Quotes about worth (2216 quotes, page 15)

“Mrs. Elvsted: You have some hidden motive in this, Hedda!
Hedda: Yes, I have. I want for once in my life to have power to mold a human destiny.
Mrs. Elvsted: Have you not the power?
Hedda: I have not—and never had it.
Mrs. Elvsted: Not your husband's?
Hedda: Do you think it's worth the trouble? Oh, if only you could understand how poor I am. And fate has made you so rich!”

Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906) Norwegian playwright, theatre director, and poet

Act II
Hedda Gabler (1890)

Life , Fate , Motivation , Understanding

“Beneath are deposited the remains of Lieut-Colonel Valentine Blacker, Companion of the Bath, of the Light Cavalry on the establishment of Fort Saint George. During ten years, Quarter Master General of the Madras Army, and subsequently Surveyor General of India. Obit. iv. February MDCCCXXVI. Aet. xl. Lieutenant-Colonel Blacker was an Officer distinguished alike for professional ability, for public zeal, for private worth, and for manliness of character. In testimony thereof his friends and comrades have caused this monument to be erected to his memory.”

Valentine Blacker (1778–1826) British colonial administrator

Gravestone.
About

Light , Memory

“I have received your critical essay [of C. L. Ragghianti who visited Morandi's studio frequently and watched him painting] for the catalogue of the Mattioli collection. I must confess that I am not a little disturbed by what you say. I shall say no more. My own desire is to continue to live with a little peace, which is the only thing that still allows me to work. I am sure I am worth much less than what you say. Not out of modesty, believe me. I only wish it were as you say. If you could, please avoid the comparison with Picasso. Furthermore I must point out an error of fact where you say on p. 4 that 'for those who might not know, Morandi draws, tries out plans of his compositions, etc.., etc..' – and you have had the occasion to see the plans of objects on my table. This only serves to immediately recover my position when I reassemble a composition. Nothing more. Another thing…. [tracing the shape of his feet on the floor]…. it's to mark a reference for re-establishing the point of view. Think about this, then. I am grateful for your concern, but believe me when I say it leaves me ill at ease.”

Giorgio Morandi (1890–1964) Italian painter

from his letter of 6 April 1953; as quoted in Morandi 1894 – 1964, ed: M. C. Bandera & R. Miracco, Museo d'Arte Moderna di Bologna, 2008; p. 44
1945 - 1964

Peace , Error , Thinking , Drawing

“Like Ronnie said, we're alone. All we have is family, for what it's worth.”

John Updike book Rabbit Remembered

Rabbit Remembered (2000)

Family

“I expect this to be my last venture in this field; 'tain't worth the grief”

Robert A. Heinlein book Grumbles from the Grave

Response to efforts to censor his first novel, Red Planet
Grumbles from the Grave (1989)

“Do you know the Halicti? Perhaps not. There is no great harm done: it is quite possible to enjoy the few pleasures of life without knowing the Halicti. Nevertheless, when questioned with persistence, those humble creatures with no history can tell us some very singular things; and their acquaintance is not to be disdained if we desire to enlarge our ideas a little upon the bewildering rabble of this world. Since we have nothing better to do, let us look into these Halicti. They are worth the trouble.”

Jean Henri Fabre (1823–1915) French entomologist and author

In 'The Halicti'

Life , Pleasure , World , History

“The worst thing to happen to the Jews since Mein Kampf…I can't look at it. It's so horrible. The Israelis that helped make this film were crooks. They never gave us the negative back, they never gave us statements — not that the film was worth anything…The lesson for Big Gus for young people is: Don't listen to anybody. We got lots of advice on that film from older, more experienced people. But the film stunk; it's a disgrace. What you saw was made from a half-inch video that somebody from Israel brought to us…The movie opened in Tel Aviv, but it opened the week of the Seven-Day War. So bombs were raining down outside, but we had a bomb inside the movie theater.”

Lloyd Kaufman (1945) American film director

Village Voice http://www.villagevoice.com/2014-01-15/film/troma-lloyd-kaufman-interview/ January 15, 2014
2014

War , People , Help

“I have said as much as that the aim of art was to destroy the curse of labour by making work the pleasurable satisfaction of our impulse towards energy, and giving to that energy hope of producing something worth its exercise.”

William Morris (1834–1896) author, designer, and craftsman

This has sometimes appeared in paraphrased form as: "The aim of art is to destroy the curse of labour by making work the pleasurable satisfaction of our impulse towards energy, and giving to that energy hope of producing something worth the exercise".
Signs of Change (1888), The Aims of Art

Pleasure , Hope , Art , Exercises

“Only the impossible is worth attempting. In everything else one is sure to fail.”

Celia Green (1935) British philosopher

The Decline and Fall of Science (1976)

“I think any music of any worth has been done by people who were very interested in the internal process of their soul and their mind that's taking place while they're writing music.”

John Frusciante (1970) American guitarist, singer, songwriter and record producer

On "The Heart is a Drum Machine" Documentary

People , Music , Soul , Thinking

“And I feel that something's coming, and it's not just in the wind.
It's more than just tomorrow, it's more than where we've been,
It offers me a promise, it's telling me "Begin",
I know we're needing something worth believing in.”

Harry Chapin (1942–1981) American musician

Remember When the Music
Song lyrics, Sequel (1981)

Feeling

“Being an old cynic myself I have strong notions about the true value of human gratitude. It is a currency whose worth plunges by the hour.”

Glen Cook book Soldiers Live

Source: Soldiers Live (2000), Chapter 95, “Fortress with No Name: Down Below” (p. 654)

Strong , Gratitude

“I'm tired of living, tired of living here in this land of small dogs, small feelings, small pleasures, small thoughts. One has to be satisfied, but I don't want to be satisfied. I won't be satisfied like a little dog, there's nothing more repulsive that small dogs when they come home frightened and satisfied from their small doggy adventures. I myself have been a big dog, but I won't be a big dog either, even if it is better to be a big dog than a little one. There's nothing between being a big dog and being a little one.I have been a big dog because I have deceived you all. I have also been a little dog because I have deceived myself. In the land of small dogs we all deceives ourselves, we all dream of small doggy adventures, but we are afraid of the greatest adventure of all. The small dogs have a panic-stricken horror of living a pure life, for the only adventure which is not small, because they think the only things worth living for are the moderately dirty ones. In the land of small dogs indecency is worse than immorality, people there don't know that only one thing is immoral: consciously wanting to hurt somebody. In the land of small dogs, therefore passive evil is more respected than active goodness.”

Stig Dagerman book A Burnt Child

Source: A Burnt Child (1948), p. 257

Life , People , Pleasure , Dogs

“I hold a mouses wit not worth a leke,
That hath but on hole for to sterten to.”

Geoffrey Chaucer book The Canterbury Tales

The Wife of Bath's Tale, l. 6154
The Canterbury Tales

“We used to think of cow's milk as a nearly perfect food. However, over the past several years, researchers have found new information that has caused many of us to change our opinion. This has provoked a lot of understandable controversy, but I have come to believe that cow's milk is not necessary for children. First, it turns out that the fat in cow's milk is not the kind of fat ("essential fatty acids") needed for brain development. Instead, milk fat is too rich in the saturated fats that promote artery blockages. Also, cow's milk can make it harder for a child to stay in iron balance. Milk is extremely low in iron and slows down iron absorption. It can also cause subtle blood loss in the digestive tract that causes the child to lose iron. … Some children have sensitivities to milk proteins, which show up as ear problems, respiratory problems, or skin conditions. Milk also has traces of antibiotics, estrogens, and other things a child does not need. There is, of course, nothing wrong with human breast milk — it is perfect for infants. For older children, there are many good soy and rice milk products and even nondairy "ice creams" that are well worth trying. If you are using cow's milk in your family, I would encourage you to give these alternatives a try.”

Benjamin Spock (1903–1998) American pediatrician and author of Baby and Child Care

Source: Dr. Spock's Baby and Child Care (1945), Seventh edition (1998), p. 346

Children , Family , Food , Understanding

“Here’s the problem with the web — this is so cool, it’s worth it. The internet is decentralized in the sense that you can kind of nuke any part of it and it still works. That was its original design. The World Wide Web isn’t that way. You go and knock out any particular piece of hardware, it goes away. Can we make a reliable web that’s served from many different places, kind of like how the Amazon cloud works, but for everybody? The answer is yes, you can. You can make kind of a pure to pure distribution structure, such that the web becomes reliable. Another is that we can make it private so that there’s reader privacy. Edward Snowden has brought to light some really difficult architectural problems of the current World Wide Web. The GCHQ, the secret service of the British, watched everybody using WikiLeaks, and then offered all of those IP addresses, which are personally identifiable in the large part, to the NSA. The NSA had conversations about using that as a means to go and… monitor people at an enhanced level that those are now suspects. Libraries have long had history with people being rounded up for what they’ve read and bad things happening to them. We have an interest in trying to make it so that there’s reader privacy”

Brewster Kahle (1960) American computer engineer, founder of the Internet Archive

Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle on Recode Decode https://www.recode.net/2017/3/8/14843408/transcript-internet-archive-founder-brewster-kahle-wayback-machine-recode-decode (March 8, 2017)

People , Secret , World , Way

“Our country is supposed to be of the people, by the people and for the people, and if that's not worth fighting for I don't know what is.”

Doris Haddock (1910–2010) American political activist

People , Fight , Country

“If we have nothing to do but service our own pleasure – because society has taught us that's all we're worth and we're exiled from positions of authority from which we could actually shape society – then we just become hedonists. Eventually, despite how great it may look on Saturday night, come Monday morning there's just purposelessness.”

Clive Barker (1952) author, film director and visual artist

The Advocate (Feb. 21, 1995)

Pleasure , Night

“After Homer and Dante, is a whole century of creating worth one Shakespeare?”

Dejan Stojanovic (1959) poet, writer, and businessman

“Tiredness,” p. 68
The Sun Watches the Sun (1999), Sequence: “A Stone and a Word”

“I think the best thing the Federal Gov. can do when it comes to education K-12 is to abolish the Federal Department of Education. The Federal Department of Education gives each state about 11 cents out of every school dollar that every state spends but it comes with about 16 cents worth of strings attached. So what I think the country … people do not understand is it’s a negative to take federal money… So just get the fed. govt. out of education completely. Leave education to the states. Fifty laboratories of innovation and best practice and in my opinion we would have some fabulous innovation that would get emulated because we are all so competitive.”

Gary Johnson (1953) American politician, businessman, and 29th Governor of New Mexico

Statement made to representatives of the Pagan Newswire Collective (PNC)
2011-10-16
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/paganswithdisabilities/2011/10/full-transcript-of-qa-with-presidential-candidate-gary-johnson/
2012-02-24
Sound Government

Money , People , Education , School

“The connection between facts and values is straightforward and philosophically uninteresting… values reduce to facts about the well-being of conscious creatures; the well-being of conscious creatures is what can be valued in this universe… Now, here’s the one bit of philosophy I’m going to anchor this to: imagine a universe in which every conscious creature suffers as much as it can for as long as it can – I call this the worst possible misery for everyone. The worst possible misery for everyone is bad. If the word bad is to mean anything, surely it applies to the worst possible misery for everyone… the moment you grant me that the worst possible misery for everyone is bad and therefore worth avoiding… well then you have every other possible constellation of conscious experience which, by definition, is better. So you have this continuum here of states of consciousness and given that consciousness is related to the way the universe is, it’s constrained by the laws of nature in some way, there are going to be right and wrong ways to move along this continuum… now this is, in philosophy, a somewhat controversial statement. I do not see how.”

Sam Harris (1967) American author, philosopher and neuroscientist

Sam Harris, Sam Harris: Can Science Determine Human Values? http://fora.tv/2010/11/10/Sam_Harris_Can_Science_Determine_Human_Values (2010/11/10)
2010s

Law , Way , Imagination , Nature

“My poor health was matched, as it often is when one is sick, by my poor mood. A deep melancholy often overtook me, and at times I asked myself whether life was worth the trouble of living.”

B.K.S. Iyengar (1918–2014) Indian yoga teacher and scholar

Light on Life: B.K.S. Iyengar's Yoga Insights

Life , Health , Mood , Time

“I saw a moving sight the other morning before breakfast in a little hotel where I slept in the dusty fields. The young man of the house shot a little wolf called coyote in the early morning. The little heroic animal lay on the ground, with his big furry ears, and his clean white teeth, and his little cheerful body, but his little brave life was gone. It made me think how brave all living things are. Here little coyote was, without any clothes or house or books or anything, with nothing to pay his way with, and risking his life so cheerfully — and losing it — just to see if he could pick up a meal near the hotel. He was doing his coyote-business like a hero, and you must do your boy-business, and I my man-business bravely, too, or else we won't be worth as much as a little coyote.”

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

To his young son from the Yosemite Valley on (28 August 1989)
1920s, The Letters of William James (1920)

Life , Books , Way , Boy

“…pornography is the orchestrated destruction of women's bodies and souls; rape, battery, incest, and prostitution animate it; dehumanization and sadism characterize it; it is war on women, serial assaults on dignity, identity, and human worth; it is tyranny. Each woman who has survived knows from the experience of her own life that pornography is captivity–the woman trapped in the picture used on the woman trapped wherever he's got her.”

Andrea Dworkin (1946–2005) Feminist writer

Introduction http://www.nostatusquo.com/ACLU/dworkin/PornIntro2.html, p xxvii.
Pornography, Men Possessing Women (1979)

Life , Women , War , Soul

“Brunetti does not necessarily create an automatic sea-change in the federal trademark registration regime. We will need to see what the USPTO does in the short term in response to the decision. If it allows previously “immoral or scandalous” marks to proceed to registration, then we should expect to see a flood of trademark applications for years' worth of a backlog of improperly-denied registrations. If the USPTO keeps sitting on its hands, however, that rush will likely be delayed until the Supreme Court (if it takes the case) decides the issue.”

Marc Randazza (1969) American writer

Decision , Change , Sea

““You are still infested with hope. You think there is a life worth living somewhere, and that some combination of action, restraint, knowledge, and luck will save you, if only you can get the mix right. Well, I’ve got news for you. Right here, right now—this is as good as it gets.”
“Things will get better!”
“Have they ever?” The dragon’s contempt was palpable. The cabin hatch hissed open. “Go. Return to your dormitory room and enjoy your present. Come back when you’ve grown large enough to look upon futility without flinching. Come back when you’ve despaired and moved beyond despair to vengefulness. Come back when you’ve decided to stop lying to yourself.””

Michael Swanwick book The Iron Dragon's Daughter

Source: The Iron Dragon's Daughter (1993), Chapter 17 (p. 304)

Life , Hope , Lying , Knowledge

“Man is about to be an automaton; he is identifiable only in the computer. As a person of worth and creativity, as a being with an infinite potential, he retreats and battles the forces that make him inhuman.
The dissent we witness is a reaffirmation of faith in man; it is protest against living under rules and prejudices and attitudes that produce the extremes of wealth and poverty and that make us dedicated to the destruction of people through arms, bombs, and gases, and that prepare us to think alike and be submissive objects for the regime of the computer.”

William O. Douglas (1898–1980) Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

Points of Rebellion (1970), p. 32–33
Other speeches and writings

People , Faith , Thinking , Personality

“In the early twentieth century the problem of production had been solved; after that it was the problem of consumption that plagued society. In the 1950s and '60s, consumer commodities and farm products began to pile up in vast towering mountains all over the Western World. As much as possible was given away — but that threatened to subvert the open market. By 1980, the pro tem solution was to heap up the products and burn them: billions of dollars of worth, week after week.”

Philip K. Dick book Solar Lottery

Source: Solar Lottery (1955), Chapter 2 (p. 16)

World , Mountain , Problem

“Some people say that i'm not worth it
I've made mistakes but nobody's perfect”

James Morrison (1984) English singer-songwriter and guitarist

One Last Chance
Song lyrics, Undiscovered (James Morrison album) (2006)

People , Perfection

“If one of two lovers is loyal, and the other jealous and false, how may their friendship last, for Love is slain! But sweetly and discreetly love passes from person to person, from heart to heart, or it is nothing worth. For what the lover would, that would the beloved; what she would ask of him that should he go before to grant. Without accord such as this, love is but a bond and a constraint. For above all things Love means sweetness, and truth, and measure.”

Marie de France medieval poet

Se l'uns des amans est loiax,
E li autre est jalox è faus,
Si est amors entr'ex fausée,
Ne puet avoir lunge durée.
Amors n'a soing de compagnun,
Boin amors n'est se de Dex nun,
De cors en cors, de cuer en cuer,
Autrement n'est prex à nul fuer.
Tulles qui parla d'amistié,
Dist assés bien en son ditié,
Que vent amis, ce veut l'amie
Dunt est boine la compaignie,
S'ele le veut è il l'otreit.
Dunt la druerie est à dreit,
Puisque li uns l'autre desdit,
N'i a d'amors fors c'un despit;
Assés puet-um amors trover,
Mais sens estuet al' bien garder,
Douçour è francise è mesure.
"Graelent", line 85; pp. 149-50.
Misattributed

Love , Friendship , Truth , Lovers

“I had taken up the question of interdivisional relations with Mr. Durant [president of GM at the time] before I entered General Motors and my views on it were well enough known for me to be appointed chairman of a committee "to formulate rules and regulations pertaining to interdivisional business" on December 31, 1918. I completed the report by the following summer and presented it to the Executive Committee on December 6, 1919. I select here a few of its first principles which, though they are an accepted part of management doctrine today, were not so well known then. I think they are still worth attention.
I stated the basic argument as follows:
The profit resulting from any business considered abstractly, is no real measure of the merits of that particular business. An operation making $100,000.00 per year may be a very profitable business justifying expansion and the use of all the additional capital that it can profitably employ. On the other hand, a business making $10,000,000 a year may be a very unprofitable one, not only not justifying further expansion but even justifying liquidation unless more profitable returns can be obtained. It is not, therefore, a matter of the amount of profit but of the relation of that profit to the real worth of invested capital within the business. Unless that principle is fully recognized in any plan that may be adopted, illogical and unsound results and statistics are unavoidable …”

Alfred P. Sloan (1875–1966) American businessman

Source: My Years with General Motors, 1963, p. 49

Question , Business , Thinking , Time

“I told you so. Seems like I'm out here a lot saying that to you people, right? I know it seems like a lot, but the truth is i said that i would beat Jeff, and i did. I told you so. I said that i would get rid of Jeff Hardy FOREVER, and i did. I told you so. And then i said i would make The Undertaker tap out to the Anaconda Vice, and you laughed! But then i did just that. And contrary to what you people believe, i didn't come out here to brag about becoming the first and ONLY man in history to make the Phenom, The Undertaker, tap out. I came out here to confront The Undertaker. I came out here to confront The Undertaker in MY ring, or my yard, if you will. I came out here to stick MY World Heavyweight Championship in his face, and look him in the eye, and say to him, I TOLD YOU SO! But, of course, he's conveniently not here right now, so instead, i think i'll address all of you people. It's come to my attention that you people think I have been preaching to you. Alright, we'll call a space a spade. The truth is, YES i have. Because you people need a good preaching to. You people need somebody you can look up to, you need a leader who isn't morally corrupt, and you need someone that's righteous, not self-righteous. And i know what your all gonna do next, your gonna do exactly what your hero, the Undertaker, did, your gonna give up! Hell, by the looks at half of you, you already have. I mean, what kind of life is it that you live? What kind of existence do you have where you wake up in the morning and you have to pop a pill to help crawl out of bed? And then, then you ravage your body with pitchers of beer, and that's supposed to somehow heal your broken self-worth. And then you just make excuses about inhaling poison into your lungs just to calm your nerves. And then, at the end of your sad, pathetic, lonely day, your in need of another pill to make you forget everything. You need a pill to help you sleep. (The crowd boos as Punk mouths "you make me sick") You are all just a legion of inebriated zombies, waiting in line at the pharmacy with your hand out, begging and pleading for that newest anti-depressant that you think is going to put an artificial smile on your face. You scratch and you claw for scapegoats for all of your inadequacies, and believe me, you have a LOT of inadequacies. And don't tell me that you self medicate yourself to forget about it all, don't tell me you don't self medicate to hide from all your inadequacies, don't tell me you don't do it. Because if you do, well then your a liar too. Your lying to yourself, your lying to yourselves right now. Your lying to the person next to you, you go home and you lie to your family, and it's insulting because right now your lying to ME. And i can see right through all of you people and your lies, because i am not a liar. I am a man who means what he says and says what he means. What i am is a prophet, i am the choice of a new generation, i am a champion that everybody can finally be proud of, i am the first and only straight-edge World Heavyweight Champion in history. And if your not straight-edge like me, well, that just means i'm better than you!”

Phil Brooks (1978) American professional wrestler and mixed martial artist

September 18, 2009
Friday Night SmackDown

Life , People , Truth , Lie

“The Devourers are the most accomplished merchants in all the many universes — so accomplished, indeed, that they sell only trash. There is a deep necessity in this, for the Devourers must occupy all their cunning in perfecting their methods of selling and so have not an instant to spare in considering the worth of what they sell.”

Fritz Leiber (1910–1992) American writer of fantasy, horror, and science fiction

Short Fiction, Bazaar of the Bizarre (1963)

Universe , Perfection

““You ever notice, Joe,” he asked, mechanically picking up the mug, “that it always takes a little more trouble to get something than the thing was really worth?”
Joe considered it. “Better than taking a lot of trouble and getting nothing.”
Dundee sipped the coffee. He didn’t seem to have heard Joe. “There’s so much weariness and fatigue in it all. For every action there is an equal… stupefaction. No, that might be bearable—it’s greater than the action.””

Tim Powers book The Anubis Gates

Source: The Anubis Gates (1983), Chapter 14 (p. 342)

Coffee

“Only a personal experience of it, or a prolonged study of men who have passed into the new life, will enable us to realize what this actually is; but it has seemed to the present writer that to pass in review, even briefly and imperfectly, instances in which the condition in question has existed would be worth while.”

Richard Maurice Bucke (1837–1902) prominent Canadian psychiatrist in the late 19th century

First Words
Cosmic Consciousness (1901)

Life , Men , Question , Study

“So man's proneness to engage in war is still a fact. But wisdom born of experience should tell us that war is obsolete. There may have been a time when war served as a negative good by preventing the spread and growth of an evil force, but the destructive power of modern weapons eliminated even the possibility that war may serve as a negative good. If we assume that life is worth living and that man has a right to survive, then we must find an alternative to war. In a day when vehicles hurtle through outer space and guided ballistic missiles carve highways of death through the stratosphere, no nation can claim victory in war. A so-called limited war will leave little more than a calamitous legacy of human suffering, political turmoil, and spiritual disillusionment. A world war - God forbid! - will leave only smoldering ashes as a mute testimony of a human race whose folly led inexorably to ultimate death. So if modern man continues to flirt unhesitatingly with war, he will transform his earthly habitat into an inferno such as even the mind of Dante could not imagine.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

1960s, The Quest for Peace and Justice (1964)

Life , Death , Wisdom , God

“And I've always said, you know, that I don't respect people that don't proselytize. I don't respect that at all. If you believe that there's a heaven and hell, and people could be going to hell — or not getting eternal life, or whatever — and you think that, "Well, it's not really worth tellin' 'em this, because it would make it socially awkward", and atheists who think that people shouldn't proselytize, "Just leave me alone. Keep your religion to yourself"… How much do you have to hate somebody to not proselytize? How much do you have to hate somebody to believe that everlasting life is possible and not tell them that? I mean, if I believe, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that a truck was coming at you and you didn't believe it —that truck was bearing down on you — there's a certain point where I tackle you, and this is more important than that.”

Penn Jillette (1955) American magician

" A Gift of a Bible http://www.crackle.com/c/penn-says/a-gift-of-a-bible/2415037", Penn Says episode 192 (), Crackle, 2:59
2000s

Life , Hate , People , Religion

“Rudolf Hess, Hitler's future deputy, who recently had moved to Munich and now lived in Elisabethstraße, close to the barracks in which Hitler resided at the time, did not think that the Soviet Republic was something worth getting upset about… Hess wrote to his parents on April 23. 'I have not experienced any unrest at all. Yesterday we had an orderly march with red flags, nothing else out of the ordinary.”

Thomas Weber (historian) (1974) German historian

Source: Becoming Hitler: The Making of a Nazi (2017), p. 47

Thinking , Parent , Time , Future

“An inch of foreknowledge is worth ten miles of after-thought.”

Jack Vance Dying Earth

Source: Dying Earth (1950-1984), Cugel's Saga (1983), Chapter 5, section 2, "The Bagful of Dreams"

“Most people are robust. If a man puts his hand on a woman's bottom, any woman worth her salt can deal with it. It is communication. Can't we be friendly?”

Jeremy Irons (1948) English actor

If a man pats a woman's bottom he's just being friendly, says Jeremy Irons
2011-08-09
Daily Mail
Liz
Thomas
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2023917/Jeremy-Irons-If-man-pats-womans-hes-just-friendly.html
2011-08-11

People , Communication

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

Michael Lewis book The Big Short

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

World , Change

“I think my greatest usefulness lies in what I've had the opportunity to demonstrate -that the most "hopeless" criminal in existence can be salvaged; that he's worth salvaging, on both humanitarian and hard-headed social grounds. Retributive justice and the execution chamber aren't the answer. In seeking a solution to the crime problem, I believe that vision can and should be substituted for vengeance. I'm convinced that there is much that is narrow and negative and wrong in society's attitude toward and treatment of the man who is said to be at "war" with it, and who often is at war with himself.”

Caryl Chessman (1921–1960) Convicted robber, kidnapper and rapist, writer

Caryl Chessman, Cell 2455, Death Row, New Jersey, 1960, p. 372

War , Justice , Problem , Thinking

“We weep before the Blessed Mother's shrine,
To think upon her sorrows, but her joys
What nun could ever know a tithing of?
The precious hours she watched above His sleep
Were worth the fearful anguish of the end.
Yea, lack of love is bitterest of all.”

Sara Teasdale (1884–1933) American writer and poet

"Marianna Alcoforando"
Helen of Troy and Other Poems (1911)

Love , Fear , Thinking , Sleep

“There's at least half a billion dollars [worth] of baseball players in Cuba right now and probably a lot more.”

Joe Kehoskie (1973) American baseball agent

On the amount of baseball talent in Cuba, from the Vanity Fair article "Commie Ball: A Journey to the End of a Revolution" http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2008/07/cuban_baseball200807 by Michael Lewis (July 2008)

“These dark days will be worth all they cost us if they teach us that our true destiny is not to be ministered unto but to minister to ourselves and to our fellow men.”

Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945) 32nd President of the United States

1930s, First Inaugural Address (1933)

Men

“It is a war of ideologies and struggle races. On one side stands National Socialism: ideology, founded on the values of our Germanic, Nordic blood. It is worth the world as we want to see: beautiful, orderly, fair, socially, a world that may be, still suffers some flaws, but overall a happy, beautiful world filled with culture, which is precisely Germany. On the other side stands the 180 millionth people, a mixture of races and peoples, whose names are unpronounceable, and whose physical nature is such that the only thing that they can do - is to shoot without pity or mercy. These animals, which are subjected to torture and ill-treatment of each prisoner from our side, which do not have medical care they captured our wounded, as do the decent men, you will see them for yourself. These people have joined a Jewish religion, one ideology, called Bolshevism, with the task of: having now Russian, half [located] in Asia, parts of Europe, crush Germany and the world. When you, my friends, are fighting in the East, you keep that same fight against the same subhumans, against the same inferior races that once appeared under the name of Huns, and later - 1,000 years ago during the time of King Henry and Otto I, - the name of the Hungarians, and later under the name of Tatars, and then they came again under the name of Genghis Khan and the Mongols. Today they are called Russian under the political banner of Bolshevism.”

Heinrich Himmler (1900–1945) Nazi officer, Commander of the SS

Heinrich Himmler speaking in Stettin to soldiers of the SS (13 July 1941)
1940s

Men , War , People , World

“Fitz-Roy's temper was a most unfortunate one. It was usually worst in the early morning, and with his eagle eye he could generally detect something amiss about the ship, and was then unsparing in his blame. He was very kind to me, but was a man very difficult to live with on the intimate terms which necessarily followed from our messing by ourselves in the same cabin. We had several quarrels; for instance, early in the voyage at Bahia, in Brazil, he defended and praised slavery, which I abominated, and told me that he had just visited a great slave-owner, who had called up many of his slaves and asked them whether they were happy, and whether they wished to be free, and all answered "No." I then asked him, perhaps with a sneer, whether he thought that the answer of slaves in the presence of their master was worth anything? This made him excessively angry, and he said that as I doubted his word we could not live any longer together. I thought that I should have been compelled to leave the ship; but as soon as the news spread, which it did quickly, as the captain sent for the first lieutenant to assuage his anger by abusing me, I was deeply gratified by receiving an invitation from all the gun-room officers to mess with them. But after a few hours Fitz-Roy showed his usual magnanimity by sending an officer to me with an apology and a request that I would continue to live with him.”

Charles Darwin (1809–1882) British naturalist, author of "On the origin of species, by means of natural selection"

volume I, chapter II: "Autobiography", pages 60-61 http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?pageseq=78&itemID=F1452.1&viewtype=image
The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin (1887)

Anger , Happiness

“I'm excited by the band [White Stripes]. It really excites me. But it wouldn't excite me if there weren't those limitations, if we weren't living in that box, if we weren't trapped. Once that goes away, then I'll know that it's not worth doing it any more.”

Jack White (1975) American musician and record producer

Perry, Andrew (13 November 2004). "What's eating Jack?" http://observer.guardian.co.uk/omm/story/0,,1347715,00.html, The Observer. (accessed October 22, 2014)
2010

Box

“... I have excluded the idea of the Fall of Man... man has made a long climb from the status of the animal until the time when he could recognize right from wrong. That recognition, at first, was based on behavior that paid, that avoided the retribution of the tribe and the gods, and that enabled the primitive society to function. Yet, however lowly in origin—and I am referring to a period centuries before right seemed to be worth following simply because it was right, or because man’s dignity and status were sustained by doing right; centuries before right was conceived as pleasing to God because he was holy and righteous—that earliest recognition of a difference between right and wrong was an immense advance, even though wrong was chosen.”

Leslie Weatherhead (1893–1976) English theologian

Source: The Christian Agnostic (1965), p.236-237 [ellipsis added]

God , Behavior , Idea , Time

“Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. challenged the underlying premise of prevailing Civil War scholarship. The South, he pointed out, had shown no evidence of a willingness to end slavery; indeed, over time it had become ever more hysterical in its defense. With one eye firmly on the recent past, Schlesinger insisted that a society closed in support of evil could not be appeased, and if it was worth a war to destroy Nazism, surely it was worth one to eradicate slavery. But not until the 1960s, under the impact of the civil rights revolution, did historians en masse repudiate a half-century of Civil War scholarship, concluding that the war resulted from an irreconcilable conflict between two fundamentally different societies, one resting on slavery, the other on free labor. Historians pushed Emancipation to the center of their account of the Civil War, and it has remained there ever since.”

Eric Foner (1943) American historian

"The Civil War in 'Postracial' America" https://web.archive.org/web/20111001073757/http://ericfoner.com/articles/101011nation.html (10 October 2011), The Nation
2010s

War , Support , Evil , Time

“Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose
Nothing ain't worth nothing but it's free”

Kris Kristofferson (1936) American country music singer, songwriter, musician, and film actor

Song lyrics, Me and Bobby McGee (1969)

Freedom

“Men will not commonly steal women that are nothing worth.”

Sir Henry Hobart, 1st Baronet (1554–1625) English politician

Bruton v. Morris (1614), Lord Hobart's Rep. 182.

Women , Men

“If you have any doubt that time is relative, try stretching fifteen minutes' worth of input of over four hours cubicle-cell time with an ultra-slow internet connection and frequent visits from supervisors.”

Rob Payne (1973) Canadian writer

Source: Working Class Zero (2003), Chapter 4, p. 31

Time

“Just to see you smile, I'd do anything.
That you wanted me to when all is said and done.
I'd never count the cost.
It's worth all that's lost.
Just to see you smile.”

Tim McGraw (1967) American country singer

Just to See You Smile
Song lyrics, Everywhere (1997)

Smile

“Childish raptures! said Lucifer, with scorn, his eyes flashing like lightning. "Are we indeed whimpering and craven children, or slaves? Can we be content with toys and little deliciousnesses? Are we not mind, as well as emotion? And is not the mind, of both angel and man, the noblest of possessions, and worth exercising. It is in our minds that we approach the closest of Him, Who is all Mind. Mind is the creator of all philosophy, all order, all beauty, all satisfaction, but emotion is the lowliest of the virtues, if it is a virtue at all. Mind has in it the capacity to know all things, or, at least, the minds of angels.”

Taylor Caldwell (1900–1985) Novelist

Dialouges with the Devil (1967)
1960s

Children , Beauty , Angels , Exercises

“In the 14th Century an anonymous English mystic wrote a book called The Cloud of Unknowing, the main theme of which is that God cannot be apprehended by man's intellect and that only love can pierce the "cloud of unknowing" which lies between Him and us. I feel that in my own life anything I have done of possible worth has happened in spite of my gross, worldly self. I have been no more than the vessel used to convey ideas above my intellectual capacities. When people praise passages I have written, more often than not I can genuinely say, 'Did I write that?' I don't think this is due to my having a bad memory, because I have almost total recall of trivialities. I see it as evidence of the part the supernatural plays in lives which would otherwise remain earthbound.”

Patrick White (1912–1990) English-born Australian writer

Australians in a Nuclear War (1983)

Love , Life , God , People

“Strive not for singularity in dress; Fools have the more and men of sense the less. To look original is not worth while, But be in mind a little out of style.”

Ambrose Bierce (1842–1914) American editorialist, journalist, short story writer, fabulist, and satirist

Source: Epigrams, p. 345

Men , Fools , Sense

“I don't know of a case where we were discussing such a dramatic step where the federal government will legislatively mandate a specific type of technology to be incorporated in all of this material. Maybe the sky really is falling this time, but I think it is worth suggesting a little bit of skepticism, it's worth offering up a little doubt before we not just entertain this, but jump ahead to what exemptions were required.”

John E. Sununu (1964) American politician

Thinking , Time

“It's bullshit, what the hell do they want me to do? The sport is going down. It's not even worth competing, because you do all the work for a year and you don't get what you deserve.”

Iris Kyle (1974) American bodybuilder

2004-01-01
Iris sees red.(Iris Kyle finishes second at Ms. Olympia)(Brief Article)
Flex
Internet
http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-111506207.html
Sourced quotes, 2004

Hell , Sport

“Here we were at Davos, moderating a discussion on value innovation, and yet only one European, Hasso Plattner [the founder and CEO of SAP AG], was on the panel. This raised the question, ‘Why aren’t there more European CEOs and companies worth listening to on this subject?’ What is the problem in Europe? The answer that kept coming back is this: Europe is strong in science and technology, but weak in connecting innovation and commerce.”

Renée Mauborgne American economist

Renée Mauborgne in: Stuart Crainer, " W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne: The Thought Leader Interview http://www.strategy-business.com/article/11695?gko=d33f3," strategy+business, January 12, 2002. First Quarter 2002. Issue 26 (originally published by Booz & Company)

Age , Question , Problem , Strong

“p>Time's right-hand man, the sea
Laughs as in joy
From his millions of wrinkles:
Laughs that his destiny,
Great with the greatness
Of triumphing order,
Shows as a dwarf
By the strength of his heart
And the might of his hands.Master of masters,
O maker of heroes,
Thunder the brave,
Irresistible message: —
'Life is worth Living
Through every grain of it,
From the foundations
To the last edge
Of the cornerstone, death.”

William Ernest Henley (1849–1903) English poet, critic and editor

</p>
Source: Poems (1898), Rhymes And Rhythms, XIV

Life , Death , Time , Heart

“A small act is worth a million thoughts.”

Ai Weiwei (1957) Chinese concept artist

2000-09, Meet the Most Interesting Person in China, 2009

“The only privilege a student had that was worth his claiming, was that of talking to the professor, and the professor was bound to encourage it. His only difficulty on that side was to get them to talk at all. He had to devise schemes to find what they were thinking about, and induce them to risk criticism from their fellows. Any large body of students stifles the student. No man can instruct more than half-a-dozen students at once. The whole problem of education is one of its cost in money.”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

Money , Education , Problem , Thinking

“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

“You must warn people not to make the intellect their God. The intellect knows methods but it seldom knows values, and they come from feeling. If one doesn't play a part in the creative whole, he is not worth being called human. He has betrayed his true purpose.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

Source: Attributed in posthumous publications, Einstein and the Poet (1983), p. 135

God , People , Feeling , Parting

“In an ever-advancing spiral the public was made to believe that only Hollywood-style extravaganzas were worth seeing and that only they could give an accurate sense of the world of art. The resulting box-office pressure made the museums still more dependent on corporate funding. Then came the recessions of the 1970s and 1980s. Many individual donors could no longer contribute at the accustomed rate, and inflation eroded the purchasing power of funds. To compound the financial problems, many governments, facing huge deficits—often due to sizable expansions of military budgets—cut their support for social services as well as their arts funding. Again museums felt they had no choice but to turn to corporation for a bail-out.”

Hans Haacke (1936) conceptual political artist

1980s, "Museums, Managers of Consciousness," 1983

World , Art , Support , Problem

“There are some who esteem that it is a naivety to believe that a moral regeneration may be possible ("soit possible", Fr.); now, if this was not the case, it would not be worth the trouble that humanity continue to vegetate without aim.”

African Spir (1837–1890) Russian philosopher

Source: Words of a Sage : Selected thoughts of African Spir (1937), p. 61.

Naivety

“[I believe in Oliver Cromwell] because he was a great fighting Dissenter. He was perhaps the first statesman to recognize that as soon as the Government became a democracy the Churches became directly responsible for any misgovernment. His great idea was to make Christ's law the law of the land, and any obstacle to this he ruthlessly swept away. How he would have dealt with Romish practices now! He said to the priest who babbled his Paternosters in Peterborough Cathedral, "Leave off your fooling and come down, sir." There was the man for the Ritualists (cheers)— worth a wagon-load of Bishops. How he would have dealt with the House of Lords! From the House of Commons he would have removed many a bauble, and he would have shaken his head and said, "The Lord deliver us from Joseph Chamberlain."”

David Lloyd George (1863–1945) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech to the National Council of the Evangelical Free Churches at the City Temple, London (25 April 1899) for the 300th anniversary of Oliver Cromwell's birth, quoted in The Times (26 April 1899), p. 12.
Backbench MP

Law , Fools , Democracy , Idea

“Our nation stood guard on tense borders; we spoke for the rights of dissidents and the hopes of exile; we aided the rise of new democracies on the ruins of tyranny. And all the cost and sacrifice of that struggle has been worth it, because, from Latin America to Europe to Asia, we've gained the peace that freedom brings.”

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

2000s, 2005, Address to the National Endowment for Democracy (October 2005)

Peace , Hope , Democracy , Freedom

“There is, let me assure you, nothing in nature more egocentrical than the embattled democracy. It soon becomes the victim of its own war propaganda. It then tends to attach to its own cause an absolute value which distorts everything else. Its enemy becomes the embodiment of all evil. Its own side, on the other hand, is the center of all virtue. The contest comes to be viewed as having a final, apocalyptic quality. If we lose, all is lost; life will no longer be worth living; there will be nothing to be salvaged. If we win, then everything will be possible; all our problems will become soluble; the one great source of evil--our enemy--will have been crushed; the forces of good will then sweep forward unimpeded; all worthy aspirations will be satisfied.”

George F. Kennan (1904–2005) American advisor, diplomat, political scientist and historian

From Russia and the West under Lenin by George Kennan (1960)

Life , War , Democracy , Nature

“My own mystic bent leads me to believe that musical variations, collage, reiteration and process, or evolution, are beautiful. Life is worth living and beauty is worth making.”

Beth Anderson (1950) American neo-romantic composer

Beth Anderson http://www.allmusic.com/artist/beth-anderson-mn0000757980 at allmusic.com, 2013

Life , Beauty , Music

“I conceive disgust at those impertinent and misbecoming familiarities, inscribed upon your ordinary tombstones. Every dead man must take upon himself to be lecturing me with his odious truism, that "such as he now is, I must shortly be." Not so shortly, friend, perhaps, as thou imaginest. In the meantime I am alive. I move about. I am worth twenty of thee. Know thy betters!”

Charles Lamb book Essays of Elia

New Year's Eve.
Essays of Elia (1823)

Dead

“There are times when it’s worth putting aside the endless myopic navel-gazing that occupies so much literature, in order to look out at the universe itself and value it for what it is.”

Greg Egan (1961) Australian science fiction writer and former computer programmer

Interview with Renai LeMay http://rlemay.com.au/greg-egan-the-big-interview/
Other

Literature , Universe , Time

“And a thimble's worth of milky moon
Can touch hearts larger than a thimble.”

Joanna Newsom (1982) American musician

Bridges & Balloons
The Milk-Eyed Mender (2004)

Heart

“What really flatters a man is that you think him worth flattering.”

George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) Irish playwright

1900s, John Bull's Other Island (1907)

Thinking

“It is worth recalling that during the 1960s, and again in the 1970s, Britain's growth rate was the lowest of all the major European economies. By contrast, during the 1980s, our growth rate has been the highest of all the major European economies. This greatly improved growth performance has been accompanied by falling inflation, which at 3½ per cent. in 1986 reached the lowest figure for almost 20 years.”

Nigel Lawson (1932) British Conservative politician and journalist

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1987/mar/17/the-economic-background in the House of Commons (17 March 1987)

“The cost of making government more responsive to the people who fund it and in whose name it exists should not be attributed solely to FOI, but even if it is, surely that is a cost worth bearing? Making government transparent and accountable to the public directly increases the efficiency of the public sector more than any number of government regulators or watchdogs.”

Heather Brooke (1970) American journalist

Page 5.
Your Right to Know: A Citizen's Guide to the Freedom of Information Act, 2nd Edition

People

“Here is something I have learned the hard way, but which a lot of well-meaning people in the West have a hard time accepting: All human beings are equal, but all cultures and religions are not. A culture that celebrates femininity and considers women to be the masters of their own lives is better than a culture that mutilates girls' genitals and confines them behind walls and veils or flogs or stones them for falling in love. A culture that protects women's rights by law is better than a culture in which a man can lawfully have four wives at once and women are denied alimony and half their inheritance. A culture that appoints women to its supreme court is better than a culture that declares that the testimony of a woman is worth half that of a man.”

Ayaan Hirsi Ali (1969) Dutch feminist, author

Source: 2010s, Nomad: A Personal Journey Through the Clash of Civilizations (2010), Chapter 14, “Opening the Muslim Mind: An Enlightenment Mind (pp. 212-213)

Love , Women , People , Religion

“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

“And be all plunderers curst.
'The best way to hate is the worst.
'Tis to find what the hated need,
Never mind of what actual worth,
And wipe that out of the earth.
Let them die of unsatisfied greed,
Of unsatisfied love of display,
Of unsatisfied love of the high,
Unvulgar, unsoiled, and ideal.
Let their trappings be taken away.
Let them suffer starvation and die
Of being brought down to the real.”

Robert Frost (1874–1963) American poet

"The Vindictives"
1920s, Further Range (1926)

Love , Hate , Way , Suffering

“It was reported that the New York Knicks have won all 12 of the home games attended by magician David Blaine. A spokesman for the Knicks said, 'if this is what it takes to win, it's not worth it.”

Tina Fey (1970) American comedian, writer, producer and actress

citation needed

Home , Game

“You know, the cure for all this talk is really a good dose of incompetent government. You get that alternative and you'll never put Singapore together again: Humpty Dumpty cannot be put together again… my asset values will disappear, my apartments will be worth a fraction of what they were, my ministers' jobs will be in peril, their security will be at risk and their women will become maids in other people's countries, foreign workers. I cannot have that!”

Lee Kuan Yew (1923–2015) First Prime Minister of Singapore

Justifying million-dollar pay hike for Singapore ministers (Straits Times, 5 April 2007)
2000s

Women , People , Country

“Many of my friends are under the impression that I write these humorous nothings in idle moments when the wearied brain is unable to perform the serious labours of the economist. My own experience is exactly the other way. The writing of solid, instructive stuff fortified by facts and figures is easy enough. There is no trouble in writing a scientific treatise on the folk-lore of Central China, or a statistical enquiry into the declining population of Prince Edward Island. But to write something out of one's own mind, worth reading for its own sake, is an arduous contrivance only to be achieved in fortunate moments, few and far between. Personally, I would sooner have written "Alice in Wonderland" than the whole Encyclopaedia Britannica.”

Stephen Leacock book Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town

Preface
Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (1912)

Way , Reading , Personality

“John Cage said that music is the moral evaluation of sound. We might generalize his remark: when we speak of art, we make a moral evaluation of the relative worth of the various contributions to a work. It is no surprise that many of the participants differ with more conventional evaluations and rank their own contributions as more important than that of the artist as conventionally defined.”

Howard S. Becker (1928) American sociologist

Art Worlds (1982)

Art , Music

“I'm not going to vote. I won't vote for a Catholic and I won't vote for a damned Republican. Maybe I've said that before. My ancestors were all Catholic and not very far back. And I have reason to hate the church.
I feel a curious kinship, though, with the Middle Ages. I have been more successful in selling tales laid in that period of time, than in any other. Truth it was an epoch for strange writers. Witches and werewolves, alchemists and necromancers, haunted the brains of those strange savage people, barbaric children that they were, and the only thing which was never believed was the truth. Those sons of the old pagan tribes were wrought upon by priest and monk, and they brought all their demons from their mythology and accepted all the demons of the new creed also, turning their old gods into devils. The slight knowledge which filtered through the monastaries from the ancient sources of decayed Greece and fallen Rome, was so distorted and perverted that by the time it reached the people, it resembled some monstrous legend. And the vague minded savages further garbed it in heathen garments. Oh, a brave time, by Satan! Any smooth rogue could swindle his way through life, as he can today, but then there was pageantry and high illusion and vanity, and the beloved tinsel of glory without which life is not worth living.
I hate the devotees of great wealth but I enjoy seeing the splendor that wealth can buy. And if I were wealthy, I'd live in a place with marble walls and marble floors, lapis lazulis ceilings and cloth-of-gold and I would have silver fountains in the courts, flinging an everlasting sheen of sparkling water in the air. Soft low music should breathe forever through the rooms and slim tigerish girls should glide through on softly falling feet, serving all the wants of me and my guests; girls with white bare limbs like molten gold and soft dreamy eyes.”

Robert E. Howard (1906–1936) American author

From a letter to Harold Preece (received October 20, 1928)
Letters

Life , God , Hate , Children

“All who are weary and heavy laden; all who suffer under injustice; all who suffer from the outrages of the existing bourgeois society; all who have in them the feeling of the worth of humanity, look to us, turn hopefully to us, as the only party that can bring rescue and deliverance. And if we, the opponents of this unjust world of violence, suddenly reach out the hand of brotherhood to it, conclude alliances with its representatives, invite our comrades to go hand in hand with the enemy whose misdeeds have driven the masses into our camp, what confusion must result in their minds! … It must be that for the hundreds and thousands, for the millions that have sought salvation under our banner, it was all a colossal mistake for them to come to us. If we are not different from the others, then we are not the right ones – the Savior is yet to come; and the Social Democracy was a false Messiah, no better than the other false ones! Just in this fact lies our strength, that we are not like the others, and that we are not only not like the others, and that we are not simply different from the others, but that we are their deadly enemy, who have sworn to storm and demolish the Bastile of Capitalism, whose defenders all those others are. Therefore we are only strong when we are alone. This is not to say that we are to individualise or to isolate ourselves. We have never lacked for company, and we never shall so long as the fight lasts. On the essentially true but literally false phrase about a “single reactionary mass,” the Social Democracy has never believed since it passed from the realm of theory to that of practice. We know that the individual members and divisions of the “single reactionary mass” are in conflict with each other, and we have always used these conflicts for our purposes. We have used opponents against opponents, but have never allowed them to use us.”

Wilhelm Liebknecht (1826–1900) German socialist politician

No Compromise – No Political Trading (1899)

World , Feeling , Democracy , Strong

“l don't know what Nordic art is worth in other people's minds.... but in today's cosmopolitan art world it doesn't figure at all... Nordic art is dangerous. It compresses all its power inside ourselves. It is not a hedonistic or sensuous art. It neither claims to be objectively intelligible, nor does it deal in clear and conscious symbols. The Danish author Jakob Knudsen hit on something important when he said that Nordic art has mood and works on the mood more than on the senses or the understanding..”

Asger Jorn (1914–1973) Danish artist

as quoted on the website of the Jorn Museum 'Articles' by Jorn http://www.museumjorn.dk/en/article_presentation.asp?AjrDcmntId=255,
1959 - 1973, Alpha and Omega', (1963–64)

People , World , Art , Intelligence

““Used to be” is not worth the breeze on which it is scribbled.”

Glen Cook book Soldiers Live

Source: Soldiers Live (2000), Chapter 2, “An Abode of Ravens: When the Baobhas Sang” (p. 368)

“I think this is a very hard choice, but the price — we think the price is worth it.”

Madeleine K. Albright (1937–2022) Former U.S. Secretary of State

Stated http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FbIX1CP9qr4 on CBS's 60 Minutes (May 12, 1996) in reply to Lesley Stahl's question "We have heard that half a million children have died. I mean, that's more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?" Albright was U.S. ambassador to the United Nations at the time.
1990s

Thinking

“Any artist worth his salt thinks music far more than he practices. Practice divides the mind between music and the mechanics of managing hands and feet. Inward hearing has its roots in musical thought.”

Benno Moiseiwitsch (1890–1963) British musician

Playing in the Grand Style (1950)

Music , Thinking

“Language is an abominable misunderstanding which makes up a part of matter. The painters and the physicists have treated matter pretty well. The poets have hardly touched it. In March 1958, when I was living at the Beat Hotel, I proposed to Burroughs to at least make available to literature the means that painters have been using for fifty years. Cut words into pieces and scramble them. You'll hear someone draw a bow-string. Who runs may read, To read better, practice your running. Speed is entirely up to us, since machines have delivered us from the horse. Henceforth the question is to deliver us from that other so-called superior animal, man. It's not worth it to chase out the merchants: their temple is dedicated to the unsuitable lie of the value of the Unique. The crime of separation gave birth to the idea of the Unique which would not be separate. In painting, matter has seen everything: from sand to stuffed goats. Disfigured more and more, the image has been geometrically multiplied to a dizzying degree. A snow of advertising could fall from the sky, and only collector babies and the chimpanzees who make abstract paintings would bother to pick one up.”

Brion Gysin (1916–1986) Canadian artist

Cut-Ups: A Project for Disastrous Success.

Lie , Literature , Idea , Birth

“No statesman e'er will find it worth his pains
To tax our labours and excise our brains.”

Charles Churchill (satirist) (1731–1764) British poet

Night, an Epistle to Robert Lloyd (1761), line 271

Pain

“And what have our unions done? What do they aim to do? To improve the standard of life, to uproot ignorance and foster education, to instill character, manhood and independent spirit among our people; to bring about a recognition of the interdependence of man upon his fellow man. We aim to establish a normal work-day, to take the children from the factory and workshop and give them the opportunity of the school and the play-ground. In a word, our unions strive to lighten toil, educate their members, make their homes more cheerful, and in every way contribute an earnest effort toward making life the better worth living.”

Samuel Gompers (1850–1924) American Labor Leader[AFL]

Gompers, Samuel. "Gompers Speaks for Labor." McClure's Magazine, February 1912, p. 376 http://books.google.com/books?id=3Su0lykF-OMC&dq=%22And%20what%20have%20our%20unions%20done%3F%20What%20do%20they%20aim%20to%20do%3F%22&pg=PA376#v=onepage&q=%22And%20what%20have%20our%20unions%20done?%20What%20do%20they%20aim%20to%20do?%22&f=false

Life , Children , People , Education

“There is always a nasty surprise in store for the imperial mind. It is typical of the imperial point of view that it is ignorant of, or blind to, the other. The imperial mind keeps missing the point. It fails to appreciate, for all its benevolence, why it might come under attack, why it might, for instance, be worth a nation's while to rise up against it. The imperial mind has to be shocked out of its daydreams.”

James Fenton (1949) poet

"Goodbye to All That?" (p. 72)
The Strength of Poetry: Oxford Lectures (2001)