; in fact, the first word an Irish boy learns in the old country is “New York,” and when he grows up and comes here, he is at home right away. Even a Jap or a Chinaman can become a New Yorker, but a Brooklynite never can. p. 41”

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

Plunkitt of Tammany Hall, Chapter 10, Brooklynites Natural-Born Hayseeds

Home , Boy , Learning , Country

“Well I'm afraid it simply does, um, [the Catholic Church] does condemn [homosexuality], yes, it calls it a - the official word is disorder, but it was refined by the current Pontiff, Ratzinger, who called it a 'moral evil'. But on the other hand we must remember, as the point that was made is that the church is very loose on moral evils because, although they try to accuse people like me who believe in the empiricism and the enlightenment of somehow what they call moral relativism, as if it's some appalling sin where what it actually means is thought, um, they um, they for example thought that slavery was perfectly fine… absolutely okay, and then they didn't, and what is the point of the Catholic Church if it says 'oh well we couldn't know better because nobody else did?”

Stephen Fry (1957) English comedian, actor, writer, presenter, and activist

(To the affirmative team) Then what are you for?!
Answering a question during the Intelligence² debate: "The Catholic Church is a force for good in the world", November 7th 2009
2000s

People , Evil

“No one has been a more consistent opponent of Communism than I have for the last twenty-five years. I will unsay no word that I have spoken about it. But all this fades away before the spectacle which is now unfolding. … I see the Russian soldiers standing on the threshold of their native land, guarding the fields which their fathers have tilled from time immemorial. I see them guarding their homes where mothers and wives pray—ah, yes, for there are times when all pray—for the safety of their loved ones, for the return of the bread-winner, of their champion, of their protector. I see the ten thousand villages of Russia where the means of existence is wrung so hardly from the soil, but where there are still primordial human joys, where maidens laugh and children play.”

Winston S. Churchill book The Second World War

Radio broadcast (22 June 1941) on the day Germany invaded the Soviet Union, quoted in Martin Gilbert, Finest Hour: Winston S. Churchill, 1939–1941 (London: Heinemann, 1983), p. 1120
The Second World War (1939–1945)

Love , Children , Home , Communication

“If this is not what springs immediately to mind as soon as the words “on average” are appended to a description of mean differences, then the words “on average” have not rectified the damage done by the use of means to describe populations of varied individuals.”

Steve Stewart-Williams (1971)

Source: The Ape that Kicked the Hornet's Nest (2013), p. 268

Spring