Quotes about work
page 70

Walter Rauschenbusch photo
Alan Charles Kors photo
Ernest King photo
Richard Long photo
Ingmar Bergman photo

“I don't want to produce a work of art that the public can sit and suck aesthetically…. I want to give them a blow in the small of the back, to scorch their indifference, to startle them out of their complacency.”

Ingmar Bergman (1918–2007) Swedish filmmaker

As quoted in "Film master Ingmar Bergman dies at 89" by Myrna Oliver in Los Angeles Times (31 July 2007) http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-me-bergman31jul31,0,3877362,full.story?coll=la-home-world.

D. L. Hughley photo

“It's really no different for me 'cause I work for BET so it's like the writers are always on strike.”

D. L. Hughley (1963) American actor and comedian

Commenting on the Writers Guild strike.
Appearance on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno (January 17, 2008)

Werner Erhard photo

“When my integrity is lacking, I am clear that I just got to be a bit smaller as a person. That keeps me working on my integrity. And the thing about integrity is it’s a mountain with no top.”

Werner Erhard (1935) Critical Thinker and Author

[Peter Haldeman, w:Peter Haldeman, The Return of Werner Erhard, Father of Self-Help, The New York Times, November 28, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/29/fashion/the-return-of-werner-erhard-father-of-self-help.html?ref=fashion&_r=0]

Hillary Clinton photo

“Life is too short, time is too precious, and the stakes are too high to dwell on what might have been. We have to work together for what still can be.”

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

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/06/07/clinton-concession-speech_n_105842.html, Washington D.C., June 7, 2008
Presidential campaign (January 20, 2007 – 2008)

Mitch Albom photo

“If the culture doesn't work, don't buy it.”

Tuesdays with Morrie (1997)

Marc Randazza photo
Henry Flynt photo
John Gray photo
Hillary Clinton photo
Corbin Bleu photo
Ellen Willis photo
Robert Crumb photo
Hillary Clinton photo
John Stuart Mill photo

“Among a people without fellow-feeling, especially if they read and speak different languages, the united public opinion, necessary to the working of the representative government, cannot exist.”

John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) British philosopher and political economist

Source: On Representative Government (1861), Ch. XVI: Of Nationality, As Connected with Representative Government (p. 382)

Michael T. Flynn photo

“One night at Socko and a year of probation were no comparison to the punishment at home. My rehabilitation was one of the fastest in adolescent history. I had it coming, and it taught me that moral rehab is possible. I behaved during my term of probation and stopped all of my criminal activity. But I would always retain my strong impulse to challenge authority and to think and act on my own whenever possible. There is room for such types in America, even in the disciplined confines of the United States Army. I’m a big believer in the value of unconventional men and women. They are the innovators and risk takers. Apple, one of the world’s most creative and successful high-tech companies, lives by the vision of transformation through exception. “Here’s to the crazy ones,” Apple’s campaign says. “The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.” If you talk to my colleagues, they’ll tell you that I’m cut from the same cloth. My military biography starts badly. I was a miserable dropout in my freshman year of college (1.2 GPA), enlisted in a delayed-entry Marine Corps program, went to work as a lifeguard at a local beach, and then came the first of several miracles: an Army ROTC scholarship. Little did I know that my rebellious activities, such as skipping class and sundry other mistakes, would lead me to playing basketball (which I was very good at) with an ROTC instructor who saw something in me. Not only that, he took surprising initiative.”

Michael T. Flynn (1958) 25th United States National Security Advisor

Introduction
The Field of Fight: How We Can Win the Global War Against Radical Islam and Its Allies (2016)

Giorgio Morandi photo
Gideon Mantell photo
Donald Tusk photo

“We want to understand democracy as an endless discussion, or a constant debate when we choose a path. (…) But when the consensus comes, (…) we work as one body.”

Donald Tusk (1957) Polish politician, current President of the European Council

Speech during Platorma Obywatelska congress in Chorzów (29 June 2013)

Donald J. Trump photo

“I see Rick Perry the other day. … He's doing very poorly in the polls. He put on glasses so people will think he's smart. And it just doesn't work! You know people can see through the glasses!”

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

2015-07-21
Trump Campaign Statement on Rick Perry
NPR
http://www.npr.org/sections/itsallpolitics/2015/07/21/424994751/the-best-insults-of-the-trump-kickoff-speech
2010s, 2015

“The notion of style has long been the art historian's principal mode of classifying works of art. By style he selects and shapes the history of art.”

George Kubler (1912–1996) American art historian

George Kubler summarizing the view of Meyer Schapiro (with whom he disagrees), quoted by Alpers in Lang, Berel (ed.), The Concept of Style, 1987, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, ISBN 0801494397

Julian of Norwich photo
Nicholas Serota photo
Christopher Walken photo
Adolf Eichmann photo
Orson Welles photo

“My father once told me that the art of receiving a compliment is, of all things, the sign of a civilized man. He died soon afterwards, leaving my education in this important matter sadly incomplete; I'm only glad that, on this, the occasion of the rarest compliment he ever could have dreamed of, that he isn't here to see his son so publicly at a loss. In receiving a compliment, or in trying to, the words are all worn out by now. They're polluted by ham and corn. And, when you try to scratch around for some new ones, it's just an exercise in empty cleverness. What I feel this evening, is not very clever. it's the very opposite of emptiness. The corny old phrase is the only one I know to say it: my heart is full; with a full heart, with all of it, I thank you. This is Samuel Johnson, on the subject of what he calls contrarieties: "there are goods, so opposed that we cannot seize both, and, in trying, fail to seize either. Flatter not yourself, he says, with contrarieties. Of the blessings set before you, make your choice. No man can, at the same time, fill his cup from the source, and from the mouth of the nile." For this business of contrarieties has to do with us. With you, who are paying me this compliment, and for me, who has strayed so far from this hometown of ours. Not that I am alone in this, or unique, I am never that; but there are a few of us left in this conglomerated world of us who still trudge stubbornly along this lonely rocky road; and this is in fact our contrariety. We don't move nearly as fast as our cousins on the freeway; we don't even get as much accomplished just as the family sized farm can't possibly raise as many crops or get as much profit as the agricultural factory of today. What we do come up with has no special right to call itself better it's just.. different. No if there's any excuse for us it all, it's that we're simply following the old American tradition of the maverick, and we are a vanishing breed. This honor I can only accept in the name of all the mavericks. And also, as a tribute to the generosity of all the rest of you; to the givers, to the ones with fixed addresses. A maverick may go his own way but he doesn't think that it's the only way, or ever claim that it's the best one, except maybe for himself. And don't imagine that this raggle-taggle gypsy-o is claiming to be free. It's just that some of the necessities to which I am a slave are different from yours. As a director, for instance, I pay myself out of my acting jobs. I use my own work to subsidize my work (in other words I'm crazy). But not crazy enough to pretend to be free. But it's a fact that many of the films you've seen tonight could never have been made otherwise. Or, if otherwise, well, they might have been better, but certainly they wouldn't have been mine. The truth is I don't believe that this great evening would ever have brightened my life if it wasn't for this: my own, particular, contrariety. Let us raise our cups, then, standing as some of us do on opposite ends of the river, to what really matters to us all: to our crazy, beloved profession, to the movies — to good movies, to every possible kind.”

Orson Welles (1915–1985) American actor, director, writer and producer

Speech given upon his acceptance of the AFI Lifetime Achievement award. Viewable http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oXJnxClGamA&list=HL1349840607&feature=mh_lolz

Geoff Dyer photo
V. P. Singh photo
Nanak photo
Cesar Chavez photo
Timothy Dwight IV photo
Ursula Goodenough photo
Ward Cunningham photo

“Let's not worry about what somebody reading the code tomorrow is going to think. Let's not worry about whether it's efficient. Let's not even worry about whether it will work. Let's just write the simplest thing that could possibly work.”

Ward Cunningham (1949) American computer programmer who developed the first wiki

A Conversation with Ward Cunningham (2003), The Simplest Thing that Could Possibly Work

Alexander Pope photo

“A work of art that contains theories is like an object on which the price tag has been left.”

Alexander Pope (1688–1744) eighteenth century English poet

Une oeuvre où il y a des théories est comme un objet sur lequel on laisse la marque du prix.
Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, part VII: Time Regained, chapter III, "An Afternoon Party at the House of the Princesse de Guermantes" ( French version http://web.archive.org/web/20010708070436/http://gallica.bnf.fr/proust/TempsRetrouve.htm and English translation http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/p/proust/marcel/p96t/chapter3.html).
Misattributed

Simone Campbell photo

“The fact is, people work hard and rely on Food Stamps—or SNAP Program—to be able to feed their families. When they work full-time they still live in poverty. That's wrong in our nation. Students who are losing hope because of the difficulty of finding jobs in this tough economy. What we need to do, what is best for America, is to raise wages, create jobs, and then we will move forward. Hard-working people are trying their best, but those who hold on to capital are not sharing the wealth, and there is the problem.”

Simone Campbell (1945) American Roman Catholic Religious Sister and activist

Simone Campbell, interviewed by Al Sharpton, " Nun Responds To Hannity's 'Communist' Comparison: 'Name Calling Is About All That Exists On That Side' http://www.mediamatters.org/video/2014/04/21/nun-responds-to-hannitys-communist-comparison-n/198961," Media Matters for America video, 4:12, April 21, 2014.

Basshunter photo
George Soros photo
Alexej von Jawlensky photo

“It was very tiny, our house [ St. Prex ], and I had no room for my own, only a window, which I could call mine. But I was so gloomy and unhappy in my soul after all those dreadful experiences, that I was quite content to sit at the window and quietly collect my thoughts and feelings. I had a bit of paint but no easel, so I went into Lausanne – twenty minutes on the train – and bought a small easel from a photographer... It was highly unsuitable for painting but for more than twenty years I have painted my best work on that little easel”

Alexej von Jawlensky (1864–1941) Russian painter

in mainly small sizes
from: 'Lebenserinnerungen', 1938
This small house was in St. Prex, in Switzerland, lake Genova, where Jawlensky concentrated himself on the view around his house in the years after 1914.. ..he painted here more than 400 'Variations on a landscape theme', in St. Prex
Source: 1936 - 1941, Life Memories' (1938), p. 186

William Saroyan photo

“My work is writing, but my real work is being.”

William Saroyan (1908–1981) American writer

Obituaries (1979)

Jean de La Bruyère photo

“Criticism is often not a science; it is a craft, requiring more good health than wit, more hard work than talent, more habit than native genius. In the hands of a man who has read widely but lacks judgment, applied to certain subjects it can corrupt both its readers and the writer himself.”

La critique souvent n'est pas une science; c'est un métier, où il faut plus de santé que d'esprit, plus de travail que de capacité, plus d'habitude que de génie. Si elle vient d'un homme qui ait moins de discernement que de lecture, et qu'elle s'exerce sur de certains chapitres, elle corrompt et les lecteurs et l'écrivain.
Aphorism 63
Les Caractères (1688), Des Ouvrages de l'Esprit

Lobão photo
Arthur Schopenhauer photo
William Henry Vanderbilt photo

“The public be damned. What does the public care for railroads except to get as much out of them for as small a consideration as possible? I don't take any stock in this silly nonsense about working for anybody's good but our own, because we are not. When we make a move, we do it because it is in our interest to do so, and not because we expect to do somebody else good. Of course, we like to do everything possible for the benefit of humanity in general, but when we do, we first see that we are benefiting ourselves. Railroads are not run on sentiment, but on business principles and to pay, and I don't mean to be egotistic when I say that the roads which I have had anything to do with have generally paid pretty well.”

William Henry Vanderbilt (1821–1885) American philanthropist

Quoted in Clarence P. Dresser, "Vanderbilt in the West" New York Times (9 October 1882). Dresser's account has Vanderbilt denying that he ran a particular passenger express service for the public benefit, but rather to drive down prices of a competing Pennsylvania Railroad service. By some accounts Dresser fabricated the interview except for the first sentence, which Vanderbilt said in refusing to give an interview. See "Reporter C. P. Dresser Dead", New York Times (25 April 1891).
Disputed

Anthony Trollope photo
Regina E. Dugan photo
Daniel De Leon photo
Walt Disney photo

“As a work of art it has the same status as a long conversation between two not very bright drunks…”

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

'A Blizzard of Tiny Kisses'
Essays and reviews, From the Land of Shadows (1982)

Vitruvius photo
Amy Hempel photo
Giorgio de Chirico photo
Jane Roberts photo
Gloria Estefan photo
Julian of Norwich photo

“Our courteous Lord willeth not that His servants despair, for often nor for grievous falling: for our falling hindereth not Him to love us. Peace and love are ever in us, being and working; but we be not alway in peace and in love.”

Julian of Norwich (1342–1416) English theologian and anchoress

The Thirteenth Revelation, Chapter 39
Context: Our courteous Lord willeth not that His servants despair, for often nor for grievous falling: for our falling hindereth not Him to love us. Peace and love are ever in us, being and working; but we be not alway in peace and in love. But He willeth that we take heed thus that He is Ground of all our whole life in love; and furthermore that He is our everlasting Keeper and mightily defendeth us against our enemies, that be full fell and fierce upon us; — and so much our need is the more for we give them occasion by our falling.

Vladimir Lenin photo
Lois McMaster Bujold photo
Henry Hazlitt photo
Mahela Jayawardene photo

“Ideas appropriate to a past social order have a strange power of influencing thought and action within a later institutional frame work.”

Eric Roll, Baron Roll of Ipsden (1907–2005) British economist

Introduction, p. 17
A History of Economic Thought (1939)

Honoré de Balzac photo

“Thinking is seeing," said he one day, carried away by some objection raised as to the first principles of our organisation."Every human science is based on deduction, which is a slow process of seeing by which we work up from the effect to the cause; or, in a wider sense, all poetry like every work of art proceeds from a swift vision of things.”

Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) French writer

Penser, c'est voir! me dit-il un jour emporté par une de nos objections sur le principe de notre organisation. Toute science humaine repose sur la déduction, qui est une vision lente par laquelle on descend de la cause à l'effet, par laquelle on remonte de l'effet à la cause; ou, dans une plus large expression, toute poésie comme toute oeuvre d'art procède d'une rapide vision des choses.
Honoré de Balzac, Louis Lambert http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Louis_Lambert (1832), translated by Clara Bell

Tom Cruise photo
Théodore Guérin photo

“I have already exceeded the amount of work my head can bear.”

Théodore Guérin (1798–1856) Catholic saint and nun from France

Letter to Sister Basilide, Madison, 1855-02-17.

John Von Neumann photo
El Lissitsky photo
Thomas Jefferson photo
Stanley Baldwin photo
Sri Aurobindo photo
Jacques Ellul photo
George William Curtis photo

“Mayor Macbeth, of Charleston, told General Howard that he did not believe that a bureau at Washington could manage the social relations of the people from the Potomac to the Rio Grande. But the answer to Mayor Macbeth is that he and his companions have managed those relations at a cost to the country of four years of civil war, three thousand millions of dollars, and hundreds of thousands of lives. The Freedmen's Bureau will hardly be as expensive as that. And while such a bureau merely defends the rights of a certain class under the laws, the aid societies give them that education which in the present state of local feeling would be inevitably withheld. The mighty arch of Sherman, wasting and taming the land, is followed by the noiseless steps of the band of unnamed heroes and heroines who are teaching the people. The soldier drew the furrow, the teacher drops the seed. There is many and many a devoted woman, hidden at this moment in the lowliest cabins of the South, whose name poets will not sing nor historians record, but whose patient toil the eye that marks the sparrow's fall beholds and approves. Not more noble, not more essential, was the work of the bravest and most famous of the heroes who fell in the wild storm of battle, than that of many a woman to us unknown, faithful through privation and exposure and disease, and perishing at the lonely outpost of duty in the act of helping the nation keep its word.”

George William Curtis (1824–1892) American writer

1860s, The Good Fight (1865)

Glenn Beck photo
Barbara Hepworth photo
Baba Amte photo
Michael Crichton photo
Neil deGrasse Tyson photo

“Do parallel universes exist? We don't know, uhm parallel universes are losing favor to the multiverse we have some cogent theoretical expectations that our universe might be just one of many spawned from this, sort of, this hyper-dimensional medium which we'll call the multiverse there's no data to support it but we have good theoretical premise to think that it's there and we have philosophical precedent we used to think Earth was special and unique. It wasn't, we got 8.. 9.. 8 planet we thought the Sun was special it's one of a hundred billion suns, the galaxy's special, no there's a hundred billion galaxies we have one universe or do we? The track record said why should there only be one? be open to the possibility that you don't live in the majority [looking? ] universe that's out there Would a separate universe.. when you say "different universe" slightly different laws of physics which (that's what I'm asking) oh this is the fun part because if you find, if you manage to get a portal to another universe don't be the first one to volunteer to go through because your atoms are working in this universe if a slightly different law of physics.. you could implode, explode come out with three heads who knows?”

Neil deGrasse Tyson (1958) American astrophysicist and science communicator

Neil deGrasse Tyson Stephen Colbert Interviews Neil deGrasse Tyson at Montclair Kimberley Academy - 2010-Jan-29 http://transcriptvids.com/v/YXh9RQCvxmg.html
2010s

Angela Davis photo
Frédéric Bazille photo

“[ Monet is].. hard at work for some time now. His paintings has really progressed, I'm sure it will attract a lot of attention. He has sold thousands of franc's worth of paintings in the last few days, and has one or two other small commissions. He's definitely on his way.”

Frédéric Bazille (1841–1870) French painter

Quote of Bazille in a letter to his brother, December 1865; as cited in The private lives of the Impressionists, Sue Roe, Harpen Collins Publishers, New York 2006, p. 43
1861 - 1865

Ellen Willis photo
Venkatraman Ramakrishnan photo
John Constable photo

“The climax of absurdity to which the art may be carried, when led away from nature by fashion, may be best seen in the works of Boucher… His landscape, of which he was evidently fond, is pastoral; and such pastorality! the pastoral of the Opera house.”

John Constable (1776–1837) English Romantic painter

Notes of Six Lectures on Landscape Painting (1836), C.R. Leslie, Memoirs of the Life of John Constable (1843), p. 343
1830s, his lectures History of Landscape Painting (1836)

Koxinga photo

“I will give you more and stronger ones. But if you still persist in refusing to listen to reason and decline to do my bidding, and if you wish deliberately to rush to your ruin, then I will shortly, in your presence, order your Castle to be stormed. (Here he pointed with one hand towards Fort Provintia.) My smart boys will attack it, conquer it, and demolish it in such a way, that not one stone will remain standing. If I wish to set my forces to work, then I am able to move Heaven and Earth; wherever I go, I am destined to win. Therefore take warning, and think the matter well over.”

Koxinga (1624–1662) Chinese military leader

Formosa under the Dutch: described from contemporary records, with explanatory notes and a bibliography of the island, 1903, William Campbell, Kegan Paul, 424, Dec. 20 2011 http://books.google.com/books?id=OpdMq-YJoeoC&pg=PA423&dq=koxinga+formosa+always+belonged+to+china&hl=en&ei=vsjiTergDM3TgAekqbzKBg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=7&ved=0CEQQ6AEwBg#v=onepage&q=same%20doom%20had%20they%20not%20taken%20to%20flight%20and%20gone%20out%20to%20sea.&f=false, Original from the University of Michigan(LONDON : KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH, TRUBNER & CO. LTD DRYDEN HOUSE, 43 GERRARD STREET, SOHO MDCCCCIII Edinburgh : T. and A. CONSTABLE, Printers to His Majesty)

Bill Nye photo

“I encourage you to look at the world around you and think about how it works. My friends, you can go forth and make this world a better place.”

Bill Nye (1955) American science educator, comedian, television host, actor, writer, scientist and former mechanical engineer

[NewsBank, 03I, Science Guy Wants You to Ask, 'Why?', The Columbus Dispatch, Ohio, October 24, 2001, Connie A. Higgins]

Ethan Hawke photo
Richard Strauss photo

“Melody as revealed in the greatest works of our classics is one of the most noble gifts which an invisible deity has bestowed on mankind.”

Richard Strauss (1864–1949) German composer and orchestra director

Recollections and Reflections

Zell Miller photo
Calvin Coolidge photo

“Johann Herbart’s work on education and particularly mathematical psychology influenced me. I think mathematics is the pure instance of construct functioning—the model of human behaviour.”

George Kelly (psychologist) (1905–1967) American psychologist and therapist

Attributed to George A. Kelly in Hinkle (1970, p. 91), as cited in: Fay Fransella and Robert A. Neimeyer. "George Alexander Kelly: The man and his theory." International handbook of personal construct psychology (2003): 21-31.

Mohammad Hidayatullah photo

“I was never in the mood of Lord Macaulay who said – I shall retire early I am very tired– I know that life meant that one must continue to occupy his time with work.”

Mohammad Hidayatullah (1905–1992) 11th Chief Justice of India

Speech By Mr. S. G. Page, Government Pleader, High Court, Bombay, Made On Monday, 28 September, 1992